I can't reproduce your border error. I bet it has to do with your iframe having width set in a way that causes it to run under another element that does not take the extra 2 pixel width of the iframe+margin into account.

You really should not be attaching events that way. This is bad for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that you only get one event per element. Personally, I really like the observe method from prototype.js, but with what you are talking about MooTools might be better.

It is really pretty rare that you should have to pass variables that way. Just use objects and store your variables in that object.

Yes, but a lot of them make life harder, and a lot of IE's quirks are just plain buggy. The point is that the web should be cross-platform: you have a standard and you code to it. Vendors should not have to implement features invented by a third party that may or may not be properly documented (ooxml anyone?). This is why we have the W3C to develop and innovate standards. Hell, MS helped write a lot of the standards that they don't implement.

A browser is not a platform. It should implement the standard so that we can code to it... "write once, run anywhere" should not be a paradigm reserved for Java.

It is not subjective. There is a standard. While no browser implements it fully, IE is (still) the worst.

Well, this thread is off topic, but I'll bite.

This polemic is not about the user. The trouble is not in using another browser, the trouble is writing websites for IE. It is a frustrating fucking nightmare. It is such a mess that anybody who has written a website in the last 5 or 6 years can not believe that people would choose IE of their own free will. Of course, the mess is transparent to the user who will blame the website if it does not look right in IE.

Now, I know that the IE situation has gotten better (but is still pretty bad) since IE7, but IE6 just won't die because its quirkiness caused a kind of lock in: corporate intranet sites are written for it and they are too expensive to correct. For these people, using another browser really has become impossible. Whether this corporate lock in was deliberate is debatable, but that is the reason the EU gets involved.

And just how do you know what my diet is like? I literally have not had fast food in years. As a vegetarian, those places have very little to offer me.

And what is this mythical "Mediterranean diet" that you are referring to? I have lived in Italy, and Spain and Morocco. I have spent significant time in Greece, Croatia, Israel, southern France and Algeria. They all border the Med and the all have very different cuisine. Of them all, Italian is probably the worst for your health, despite what you seem to think (one big meal per day instead of several small ones, lots of cheese, high in sugar, etc). Oh, and they all have more overweight people and shorter lifespans than my current home, Belgium.

So how about instead of being an arrogant stereotyping prig, you go learn a little bit?

What do you want, The Fat Duck? You can get decent food in any of the dozen or so airports that I go to regularly, though apparently YMMV. You just have to look around a bit to find the places that are selling fresh food, and there always are some. I am a vegetarian and pretty picky even within that already limited range of food, yet I always find a place that caters to what I like.

If you pick the franchises like MacDonalds or just go to the first place you see, that is your own fault; realize that you are voting with your money.

Of course, the gp is absolutely right that airport food costs way too much. This has more to do with the airports than the restaurants, though, since they charge an arm and a leg for retail space. The exception in my experience is Barcelona: food costs the same in town as at the airport.

I disagree. Airport food is usually pretty good, although it is way too expensive. Also, trying to get a nice meal (which, for me, usually includes drinks and sauces or yogurt) through security is not that easy.

I think this has more to do with a pyramid of needs. Once you have enough sleep, you think about water. Once you have enough water, you think about nutrition. Once you have enough nutrition, you think about the food tasting good, and so on.

What this survey means is that airports are meeting those basic needs well enough that people can think about things that are higher up on the pyramid but not adequately provided, not that those things lower on the pyramid are actually that important.

Imagine for a moment that airports suddenly removed all of the bathrooms. Where do you think Wifi would rank on the next survey?

Click the links and you will understand.

Well, you are obviously not the norm. Research has shown that people play games just for the violence, which is the motivator behind the latest blockbuster.

Of course, if you ask me, no violence is too much.

As a researcher, I write a lot of long documents. If you were really writing long documents and saving time were really what mattered to you, you would be using LaTeX. Seriously, LaTeX effectively automates

• citations and bibliography
• tables of contents (don't even try to say that Office does this. The feature exists but it does not work right.)
• indexes
• reformatting the document quickly (MLA to Chicago? change one line. Journal to Book? change one line. different font, but only for text and not headlines? change two lines)

If, on the other hand, all you do is write little five page or less memos or letters, Office is clearly superior to LaTeX. But then, you would really need to convince me that MS Office saves you any time whatsoever over OpenOffice or KOffice.

Unless, of course, your argument is that Office is faster because you know it already, which really is not valid for the rest of us.

But the ammunition will be different. When you see a truck, you hit it with High Explosive (HE) or heavy machine gun fire. If you see a tank, you hit it with Kinetic Energy (KE) or High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds.

There is good reason for this. If you hit a tank with something that just explodes and rains shrapnel, the hit will just bounce off, maybe destroying the optics but that is about it. You have to pierce the armor, which you do by hitting it with something very heavy and slender (such as a rod of depleted uranium) traveling at high speed that focuses a bunch of energy on one point. The heat from the collision and spalling from the armor itself then destroys whatever is behind the armor.

This does not work for a truck. If you hit it with a KE round, the round will just sail right through it. If there is nothing vital (the driver, engine, fuel lines, etc) where the KE round happens to pass, then the truck will just keep rolling. That is why you hit it with HE or MG fire. The many small bits of metal from an exploding HE round have a much higher chance of hitting something vital than the single big chunk from a KE round.

As far as a tank is concerned, you usually only get one or two shots at it before it or its buddies start returning fire. If you hit it with the wrong ammunition, he is going to kill you.

It should be noted that the inverse is also true. Making vehicles such as a truck look highly armored increases their survivability in certain situations because AT rounds are rarer than lighter ammunition and an infantry squad with a machine gun is not going attack a tank.

No, that would be punishing EU member states at least as much Intel. Have you looked at the market for servers lately? Desktops? Laptops? Intel is subject to anti-competition laws because it has a dominant market position. If you were to suddenly cut their products out of the market, that would hurt every manufacturer of IT equipment and every business that uses said equipment. That is a great way to hurt the EU's ability to perform in the world market.

The reason a fine is useful is precisely because the costs are passed on to Intel customers worldwide, not just in the EU. This means that it really is Intel that is paying for its behavior on a global scale.

No. At the very least, this gives schools a bargaining chip when negotiating journal packages with Elsevier.

Also, anything that brings the sickening relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to light is a good thing. Many times, doctors will prescribe the latest (expensive) drug to a patient when a generic does the job just as well precisely because the pharmaceutical companies bombard them with this kind of semi-false information. People need to be aware of this.

It is from HL Mencken, The American Mercury, April, 1924. The sentiment goes back at least to JJ Rouseau.

Here is a great quote from the article:

Either the journalist is a product of the LA school system or the LA school system mandates that teachers show up late.

More to the point, however, is that this is actually not such a bad system, no matter what populist journalists wishing to stir up anti-(government|teacher's union) sentiment says. As somebody with managerial experience in the federal government, I can attest that establishing a pattern of misconduct is a very effective way to get people fired. However, it requires that administrators keep their paperwork in order. There has to be a written record in place establishing that the misconduct actually happened. This requirement is a good thing in government positions because it keeps people from getting fired for political reasons and thus helps prevent nepotism and cronyism. The horror stories that you hear about the impossibility of firing bad employees always come from inept administrators who could not be bothered to properly manage their personnel and want to blame the system for their failings.

That depends who you ask. The functionalists would say yes, the realists would say no and the constructivists would say sort of. Theorists of multi-level governance would say that the whole concept of a sovereign state is over and done with but most of us have yet to realise it.

Also, it is true that fines are a significant portion of the EU's small budget.