Guess it depends on what you mean by "expose" - you can add filters for most document formats, everything from zip files to PDF to JPEG to DWG to MP3. Querying the indexing service is a bit awkward, IMO, but it's there and works quite well - it's just not all that well-known, for whatever reason.
A comparison of the absolute number of votes is very disingenuous...
Allow me to translate "This comparison does not support the sort of positive spin I wish to deploy, so let me ignore it in favor of something else";)
The relevant figure is the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2000 compared to the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2004.
In which case, he's the first president since 1988 to garner more than 50% of the popular vote.
The reality is, almost half the people in the US still wanted someone other than Bush as their president.
Please. The reality is, in pretty much every election, "almost half" the people in the US want someone other than the eventual winner to be president. You're taking a two-party system and claiming that it's meaningful that people split into two camps - of course it's not, it's a systemic result of the duality of party politics. In 1992, more than half of voters - 57% of them, to be exact - wanted "someone other" than Bill Clinton to be president, but he certainly didn't seem particularly handicapped by that fact. Nor do I recall anyone claiming that he should be handicapped by that fact.
But for Bush, it will be seen as a mandate.
It is a mandate. You lost at least four seats in the House, and four in the Senate, including the de facto head of the Democratic party, Tom Daschle. Spin it any way you like, if it makes you feel better, but the fact remains - John Kerry took a 500,000 vote margin of victory for Gore and turned it into 3.5 million vote margin of victory for his opponent. Bush went from 47.8% of the electorate to 51.5%, a gain of almost four points and more than 8.5 million votes since 2000 - so much for that business about heavy turnout favoring Dems, by the way. Anyway, you keep winning moral victories like that, and there won't be anything left of the Left by the time the decade is out...
Of course we can, but can we expect them to look after ourinterests?
The only race which will have a candidate who will attend to 100% of your interests 100% of the time will be when you run for office. Until then, you'll have to settle for the knowledge that you'll get some of what you want some of the time from someone else.
Kerry's political career isn't over, conceding an election he may have won doesn't hurt it as much as prolonged legal battles would.
He won't run again. Bush went from -500,000 in 2000 to +3.5 million in 2004 - a swing of 4 million votes on Kerry's watch. Besides, the days when a William Jennings Bryan could run for president and lose four times are gone forever - parties and voters don't have the patience for it any more. He'll return to the Senate, and that'll be as high as John Kerry climbs in his career. Now that Daschle's gone, the Democratic party is, at least temporarily, headless - it's too early to talk about 2008, but for now the field is wide open for any potential candidate to seek the nomination. Lots of people in the Democratic party ranks are going to be reviewing their own resumes this evening, trust me;)
An interesting question is, will they even bother to count provisional ballots after a candidate has conceded?
Valid provisional ballots must be counted and included in the final tally. Given that Kerry's not challenging the result, it'll probably go pretty quickly - there's not going to be an extended argument over each ballot by lawyers from each side, to determine whether it is, in fact, valid. The state counters will be left to determine validity pretty much on their own, with perfunctory oversight from members of each state party, I suspect.
Convinced of their role as watchdog over everyone else (including the other watchdogs), they proudly don their tin hats and demand the equivalent of a recount everywhere.
I really think we can believe that John Kerry and his people are capable of looking out for their own interests - if they had evidence that there was enough of a problem to flip the election, or if they even believed that such evidence existed, they'd be pursuing it right now, instead of fine-tuning a concession speech. Let the Monday-morning quarterbacks do their web-board bitching - the people whose job it is to make the call have made the call, and very likely done it based on more and better information than any of the putative "watchdogs" have at this point.
A concession speech is not a legally binding construct - it is a political move, not a legal one. All the votes must still be counted, including the ones that haven't been counted a half-hour from now, when Kerry is in the middle of his speech. All Kerry is doing is signaling that he is not planning on pursuing recounts or legal strategies designed to bring about his victory - his campaign for president is ending as of 2:00 PM today.
If, however, it should turn out that he has won Ohio, for example, when all the ballots are counted, then he will still gain Ohio's electoral votes and, presumably, the presidency, in spite of the fact that he has conceded defeat. That is not going to happen, as a practical matter, but it is at least theoretically possible. Elections boards don't stop counting just because one candidate or the other admits defeat - they still have to have a final count for the records, if nothing else.
There should be a lot of traffic. This is perhaps the most important election of the current young digerati generation
Random 500 and 503 errors notwithstanding, I don't know about that, in a sense. Regardless of who's elected today, the country will continue to muddle through. We always have before, and I don't sense a sea change in that respect - there is a fairly sizeable contingent of folks in this country who aren't quaking in their boots at the thought of either man inhabiting the White House, something that partisans on both sides tend to forget in their relentless drive to demonize the other fellow.
For whatever reason, there were a ton of people just staring at that one placard. Noone demonstrating, saying anything, but just staring and thinking.
The tires of at least 30 cars and vans rented by the Republican Party to carry voters to the polls were slashed, Milwaukee police said this morning. The discovery was made at 6:30 a.m., said Sgt. Mark Wroblewski.
The rental cars were parked near a GOP office in the 7100 block of W. Capitol Dr. Wroblewski said "at least" 30 cars were disabled. At least one tire was slashed and in some cases, all four tires were cut. Detectives were on the scene, the sergeant said. Police had no suspects in custody as of 8 a.m.
A place to talk politics that will start off intelligently, and end in a bloodbath where only the extreme sides remain.
Just like the last half a dozen election threads we've had in the last few days. Fun is fun, but do we really need one a day? How about a perpetual, ongoing politics thread, one that never gets pushed off the front page, so that we can at least keep it all in one place...
As far as treaties, well, the United States has already set the precedent that international treaties are worthless (being fully prepared to renege on treaties with Russia over anti-missile technology).
That would be a shame if it were true, which it isn't. If you had read the ABM treaty, which you obviously haven't, you'd know why it was false...
Of course it's not out of your hands. You've just voted.
At which point, you're done contributing, and nothing you do has any further impact on the outcome.
You're saying that people will vote for a candidate because they've already heard they are going to win!
No, I'm saying that people will not get out and vote for a candidate that they've already heard will lose, and I've got history on my side - early calls in 1980 clearly affected turnout in the west. Larger turnout wouldn't have saved Carter, but depressing it probably cost the Democrats at least one seat in the House, maybe two. Given that, why on earth should you get the information that much earlier, particularly when the time of its release has no material impact on you at all, and the only potential impact on the outcome is negative for one side or the other?
If some people in the networks know, why shouldn't all of us?
Why should you know? What possible difference does it make whether you hear the first results at 3 pm or at 8 pm or at 7 am the next morning? What good does it do you to know four hours earlier than you might have otherwise known? What good does knowing earlier do anyone at all? Really, once you vote, it's out of your hands regardless of what happens, so there's no point in potentially discouraging others just for your own self-gratification.
It's always fun to contribute to a thread I won't be able to read at work tomorrow, because it won't get past the bad-word filter on the boss's proxy server;)
Drudge is an ass - not that he listens to anyone other than his own giant ego, but whatever. I doubt Drudge has the resources to commission a real nationwide exit poll for himself, so if he does, it'll be because someone at one of the networks is leaking it to him.
Seriously, nobody's going to be doing any exit-poll results until the polls start closing, which won't be till around 7 pm in the East at the earliest. All you'll get is the usual "we're standing outside a polling place in Bumfuck, Iowa, and the mood of the people is restive/festive/destructive/cheerful/whatever" during the day, so drive carefully, keep your eyes on the road, your hands on the wheel, and watch the news when you get home in the evening....
Well, hell - I happen to be sitting at a Win2k box right now, with a fully updated IE. I never use it - I'm a 'fox fan myself - but I do keep it patched. And the bug does appear to affect a fully up-to-date version of IE 6 (6.0.2800.1106) on Win2k - the status bar shows www.microsoft.com, rather than the actual link target of www.google.com. Doesn't strike me as much of a "hole", but it's there.
Fair enough - I haven't read the OSX version, but I have read the Windows and Solaris guides, so maybe you can settle for extrapolation instead of investigation;)
....actually implementing everything the NSA recommends in its guides will get you a system that is both highly secure and exceptionally inconvenient for its users. It's a useful reference, to see if you've forgotten anything that you particularly want, or anything obvious, but as always, individual admins will have to decide for themselves where they want their systems to lie on the security-usability axis...
Slashdot Mirror
Guess it depends on what you mean by "expose" - you can add filters for most document formats, everything from zip files to PDF to JPEG to DWG to MP3. Querying the indexing service is a bit awkward, IMO, but it's there and works quite well - it's just not all that well-known, for whatever reason.
Allow me to translate "This comparison does not support the sort of positive spin I wish to deploy, so let me ignore it in favor of something else" ;)
The relevant figure is the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2000 compared to the percentage of the popular vote that Bush got in 2004.
In which case, he's the first president since 1988 to garner more than 50% of the popular vote.
The reality is, almost half the people in the US still wanted someone other than Bush as their president.
Please. The reality is, in pretty much every election, "almost half" the people in the US want someone other than the eventual winner to be president. You're taking a two-party system and claiming that it's meaningful that people split into two camps - of course it's not, it's a systemic result of the duality of party politics. In 1992, more than half of voters - 57% of them, to be exact - wanted "someone other" than Bill Clinton to be president, but he certainly didn't seem particularly handicapped by that fact. Nor do I recall anyone claiming that he should be handicapped by that fact.
But for Bush, it will be seen as a mandate.
It is a mandate. You lost at least four seats in the House, and four in the Senate, including the de facto head of the Democratic party, Tom Daschle. Spin it any way you like, if it makes you feel better, but the fact remains - John Kerry took a 500,000 vote margin of victory for Gore and turned it into 3.5 million vote margin of victory for his opponent. Bush went from 47.8% of the electorate to 51.5%, a gain of almost four points and more than 8.5 million votes since 2000 - so much for that business about heavy turnout favoring Dems, by the way. Anyway, you keep winning moral victories like that, and there won't be anything left of the Left by the time the decade is out...
The only race which will have a candidate who will attend to 100% of your interests 100% of the time will be when you run for office. Until then, you'll have to settle for the knowledge that you'll get some of what you want some of the time from someone else.
Kerry's political career isn't over, conceding an election he may have won doesn't hurt it as much as prolonged legal battles would.
He won't run again. Bush went from -500,000 in 2000 to +3.5 million in 2004 - a swing of 4 million votes on Kerry's watch. Besides, the days when a William Jennings Bryan could run for president and lose four times are gone forever - parties and voters don't have the patience for it any more. He'll return to the Senate, and that'll be as high as John Kerry climbs in his career. Now that Daschle's gone, the Democratic party is, at least temporarily, headless - it's too early to talk about 2008, but for now the field is wide open for any potential candidate to seek the nomination. Lots of people in the Democratic party ranks are going to be reviewing their own resumes this evening, trust me ;)
Valid provisional ballots must be counted and included in the final tally. Given that Kerry's not challenging the result, it'll probably go pretty quickly - there's not going to be an extended argument over each ballot by lawyers from each side, to determine whether it is, in fact, valid. The state counters will be left to determine validity pretty much on their own, with perfunctory oversight from members of each state party, I suspect.
I really think we can believe that John Kerry and his people are capable of looking out for their own interests - if they had evidence that there was enough of a problem to flip the election, or if they even believed that such evidence existed, they'd be pursuing it right now, instead of fine-tuning a concession speech. Let the Monday-morning quarterbacks do their web-board bitching - the people whose job it is to make the call have made the call, and very likely done it based on more and better information than any of the putative "watchdogs" have at this point.
If, however, it should turn out that he has won Ohio, for example, when all the ballots are counted, then he will still gain Ohio's electoral votes and, presumably, the presidency, in spite of the fact that he has conceded defeat. That is not going to happen, as a practical matter, but it is at least theoretically possible. Elections boards don't stop counting just because one candidate or the other admits defeat - they still have to have a final count for the records, if nothing else.
So much for that....
Random 500 and 503 errors notwithstanding, I don't know about that, in a sense. Regardless of who's elected today, the country will continue to muddle through. We always have before, and I don't sense a sea change in that respect - there is a fairly sizeable contingent of folks in this country who aren't quaking in their boots at the thought of either man inhabiting the White House, something that partisans on both sides tend to forget in their relentless drive to demonize the other fellow.
For whatever reason, there were a ton of people just staring at that one placard. Noone demonstrating, saying anything, but just staring and thinking.
Wow. Wish I was there.
Stay safe.
Say, forget the election - who wants to see if we can slashdot Slashdot? ;)
Just like the last half a dozen election threads we've had in the last few days. Fun is fun, but do we really need one a day? How about a perpetual, ongoing politics thread, one that never gets pushed off the front page, so that we can at least keep it all in one place...
I don't think so - Art Cable sounds like he's doing okay on the money front, but there's no contact info to ask him what's going on...
That would be a shame if it were true, which it isn't. If you had read the ABM treaty, which you obviously haven't, you'd know why it was false...
At which point, you're done contributing, and nothing you do has any further impact on the outcome.
You're saying that people will vote for a candidate because they've already heard they are going to win!
No, I'm saying that people will not get out and vote for a candidate that they've already heard will lose, and I've got history on my side - early calls in 1980 clearly affected turnout in the west. Larger turnout wouldn't have saved Carter, but depressing it probably cost the Democrats at least one seat in the House, maybe two. Given that, why on earth should you get the information that much earlier, particularly when the time of its release has no material impact on you at all, and the only potential impact on the outcome is negative for one side or the other?
Why should you know? What possible difference does it make whether you hear the first results at 3 pm or at 8 pm or at 7 am the next morning? What good does it do you to know four hours earlier than you might have otherwise known? What good does knowing earlier do anyone at all? Really, once you vote, it's out of your hands regardless of what happens, so there's no point in potentially discouraging others just for your own self-gratification.
It's always fun to contribute to a thread I won't be able to read at work tomorrow, because it won't get past the bad-word filter on the boss's proxy server ;)
Substitute Idaho, New York, Kansas, California, Utah, et cetera, as you see fit ;)
Drudge is an ass - not that he listens to anyone other than his own giant ego, but whatever. I doubt Drudge has the resources to commission a real nationwide exit poll for himself, so if he does, it'll be because someone at one of the networks is leaking it to him.
Seriously, nobody's going to be doing any exit-poll results until the polls start closing, which won't be till around 7 pm in the East at the earliest. All you'll get is the usual "we're standing outside a polling place in Bumfuck, Iowa, and the mood of the people is restive/festive/destructive/cheerful/whatever" during the day, so drive carefully, keep your eyes on the road, your hands on the wheel, and watch the news when you get home in the evening....
Well, hell - I happen to be sitting at a Win2k box right now, with a fully updated IE. I never use it - I'm a 'fox fan myself - but I do keep it patched. And the bug does appear to affect a fully up-to-date version of IE 6 (6.0.2800.1106) on Win2k - the status bar shows www.microsoft.com, rather than the actual link target of www.google.com. Doesn't strike me as much of a "hole", but it's there.
Fair enough - I haven't read the OSX version, but I have read the Windows and Solaris guides, so maybe you can settle for extrapolation instead of investigation ;)
Just thinking of further exercises in futility ;)
I'll put it alongside my copy of Speling Fer Slahsdooters.
....actually implementing everything the NSA recommends in its guides will get you a system that is both highly secure and exceptionally inconvenient for its users. It's a useful reference, to see if you've forgotten anything that you particularly want, or anything obvious, but as always, individual admins will have to decide for themselves where they want their systems to lie on the security-usability axis...
Ah, no wonder your reply to me seemed a non sequitur - I think you must have been referring to the AC's comment, not mine? ;)