Oh well you should visit Europe, Amsterdam in particular. You see, there's this little protestant, burgeois, probably a tad cinical country called Netherlands where pot & mushrooms is legal; the dealers are just weird shopkeepers... and the stuff you get is premium quality... and it's all properly taxed. The bad chem stuff you find in raves & discos is illegal but these people are sensible enough to understand that fear of arrest and SWAT assault dissuades people from looking for treatment rather than from getting fsck'd into the substance abuse. So, since there's no SWAT lusting to rape your butt if you get a bad trip, once you're back from the dead a thoughtful shrink helps you out of your problems and keeps an eye on you in case you're still too rabid to come to terms with your shit. You know, one thing that really helps is having that warm feeling that if you stumble and fail you have a community that doesn't want to trample you; actually they want you out of trouble, if not out of goodwill, at least to avoid having a looney shooter on the run. It helps a lot, lot more that a gun in your pocket and paramilitary officers on patrol. Think about it... it's the essential diff between Old Europe and you guys
Well, you shouldn't have mitigated the hooker-line. See, you were honest, cautious: your were plonked! The other guy, devious, whorish, deceitful: he got frontpaged... That's life; I thought you had learned (or is it learnt?) the lesson after Bushie got 4 more yrs (I did when Berlusconi got the high stool)?
I'll chime in, my powerbook has gone through 3 power supplies; one actually shorted on the DC line because of the cheap wire thus melting the whole device in a characteristic smelly (toxic?) plume. The battery pack latch of the same powerbook weared off causing it to jam if certain precautions aren't taken. The DVD drive sometimes makes some nasty noises, likely the full-stroke sensor doesn't work and the stepper motor to laser caddy gear skips; it hasn't given the ghost yet but I'm wary of Warner DVDs that tend to trigger this behaviour. Unfortunately the fans are starting to make funny noises. It doesn't suffer from flaky paint but other do and let's not forget the logic board fusses on the iBook and the battery problems of the Al powerbooks. Granted, it'll be 2 years old in 2 weeks and I still enjoy it as the first day (try that on a w2k Dell!) but powerbooks aren't some mithical Andruil, just another mass produced device.
Now, to be on topic: all these problems can be eventually reduced to lapses in an otherwise good quality control process; certainly better than Dell's or Medion's but still improvable. Now, I'm not saying that it's the chineses' fault, I've seen western made gsm phones crap out like flies (and don't forget good 'ol crappy FIAT... I'm italian, I see these poor jokes every day) but sometimes they do cut a corner too much over there...
Unfortunately my father's 40 yrs old AKAI amp was built with other quality standards in mind. Today it would be overkill to embed such high durability in products we have accustomed to consider consumables; this point is important and it's both our fault and the corps'. We, as consumers, enjoy a continuous turnover of our toys and them, the corps, are quite happy to make products that "help us" take the decision it's time to buy a new one.
Back on my unlucky powerbook... the power brick... what fool would save the 1 cent for a short guard and get to change, free of charge, thousands of blown supplies? This is a design flaw, a mistake done in Cupertino... shure, the cheap chinese cable is the initial cause, but Apple could have reconditioned rather than landfilling if not for the missing transistor (no, not a fuse, just a transistor wired up to shut down the supply if the draw is too high...), tsk... tsk...
Hadn't the author interjected "as well as" it would have been correct in giving a consecutive causality meaning rather than an enumeration of effects. Yeah, it's tough... probably the two forms superposed while she/he was typing her comment and mixed up. EN isn't my mother tounge and it took me a good 3 minutes to write the first sentence; unfortunately I happen to experience the same in my native language but I believe it's because I often compete for attention. The final outcome is that I don't have much time to transpose the concepts in proper medium, thus introducing symbolic interference; trouble is, the habit sets in. Shame... stupidified by environmental behavioural pollution.
You're right... I did get into a bumbling ram but it happens; I'm a bit burnt out!;-) Anyway, the rig I saw was (obvously) an IBM and I was enumerating, confusingly I agree, the specs that the tech had gloatingly told me while I was wiping the tears off my face when they assembled it;-) Now, the parent post was playing down IBM like "not much different from Dell" so I thought about that machine...... ah, BTW, the machine itself was redundant... there were two of 'em... ("Oh my God, it's full of stars...")
I don't know about spanish food but being italian I can certainly confirm that our food can be very tasteful and incredibly varied for such a relatively small country (it must have to do with it being quite a bunch of squabbling separate states until little more than 100 yrs ago); I find it strange though that spanish cuisine is that bad/boring... boh. But please don't ever eat at the Autogrill, it's rather hideous and in any case, beware the Tourist Traps; cities, Rome especially, is full of 'em and do they rip you off!
Nope, think a pendulum locked at the maximum swing position. Ok, I'm being cerebral so think a stat ram cell like two inverters interlocked so that the output of one forces the other in a state whose output forces the first one into the same state it was before like an oscillator that dosen't oscillate (it would if the second's output would force the first inverter to change state rather than maintain the current).
It's like a flipflop but wired differently. It's wicked fast because you don't have to refresh the ram pages and also reading isn't destructive (DRAM reading on the other had is because the charge in the MOS transistor has to be driven to the sense amp in order to measure it and decide whether it's a 0 or a 1). DRAMS are slow because you have to wait for the correct time slot while the chip isn't refreshing.
Bullshit... I once saw a low end intel IBM server... yeah... IBM is just like any other incorporated beige box assembler... Dell? Oh, you're so much wrong... listen: redundant monster fan, redundant power supply & cabling, redundant motherboard chipset, HotSwap PCI cards, HotSwap and (configurable) Redundant RAM (have you ever heard of RAM RAID? is that Redundant Array of Expensive Ram?)! You can pop the Bleedin' memory sticks from the machine Live! (I mean, the Dimm socket braces have leds identifying the faulty stick!)... drums roll... HOTSWAPPABLE BLOODY CPU BASKET (two at the same time... the thing waits brainless for the tech to drop the new one)! Yeah... just like that Dell... I'm daed shure this beast doesn't even let Winders touch the metal, there must be some virtualizing layer because I can't possibly believe Windows could ever survive in such an advanced machine without self-formatting in shame! Now boy, go blow your nose and play with your cold-cathode modded water-hyped P4EE...
probably because we have difficulty finding jobs ourselves? Remember, the executive expat thing you described is usually nationals staffing some foreing branch office for a couple years; even worse, chances are that if you're a highly trained pro, there's little chance you'll find a company (here in IT al least) that needs you rather than some lowly temp slaving in a call centre. Actually you need a sponsor and a job post (12 mo at least) waiting for you... considering that all you can find here is 6 mo stages, maybe renewable... you're better off filing for something in a multinational and ask for an abroad mission...
no, italians are particularly immoral: always ready to howl for poor service and lack of justice while given the chance they're the first to blatantly break the rules at their leisure and convenience. Try that in Germany! As far as kings are concerned... italians have little interest at kingship being obsessed by the idea of getting their lousy face on TV; we've come to the trashy apex of an '80 lifestyle: all the money spent, ignorant like a bag of coal, living a life as described in the ads and in "collective confession" talk shows. We're sick, honest... I mean, look at Berlusconi and the circus around him...
... the odds of a racist society. In Italy we use extra-comunitarian (non EU citizen) as a parafrase for the ass-poor immigrant to whom nobody will ever rent an apartment for a reasonable fee, give a legal job, pay the pension fund contributions, etc... Strangely enough this mistreatment also applies to an USian, Australian, Canadian... whatever. Weird, having a highly productive citizen of an avanced western country treated with the same disdain for a stinkin' north african movin' in to spread criminality (no shit, I've heard this delirium more than once...) Perhaps you're better off trying in Spain; it isn't much different from Italy as far as lifestyle goes, but they seem much more integrated and civilized than us and, for bonus, their economy is much livelier than ours!
OMG! The 1994 book even has chapters devoted to NETIQUETTE!, spam and basic security advice... it even tells about the difference in hacker/cracker! Oh shit! I want an LSD trip and dream about a world where all friggin' surfers have notion of this, Microsoft was broken in two comapnies: OS and Applications, Bush wasn't thrown into office by his cronies, damn wars all 'round the globe and Berlusconi was a convicted fraudster... hell, I want MY world back! I haven't hurt anybody, why must I suffer all this?
No, it's like sexual tourism; over here in Italy, if you go out on vacation in some desperately poor country to ream a child in the ass you face a couple decades in the slammer. We don't insist on foreing governments signing laws to behead paedophiles on a field trip; we take care of our sickos ourselves once they're back home, playing the part of the well behaved citizen.
Of course whenever you start talking economy all kind of abuse becomes magically possible: on our very homeland Enichem executives were aquitted for having intoxicated residents & workers of a disastrous petrochem plant netx to Venezia basically covering up a sad story of greed, criminally irresponsible conduct, etc... so I doubt we would have done differently than the US. On the other hand, I don't feel it's right; I expect an italian to behave as one wherever he or she happens to be or work; ethics don't have borders (at least for those that belong to our community)... it's tribal I know, but we're only animals aren't we?
Or better, Mozilla's lack thereof. This is something that has always baffled me; why on earth does Mozilla (or Thunderbird) only display the ACLs in ro mode? It must have the getAcl() (or whatever) command and some stupid little parseAcl() in order to display them. So why, why... again why hasn't anybody whipped up a stinkin' setAcl() function is beyond me. LDAP write support is another sorely missing feature. Evolution can do it. These two miserable little features would make TB an instant Winner, no question. And oh yes... vcf support, please!
The mirror type solar power plant might work too, but they cost an order of magnitude more to make per megawatt than a nuclear plant. And they're not manintenance free once built.
Yeah, because nuclear power plants are maintenance free are they? Speaking about the price per power unit; do you mean unit price for the *energy* or, as your wording imply do you refer to the price paid for a given amount of power? In the latter I might agree that nuclear plants deliver quite a high energy density, perhaps economically unobtainable by other means but if you consider the price paid for the correct disposal of the waste... well, nuclear is so hideously expensive to be uneconomical (unless of course the corporation isn't paying for that but rather dumps the responsibility on the goverment... ding! more taxes to pay for the managment's Martini)
You're right that there are specific treaties and that those have been signed years ago. But as you said, these treaties do not allow police enforcements that wouldn't have been legal in the participant country itself. Now, on one hand we tried to play around our own legal system in order to go on fishing expedtions that would doubtly have been conceded had it happened in Italy; on the other I think such requests would have been thrown out by any US court had not been for the Patriot Act...
Regarding Turkey, I *think* it's getting slightly better now, but until not long ago it was ILLEGAL to speak about anything that had to do with the IDEA of Kurdish identity... one turkish member of parliament was arrested for speaking kurdish in the House... it's not only about the PKK... it's about denying the very existence of the kurd ethnicity... that badly stinks of stalinism
Please try to contextualize when such a law was written... about the time when Germany was a pile of rubble, littered by millions of dead carcasses and hungry homeless people. It's a law, a decision, taken by a deluded community vowing never to commit the same capital mistake ever again...
My dear fellow americans... you're so quick waving your Freedom Of Speech liberties but then, you had Mc Carthy, Kennedy, Luther King, Malcom X assasinated; you still, to a certain extent, exert strong control on what's acceptable to say or not. In practice, the noble principle doesn't always soar like Ashcroft's Eagle...
After all the same Freedom of Speech is the pet principle that brought together anyone freeing from Europe and you built a communal identity around it. I'm pretty shure the same applies to the germans... and it's commendable that they rebuilt their dignity and identity around the shame and grief of their past... these aren't things to dismiss so quickly, I believe...
No it's an example of the Patroit Act in effect... you see, the originating countries' laws and guarantees wouln'd have permitted the indy incident, but since the US loosened the strings of their system it became an opportunity for some of our enforcement agencies to obtain something that would have been illegal to do according to our rules... you were a tool my friends; it's akin to a third world puppet dictator doing the dirty job for the western administrations and corporations...
Probably because of the rich (was it gas or oil) fields that many believe are plentiful in northern Iraq. That's why the turkish army ammassed it's troops on the border hoping to help out the US invasion and when the US said "no thanks" Turkey replied by not allowing the US troops to pour down from their border (pretty strange for a NATO country).
You see, Turkey would have been a rather "willing" country but everyone knew that their behaviour would have been a tad more distasteful that Abu Grahib so they were left out. I think that's the reason why the whole invasion became the "long run" from the south, and why the US was hasteful to get in touch with the commando squads that were flown into Kurdistan just to make shure Turkey got the message that their "help against terrorism" wasn't wanted nor needed.
If there was one thing done right in this stupid war that's the management of the northern sector. You don't hear much about that part of the country; apparently the "terrorist kurds" are really making an effort in controlling their territory and getting the message across that they're not just a bunch of guerrilla, but rather a structured, identifiable "nation".
This will irritate Turkey to no end... and I fully expect trouble and "necessary action taken to prevent the spread of Terrorism", once the Kurds will vote (or prepare to vote) themselves into an independent or federate region. That would, alone, undermine the turkish policy against the kurd minority and reveal it as the racist, ethnic assasination and human violation that it is. I only hope, at that point, that the US won't be so callous to move out and leave the kurds alone to deal with the turks (but I wouldn't bet a cent on that)...
Back on topic... yeah, Turkey isn't exacly what you call a western democracy by today's standard. It's more like a struggle between middle eastern theocracy and a '900 european nationalistic dictatorship. It can't possibly be part of the EU as is; but slamming the door in their face wouldn't help either (especially in DE with it's largest turkish immigrate community) it's a matter of pulling the strings without snapping them; and incidentally basing diplomatic and political careers on the process... don't expect it to be solved soon... in a lifetime? Yes, shure... but no sooner...
Why not use Berkeley DB for the little weblet serving Quick & Dirty templated views from a semi static content bucket. It's even javaized now...
Actually I'm curious to hear from anybody using the thing...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well you should visit Europe, Amsterdam in particular. You see, there's this little protestant, burgeois, probably a tad cinical country called Netherlands where pot & mushrooms is legal; the dealers are just weird shopkeepers... and the stuff you get is premium quality... and it's all properly taxed. The bad chem stuff you find in raves & discos is illegal but these people are sensible enough to understand that fear of arrest and SWAT assault dissuades people from looking for treatment rather than from getting fsck'd into the substance abuse. So, since there's no SWAT lusting to rape your butt if you get a bad trip, once you're back from the dead a thoughtful shrink helps you out of your problems and keeps an eye on you in case you're still too rabid to come to terms with your shit. You know, one thing that really helps is having that warm feeling that if you stumble and fail you have a community that doesn't want to trample you; actually they want you out of trouble, if not out of goodwill, at least to avoid having a looney shooter on the run. It helps a lot, lot more that a gun in your pocket and paramilitary officers on patrol. Think about it... it's the essential diff between Old Europe and you guys
without offence,
e
Well, you shouldn't have mitigated the hooker-line. See, you were honest, cautious: your were plonked! The other guy, devious, whorish, deceitful: he got frontpaged... That's life; I thought you had learned (or is it learnt?) the lesson after Bushie got 4 more yrs (I did when Berlusconi got the high stool)?
... why oh why can't you kiddies learn html? Come on! you can either use the a-href std or use the autolink thingie please! linkie
I'll chime in, my powerbook has gone through 3 power supplies; one actually shorted on the DC line because of the cheap wire thus melting the whole device in a characteristic smelly (toxic?) plume. The battery pack latch of the same powerbook weared off causing it to jam if certain precautions aren't taken. The DVD drive sometimes makes some nasty noises, likely the full-stroke sensor doesn't work and the stepper motor to laser caddy gear skips; it hasn't given the ghost yet but I'm wary of Warner DVDs that tend to trigger this behaviour. Unfortunately the fans are starting to make funny noises. It doesn't suffer from flaky paint but other do and let's not forget the logic board fusses on the iBook and the battery problems of the Al powerbooks. Granted, it'll be 2 years old in 2 weeks and I still enjoy it as the first day (try that on a w2k Dell!) but powerbooks aren't some mithical Andruil, just another mass produced device.
Now, to be on topic: all these problems can be eventually reduced to lapses in an otherwise good quality control process; certainly better than Dell's or Medion's but still improvable. Now, I'm not saying that it's the chineses' fault, I've seen western made gsm phones crap out like flies (and don't forget good 'ol crappy FIAT... I'm italian, I see these poor jokes every day) but sometimes they do cut a corner too much over there...
Unfortunately my father's 40 yrs old AKAI amp was built with other quality standards in mind. Today it would be overkill to embed such high durability in products we have accustomed to consider consumables; this point is important and it's both our fault and the corps'. We, as consumers, enjoy a continuous turnover of our toys and them, the corps, are quite happy to make products that "help us" take the decision it's time to buy a new one.
Back on my unlucky powerbook... the power brick... what fool would save the 1 cent for a short guard and get to change, free of charge, thousands of blown supplies? This is a design flaw, a mistake done in Cupertino... shure, the cheap chinese cable is the initial cause, but Apple could have reconditioned rather than landfilling if not for the missing transistor (no, not a fuse, just a transistor wired up to shut down the supply if the draw is too high...), tsk... tsk...
Hadn't the author interjected "as well as" it would have been correct in giving a consecutive causality meaning rather than an enumeration of effects. Yeah, it's tough... probably the two forms superposed while she/he was typing her comment and mixed up. EN isn't my mother tounge and it took me a good 3 minutes to write the first sentence; unfortunately I happen to experience the same in my native language but I believe it's because I often compete for attention. The final outcome is that I don't have much time to transpose the concepts in proper medium, thus introducing symbolic interference; trouble is, the habit sets in. Shame... stupidified by environmental behavioural pollution.
You're right... I did get into a bumbling ram but it happens; I'm a bit burnt out!;-) Anyway, the rig I saw was (obvously) an IBM and I was enumerating, confusingly I agree, the specs that the tech had gloatingly told me while I was wiping the tears off my face when they assembled it;-) Now, the parent post was playing down IBM like "not much different from Dell" so I thought about that machine... ... ah, BTW, the machine itself was redundant... there were two of 'em... ("Oh my God, it's full of stars...")
I'm tired... hunting for excuses to avoid work and probably a bit burnt out... ;-)
I don't know about spanish food but being italian I can certainly confirm that our food can be very tasteful and incredibly varied for such a relatively small country (it must have to do with it being quite a bunch of squabbling separate states until little more than 100 yrs ago); I find it strange though that spanish cuisine is that bad/boring... boh. But please don't ever eat at the Autogrill, it's rather hideous and in any case, beware the Tourist Traps; cities, Rome especially, is full of 'em and do they rip you off!
Nope, think a pendulum locked at the maximum swing position. Ok, I'm being cerebral so think a stat ram cell like two inverters interlocked so that the output of one forces the other in a state whose output forces the first one into the same state it was before like an oscillator that dosen't oscillate (it would if the second's output would force the first inverter to change state rather than maintain the current).
It's like a flipflop but wired differently. It's wicked fast because you don't have to refresh the ram pages and also reading isn't destructive (DRAM reading on the other had is because the charge in the MOS transistor has to be driven to the sense amp in order to measure it and decide whether it's a 0 or a 1). DRAMS are slow because you have to wait for the correct time slot while the chip isn't refreshing.
Bullshit... I once saw a low end intel IBM server... yeah... IBM is just like any other incorporated beige box assembler... Dell? Oh, you're so much wrong... listen: redundant monster fan, redundant power supply & cabling, redundant motherboard chipset, HotSwap PCI cards, HotSwap and (configurable) Redundant RAM (have you ever heard of RAM RAID? is that Redundant Array of Expensive Ram?)! You can pop the Bleedin' memory sticks from the machine Live! (I mean, the Dimm socket braces have leds identifying the faulty stick!)... drums roll... HOTSWAPPABLE BLOODY CPU BASKET (two at the same time... the thing waits brainless for the tech to drop the new one)! Yeah... just like that Dell... I'm daed shure this beast doesn't even let Winders touch the metal, there must be some virtualizing layer because I can't possibly believe Windows could ever survive in such an advanced machine without self-formatting in shame! Now boy, go blow your nose and play with your cold-cathode modded water-hyped P4EE...
probably because we have difficulty finding jobs ourselves? Remember, the executive expat thing you described is usually nationals staffing some foreing branch office for a couple years; even worse, chances are that if you're a highly trained pro, there's little chance you'll find a company (here in IT al least) that needs you rather than some lowly temp slaving in a call centre. Actually you need a sponsor and a job post (12 mo at least) waiting for you... considering that all you can find here is 6 mo stages, maybe renewable... you're better off filing for something in a multinational and ask for an abroad mission...
no, italians are particularly immoral: always ready to howl for poor service and lack of justice while given the chance they're the first to blatantly break the rules at their leisure and convenience. Try that in Germany! As far as kings are concerned... italians have little interest at kingship being obsessed by the idea of getting their lousy face on TV; we've come to the trashy apex of an '80 lifestyle: all the money spent, ignorant like a bag of coal, living a life as described in the ads and in "collective confession" talk shows. We're sick, honest... I mean, look at Berlusconi and the circus around him...
... the odds of a racist society. In Italy we use extra-comunitarian (non EU citizen) as a parafrase for the ass-poor immigrant to whom nobody will ever rent an apartment for a reasonable fee, give a legal job, pay the pension fund contributions, etc... Strangely enough this mistreatment also applies to an USian, Australian, Canadian... whatever. Weird, having a highly productive citizen of an avanced western country treated with the same disdain for a stinkin' north african movin' in to spread criminality (no shit, I've heard this delirium more than once...) Perhaps you're better off trying in Spain; it isn't much different from Italy as far as lifestyle goes, but they seem much more integrated and civilized than us and, for bonus, their economy is much livelier than ours!
OMG! The 1994 book even has chapters devoted to NETIQUETTE!, spam and basic security advice... it even tells about the difference in hacker/cracker! Oh shit! I want an LSD trip and dream about a world where all friggin' surfers have notion of this, Microsoft was broken in two comapnies: OS and Applications, Bush wasn't thrown into office by his cronies, damn wars all 'round the globe and Berlusconi was a convicted fraudster... hell, I want MY world back! I haven't hurt anybody, why must I suffer all this?
Yep, very true indeed... see for yourself: sane linky to online version of said book I also happen to agree on the second point...
No, it's like sexual tourism; over here in Italy, if you go out on vacation in some desperately poor country to ream a child in the ass you face a couple decades in the slammer. We don't insist on foreing governments signing laws to behead paedophiles on a field trip; we take care of our sickos ourselves once they're back home, playing the part of the well behaved citizen.
Of course whenever you start talking economy all kind of abuse becomes magically possible: on our very homeland Enichem executives were aquitted for having intoxicated residents & workers of a disastrous petrochem plant netx to Venezia basically covering up a sad story of greed, criminally irresponsible conduct, etc... so I doubt we would have done differently than the US. On the other hand, I don't feel it's right; I expect an italian to behave as one wherever he or she happens to be or work; ethics don't have borders (at least for those that belong to our community)... it's tribal I know, but we're only animals aren't we?
Or better, Mozilla's lack thereof. This is something that has always baffled me; why on earth does Mozilla (or Thunderbird) only display the ACLs in ro mode? It must have the getAcl() (or whatever) command and some stupid little parseAcl() in order to display them. So why, why... again why hasn't anybody whipped up a stinkin' setAcl() function is beyond me.
LDAP write support is another sorely missing feature. Evolution can do it.
These two miserable little features would make TB an instant Winner, no question. And oh yes... vcf support, please!
The mirror type solar power plant might work too, but they cost an order of magnitude more to make per megawatt than a nuclear plant. And they're not manintenance free once built.
Yeah, because nuclear power plants are maintenance free are they? Speaking about the price per power unit; do you mean unit price for the *energy* or, as your wording imply do you refer to the price paid for a given amount of power? In the latter I might agree that nuclear plants deliver quite a high energy density, perhaps economically unobtainable by other means but if you consider the price paid for the correct disposal of the waste... well, nuclear is so hideously expensive to be uneconomical (unless of course the corporation isn't paying for that but rather dumps the responsibility on the goverment... ding! more taxes to pay for the managment's Martini)
You're right that there are specific treaties and that those have been signed years ago. But as you said, these treaties do not allow police enforcements that wouldn't have been legal in the participant country itself. Now, on one hand we tried to play around our own legal system in order to go on fishing expedtions that would doubtly have been conceded had it happened in Italy; on the other I think such requests would have been thrown out by any US court had not been for the Patriot Act...
Regarding Turkey, I *think* it's getting slightly better now, but until not long ago it was ILLEGAL to speak about anything that had to do with the IDEA of Kurdish identity... one turkish member of parliament was arrested for speaking kurdish in the House... it's not only about the PKK... it's about denying the very existence of the kurd ethnicity... that badly stinks of stalinism
Please try to contextualize when such a law was written... about the time when Germany was a pile of rubble, littered by millions of dead carcasses and hungry homeless people. It's a law, a decision, taken by a deluded community vowing never to commit the same capital mistake ever again...
My dear fellow americans... you're so quick waving your Freedom Of Speech liberties but then, you had Mc Carthy, Kennedy, Luther King, Malcom X assasinated; you still, to a certain extent, exert strong control on what's acceptable to say or not. In practice, the noble principle doesn't always soar like Ashcroft's Eagle...
After all the same Freedom of Speech is the pet principle that brought together anyone freeing from Europe and you built a communal identity around it. I'm pretty shure the same applies to the germans... and it's commendable that they rebuilt their dignity and identity around the shame and grief of their past... these aren't things to dismiss so quickly, I believe...
No it's an example of the Patroit Act in effect... you see, the originating countries' laws and guarantees wouln'd have permitted the indy incident, but since the US loosened the strings of their system it became an opportunity for some of our enforcement agencies to obtain something that would have been illegal to do according to our rules... you were a tool my friends; it's akin to a third world puppet dictator doing the dirty job for the western administrations and corporations...
Probably because of the rich (was it gas or oil) fields that many believe are plentiful in northern Iraq. That's why the turkish army ammassed it's troops on the border hoping to help out the US invasion and when the US said "no thanks" Turkey replied by not allowing the US troops to pour down from their border (pretty strange for a NATO country).
You see, Turkey would have been a rather "willing" country but everyone knew that their behaviour would have been a tad more distasteful that Abu Grahib so they were left out. I think that's the reason why the whole invasion became the "long run" from the south, and why the US was hasteful to get in touch with the commando squads that were flown into Kurdistan just to make shure Turkey got the message that their "help against terrorism" wasn't wanted nor needed.
If there was one thing done right in this stupid war that's the management of the northern sector. You don't hear much about that part of the country; apparently the "terrorist kurds" are really making an effort in controlling their territory and getting the message across that they're not just a bunch of guerrilla, but rather a structured, identifiable "nation".
This will irritate Turkey to no end... and I fully expect trouble and "necessary action taken to prevent the spread of Terrorism", once the Kurds will vote (or prepare to vote) themselves into an independent or federate region. That would, alone, undermine the turkish policy against the kurd minority and reveal it as the racist, ethnic assasination and human violation that it is. I only hope, at that point, that the US won't be so callous to move out and leave the kurds alone to deal with the turks (but I wouldn't bet a cent on that)...
Back on topic... yeah, Turkey isn't exacly what you call a western democracy by today's standard. It's more like a struggle between middle eastern theocracy and a '900 european nationalistic dictatorship. It can't possibly be part of the EU as is; but slamming the door in their face wouldn't help either (especially in DE with it's largest turkish immigrate community) it's a matter of pulling the strings without snapping them; and incidentally basing diplomatic and political careers on the process... don't expect it to be solved soon... in a lifetime? Yes, shure... but no sooner...
Why not use Berkeley DB for the little weblet serving Quick & Dirty templated views from a semi static content bucket. It's even javaized now...
Actually I'm curious to hear from anybody using the thing...
But since it's been done on the 'unter-nnet' it's a new & novel implementation of, uh, teh-nulogy... at least according to the USPTO... ;-)