Well, thank heavens it's finally happening, but people are now getting bent out of shape about Trent Lott's idiocies (see Lott: It gets worse). Prominent Republicans like William Bennett are rightly calling for Lott to step down as a party leader. All I can say is: What took them so long? And I don't even mean his remarks from last week -- I mean his completely reactionary right-wing views on every issue there has ever been. The Republican leadership of Congress is a disgrace to the country and to the Republican party. It's why no thinking person should ever vote for a Republican, regardless of an individual candidate's views on the issues -- Republicans elected to Congress will have to toe the party line, will be forced to vote against their own stated positions simply because of party discipline. And those moderate Republicans who are elected because they have moderate views will be the enablers of the Republican leadership's goal of pushing through the President's agenda to undo the progress made in the days since the Reagan/Bush debacle came to an end. Lott is finally apologizing fully, claiming that he really didn't mean to refer to Thurmond's party's platform (which consisted entirely of segregation). Well, perhaps it's true that he wasn't thinking about that, but that just goes to show that the man doesn't belong in public life. If he is so thoughtless as to say "accidentally" such inflammatory things, then he isn't qualified to be given the kind of responsibility he has had in the past. But he's not stepping down, as he should. This is a great thing for the Democrats, since it proves that Republicans really do not at heart represent tolerance.

A couple of interesting articles encountered in the last week discussing Microsoft-related issues in general:

• The first, by Albert Kallal, an e-crony of mine in comp.databases.ms-access, speculates about why Microsoft is going for .NET as a thin client strategy when they already have a winner of a thin client (Windows Terminal Services): http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn/Articles/ThinClientsand.net.html.
• The second is a less Microsoft-friendly article, Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going. It discusses a lot of the vulnerabilities of Windows XP (and all of MS's NT-based OS's). It's pretty interesting in that it outlines a lot of the reasons why the NT-based versions of Windows are not as secure as MS would like us to believe. Of course, in my opinion, Windows security is more than enough for the vast majority of business users, though one must make numerous alterations to the default Windows configurations in order to make Windows as secure as it ought to be (the EVERYONE group and the way permissions are allocated to it is simply an abomination, for instance).

I am amazed at how profoundly stupid the readers of Slashdot (or, at least, the people who post) really are. Not a day goes by but that hundreds of Slashdot posters completely miss the point on just about any issue that is discussed there. Today's annoying topic is campaign finance. I simply can't stand people who complain about the system and won't vote. And the ignorance of the way in which the multiple systems regulating political contributions actually work is astounding. Yes, I'm an insider to this (having a major political campaign fund as a client), but I knew the basics long before I ever got involved with it on a regular basis. Free speech as practiced on Slashdot is, I guess, a good thing, but gad, these people are so frigging stupid it's astonishing.