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Kevin,

This e-mail is to notify you that an unusual usage alert has been triggered on your Safari account. Safari does this to protect your account in the event it is being compromised and to protect Safari's intellectual property. Please see Safari's Terms of Service for specific information regarding the acceptable use of our books. Continued alerts will result in the system locking your account.

Please make sure that you are not running programs that 'speed-up' web browsing; or that spider, crawl or automatically capture web pages for offline viewing. These types of tools will trigger further alerts and violate the Safari Terms of Service.

Thank you,

The Technical Support Team
Safari Tech Books Online

I have to admit: Safari, from O'Reilly is a bloody good service. You subscribe and they give you online access to all their books (but only so many at a time) plus loads of others. You can also (for a fee) download pdfs of chapters. I can't afford the subscription, but they do a two-week free trial, and when you really do need to read Enterprise JavaBeans before your exam on Wednesday, that's a good deal.

Then I thought: 'Perl::UserAgent' is my friend. So I built a little pet spider to grab the entire book. I suppose, looking back, I'm surprised I managed to get it all befoer this happens. Actually, since this just a warning, I suspect I could go and get another book downloaded before it gets locked, but I really am gonna need it for the next two weeks.


So, the French have rejected the European Constitution. This has two really bad effects: it could make all my hard work on those European Constitution nodes a big waste of time; and it will also mean the continuation of british newspapers, radio and TV programs blurting various soundbites on the theme "French say non!" thinking that they're really clever. Seriously though, I was chatting with a french friend -- well, the fiancee of a sister of a friend actually -- who said he was voting "non" */me winces* because the new contitution was too free market, too conservative. On the news yesterday, a succession of Brits said the constitution was too socialist and too left wing. Maybe this shows where the real problems lie with closer EU intergration.

Actually, where the real problem with closer EU intergration probably lies is to do with the members of the UK public questioned last week who, amongst other things, thought that saying "yes" to the constitution would mean:

Whilst none of these things would bother me too much -- although, I like to see the Union Flag flying alongside the European one --- they are also all untrue. It won't matter how much the public are educated during the run up to an referendum over here; these people don't care, and every shout of "Germans coming in through the back door!" will persuade a million more Daily Mail readers to vote "non", er, I mean no with a good, solid British cross on the ballot paper.

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