more vintage computer stuff

Well... part of the problem is that some sites that _I_ find useful really depend of active content, and are completely unusable unless you use it. But, above and beyond that, my anger (not too extreme a word, I think) at active content is about more than me. There's a quotation from a novel I once read that made an impression on me; about how a professional marine civil engineer was ticked off at some shoddy work, saying that if offended him because people might think that the professionals in the field couldn't do any better; and they could, but not all of them did. Here it is: "I'm in the business of building things. And I am a specialist in the ways of protecting structures from the sea. I guess it would be personally offensive to me to have the public at large think my profession is so inept and unaware that we would build a few hundred million dollars' worth of high-rise living units on a fragile sandspit without knowing what will happen." (It's from "Condominium", a so-so book by John D. MacDonald. Fine - in fact, very good - for an airplane flight or the beach, but not serious literature.) But that's a big part of it, for me - the notion that as a field, we know full well how to do better - but instead, for complex reasons I don't want to get diverted into now, we have inflicted this abomination on all the innocent users, who are nowhere as well able to protect themselves as you and I are. Noel