"some time in the future" sounds to me like "if I can't sell it to somebody first"
You obviously don't know Aardappel. He's been known to release sources, as he did with his E compiler. And guess what, it really was "some time in the future", i.e. when he had pretty much stopped making changes to it. Cube is still a work in progress and I bet you won't see the sources until it "stabilises", after a few more releases. I.e., when he is satisfied with it. You might not agree, but that's his code after all.
And no, actually he doesn't even think it would be appropriate using in a commercial project, as it more or less deliberately lacks some bells and whistles. It's just something that he wanted to do for fun, his way and mostly on his own, simply for the sake of it. I know because we talked a lot about this stuff.
I started the d/l before I read there's no sources, which is a shame I was kinda looking forward to having a look at such a small project with such a nice output. Seemed like a good place to do some simple bot programming.
Do not despair. In the meantime, I suggest you start looking into the built-in language. It's quite powerful, I've been experimenting with it for advanced mapping purposes. And if there's something that it can't do for you (scripted AI?), ask Aardappel nicely and he might add it.
Simplicity of structure means that you don't need a fast CPU and allows cool things like realtime editing (other engines require you to "compile" your maps - Cube also lets you edit maps with other users on the Internet). That "brute force" means that it relies a lot on a fast GPU.
In other words, the real bottleneck with Cube is the graphic card and its OpenGL implementation, not the CPU. As long as you have decent OGL drivers and something relatively recent like a GeForce 3-4 or a Radeon, even a CPU under the GHz mark should be more than enough.
Slightly unrelated, but given Aardappel's background, OF COURSE there is a powerful scripting language built-in.
And nobody seems to be remembering the whole issue that set this off in the first place: hatespeech against the Blessed Mother.
For the umpteenth time: it's not just that. Since the end of 1999, Italian law has depenalised blasphemy. And in 1995 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that cursing at the "Blessed Mother" or saints does not constitute blasphemy. Only cursing at any deity (God, Allah, Buddha, etc.) does.
The Italian government itself actually funded in large part with a grant a highly blasphemous movie.
Again, this is making the news only because it seems picturesque to "journalists" worldwide. If you want to know why the Italian Police bothered with the site, follow the money - i.e. tax fraud and what not, which of course is nothing new or glamourous. Alleged blasphemy alone wouldn't have been enough to trigger the operation: witness all blasphemous Italian sites still around.
I see you persist in denying that there is a common Italian culture.
Maybe because I know what I am talking about, namely that there doesn't happen to be one?
Well, it has a common culture whether you realise it or not and a bit of traveling to several different countries in Europe and to different parts of the US (East coast vrs. West coast) has made that clear to me.
And again, what would the traits of that culture be?
For your information, I've travelled all over Europe and have been living in the US for almost three years now.
Studying a regions laws, the way they do business and life styles of it's citizens is something that everyone who has access to a library or an uncensored internet connection can do and so ignorance is a poor excuse.
Exactly! There's no excuse for your ignorance. You should really start looking into the issues before spouting truths which really aren't so.
Your comments lead me to wonder how much time you actually spend studying your own politics and looking at other cultures as your responses seem knee jerk and poorly thought out, and are the sort of thing I'd expect to read in News International Tabloid.
YOUR responses are poorly thought out here. You haven't done any substantive research, yet you draw sweeping conclusions.
For example, you mentioned "Mafia". That's a misnomer, you should be talking of organised crime. Mafia is just one of such organisations, with roots in Sicily. There are others, like camorra and ndrangheta, which were born out of different social contexts, are structured differently and involve different issues. Your sweeping generalisations make a complex matter look trivial. And Italy's problems have been compounded throughout history by exactly that behaviour: excessive simplification and failure to fairly assess issues.
Don't lecture me if you don't even know the differences between mafia and e.g. camorra.
Italy has a well educate populace with good infrastructure.
Which Italy? Southern Italy lags behind. The working force there is not as trained as in Northern Italy. That's a fact. Do some research and you'll see I'm not making up stuff. There still are kids who drop out of school when they're 10 or younger.
Infrastructure? Ahah, you must be kidding. Let's take a look at railways: they're much "denser" in Northern Italy. The mainland railway has two tracks, while the railway in Sicily has only one track and you can imagine the consequences.
Do you follow the news? There's no water right now in Southern Italy. Lorries are being used to bring it from the North. Do you call that a good infrastructure? It's even more depressing if you consider that it was the Romans that had mastered moving water from one place to the other.
The sad reality is that nobody wants to do business in Southern Italy, because there's no decent infrastructure there. For decades the government has been trying to pour huge amounts of money to solve the divide. It didn't succeed probably because it wasn't a focused effort. It subsidised Fiat and the Agnelli family, mainly. And to add insult to injury, Southern Italy actually pays slightly more in taxes than the North, despite being poorer and labelled as a mass of tax evaders.
I was born there. I know how things work there. I know how it feels to live there. You obviously don't. At least have the decency to delve deep enough into the issue, otherwise don't bother at all. Get a book or two - don't stop at newspapers, they're too superficial and too concerned with what amounts to gossip these days.
If it can escape some of it's cultural pitfalls (white collar crime, corruption and the tolerance of it) then there is no reason it could not continue to grow has it has done in the late 90's.
Gee, you JUST DON'T GET IT. White collar crime is not the problem or the cultural pitfall. I wish it was that trivial; Italy would be much better off. We'd root it out and live happily. Unfortunately it's not like that.
Corruption didn't grow in the 90's. If anything, it shrank for a while. It's always been there and actually was more rampant in the 80's. During the 90's it might have gained more visibility, but we don't judge things by their mere appearance, do we?
Anyway, as I said, that's not the problem. It's the symptom. If there's blood in your feces, you don't fix the problem by simply removing the blood from them. You find where that blood comes from and solve the matter at the root.
Same with corruption in Italy. It's a consequence of older, deeper ingrained and more complex problems. You seem to be too obsessed with Italy's moles on its face. I'd rather be concerned about the cancer throughout its body first.
In fact, his election was act of downright stupidity (IMHO) by the populous and was criticized by main stream press the world over.
Eh, now you lecture me on Berlusconi. I've known about him for 20 years. He got into most Italians' life in one way or another, anyway. I bet I know much more about him than you do. You can spare me that.
I saw him rise in the 80's thanks to his ties with Craxi. Where were you then? Where was the world's mainstream press then? Most of it happened under the sun. Why didn't they criticise back then?
Who were the most vocal opponents? That's easy: two Italians. Comedian Roberto Benigni (of Life is beautiful fame) and, to a larger extent, iconoclast/comedian/satirist Beppe Grillo. That's sad, but true. Berlusconi's political opponents were and are largely unsubstantial. Same for the press - in Italy AND abroad.
I'm even more disappointed than you are about his election - because it's MY country. Yet, can you explain why he was elected? What made stupid electors pick him?
You can ignore that (and the fact that is is a legacy of a common Italian culture)
Little clue for you: for thousands of years in Italian cultures leaders weren't even elected by the people. Only in 1912 the whole male population was given the right to vote (women got it in 1945). Before that, only the very few with some education or willing to pay a voting tax were allowed to vote (and that started in 1882 anyway).
Can you point me to one document describing this alleged "common Italian culture" through the centuries? Just one.
To reassure you that I am not seeing things, with a quick Google search I found a brief essay about the so-called Southern Problem (University of Toronto, Italian studies). It's a good starting point.
but exactly how do you explain not only all the scandal's of the 90's
I explain them with more complex historical and social problems than the wishy washy arguments you bring. I would love to make all of Italy's problems amount to just the scandals from the 90's (which is pretty much all you seem to know). Where do I sign? Even with my blood, it's no problem.
and your government shutting down web sites on charges of "blasphemous" web sites?
First of all, the matter seems to be more complex than what was described in the media's sensational reports. There's not just blasphemy involved, but tax evasion as well (the operation was carried by the fiscal police). The site was more or less seized, not shut down, pending further investigation. And for one site that was seized, there are hundreds of others which are still around. But reporting the whole thing that way wouldn't have been as interesting, sensational and picturesque for audiences worldwide.
Second, in 1995 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that cursing against the Madonna and saints is not a blasphemy and thus not a crime. It is such only when against a deity (not just the Catholic God, but Buddha and all the others as well). The Church didn't like it, but that was the final ruling. Since the end of 1999, blasphemy has been depenalised as well.
Third, as I already pointed out (and you chose to ignore) there have been blasphemous movies which were not censored in Italy. One of them is highly disturbing and graphical and was even financed in large part by a government grant! Yet, the UK has been censoring a movie because of blasphemy for 14 years now. Where's the outrage for that?
Censorship of blasphemy in Italy is more an urban legend than anything else (I've lost the count of how many curses I heard on Italian TV in my life). The burden of proof is on you: just bring me one real example. I've brought you one of censorship in the UK.
I'd rather have you and folks all over the world focus on the real problems, not frivolous stories like this.
Italian culture is not a culture that suddenly popped ino existence, it is a region that has shared a common culture for over two thousands years, like all culture it has continued to evolve and change, but it is still a shared culture as it was 2000 years ago.
Nonsense. What would that common culture be?
At the very least you can identify two separate cultures in Italy. One in the North, one in the South. They differ a lot in music, literature, language, cuisine, traditions, etc. Mentalities differ as well. Foreigners are mostly familiar with the Southern culture, because that's where most poor emigrants came from.
The Italian language itself is an artefact. It's just a variant of a Tuscan dialect. Until just a few decades ago, the majority of the population learnt Italian in school or as a second language. Put a Venetian in a Sicilian family and he won't understand most of what they say to each other.
Such a beast as "an Italian culture" is slowly taking shape only now, after considerable migratory flows. Even something relatively irrelevant like spaghetti was, until a hundred years ago, mostly a Southern thing.
If you had studied Italian history, you would be familiar with the quote from the Prime Minister who was instrumental in the Italian unification: "we made Italy, now it's time to make the Italians". Even if the land had been called Italia for a million years, that wouldn't have mattered anyway, because still there was no such thing as "an Italian".
Obviously I'm not suggesting *your* responsible, but your region's earlier religion dominated culture was and that dominance of religion in that culture still survives today.
Which of the several cultures are you talking about? See, in the region of Italy I come from there are still rituals which date back to the period before Christ even (allegedly) lived. The local people have their own brand of christianity, which mixes pagan elements (and after all, Christmas itself was a pagan festivity that christianity assimilated). I don't subscribe to any of that stuff, although I do find it interesting from a sociological and anthropological point of view.
Where's the religion-dominated culture? Tune to any Italian TV channel and you'll see plenty of almost naked bimbos. Walk down the street and see how much women cover of their bodies, compared to other nations.
Both divorce and abortion are legal. And that happened while the Christian Democratic party was still heading the government.
The Roman Church likes to whine almost daily about all that stuff, yet Italians do get divorced, take the pill and watch stupid quiz shows with half-naked women. The Prime Minister himself, Berlusconi, claims being "anointed by the Lord" and a defender of the family as a fundamental institution, yet he got divorced once. Religion is a big deal, sure... but only in theory. Or as a facade. Otherwise Italians wouldn't have been reknown worldwide for their loving skills.;))
There is a separation of church and state. There's no prayer in public schools. No religion in the national hymn (which actually mentions a Roman general). There's a weekly hour teaching of religion in high schools (often focusing on catholicism, but often focusing on a broad range of religions), but it's not mandatory. I either walked out or started bashing the poor teacher.;)
Which brings me neatly on to the next issue, you took offense at my use of Stereotypes.
I wasn't really offended by the use of stereotypes. I simply objected to your basic knowledge of facts, which eventually led to your use of stereotypes.
The Italian nation is a highly complex matter. Many say it shouldn't have been unified in the first place, for one reason or another. I don't agree with that, but I do think that it could have been done better and that there's still a long way to go.
And just because the Vatican happens to be in Rome and lots of Italians go to church on Sundays or claim being religious, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Church is a key factor in an Italian's life. Unless he/she decides to, of course.
I managed to use my own TT fonts for Mozilla on the system I'm typing this on, but the same doesn't seem to work on a couple of other systems on my LAN (where, though, I have GNOME2, which looks nicely once I installed my own fonts). I lost my patience trying to find the exact permutation of settings to reproduce the same behaviour.
Font handling is a real mess: you have the paths in XF86Config, then Xfs' own paths and now there's Xft's (very recent versions read an XML file in/etc/fonts/ for its configuration). Plus Mozilla requires, at the moment, that you enter the paths once again in one of its *.js configuration files. I hope distributions will be able to settle soon on Xft, which looks like a simple and sane solution.
Wow, you couldn't possibly fit any more stereotypes in so little space. You missed only pizza and spaghetti.
Italy was the same country that imprisoned Galileo under house arrest for life and refused him all medical treatment for daring to suggest that Copernicus had been right and that the Earth went around the Sun - because it was deemed blasphemous.
A clue for you: Italy didn't even exist in Galileo's days. Maybe it's time for you to get some dust off those history books. Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, not by the Italian government, which simply didn't even exist in the first place.
Quite frankly it's about time Italy stopped living in the middle ages and stopped persecuting it citizens for not following a decreed religion.
Another clue for you: the movie "Visions of ecstasy" has been banned in the UK since 1989 on the very grounds of blasphemy. In Italy that can't happen anymore, by law - at the very most they can restrict movies to mature audiences. Who's talking now?
"MIRACLE! BERLUSCONI APPEARS TO THE MADONNA "and says to her: "I WILL GIVE YOU ANOTHER SON "to save Italy from communism "BUT THE MADONNA TOLD HIM TO FUCK OFF!"
Somehow that's not censored and it's sold in all newsstands in Tuscany and nearby regions (it's not written in proper Italian, but a few Tuscan dialects, mainly Livornese). You can read those titles at pretty much any corner in, say, Florence.
Section 6 of article 21 is not that draconian. Or at least not anymore. For the last few years, thanks to the highly controversial movie "Toto' che visse due volte" (Toto' who lived twice), it hasn't been possible anymore for censors to ban altogether a movie in Italy. At most, they can restrict it to audiences over the age of 18.
One of the scenes that censorship wanted cut - a cut that the directors refused vehemently, which led to the initial ban of the movie - involved a naked-bottom Madonna. The amusing thing is that the movie had been partially financed by grants from the Italian government itself.
Wired mentions Bertolucci's woes with Last tango in Paris, over which he temporarily lost some of his rights, first of all the right to vote. That happened a few years after the movie was released. A judge struck that ruling down in 1982, as in his opinion public morality had changed in the meantime and the movie could no longer be considered offensive. The Constitution, after all, refrains from specifying in detail what "offensive to public morality" really means. This second ruling was triggered by an unannounced screening of the movie at a film festival in Rome - those reels were of course illegal at the time, but they belonged to the German director R.W. Fassbinder, who had died just a few weeks before, anyway...
In this case there doesn't seem to be any ruling yet. They probably picked somebody with not enough resources to defend themselves in court. Or somebody who had breached the law in other ways on the side.
People can still see "Toto' che visse due volte", if they want to. They can still listen to an underground band from Rome, Santarita Sakkascia (a pun on the name of the saint, Santa Rita da Cascia), perform "Santi numi" - "Sainted divinities", a cover of Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit", whose verses are nothing but a list of blasphemies against God and a bunch of saints. And they can see the uncut "Il pap'occhio", a satirical comedy from 1980 featuring Roberto Benigni, initially cut, in which the Pope tries to start a Vatican TV station to make up for the declining popularity of the Roman Church.
Amiga UNIX aka AMIX was not a port V.5. It was a port of V.4. Even better, it was the first SystemV Release 4 to hit the market.
At the time Sun was interested in OEMing the A3000UX, as they still had demand for 68k-based systems, while their efforts had already been shifted to Sparc. Obviously enough, the managers at C= succeeded in compromising a deal that would have been a good publicity stunt for C= itself and the Amiga. Oh well.
Haven't rumours about Linux ports of M$ stuff been around for quite some time? I recall, among the others, reading about a beta version of their Media Player for Linux.
MS loves Linux? More evidence that Linux is gaining ground as a desktop operating
system comes from Microsoft, which is reportedly planning a Linux version of its Windows
Media Player software.
According to a story on VNUNet.com, Microsoft is considering releasing a Linux version of
its Media Player after launching a Macintosh version.
"We see a need for Unix players and are working in that direction, including Linux," Paul
Boudreau, Microsoft's program manager for music and entertainment, said in the article.
Slashdot Mirror
What resolution?
The CPU is more than adequate, you might even find it spends some time idle. First of all I'd check the OpenGL drivers.
And no, actually he doesn't even think it would be appropriate using in a commercial project, as it more or less deliberately lacks some bells and whistles. It's just something that he wanted to do for fun, his way and mostly on his own, simply for the sake of it. I know because we talked a lot about this stuff. Do not despair. In the meantime, I suggest you start looking into the built-in language. It's quite powerful, I've been experimenting with it for advanced mapping purposes. And if there's something that it can't do for you (scripted AI?), ask Aardappel nicely and he might add it.
Simplicity of structure means that you don't need a fast CPU and allows cool things like realtime editing (other engines require you to "compile" your maps - Cube also lets you edit maps with other users on the Internet). That "brute force" means that it relies a lot on a fast GPU.
In other words, the real bottleneck with Cube is the graphic card and its OpenGL implementation, not the CPU. As long as you have decent OGL drivers and something relatively recent like a GeForce 3-4 or a Radeon, even a CPU under the GHz mark should be more than enough.
Slightly unrelated, but given Aardappel's background, OF COURSE there is a powerful scripting language built-in.
RTFM?
The Italian government itself actually funded in large part with a grant a highly blasphemous movie.
Again, this is making the news only because it seems picturesque to "journalists" worldwide. If you want to know why the Italian Police bothered with the site, follow the money - i.e. tax fraud and what not, which of course is nothing new or glamourous. Alleged blasphemy alone wouldn't have been enough to trigger the operation: witness all blasphemous Italian sites still around.
For your information, I've travelled all over Europe and have been living in the US for almost three years now. Exactly! There's no excuse for your ignorance. You should really start looking into the issues before spouting truths which really aren't so. YOUR responses are poorly thought out here. You haven't done any substantive research, yet you draw sweeping conclusions.
For example, you mentioned "Mafia". That's a misnomer, you should be talking of organised crime. Mafia is just one of such organisations, with roots in Sicily. There are others, like camorra and ndrangheta, which were born out of different social contexts, are structured differently and involve different issues. Your sweeping generalisations make a complex matter look trivial. And Italy's problems have been compounded throughout history by exactly that behaviour: excessive simplification and failure to fairly assess issues.
Don't lecture me if you don't even know the differences between mafia and e.g. camorra. Which Italy? Southern Italy lags behind. The working force there is not as trained as in Northern Italy. That's a fact. Do some research and you'll see I'm not making up stuff. There still are kids who drop out of school when they're 10 or younger.
Infrastructure? Ahah, you must be kidding. Let's take a look at railways: they're much "denser" in Northern Italy. The mainland railway has two tracks, while the railway in Sicily has only one track and you can imagine the consequences.
Do you follow the news? There's no water right now in Southern Italy. Lorries are being used to bring it from the North. Do you call that a good infrastructure? It's even more depressing if you consider that it was the Romans that had mastered moving water from one place to the other.
The sad reality is that nobody wants to do business in Southern Italy, because there's no decent infrastructure there. For decades the government has been trying to pour huge amounts of money to solve the divide. It didn't succeed probably because it wasn't a focused effort. It subsidised Fiat and the Agnelli family, mainly. And to add insult to injury, Southern Italy actually pays slightly more in taxes than the North, despite being poorer and labelled as a mass of tax evaders.
I was born there. I know how things work there. I know how it feels to live there. You obviously don't. At least have the decency to delve deep enough into the issue, otherwise don't bother at all. Get a book or two - don't stop at newspapers, they're too superficial and too concerned with what amounts to gossip these days. Gee, you JUST DON'T GET IT. White collar crime is not the problem or the cultural pitfall. I wish it was that trivial; Italy would be much better off. We'd root it out and live happily. Unfortunately it's not like that.
Corruption didn't grow in the 90's. If anything, it shrank for a while. It's always been there and actually was more rampant in the 80's. During the 90's it might have gained more visibility, but we don't judge things by their mere appearance, do we?
Anyway, as I said, that's not the problem. It's the symptom. If there's blood in your feces, you don't fix the problem by simply removing the blood from them. You find where that blood comes from and solve the matter at the root.
Same with corruption in Italy. It's a consequence of older, deeper ingrained and more complex problems. You seem to be too obsessed with Italy's moles on its face. I'd rather be concerned about the cancer throughout its body first. Eh, now you lecture me on Berlusconi. I've known about him for 20 years. He got into most Italians' life in one way or another, anyway. I bet I know much more about him than you do. You can spare me that.
I saw him rise in the 80's thanks to his ties with Craxi. Where were you then? Where was the world's mainstream press then? Most of it happened under the sun. Why didn't they criticise back then?
Who were the most vocal opponents? That's easy: two Italians. Comedian Roberto Benigni (of Life is beautiful fame) and, to a larger extent, iconoclast/comedian/satirist Beppe Grillo. That's sad, but true. Berlusconi's political opponents were and are largely unsubstantial. Same for the press - in Italy AND abroad.
I'm even more disappointed than you are about his election - because it's MY country. Yet, can you explain why he was elected? What made stupid electors pick him? Little clue for you: for thousands of years in Italian cultures leaders weren't even elected by the people. Only in 1912 the whole male population was given the right to vote (women got it in 1945). Before that, only the very few with some education or willing to pay a voting tax were allowed to vote (and that started in 1882 anyway).
Can you point me to one document describing this alleged "common Italian culture" through the centuries? Just one.
To reassure you that I am not seeing things, with a quick Google search I found a brief essay about the so-called Southern Problem (University of Toronto, Italian studies). It's a good starting point. I explain them with more complex historical and social problems than the wishy washy arguments you bring. I would love to make all of Italy's problems amount to just the scandals from the 90's (which is pretty much all you seem to know). Where do I sign? Even with my blood, it's no problem. First of all, the matter seems to be more complex than what was described in the media's sensational reports. There's not just blasphemy involved, but tax evasion as well (the operation was carried by the fiscal police). The site was more or less seized, not shut down, pending further investigation. And for one site that was seized, there are hundreds of others which are still around. But reporting the whole thing that way wouldn't have been as interesting, sensational and picturesque for audiences worldwide.
Second, in 1995 the Italian Supreme Court ruled that cursing against the Madonna and saints is not a blasphemy and thus not a crime. It is such only when against a deity (not just the Catholic God, but Buddha and all the others as well). The Church didn't like it, but that was the final ruling. Since the end of 1999, blasphemy has been depenalised as well.
Third, as I already pointed out (and you chose to ignore) there have been blasphemous movies which were not censored in Italy. One of them is highly disturbing and graphical and was even financed in large part by a government grant! Yet, the UK has been censoring a movie because of blasphemy for 14 years now. Where's the outrage for that?
Censorship of blasphemy in Italy is more an urban legend than anything else (I've lost the count of how many curses I heard on Italian TV in my life). The burden of proof is on you: just bring me one real example. I've brought you one of censorship in the UK.
I'd rather have you and folks all over the world focus on the real problems, not frivolous stories like this.
At the very least you can identify two separate cultures in Italy. One in the North, one in the South. They differ a lot in music, literature, language, cuisine, traditions, etc. Mentalities differ as well. Foreigners are mostly familiar with the Southern culture, because that's where most poor emigrants came from.
The Italian language itself is an artefact. It's just a variant of a Tuscan dialect. Until just a few decades ago, the majority of the population learnt Italian in school or as a second language. Put a Venetian in a Sicilian family and he won't understand most of what they say to each other.
Such a beast as "an Italian culture" is slowly taking shape only now, after considerable migratory flows. Even something relatively irrelevant like spaghetti was, until a hundred years ago, mostly a Southern thing.
If you had studied Italian history, you would be familiar with the quote from the Prime Minister who was instrumental in the Italian unification: "we made Italy, now it's time to make the Italians". Even if the land had been called Italia for a million years, that wouldn't have mattered anyway, because still there was no such thing as "an Italian". Which of the several cultures are you talking about? See, in the region of Italy I come from there are still rituals which date back to the period before Christ even (allegedly) lived. The local people have their own brand of christianity, which mixes pagan elements (and after all, Christmas itself was a pagan festivity that christianity assimilated). I don't subscribe to any of that stuff, although I do find it interesting from a sociological and anthropological point of view.
Where's the religion-dominated culture? Tune to any Italian TV channel and you'll see plenty of almost naked bimbos. Walk down the street and see how much women cover of their bodies, compared to other nations.
Both divorce and abortion are legal. And that happened while the Christian Democratic party was still heading the government.
The Roman Church likes to whine almost daily about all that stuff, yet Italians do get divorced, take the pill and watch stupid quiz shows with half-naked women. The Prime Minister himself, Berlusconi, claims being "anointed by the Lord" and a defender of the family as a fundamental institution, yet he got divorced once. Religion is a big deal, sure... but only in theory. Or as a facade. Otherwise Italians wouldn't have been reknown worldwide for their loving skills.
There is a separation of church and state. There's no prayer in public schools. No religion in the national hymn (which actually mentions a Roman general). There's a weekly hour teaching of religion in high schools (often focusing on catholicism, but often focusing on a broad range of religions), but it's not mandatory. I either walked out or started bashing the poor teacher.
The Italian nation is a highly complex matter. Many say it shouldn't have been unified in the first place, for one reason or another. I don't agree with that, but I do think that it could have been done better and that there's still a long way to go.
And just because the Vatican happens to be in Rome and lots of Italians go to church on Sundays or claim being religious, it doesn't necessarily mean that the Church is a key factor in an Italian's life. Unless he/she decides to, of course.
I managed to use my own TT fonts for Mozilla on the system I'm typing this on, but the same doesn't seem to work on a couple of other systems on my LAN (where, though, I have GNOME2, which looks nicely once I installed my own fonts). I lost my patience trying to find the exact permutation of settings to reproduce the same behaviour.
/etc/fonts/ for its configuration). Plus Mozilla requires, at the moment, that you enter the paths once again in one of its *.js configuration files. I hope distributions will be able to settle soon on Xft, which looks like a simple and sane solution.
Font handling is a real mess: you have the paths in XF86Config, then Xfs' own paths and now there's Xft's (very recent versions read an XML file in
There's a satirical monthly publication in Tuscany that, among the others, has mocked the Roman Church for the past thirty years. I'm not simply talking of light jokes, there's also plenty of highly graphical comics. I can't find any of the worst examples online, only a mild yet blasphemous cover from two years ago, a few comics and this month's quite blasphemous cover (foul language ahead):
"DANGER - PEDOPHILE PRIESTS
"KIDS, WATCH OUT FOR THE ROSARY BEADS/BALLS
"If they have hair, leave them alone!"
"Kids, come in! It's time for rosary!" "Yes, yes.. that's what he always says, but then after each time our asses are just a constant fizz!"
Or this:
"MIRACLE! BERLUSCONI APPEARS TO THE MADONNA
"and says to her:
"I WILL GIVE YOU ANOTHER SON
"to save Italy from communism
"BUT THE MADONNA TOLD HIM TO FUCK OFF!"
Somehow that's not censored and it's sold in all newsstands in Tuscany and nearby regions (it's not written in proper Italian, but a few Tuscan dialects, mainly Livornese). You can read those titles at pretty much any corner in, say, Florence.
How do you explain that?
Section 6 of article 21 is not that draconian. Or at least not anymore. For the last few years, thanks to the highly controversial movie "Toto' che visse due volte" (Toto' who lived twice), it hasn't been possible anymore for censors to ban altogether a movie in Italy. At most, they can restrict it to audiences over the age of 18.
Wired has a short article about the issue.
One of the scenes that censorship wanted cut - a cut that the directors refused vehemently, which led to the initial ban of the movie - involved a naked-bottom Madonna. The amusing thing is that the movie had been partially financed by grants from the Italian government itself.
Wired mentions Bertolucci's woes with Last tango in Paris, over which he temporarily lost some of his rights, first of all the right to vote. That happened a few years after the movie was released. A judge struck that ruling down in 1982, as in his opinion public morality had changed in the meantime and the movie could no longer be considered offensive. The Constitution, after all, refrains from specifying in detail what "offensive to public morality" really means. This second ruling was triggered by an unannounced screening of the movie at a film festival in Rome - those reels were of course illegal at the time, but they belonged to the German director R.W. Fassbinder, who had died just a few weeks before, anyway...
In this case there doesn't seem to be any ruling yet. They probably picked somebody with not enough resources to defend themselves in court. Or somebody who had breached the law in other ways on the side.
People can still see "Toto' che visse due volte", if they want to. They can still listen to an underground band from Rome, Santarita Sakkascia (a pun on the name of the saint, Santa Rita da Cascia), perform "Santi numi" - "Sainted divinities", a cover of Nirvana's "Smells like teen spirit", whose verses are nothing but a list of blasphemies against God and a bunch of saints. And they can see the uncut "Il pap'occhio", a satirical comedy from 1980 featuring Roberto Benigni, initially cut, in which the Pope tries to start a Vatican TV station to make up for the declining popularity of the Roman Church.
It seems I can't explain
The way I feel about you
You just don't understand
You are from Kalamazoo...
(Frank Zappa, "Jumbo go away", 1981)
At the time Sun was interested in OEMing the A3000UX, as they still had demand for 68k-based systems, while their efforts had already been shifted to Sparc. Obviously enough, the managers at C= succeeded in compromising a deal that would have been a good publicity stunt for C= itself and the Amiga. Oh well.
There was one such rumour on Wired's site:
The VNUNet link there seems to be wrong, you might want to try this instead.