Do you want to hear the most incredible "it's not a bug - it's a feature" story ever?

After shooting hundreds of megs of RAWs with my Canon 350D last couple of weeks, I noticed a very strange thing - importing this large amount of files from my camera into F-Spot took ages. F-Spot ate memory in tens and hundreds of megabytes and never returned it back to the system. Well I blamed it on Mono and went searching for a better way. Then I found out that command-line C program gphoto also take the same horrific amount of memory to import my photos. I saw that to download 900 Mb of photos (~250 photos) photo memory use went up to ~910 Mb (2 Mb were shared). Luckily Linux managed to swap out part of gphoto, so I could finish the download with my 512 Mb of real RAM and a 1 Gb swap file. I googled and founds tens of bug reports on this - first of them as early as December 2004. Ouch.

Well - let's see what the problem is, shall we? Some bugreports reference a bug in gphoto's SourceForge bug tracker where a users reports that downloading a 250 Mb video file takes 250 Mb of RAM and developers reply that unfortunately that is the limitation of current infrastructure and it is very hard to fix. Bumer.

But wait! He says that downloading ONE file takes a lot of RAM. This limit should not exist when downloading multiple files - we should be able to drop information about previous file as soon as we start downloading the next one, right?

Ok, lest see, what really is going on there. Downloading source of gphoto. Looking at it. Seeing a lot of mess. After around 10 minutes I start to understand that there is a table of option names and functions and the real job is doe by command line parser who calls a function as soon as he encounters a proper parameter on the command line. :P After 3 more minutes jumping around the code I finally get to a function that gets called to download a single file. Looks pretty easy:

• take a CameraFile pointer


• pass it to gp_file_new() for inicialization


• pass it to gp_get_file() to get the actual data of file (download happens here)


• pass it to gp_write_file_to_file() to dump the data to a file on disk


• pass it to gp_file_unref() to free the data

Looks all fine and dandy so far. However I see the memory use that suggest that this last operation does not happen as it should, so I search for the gp_file_unref() function. I do not find it in gphoto source, but as I soon figure out - it is in libgphoto2. The function is pretty straight forward - the reference count of the structure is reduced by 1 and if it has reached 0, the structure is freed from memory via gp_file_free() function.

Hmm, I wonder what will happen if I replace gp_file_unref() with gp_file_free() in gphoto? After a quick compile and installation (I thank the Gods and all DD's for the wonders of "debuild -us -uc && sudo dpkg -i ../gphoto*.deb") I ran gphoto again. Wow, it now only consumes 8-16 Mb of RAM and not 900. The files downloaded fine, but in the end glibc made a lot of fuss about "double free". What does that mean? It means that someone managed to get a reference to our MemoryFile and didn't give it back. Naughty boy!

We only call three functions using that pointer, so it should not be hard to trace them trough the source to see what they do. The gp_file_new() function looks good, it sets reference count to 1 always. gp_get_file is more complex - I get to crawl through a lot of strange redirects to all levels of gphoto architecture. At one point I get a bit alarmed as I see a local variable called ref_count, but then I see that the code just stores reference count there for safekeeping while data is copied from another object and right after that copy reference count is put back safely. After all that I get to the end of the gp_get_file function, just a couple thing left - cache the result, clean up and return the file. Wait a minute ....

CACHE?!?!?!!

$(&@($^@#$(^@&^$(#&$@#(&$(@#$&!^&$^@*!(&$#(@& !!!!!

It appears that someone thought that it is a good idea to use a gig or so of my RAM for cache, just in case if I would like to download the same photos the second time around in the same program call. IT IS NOT!

Results: one line patch, one NMU building for upload, one *very* long bug in upstream bug tracker, one developer quite upset and not too convinced about the correctness of free software ways any more :P

17:30 <+quinophex> the pages that really wind me up are the ones which people are saying "we paid 50 grands for these, aren't they great!"
17:30 <+quinophex> and they are more shit than i could do
17:30 < iDunno> hehe
17:30 <+quinophex> ...when i am forced to use a copy of frontpage 97
17:30 < iDunno> and probably aren't accessable ;)
17:30 <+quinophex> on windows 3.1
17:30 < iDunno> quinophex: shudder.
17:30 <+quinophex> with my eyes gouged out with a stick
17:31 <+quinophex> and broken fingers
17:31 < iDunno> quinophex: and an abacus instead of a networked computer?
17:31 <+quinophex> something like that :)
17:31 < iDunno> whilst simultaneously inventing the wheel and deodorant
17:31 < iDunno> and taking a shower.
17:31 <+quinophex> while plugged into the mains :D
17:32 < iDunno> and pro-creating.
17:32 <+quinophex> with a goat
17:32 <+quinophex> and a squid
17:32 < iDunno> at the same time?! crikey.
17:32 < iDunno> that sounds messy ;)
17:33 <+quinophex> with anal bleeding
Conclusion - me and quinophex agree that the web is generally populated by a bunch of broken pages, and most web developers need shooting :)

So having found time to catch up satisfactorily on the implementation, time to get back into the blogging. After working out what you actually want to do, the next step in implementing stuff, in my book, is to make sure you fully understand the context of the stuff you’re trying to change. In this case, the “unapproved” queue concept comes from some thoughts from quite a while ago that come under the heading “NIv2” for “new incoming v2”. For reference, the original “new incoming” was the switch to separate queues for new, byhand, and accepted packages, which was followed by a notable update shortly after to make accepted autobuilding possible. That setup works, but has a few problems. One is that packages sit in accepted for quite a while (up to a full 24h), and occassionally in that time it can become inappropriate to actually add the package to the archive – for instance if it’s a build of a package that’s then removed from the archive. This results in an UNACCEPT, and requires manual intervention, since potentially it can result in weird inconsistencies, such as bug closures. Another is that files in the various queues aren’t tracked in the database, which can result in files (particularly upstream tarballs) being lost or left behind, and also requires some unpleasant special casing in the code. A final concern is that one of the bigger time sinks in the daily pulse is the apt-ftparchive scan, which is actually just doing work that’s already been done in order to allow packages in accepted to be autobuilt. Put all those concerns together with the ones mentioned last week, and you get the impetus for NIv2. The principle of that is to put stuff in the queue into the database properly, simplify it, extend the queuing support to deal with different queues, and move stuff from accepted directly into the pool every quarter hour, though only pushing to buildds that frequently, leaving updates of Packages files and mirror pushes to still be daily, or every few hours or whatever. This is what that bit looked like in the dak TODO:

[hard, long term] unchecked -> accepted should go into the db, not a suite, but similar. this would allow katie to get even faster, make madison more useful, decomplexify specialacceptedautobuild and generally be more sane. may even be helpful to have e.g. new in the DB, so that we avoid corner cases like the .orig.tar.gz disappearing ‘cos the package has been entirely removed but was still on stayofexecution when it entered new.

Obviously, it needed to get defined a little more clearly than that to work out how much the changes for the security queues I’m interested in depend on the other changes, and what they actually mean in detail. After some IRC discussion we came up with more or less the following summary of what NIv2 actually means:

How NIv2 should work. q/accepted goes away; once packages are accepted, they get added straight into the pool and the database. At this point they’re added to a micro-suite for the buildds, and so apt-ftparchive can cache the package contents; and a symlink tree is made up so incoming.d.o works. The micro-suite might or mightn’t be a fully fledged suite in the database. Presumably it wouldn’t be visible in dists/ though. The micro-suite probably should contain packages uploaded to unstable for X hours, where X is 48 or 2x pulse-interval or similar. This means UNACCEPT is impossible and apt-ftparchive takes less time in cron.daily. q/byhand and q/new get new friends: q/sec-embargoed, q/sec-unembargoed, q/stable-updates. Rather than checking for “byhand” entries, or a lack of overrides; uploads get diverted to those queues if they’re uploaded to security or stable, and get moved out of there when a security team member or stable RM (ie, Joey) runs an amber/lisa-esque command. This means sec-embargoed and sec-unembargoed need to be autobuilt. This also means that proposed-updates can be a full suite, and point releases can be a matter of (a) adding proposed-updates to stable; (b) removing old versions from stable; (c) removing packages that have to be dropped; and users can put “stable + proposed-updates” in their sources.list reasonably sanely. This also means that REJECTs from accepted (security) or the archive (p-u) aren’t needed. It means the queue ends up looking like:

    unchecked      [uploads go here, insecure]
    holding        [secured]
    new            [waiting NEW processing]
    byhand         [waiting byhand processing]
    stable-updates [waiting stable RM approval]
    done           [.changes files for accepted packages]
    reject         [.changes, .reason and rejected stuff]
    bts_version_track [data for BTS]

with q/accepted disappearing and q/proposed-updates and q/old-proposed-updates being replaced by the stable-updates / oldstable-updates queues.

One of the nice parts about this is that it breaks down fairly neatly into three sets of changes: supporting additional queues, removing the accepted queue, and tracking queue stuff in the database. It does make those changes more or less dependent though – the new queues need to be autobuilt in the way accepted is at present; so it makes sense to add the queues before removing accepted so as not to lose the queue autobuild support. The above actually can be simplified a little further – instead of managing a microsuite for changes since the last update, it’s possible to add accepted packages directly to the real suite; and generate the Packages files needed for autobuilding by querying packages accepted to unstable in the last 24 or 48 hours, simply by adding a field to track upload time for binaries as well as sources. In any event, this thus makes generalising the queue autobuild support the next challenge.

My main fear in life is pain. I'm a wuss. Nowhere is this more obvious than when I'm at the dentist. I literally start shaking when I sit in the chair. While he's prodding around inside my mouth I can feel myself tense up more and more until I force myself to relax and then the process repeats. Being 6'1" I don't get a lot of people believing me when I tell them just how nervous the whole thing makes me. Anyway. When I came to Norwich I managed to find a dentist who claimed to be suited to nervous patients. I went and didn't find them that good, but did make an appointment for my next checkup 6 months after my initial appointment. And then they cancelled it and I spent the next 3 years thinking I should really get round to sorting it out again and not doing so. Then several weeks ago I was having a conversation at an ALUG meeting with Becca and she recommended her dentist. So I decided I should give them a go and discovered that Phill also uses the same one and said they were good too. I finally got around to going today (having filled out all the forms last week). The dentist was nice and friendly and took me on board about being shit scared. And said some consoling words about my teeth being in reasonable shape. I got away with a scale and polish (which I have to go back to get completed in a couple of weeks) and no mention of a drill anywhere. Rock. Now let's see if I can manage a regular checkup schedule. :) Oh, it's the Guildhall Dental Practice at 9 Upper Goat Lane, Norwich if anyone else is looking. 01603 760032.

The news today included pictures from a Thanksgiving parade, one of which showed cheerleaders(?) dancing, and bringing up cardboard cutout cars. Cue the anchor’s voiceover: “The Thanksgiving feast originated from a feast thanking for a good harvest.” Yeah, a car harvest.

There’s a reason why I’m going through Baen’s pile of published books. He is the only publisher I know who gets ebooks, I mean really gets them. (Virtually?) all of his catalogue is available in ebook form – with no Digital Restrictions Management! – for a reasonable price, and quite a few are available for free in the Baen Free Library. You can read these books on the browser, or download them to your PDA, whatever works for you. Naturally, you can always buy a dead-tree version, instead. I figure, this publisher is worth the money I pour at him, and hence I pour it in quantity. This is my explanation for having expended six euros for the following ebook. Cally’s War by John Ringo and Julie Cochrane is a sequel to a four-book trilogy by the first author. The trilogy is heavy-duty military science fiction, telling an excellent version of the “aliens invade Earth” story. Cally’s War is set forty years later, and features a minor supporting character from the trilogy as the main character. By the start of the book, Cally is an assassin working for a secret society which wages a secret war against the galactic domination of the Darhel species. The plot of the book revolves around the threat of the secret society being exposed to the opposition, and Cally’s mission in this book is basic counterintelligence: find out the mole and destroy it. However, it would be wrong to think that this book tells an espionage story, or that the counterintelligence plot is integral to the book: the plot is weak, mainly serving as a thin connector between episodes involving Cally’s personal life, or the lack of it, and her sex life (from whose lack she does not suffer). This book, however, seems to suffer from the lack of an editor. There are good ideas, and the storytelling is okay, but to make a really good book, the authors should have regarded this version as the first draft to be thrown away – and rewritten the book completely. There is really no unity in the story, and several good themes worthy of exploration are just skimmed. It is obvious that Ringo did not contribute much prose to this book: the bad politics rants are conspicuosly absent. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had Ringo actually written more of the book, even if it meant suffering through new pro-Bush rhetorics. I suppose this book could work standalone, that is, it does not depend on the reader having read the previous books. On the other hand, there is very little that speaks for reading this book at all, except that it continues the story started in the four-book trilogy. I appreciated the story as a continuation of Cally’s arc, and some of the sex scenes were fun to read, but otherwise it left me wanting. I rate this book 4/10.

Compare (in an utf-8 enviroment)

  % printf "'% 2s'\n" "a" 
  ' a'

with

  % printf "'% 2s'\n" " " 
  ' '

That happens with the builtin printf as found in bash and zsh, and with /usr/bin/printf. Also with perl, both with and without “use utf8”. As Clint pointed out to me, printf(3) states that “the precision determines the number of bytes written, not the number of wide characters or screen positions”, so the behavior is correct. Still, I’d like a way to get what I want (' '), does somebody have a suggestion for me? I can only think of uglyness.

I've already fielded enquiries from two people who have found my blog via Google, and given the 10,500 visas a year being issued, there's only going to be more, so in the interests of not spending too much time answering questions individually, I'm going to write a detailed account of things. Disclaimer: This article is not a replacement for doing your own homework. I expressly disclaim any responsibility for you getting your visa application denied, being cavity searched when you attempt to enter the US, or being sent to Guantanamo Bay. In particular, this information is subject to change, and as I'm not applying for a new visa every day, I'm not going to know about the changes. If you find something here that is blatantly wrong, or out of date, please let me know, but at the moment, I'm writing about my experiences. I'm undecided about maintaining a website devoted to capturing the state of the art in E-3 visa applications. If in doubt, spend the money (and I do mean spend, it's not a cheap phone call) and call the information line - 1902 941 641 - to speak to a human being, and ask all the questions. Resources

• The Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's page on E-3 visas
• The US Consulate's E-3 visa page
• The US Consulate's page on applying for a non-immigrant visa

What's the process? Your potential employer (sponsor) needs to file a Labor Condition Application (see the form here). At present, this form hasn't been brought up to date with respect to E-3 visas, it's the same form used for H1-B visas. Your employer needs to have written at the top of each page "E-3 - Australia - to be processed". This bit of handwriting is apparently key. You need to have the signed LCA in your hot little hand before you roll up at the US Consulate to apply for your visa. As for how long these take to be processed by the Department of Labor, the FAQ says a week for postal applications. From my experience, and the experience of a couple of other people I've spoken to, it takes anything up to about four weeks. Generally speaking, you do not have to concern yourself with the LCA process, unless for some reason, you're sweating on the LCA so you can apply for your visa. My personal opinion is that the whole process is so long, bureaucratic and unpredictable, that you really don't want to be making any firm plans based on any assumptions on when you think anything is going to happen. Start your planning from when you have been issued your visa, not when you expect you will be issued your visa. Once the LCA has been issued, your sponsor will send it to you along with a wad of paperwork, most of which you just take with you to the consulate. You can make an appointment online. Paperwork-wise, you need to take a completed DS-156 and a DS-157 if you are male between 16 and 45. These forms are available here. You can make an appointment online, the links to make an appointment at each of the US Consulates are also here. I found that the lead time to an appointment was around a month, so if you know the LCA application has been made, you can probably make the booking at the Consulate, so as to try and parallelise things a little bit. What do you need to take to the interview? You need to take your completed DS-156 and DS-157 forms. You need one for each person. So if you are the principal (i.e. the person being hired), you need a DS-156 for yourself, and your spouse, and whichever of you is male needs a DS-157. Bring the sponsor's offer letter too. You need a receipt for a non-refundable visa application fee. You need one receipt per person applying for a visa. You get these receipts by paying $130 per person at any Australia Post outlet. As the visa is non-immigrant, you need to be able show some sort of ongoing connection with Australia. If you own property here, and are planning to continue owning it while in the US, bring a rates notice. I don't know what else is useful to demonstrate an ongoing connection. Also bring a bank statement, as you need to demonstrate an ability to support yourself while in the US. Bring birth certificates and marriage certificates. Also bring a copy of your University transcript, and any assessments that your employer may have had done that state that you hold the equivalent of a US degree. I'm not sure how hard and fast the whole degree thing is. I have an incomplete degree and about 10 years of work experience. This was sufficient. I don't know how you'd go with absolutely no degree and lots of work experience. Finally, you need to bring two US-sized passport photos. These are 5cm x 5cm, which are not what your average passport photo is like if you go somewhere and ask for a passport photo. Processing takes about 3 days, although you get an indication on the day as to whether you are successful or not. If you don't want to come back to collect your passport with the visa in it, you need to leave sufficient stamped, self-addressed envelopes so that the Consulate can mail the passports back to you. It's a bit hazy as to what constitutes 3 days, but assume 3 full working days, plus whatever time it takes for the postage, so up to 5 working days. Good luck with your visa application. Let me know how it goes, and if this has been of assistance.

I knew that hard disks had a limited time-life park/unpark-wise, but I didn’t know that was that bad. I always thought that because of ext3’s commit every 5 seconds, disk would never spin out and park the head. I was wrong. It seems that whether or not the disk is accessed, every put here the time it is for your disk minutes, it does park and unpark the head. Well, at least on laptop disks, because it seems this is not the case for desktops. My 3 year-old vaio, which is now this web server, has a Load_Cycle_Count of 580465 for 9775 Power_On_Hours, which is about 1 load cycle per minute.
My 1 year-old vaio, has a Load_Cycle_Count of 83718 for 4043 Power_On_Hours, which is about 1 load cycle every 3 minutes. While I managed to actually stop the load cycles to occur on the older vaio, with hdparm -B254, nothing actually stopped it on the newer one. I tried to change some other parameters with hdparm -S but nothing did work. I still have to take a look at the BIOS, though. Now, the question is : why the fuck are the heads parked/unparked every little while even when accesses occur ? Is it a conspiracy so that laptop disks won’t last forever ? Well, at least, I’ve never experienced a hard disk failure in 12 years of using computers with hard disks. For how long ?… [Note: the Dell laptop provided by my company, running Windows XP (which also has a somewhat journalled filesystem and commits the journal every few seconds) has around 24000 load cycles for about 800 hours of use, which is 1 load cycle every 2 minutes, so this is not a Linux issue.]

I didn't blog immediately when I got back homei, mainly because the first days after my return (which was on Sunday) I was too busy feeling like shit.
The fair was rather straining, especially since I was there on my own and a normal fair day included about 3 hours of car driving (half of it in a horrible 7 line fair traffic management system) and about 9 hours of standing around, all tarted up with pantsuit, high heels, make up et al., smiling, looking attentive and not as bored (and in pain) as I was. (No, there are no pictures!!)

Anyway, enough whining. I am back and made an almost full recovery (Save some big bruises on my right leg, of which I have no idea where I got them. Probably bumped something against my leg when taking down the booth again.) and there are now much more pleasant times ahead. The Leipzig christmas market opened today and I plan to pay it a visit sometime this weekend. (Yea, I know, kitschy, sentimental, commercialised, ... but it's fun anyway, so shut up and have a gingerbread.).

The second highlight of this weekend will be the Skatalites concert I'll see on Saturday. For those who don't listen to Ska, the Skatalites can be considered to be among the "founding fathers" of today's Ska music. They were most popular around '63 - '65, today they are of course all pretty old guys (And girls they bring Doreen Shaffer, yay!!).
But they still do some considerable rockin! And it is to be supposed that there might even be a fair amount of enjoyable skankin' going on among the faithful followers of the acustic and sensual delight that is good Ska music.

So, what’s with all the broken laptop hard disks?! I have two laptops running almost all day (one as a cheap simple server with built-in UPS) and one as workstation. But in the last, say, 2 years I had to replace the 2.5” (laptop) hard disk drives 4 times! Since laptop HDDs cost a lot more per megabyte than normal 3.5” drives, this was becoming an expensive issue for me. So, I geared up S.M.A.R.T on both machines and did some investigating. The major issue seems to be the load/unload system that is integrated into more and more of these drives nowadays. The heads will automatically be retracted (parked) after some idle time to decrease the risk of shock damage and reduce power consumption. However, this seems to be a bad combination with Linux. I have not done any research into the specific implementation of the journaled file systems that I use (ext3, XFS), but it can something to do with it. It seems the heads of almost all laptop disks I encounter are continuously unloaded and loaded instead of around 5 times per hour. It seems a hard disk drive is made to allow for 300.000 load/unload cycles, after that the mechanism wears of so that inaccurate moving can occur and the platters can be damaged because of a small miss. Now, my drives had 650.000, 1.2000.000 and 900.000 before bad sectors and completely erratic behaviour start to occur, but this was within a year. My most recent broken drive had about 3 load cycles per minute, this means 180 per hour. With things going bad at 600.000, the disk thus had a lifetime of 3333 hours (138 days). This is ridiculously short. So I’ve turned APM of all my drives off (hdparm -B254). Better a small risk of bad sectors when dropping my laptop than having to replace my disk within the year. Also note that my brand new Western Digital disk has spent 14.000 of its load cycles within the first 15 hours that I was busy with installing Debian and recovering backups! If someone has more information about this, please let me know.

The Fahrplan (yes, that's German — it means "schedule") of the 22C3 (the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress) is online now. Joi Ito will deliver the keynote speech titled "Private Investigations". Here's a small (really!) selection out of the plethora of great lectures:

• Understanding buffer overflow exploitation
• Hacking CCTV
• Peer-to-peer under the hood
• The intelligent web searcher
• RFID - overview of protocols, librfid implementation and passive sniffing
• VoIPhreaking
• European politics concerning digital rights
• Biometrics in Science Fiction
• Software Patenting
• A way to fuzzy democracy
• Military intelligence for terrorists(tm)
• Black Ops Of TCP/IP 2005.5
• Robots for fun and research
• Search Engines - Oracles of the Information Society
• Secure Code
• Literarisches Code-Quartett
• Attacking the IPv6 Protocol Suite
• Towards the first Free Software GSM Phone
• Esperanto, die internationale Sprache
• "Xbox" and "Xbox 360" Hacking
• How to construct Utopia
• The truth about Nanotechnology
• Free Software and Anarchism
• Hacker Jeopardy
• Breaking Down the Web of Trust
• Access to Knowledge
• Bluetooth Hacking - The State of The Art
• The very early Computer Game History
• Security Nightmares 2006

Four days, four rooms, lectures from 12:00 am to 12:00 pm every day. Need I say more?

I know I said I was swamped until December, but there’s always a few minutes to release a new version of a package, right? It’s kind of like dessert—there’s always room. I’ve released randomplay 0.49. The new version adds a keystroke to pause playing and a keystroke to display the available keystrokes, and the ability to configure UTF-8 display of tags on or off. I’ve also improved the documentation and filled in the sample rc file to give all available options. By the way, Clint Adams, I would be happy to add Audioscrobbler support. Unfortunately, there is not yet any Net::AudioScrobbler perl module. I contacted the guy who is working on it and he said it’s not yet fit for public consumption, but will let me know when it is.

(Reposted from old blog) Inspired by Matthew Palmer’s writings (1, 2) on his experiences about the Australian judicial system, I decided to write a series of essays on the Finnish legal system, mostly to contrast it with the universally familiar United State system (even if that universal familiarity is a little skewed by generally having been obtained from dramatizations and not actual court practice). I will concentrate on criminal cases. I will write based on my personal experience as a part of the judicial system, and I will be supplementing the experience with my personal research into law. I am not legally trained, but I have read a fair bit of law and related literature. I am a lay judge in the Jyv skyl District court. I will explain the significance of that later, but I hope it suffices to say, here, that I have sat on the bench, as part of four-judge panels, since March this year, in ten sessions each a day long, and each containing at least two, usually four or five criminal cases. Some highlights:

• There are no plea bargains. With some minor exceptions, every criminal case is tried in a full court session.
• There is no jury. Criminal cases are tried as a rule by a panel of four judges, of which one is legally trained and three are lay judges, each having an equal vote.

Later essays in this series:

• The main hearing in a Finnish criminal trial (November 16, 2005)
• The Finnish lay judge system (November 16, 2005)

Fictional depictions of court cases in this series:

• Driving While Intoxicated – A Glimpse of Finnish Criminal Justice, Part One

Read more

This entry is mostly for the benefit of Martin-Éric Racine, who is having trouble with Blosxom and dates. I'm forced to use this arcane method of communication, since Martin-Éric threatens to charge for any incoming email. I would like to direct your attention to Blosxom plugins for indexing. They allow, for example, to preserve entry dates even when the entries are modified later.

I claimed yesterday that the council of minister looks very much like an upper house of a bicameral parliament. It is somewhat unusual in that the members are not chosen for a certain term but serve by virtue of holding an office in a member state, but it is not a decisive unusuality. Martin-Éric Racine countered: No, it is not. The council is bureaucracy overruling the Parliament, thus invalidating the very principle of democracy. We have seen this in action with the new EU Patents law: the Parliament had passed several amendments to the original proposal, yet the Council ended up ignoring those democraticly voted amendments and passing an even worse legislation than the original draft. This is clearly different than what happens between a higher and lower chambers each examining new legislation before it is ratified. Wouter Verhelst already said most of what I would have said myself; the bottom line is that Martin-Éric is mistaken about the powers of the council of ministers. Does he by any chance confuse the council of ministers and the commission? It would explain his calling the council a "bureaucracy", which it really is not. The power balance between houses in bicameral parliaments varies. My claim cannot be dismissed just because the two organs do not work exactly like the English parliament, for example. An important thing is that the lower house is almost always directly elected and the upper house comprises often representatives of areas or member states. Finally, I would like to note that the bicamerality of the EU parliament system is independent of my claim that the EU is a country; if a non-country can have a parliament, it certainly can have a bicameral parliament. So you don't have to rebut it just because you don't believe in my claim about the countriness of EU. Oh, BTW, Martin-Éric, please don't mess with your posting dates. It makes your postings to appear more recent in PD than they actually are and to float to the top, where they obscure legitimately new postings by others. For example, your response to my previous posting appears much later in PD than Wouter's reply to it.

Some people think that only countries have constitutions. I find that strange, since both write at Planet Debian; surely, Debian is not a country! [Update: As hinted in the comments, I did not get MJR's posting. My bad. Let it be known here that he expresses roughly the same argument I presented above.] In fact, the European Union is a country. It has a bicameral parliament (the council of ministers is sufficiently upper-house-like to qualify as one IMHO), a currency it governs, a passport, and it is the highest authority inside its borders. It is an unusual country in that its meber states have broad powers, but it is a country nonetheless. It possesses all four of the defining properties of statehood according to the Montevideo convention: The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. The first three are uncontroversial, and though the fourth is weak, it is present. (Okay, that last paragraph is controversial, and I know the arguments are not airtight, but I do believe the case is valid.)