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Your assumption, by the way, that harsher sentencing is a direct contributor is likely erroneous.

I don't know why the crime rate is falling and there doesn't appear to be any consensus. It appears to correlate with harsher sentencing and lower unemployment and those are both plausible explanations but it could be something else or some kind of cyclical pattern.

However, the crime rate fell without making the punishment fit the crime, teaching people to evaluate whether laws are just, or applying laws equally, which were your requirements. I can't see any reason to think those will be much help aside the devout hope that people will respond positively to well-intentioned measures. Some views of human nature suggest that criminals will simply treat those measures as a show of weakness.

Take Finland's admirably low crime rates...

Shoplifting, which is the crime specifically under discussion here, is still a big problem in Finland:

Finland's shrinkage is among the highest in Europe, or 1.44 percent of turnover. However, Finland's figure did fall by three percent from the previous survey.

According to the barometer, 48 percent of the shrinkage is a result of shoplifting. Dishonest employees create one third of the losses, and seven percent can be blamed on suppliers. The rest is caused by mistakes in pricing and breakage.

In Finland, shoplifting costs the retail sector some 448 million euros annually. Combined with the anti-theft investments of 118 million, the annual total rises to 566 million euros.

In any case, I doubt if Finland has any lessons to teach the U.S. about crime fighting without first reorganizing the whole society around a huge social support structure, the way Finland has done, with the accompanying high taxes and big government that Americans traditionally resist.

Perkele is a name of the old Finnish deity.

One thing is certain, these cameras do not save any lives. I remember clearly once in high school a Policeman came to give a talk on vehicle safety he showed us a big graph with a stedily declining death rate over the years, he pointed out the huge drop after the introduction of seat bealts, then one after they banned drink driving, and a smaller drop after the introduction of airbags. My hand immediently shot up and I asked him when speed cameras were introduced, my teachers just laughed and he never answered the question.

Your question was answered by a Finnish study recently (only a Finnish link, sorry). The headline says "Camera control halved the amount of accidents resulting in death".

The article also states that "Camera control does not affect the number of accidents but the accidents are less severe than before. For example, the amount of fatal accidents has been reduced to less than a half."

I'll rather believe an official study than your so very logical proof: My teacher laughed at my question --> cameras do not save any lives. :-P

For a while there was a short item on the site of Helsingin Sanomat (the largest paper in Finland) but that was taken away after an hour or so.

Sorry I'm duping my earlier comment but this may be relevant.

Not a bad point, considering we had exactly this kind of scandal a few days ago in Finland. This time the controls worked, but how often does telecoms information get misused unnoticed?

The leading newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat made a similar decision several years ago. Although that decision was about the Finnish language, it is relevant here since the relevant bits of capitalization customs are essentially the same in Finnish and English. Of course, not all Finns follow the lead of Helsingin Sanomat :)

As I recall, the newspaper's argument was that the Internet is a phenomenon and therefore should be treated as a general noun. I don't really buy that, though.

In the regular flamewars in Finnish newsgroups on this topic, it has been pointed out that nobody actually uses "internet" in the supposed alternate meaning (an Internet Protocol based network of networks that is not necessarily the Internet) in actual text. A message discussing this difference is naturally disqualified.

According to Helsingin Sanomat, IBM will build two of these giants. One of them will run Linux.

Ofcourse, after the breach had been already made public by Helsingin Sanomat. Anyway, yes, I agree - it's better that this is discussed publicly - than kept secret. Oh, and to me it's the same which telco it was - the interesting part is that atleast now everyone knows any company can get caught for it. Also, hopefully this makes the BOFHs at all the gazillion ISPs consider their acts before lurking customer emails - it still the same issue even though the media is different.

F-Secure's researchmanager, Mikko Hyppönen, advices people to "update virus scanners and change to Linux, if possible".

Quote taken and translated from finnish newspaper's article.

- blwrd

Is there a link on Hesari or somewhere wlse, about this?

I'm not aware of any online translator from Finnish to English so here is my own very short summary:

A man was selling reselling upgrade, replacement, OEM and other cheaper or free versions of programs as a full versions (he had made fake packages so they seemed like full versions).

The Finnish Court of Appeals judged him guilty of fraud, but not to copyright violations, since he hadn't made illegal copies. (That fraud come because his customers weren't eligble to normal support and upgrades to these programs.)

In short, EULAs are not valid in Finland.

Several US based companies including Microsoft tried to get big compensations both on copyright violations (2400000 FIM) and for legal costs (980000 FIM). From the fraud, the man had to pay 300000 FIM (I can't say from the article if that sum went to his customers or the US companies) and for legal costs the court agreed that 70000 FIM would be the right amount.

(I hope I didn't make too many mistakes.)