Pangloss

Severian, I wish I had your gift with words, sir. That was just brilliant. Not bad at all for a heartless bigot! I happen to share the view that banning gay marriage is a bad thing, but I think the posters in this thread are completely off the deep end in declaring anyone who takes the opposite view to be a bigot, and then defending that as a valid form of debate. I'm sorry guys, that's just how I see it. Mokele that post was.... disappointing. I think you know that insulting people is not how you change minds. I'm just going to stop here, because I have a lot of respect for you guys but I'm just not going to see eye to eye with you on this.

Are they assholes, or are they being "apt"?

It matters, it just doesn't stop the violence. It keeps us from looking helpless and impotent.

What's bad about them is the dismissal of legitimate political debate as "bigotry". I don't know about the citizens of Utah or Massachusetts, but when I voted I intended for my senators to use civilized, reasoned discourse in order to determine the best course of action for the country. If they're going to flame each other like children who just got AOL accounts for their birthdays, then I'll be happy to hand them a pair of revolvers and point them at the nearest open field.

Exchange would not be a cost-effective choice for this company. You know, you can download the trial version for free and take a look at it directly. I don't think they realize what they're actually talking about. It's been my experience that a lot of times the MBA types will say something like "Exchange" because it sounds impressive, but what they really mean is "we're putting a hyperlink to Hotmail in everyone's IE Favorites".

I heard something about this on the radio today and was pretty flabbergasted. That kind of rhetoric is usually kept firmly in check. Hell, I'd have to issue him a warning for posting something like that on our boards. One would like to think that the US Senate would maintain SOME level of decency.

Heh, that's a good one, thanks for passing it along. They're spinning faster than their pirated music CDs. I like how when other countries convince US courts to recognize their patents, it's a-okay, but when the US tries to get courts in other countries to recognize our patents, it's an example of the US government trying to influence foreign countries in their domestic laws. Everything's okay, so long as the downtrodden, underprivileged Russian people get access to cheap American music.

The Microsoft web site has plenty of tutorials that are much better at explaining how the program works than I could possibly be. If they're interested in some training you can drop me a private message and I can see about getting you hooked up with a local training provider.

It's a bit of an undertaking -- it's a good bit more than just a mail program. MS offers, if memory serves, a five-day course on it that's pretty good. There are also some excellent books available. Supporting Exchange involves a little bit of a learning curve, especially in an Active Directory environment. (It helps a good bit if you're already familiar with the principles of AD.) If all your office is doing is passing email around the company then they may be able to get by just using POP3/SMTP/IMAP services in their Windows Server (which I assume they already have). Or you can convert an older computer to Linux and throw in a similar client, without impacting on the performance of your existing Windows Server (which is presumably doing something already). These are popular and common alternatives. If they're planning to do calendar/task/appointment sharing, and/or they have Active Directory, and/or they need a lot of control over the email system in a comprehensive package, then Exchange Server is a good investment. There are alternatives at that level as well.

It's ironic that just yesterday the western diplomatic coalition offered to give Iran the remaining pieces it needed to build nuclear power plants AND a five-year fuel supply. Apparently we're comfortable enough with letting Iran (of all countries!) handle nuclear waste.

The Amendment failed to pass the Senate this morning, failing to even garner support from all the Republican members, much less the 5 Democrats it needed.

RSS is a syndication protocol used to distribute web services. So, for example, you can centralize your web surfing through a single application (like Outlook) and pull article feeds into it instead of hitting each site individually. The data is typically formatted in XML, and is not readable in a browser by itself. You view it in an aggregator, or after it's been consumed by a web site. This board, and my blog, are typical examples of sites that provide RSS feeds. If you have an aggregator, you can view postings from this site without actually visiting this site (if you're running Firefox you can probably see the little orange RSS icon in the lower-right corner of this window right now). A more sophisticated example of web services may be seen in the way Amazon.com displays Fed-Ex and UPS shipment tracking data to Amazon customers who want to know why their order hasn't arrived yet, or the way Orbitz/Priceline/etc access and redisplay airline flight info.

Well I guess I'm getting schooled here, but I can't complain -- at least I'm learning something new in the bargain!

You're not a true geek unless you have an RSS feed! http://www.cafepress.com/kissmyrss.27813044

Mokele, if you take a close look at page three of the first link in the post just above, you'll see an interesting tidbit about the exit polls: According to the next paragraph, the margin of error was as high as SEVEN PERCENT in some of those states. The way he writes about it seems to support your interpretation of what the margin of error represents (that it refers to the accuracy of the poll against the voting population rather than the accuracy of the poll against internal mistakes). Maybe I'm just completely out in left field on that, I don't know. I still want to see some kind of definitive statement on it, if such can be found.

Interesting... Salon's articles have generated quite a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere community. Kennedy himself wrote a response to Manjoo's criticism, and Manjoo wrote a response to THAT. And Salon's editorial board posted a position of its own, basically saying "hey it's not our fault, we HATE Republicans!" http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/rfk_responds/ http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/06/salon_answers/

Wow. Do you think you could possibly state that in a more offensive manner?

<blink blink> Did I read that right?

Interesting response to Kennedy's article in Salon by Farhad Manjoo: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/index_np.html It's locked behind a login, but I'll see if I can post a couple of excerpts from it when I get home tonight.

No, what I'm looking for here would be some sort of statement or instruction manual on polling that indicates what that accuracy rating actually means to the pollsters. What do THEY think that "+/- 1%" means. If you find a source along those lines, I'd be interested in that.

That would be an answer to a different question from the one you asked me, bascule.

There are two main aspects to "rallying the base" that impact on modern politics. The first is the issue of voter turnout. Around 80% of the country votes either Democrat or Republican every time, regardless of who the candidate happens to be. On top of that, 92-96% of all incumbents (for all kinds of elected offices) are returned to office, regardless of their party affiliation, which is an indication of what kind of uphill battle the opposing party has to deal with. So the general idea of "appealing to the base" is that whichever base turns out actually has a tremendous impact on who gets elected (because 40% > 20%). In fact it could well have a greater impact than trying to appeal to that "moderate middle". Presidential elections are actually the exception, rather than the norm, when it comes to appealing to moderate voters. Congressional elections are very much about mobilizing the base, because you typically have a higher population of one or the other, which is why that party is represented and the other one is (typically) not. The other concept that comes in to play, especially in national politics, is the issue of passing legislation. Because the president's approval rating is low, he can't convince congress to pass legislation that it normally has qualms about. If his rating is high, they don't want to "mess" with him, and are more cooperative. Because it's low, they can "afford" to disagree -- in fact it helps them, because 435 of them (plus around a third of the senators) have to get re-elected every November. How mobilizing the base correlates to approval ratings is by giving him free poll bumps. The president has the "bully pulpit" (to quote TR) -- when he speaks, people listen. So if he talks about things that his base likes to hear, he gets an instant bump in approval ratings, which amounts to chips he can cash in over on the Hill.