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Oh... He said "especially for children" so, knowing that Japan had a childrens' holiday on exactly the same day, I got the idea that there were distantly related children-themed holidays on Nov-15th in different Eastern cultures.

FaRe-Ed, you're right though--I just looked it up. Aeed marks the end of Ramadan so the date changes each year... it appears to be just a coincidence that the day also fell on Shichi Go San this year.

It does do spellchecking.

e.g. "dictionery"
The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Click on a spelling suggestion below or try again using the search box to the right.

Suggestions for dictionery:
     1. dictionary
     2. dictionaries
     3. dictionally
     4. dictional
     5. dicoumarin
     6. dishonorer
     7. disharmony
     8. discounter
     9. diachronies
    10. dishonored

I'm also a fan of dictionary.com too though.

I'm sure this will change.

No matter how much a country dislikes Bush, it will benefit them to be on the good side of American policy themselves. This will provide incentive for many European leaders to talk nice about him, even though they disagree with, or even hate, his policies.

I also expect these leaders to try and keep this praise off the front-pages of their own domestic media. And some Americans will want to see this foreign praise and say "see, I told you the world would come to their senses". But I'm sure it will be almost entirely politicking on the part of the foreign leaders.

Saying this might give the wrong impression--especially when splitting hairs with non-native speakers of English here.

People might read this and wrongly think that Americans as a whole support Bush more than they've ever supported "any other president in history". The margin of victory is certainly more representative of Bush's support--51% vs. 49%.

As has been pointed out, the voter-turnout was much larger than normal. Kerry himself also received more votes than Regan did in either of his elections.

When people say that the US is not a democracy, they are usually holding a strict view of what makes a "true democracy". More specifically, they are usually referring--whether they know it or not--to the 2,400+ year-old idealistic definition of democracy as defined by the Athenian statesman Pericles (Google Search: Pericles funeral oration). Since even Pericles' Athens didn't live up to his own definition of this ideal, his words were taken as propaganda for Athenian imperialism.

In this strict scholarly sense, people can argue that the US is not a democracy, and is instead, a "democratic federated republic" or something to this effect. But when someone hears the word "democracy" in conversation, they're probably thinking something very similar to the M-Webster definition.

Language is always changing and I think that, now, it is useful and accurate to refer to America as a democracy. Whew. This has turned into a mouth full.

Anyway, in the spirit of all this... I vote for the Merriam-Webster definition!

I've seen several bits of questionable evidence in the topic (from several people) but I just couldn't let this go:

The cease-fire isn't still in effect. After the US left, it was not able garner enough support to satisfactorily bolster South Vietnam. Two years after we (America) withdrew, the cease-fire was broken and South Vietnam was overrun. There haven't been two Vietnams for almost 30 years. The events and outcomes in Vietnam and Korea can't really be compared.

I certainly agree that it doesn't make sense to use combat experience as a main (or even large) factor in choosing a president.

But I'm also inclined to believe that combat experience helps to temper and refine a decision maker's judgement with regard to wartime decisions. The cast of the current administration plays out this idea: those with combat experience support a more measured and prudent posture and those without combat experience are favoring more aggressive policies.

Now, I wouldn't be too surprised to find that this didn't hold up historically. A study comparing combat experience in youth (or lack thereof) to wartime policy decisions later in life would be an interesting read. But since I haven't seen any proper evidence that supports or refutes this, all I have to go on is my gut.

Last Wednesday (10/6/2004), the Armed Services committee had their hearing on the final findings of US's own official weapon inspection reports.

rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/project … 4_armed.rm

The whole thing's pretty long. But I think the basis for most peoples' ire with the entire situation is summed up nicely by Senator Carl Levin's take on the situation (fast-forward 9 minutes into the hearing). Please note that Levin's comments were made within the context of the US weapon inspector's newly-released final report.

The CIA has also posted the key findings of committee's report online here:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd … ndings.pdf

This will probably be my last post in this topic too.
(I groaned when I saw this in the topic list but couldn't help myself.)

This goes for email addresses associated with guest-posts too?

A question about the planned "Post moderation queue":

Is this going to queue all posts except for admin-posts (as mentioned here) or is the queue likely to have other options?

I'm thinking I'd like to use a queue--but only for guest posts. If this kind of functionality isn't built in, I might make a mod for it if it's not too harsh a change.

Ouch. You're certainly right about that... I know I'd find that annoying. I just finished a flat file mini-search-engine/parser for large XML flat files--I'm able to keep things very-zippy under high server load because they're static and I can cache them... but that doesn't sound like a viable option with an ever changing forum.

Maybe a straight MySQL_to_XHTML module then?

Again, all vapor-ware musings...

I posted a topic a few days ago about modelling Pun's internal script structure after XHTML 1.1's module structure (XHTML 1.1 Parallelism - http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=4708).

I was thinking that the basic install of PunBB would include a minimal set of modules to run a forum. But using it for things like CMS also seems to fit with this.

Bear with me here: each module could be a folder containing a small handful of that module's php scripts...

Let's say that a basic PunBB 2.0 setup includes the following module-folders:
  *Core (required: includes things like config, post, delete, edit, etc.)
  *Admin  (required)
  *MySQL_to_PunXML (a something_to_PunXML would be required)
  *PunXML_to_XHTML_Basic (a PunXML_to_something would be required)
  *Lang_En (one lang module would be required)
  *User (with user login, and post options)

That'd be the basic install which assumes you're using PunBB as a forum. But if you wanted to use it simply for CMS, you could take out the "User" module--so no one could log in or post except the admin and add "display:none;" in the CSS to turn off certain elements. Then, web surfers could browse the site and look at content without all of the usual forum trappings. It wouldn't be a full-featured CMS, but hey, it's made to be a forum.

And if you needed to, you could replace the Pun_to_XHTML_Basic module with Pun_to_XHTML_1.1, Pun_to_XHTML_Trans or whatever.

This type of setup would allow for a light version of CMS support with no code bloat at all... it'd be leaner than the full PunBB.

Anyway... I've taken a look at (and make a few mini-hacks to) PunBB's code so I know this idea isn't simply an add-on to PunBB as it stands now... although I am very pleased with PunBB 1.1.5. I like the module idea because I think it'll help PunBB stay lean and flexible in the long term future.