i was helping get the link up into kacst (their nsf equivalent) in ryadh back in '94, and a rather grownup friend there, Abdulaziz A. Al Muammar, who had his phd from the states and all that, explained it to me something like this way. yes, to a westerner, our ways of shielding our society seem silly, and sometimes even worse. but tell me, how do we liberalize and open the culture without becoming like the united states [0]? not an easy problem. considering the *highly* offensive material that arrives in my mailbox (and i do not mean clueless nanog ravings:-), my sympathy for abdulaziz increases monotonically. so perhaps we should ask, rather than ranting, how do we, the self-appointed ubergeeks of the net, think we can clean up our own back yards, before we start talking about how others maintain theirs? randy --- [0] - which, americans need to realize is, to much of the civilized world, the barbarian hordes, sodom, and gomorrah rolled into one