Wow 12 years. It's been a long time. Curiosly enough back in my last university year (2001), as a final project for the telecommunications degree, I simply took your great Snort program (i do not remember the exact version, maybe 0.9) and patched it so Snort could take advantage of multiprocess and multithread configurations, so multiprocessor (no multicore at those days) machines could use all the available processors when processing network traffic. It was a trivial solution, since parallelization was carried out on a packet basis (we left out preprocessing), but with this simple trick we could literally multiply the performance of the sniffer per the number of processors present on machine. It is incredible that no one has thought about that way of improving Snort until now. I have not looked at Suricata code or Snort's newer releases, but from the comments above I suppose the path followed by those developing Suricata must have been the same. The only difference is that it didn't take us 1 million dollars to develop a similar solution, since an unpaid programer (myself) plus a few months was all what we used.

I must agree with MPAB to a certain point. That fear of the right wing parties to be related by left wing powers to fascims is what made former president Aznar ridiculously label his own conservative party as a centric party. IMHO it will still take some generations to weaken the mainstream idea of relating the conservative parties to something intrinsically non-democratic thanks to our historic heritage. What is more interesting is that other countries under recent dictatorship regimes, but with other ideological perspective, such as Poland, tend to bind left wing ideology to something intrinsically bad, corrupt or anti-democratic (just the same thing that happens in Spain but with the opposite ideology).

One interesting thing I found out about the TGV is the rolling stock technology is actually Spanish (a Talgo design - i.e. the one axle shared between two lightweight cars). The latest Talgo rolling stock also automatically tilts in corners without the need for gyros or hydraulics - an ingeniously simple system. Renfe has been running Talgo stock since the 1950s (the railway museum in Madrid has an example of one of the original Talgo-II sets)

I am totally fed up with the terms commonly used in media, here in Spain, where they usually intentionally mix "Internet downloads" with piracy, when they want to refer to P2P networks, that are the real ones that are supposedly causing troubles to Entertainment Industry. Most Internet users do not distinguish between a website or FTP download from a download from a P2P network, but judges and lawyers do.

When you upload a file to an FTP server you are violating copyright laws, since you are using the right to distribute copyrighted content. When you share the same file on a P2P network, from the legal point of view, you are using your right to private copy of copyrighted content. Here in Spain we do still have the right to private copy, so when I buy a CD I can copy it for personal use. I have the right to lend my original copy of the CD to a friend, but private copy rights allows me to lend not the original but also the copied CD to a friend. And what can be shocking is that private copy law in Spain does not restrict users to a fixed number of copies for personal use. So, from the juridical point of view, sharing your CD songs on Bittorrent network is no different from lending your CD copies to friends.

Having reached this poing technology has evolved much more than laws. So copyrighted content sharing is no longer related to lend some CDs to some friends or relatives, but to the whole world. Spanish RIAA (SGAE) is struggling to press politicians so they "adapt" the private copy law or even make it disappear. I think they are taking the steps, though the things go slower that in other near countries. They have not managed to limit private copy law but they have succedeed in broadening the range of the "Canon compensatorio", that could be translated as compensatory fee. This is a tax that has been around since tape times, and used to add a percentage to the price of blank tapes or photocopiers among others (books, as copyrighted content, were also protected by this law). Nowodays SGAE has managed to extent this compensatory fee to not only blank media supports (DVDs, CDs, etc.) but also flash cards, mobile phones, hard disks, computers, mp3/4 players, etc. They even managed to ask for a fee on the Internet connection, though I think they have succedeed in it yet. It has been reported that the average Spanish family pays now over 300 euros a year with the current compensatory fee, that is entirley redistributed between Entertainment companies and artists (though the say they share it between artists) by SGAE itself, which is an obscure and privately led organization. 300 euros a year pro family is much more than what an averege Spanish family spent on copyrighted content a few 10 years ago (when copying means where not so effective).

Having said all this I would thank that at least I no longer have to put up with the ads at movie theaters or on TV calling me a thief for legally sharingmy copyrighted content, when I am just using a right, for which I have literally paid a significant amount of money. And not only that, but also taking into account that this money goes to an obscure and mafioso association (not even a company, that must keep its balance clearer), whose role in society is quite a bit less than beneficial.

I always thought that the decisive factor was indeed the weather conditions, as own Phillip II stated:

That means:

We usually desire what we lack. In Spain it is just the opposite. There are so many parties that it is rather difficult to build up a strong government, and pacts are almost always mandatory after a presidential election.

What is more dramatic is that the parties involved in these pacts are usually small sized nationalist parties that do not precisely look for the general interest of the country but just the opposite, to weaken it so their demands be more feasible.