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Finland literally just had a case where man sat in prison for nine months for rape before his accuser according to the biggest newspaper in the country "found God and confessed to the police that she lied about it".

He's still fighting in court to get his criminal record expunged of this. She was just given a small fine, told to return some of the money he had to pay her for her suffering and a suspended sentence with some community service on top of it. She won't spend a day in jail over this.

https://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/art-...

Welcome to progressive concept of "equality" of sexes, where there's the arbeit macht frei men and ubermensch women.

Finland's unemployment rate is currently 8.4%, but thanks for playing.

How about you stay out of things you know nothing about? The official employment rate goal of current government is 72%.. Which is unlikely to succeed.. Links in finnish https://www.hs.fi/paakirjoituk... https://www.uusisuomi.fi/kotim... https://www.pohjalainen.fi/mie... https://www.kauppalehti.fi/uut... http://www.iltalehti.fi/politi...

I haven't followed this too closely (and I certainly do not know enough about each different visa to know if they are right or wrong), but according to one Finnish news source (hs.fi), they apparently weren't supposed to need work visas since their concert was going to be held in a private event.

Finland's official Pravda^W^Wleading newspaper had an article on this particularly American issue. The main thesis is that you guys have a lot of freedom to offend and beat up each other, because any government intervention would go against the natural freedom of free men to do unto each other as they like. Of course, the follow-up is reduced freedom for individuals in lots of ways. You guys have more freedom than us in certain ways, but as a result you have less freedom in some other ways. It's hard to say which way is right, but it sure sounds a lot like BSD vs. GNU.

Personally, I'm in for more freedom in some areas. Finland officially switched from the Eastern Bloc into the EU 20 years ago, but I'm yet to see the full effects.

Because the 72 virgins for the terr'rists in heaven aren't what they expected.

Here's a bit cleaner URL to the same article: http://www.hs.fi/sunnuntai/a1409895098937

20 seconds away was ~20 km away. None of the passengers would have even noticed it. It was a near miss in that if it wasn't prematurely detonated it would have struck the aircraft, not in that it was actually near the aircraft.

I'm European and do think that privacy is very valuable. I also think the decision was utterly retarded, ripe for abuse and obviously made by people who have no idea about technology.

So, what is Google supposed to erase from the web? An example is here - in Finnish, I'm sorry, but I'll try to paraphrase a bit (you can run it through the translation service of your choice, if you wish). A person approached Helsingin Sanomat, a major Finnish newspaper, offering to be interviewed about why he wants his info removed from the web. He had committed some felonies a decade ago. He felt that he had already served his punishment (given how lenient our sentencing is, he most certainly has) and wanted a fresh start.

But the reporters dug a bit deeper into his life - turns out that there are ongoing court cases against him for both attempted fraud and fraud. After this was pointed out to him, he refused to be interviewed or his name associated with the article.

In this case, it was the reporters who found out about this. But they had only a single person to process. Should Google themselves figure out individually which claims have merit? Or should Google just automatically censor everything on request (let's face it, that's what this really is)? And most importantly, Google does not host the content. If there is an issue with the content, shouldn't one contact the content provider?

I'm willing to buy the first argument up to a point, although once they've visited a site it should show up as a suggestion in the address bar - but perhaps they'll still search for it, the stupidity of some never ceases to amaze me. I'm not sure about the second one though - if you check the list (it's the first top 10 list - the page is in Finnish but you can ironically enough use Google to translate it), those are all web sites. Basically all they'd need is to be appended with .fi or .com depending on the site, and most of them wouldn't really make much sense in a more verbose query. And right below it is "on the rise", there you'll find queries with more words in them.

I can confirm this. The annual pay for the Finnish president is currently €126,000.[1] The guy himself voluntarily lowered it recently.

http://www.vupen.com/english/
"defensive and offensive cyber security". Helsingin Sanomat, biggest newspaper in Finland, claims the company is selling security holes (most likely accompanied with easy way to use them) for governments and intelligence agencies.
In Finnish: http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/Tietoturva-aukoilla+tahkotaan+miljoonia/a1371264995752

Here is also a Finnish version.

Fingerpori is very popular in Finland. ;)

Translation of the 27th Dec strip would be "I bought eye shadow that really brings your eyes out" ... "I put too much".

Fingerpori is very popular in Finland. ;)

Translation of the 27th Dec strip would be "I bought eye shadow that really brings your eyes out" ... "I put too much".

You do understand that the interviewed current and ex-employees of Nokia had to speak generally and under the condition of anonymity because they are subject to very strict NDAs? Talking about anything specific could make it possible to identify the individual. We should be greatful that we even got this peek into the inner workings of the MeeGo project, and what went wrong.

BTW if you want a more in-depth (albeit slightly outdated) look at Nokia's downfall from #1 mobile phone producer in the world, have a look at this article. It is also much more journalitically written, and touches extensively on MeeGo as well.

I don't think this has existed in recent history - I'd imagine old Motorolas were made here, though. Anyone know?

My obsolete Nokia is made in Finland, and they had quite a bit of manufacturing capacity in Finland, Germany, and... Hungary? (until recently, at least. The slogging they've been getting doesn't give them the luxury of that anymore, I suppose, and they've been shutting down facilities). Their cheap models have been made in Korea and more recently China for some time, though.

Yup. This is the state of Nokia's Finland plant these days...

Anyway, wouldn't stuff made in South Korea be the best option right now? In terms of fair play and pay? It's a highly-developed country.

âoeThis isnâ(TM)t Nokiaâ(TM)s fault â" itâ(TM)s [Microsoft's]"

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Impending+shutdown+has+severe+impact+on+Salo/1329104318612

I'd like to thank my representatives. The problem is, I don't live in Poland or know any Polish... Can someone from there tell me who/where/how to send my thanks and perhaps who to donate a bit of money for next elections? (I feel somewhat betrayed by the far-left candidate I voted for, who actually became a minister of culture and one of the first things he did was to act like a good puppet of our RIAA-equivalent. He was the one guy I had hoped to protect my interests against those of multinational capitalistic corporations...)

Poland should have something like sixth-most weight to throw around in the EU but for some reason, they tend to act like one of the smaller countries. It's good that a lot of decisions are still made through consensus like this. And I feel a bit of pride that our own parliament likes it just the way it is.

That's just a lot of fingerpointing and maybes. What happened is that someone of them found an easily exploitable site, possibly an sql injection or a known vulnerability in an off the shelf software. They then made up a silly excuse about how it is righteous for them to hack said site and did so. Previously they have exploited a message boards softwares failure to strip html tags to post flashing images on a board for epileptics, blaming any seizures caused by said images on the webmasters failure to secure his software. Dumped customer email and usernames to a porn site because uh.. people looking at porn are bad? Hacked a Finnish government site becasue uh... Finland is ruled by a brutal military regime suppressing freedom of expression?

Actually they seem to be quite irresponsible and incompetent, French Areva is building Olkiluoto 3 power plant here in Finland.

Building project is years behind because of poor quality and workmanship.

Under constructors have used modern slave labor from former eastern block countries, some electricians had a wage of under two euros per hour.

So far Areva quality has not impressed me, I was pro nuclear for a long time, but watching Olkiluoto III building process has changed my view from pro nuclear to nuclear skeptic.

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Construction+work+on+Olkiluoto+III+nuclear+reactor+to+experience+further+major+delays/1135256255133

Aluminium is 8% of the planet's crust. it's not a rare earth metal: it's available in unbelievably large quantities. Europositron, a company that has also developed a 100% rechargeable high-capacity cell (5x that of NiMH) - that doesn't degrade or require chemical or mechanical re-processing - has recognised the capacity of aluminium for years. unfortunately, despite working demos, nobody's believed them.

This Europositron?

See, it's stuff like this which makes slashdotters wary of battery breakthroughs, even when they may actually be legitimate.

You mean the same Eurpositron that was exposed as a stock scam and never had an actual product?

This the beginning of the end for Nokia. The company's not been able to answer the competition that American companies like Google and Apple poised to it. The reason for this is that the company's internal processes are not from the IT but traditional manufacturing industries. (All explained in painful detail in this article.) Nokia's only viable products are Qt and Maemo, which were both developed externally outside the so-called "Nokia Process", both of which coincidentally are not part of the current future roadmap (MeeGo is Lost In Action and Qt will not be ported to WP7).

For those who say Elop will give new direction: no, I don't believe it. I am be tempted to raw parallels to Obama: a black horse; lots of hype, but little actual concretion, all while the economy still continues to plummet. My advise for those who own Nokia's shares: hold them until mid-Q4. If there is no takeover bid from Microsoft by November, dump them at whatever price the market is still willing to pay.

Now Playing: The Doors – The End

There was a very good series of articles in the English edition of Helsingin Sanomat: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Knock+Knock+Nokias+Heavy+Fall/1135260596609

It basically tells, that it all began around 2003, when the development focus shifted from actual devices to software and services.
Then came hordes of managers of various levels, but there was no leader, there was no vision at all, just @ss-covering 'en masse'.
In the end, dozens of managers could say "no" to just any idea, but the one, who can say "yes" was just nowhere to be found in the crowd.
Etc., etc.

By the way, quite the same thing happened to MeeGo, however in a bit smaller scale. Inside Nokia, everybody knew, that Symbian was a dying platform. The managers fleed like rats from a sinking ship, and eventually too much of them ended up in the to-be-featured MeeGo Dept. Guess what happened next...

According to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Elop wasn't allowed to trade the shares. Nokia informed the paper that after Elop started planning the co-operation with Microsoft, trading away the Microsoft stock and buying Nokia stock instead would have been considered illegal due to insider information.

A poor translation of the article is as follows:

On Saturday, Nokia informed Helsingin Sanomat that the CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, doesn't own any Nokia shares yet due to stock market regulations. The same reason has prevented Elop from selling his remaining Microsoft shares.

Stock market regulations prevent company insiders from using unreleased insider information in their trades. According to Nokia's interpretation, the changes in strategy that Elop planned were considered insider information until last Friday.

When Elop started his work on 21st of September, he also started to plan the new strategy. Nokia informed the because of this, Elop hasn't been able to buy shares.

According to Nokia, Elop had to stop selling his Microsoft shares last year for the same reason. According to Nokia's information, Elop was able to sell 60 percent of his Microsoft shares which means he still has 40 percent left to sell.

Elop stopped selling his Microsoft shares when significant co-operation with Microsoft was brought into the plans.

Nokia doesn't publish the date when that happened, but according to information from Nasdaq, Elop sold 23 000 Microsoft shared on the last day of previous August.

He still has 261 000 Microsoft shares.

Yes. The stock market seems to realize how bad this is:

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Announcement+of+strategic+partnership+with+Microsoft+leads+to+sharp+falls+in+Nokia+stock+in+Helsinki/1135263731421

Ivana Trump regards her name as a trademark, too.

Well, the US has managed to do it to a Finnish company, so there.

Today Europeans in general and Germans particularly know what happens if you let governments screw around to much.

I take it you haven't been in Finland. We have some weird on-going process where our highest ranking police officer seems to be running some sort of political campaing to get every people under at least some kind of surveilance. Latest idea was to take finger prints of every citizen so that they could "solve serious crimes more easily". I really don't know how my finger prints are going to help solve serious crimes when I'm not the one making them.

Then there's our current government, which I thought was supposed to be liberal and all but ended up being as socialist as the former one, making all kinds of laws to protect the children (of course) and Nokia.

So if you have open positions for programmers in Germany I might be interested ;)

Don't know about Finland, but I mostly use the mail system for packages and magazines.

There's parody on this in Finland's main paper today. "The organically grown lamb you ordered arrived as an attachment."

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Nokia+executive+Olli-Pekka+Kallasvuo+pays+massive+fine+for+minor+tax+fraud+/1135218462956

Why do we want to watch videos inside a web page? This is something I've never understood, and the first time I saw YouTube it looked like an extremely dumb idea. There must be better ways of distributing video on the Internet. I always use clive when somebody sends me a youtube/vimeo link, but I'd much rather get a link to the actual file.

I'm probably just an old-fashioned geek, but I like to focus on whatever I'm doing. When I'm watching a video, I'd rather not watch any extraneous crap around it. It's an issue of both screen real estate and attention. Now get off my lawn!

Seems slashdot didn't like nordic characters - proper link

And here's a link to an English language article from the Finnish Broadcasting Company (the Finnish equivalent of the BBC): 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right

Seems slashdot didn't like nordic characters - proper link

This news has been written quite loosely around the news sites - original article (in finnish) states that ISP's must be capable of offering reasonably priced, atleast 1Mb broadband to every house. During this year Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority will state who those ISP's are that must be able to provide the services (probably the largest ones). So it's not free, like many seem to think - just reasonably priced (probably around 20-50e/month)

This part yet is not really that interesting since it's already pretty much common place.

However the law also states that the speed of the line must be atleast 75% of the said one during 24 hour measurement period. And what's more interesting is that by 2015 it will be 100mbit. Even though this is already available in the largest cities, it will mean major infrastructure development from the ISP's in other areas.

Oh and btw, no ISP in Finland has transfer limits or such crap. Not even mobile operators, who offer unlimited 5Mbit 3G for something like 30e/month.

Hopefully this also means that those three-strike laws wont be possible, since getting broadband access should be a legal right.

No, slander is illegal. "Insulting" was a bad word to use, "criticizing" would have been more correct. Currently you have to be very careful about objecting to anything done by a foreigner. Just look at this article (Finnish). Apparently police targeting pickpockets is now racist if most of the pickpockets happen to be foreigners.

Female circumcision is an extreme example that no sane person tolerates. The problem is that anything less in your face is tolerated, in the name of multiculturalism. That leaves plenty of room to oppress women.

You're wrong about the hotels. Two of them are in central Helsinki. One is in Kallio, which is probably the least popular central area, but still popular compared to locations further away. The totally insane one is in Punavuori (Finnish), one of the most sought after locations for apartments.

Nice strawman calling anti-immigrants skinheads. Most of us are against skinheads too. We're not willing to tolerate people who themselves don't tolerate anything. This includes both refugees from backwards cultures and skinheads of our own. Unfortunately the skinheads are already here, but the refugees can be stopped at the border without harming our democracy. I would also point out that most modern skinheads are more talk than action, and they should have free speech too.

You're being hopelessly naive believing that officials have any success "encouraging women to have more equal status" (", mmmkay"). In Stockholm, TEN percent (article in Swedish) of 15-year old girls are having trouble with honor culture. This is in one of the most accepting countries on the planet. Even worse, when the percentage of immigrants in one area becomes large enough, attacks against the local culture reach out of control status (Swedish). If you don't speak Swedish, part of the article points out that firemen had to stop responding to fires that weren't spreading because they were too afraid of violence.

The talk about integrating refugees is all talk and no action. In practice, the refugees are trying to bring their own oppressive culture with them - the one they claim to be fleeing from. Sure, some of them actually believe in freedom, but there is no effort at all to weed out those who actually deserve our protection. The same will happen in Finland unless it's stopped now.

The multiculturalist fanatics are also trying to destroy our democracy. A Dutch member of parliament was banned from entering the UK to address the House of Lords, because their government thought it would cause trouble.

The Finnish prime minister is a coward and a traitor to the constitution. When the muslim world was in uproar about the Danish political cartoons, he apologized on behalf of Finland that they were published here too. Apparently he thinks they should have been hidden from view so us subjects couldn't decide for ourselves whether there was anything wrong with them. The message is clear: anything that muslims find offensive shouldn't be free speech, and boy are there a lot of those things.

1) The party was founded there. Give it some time in other countries.

The Finnish Pirate Party just collected the 5000 members required for registration.

See the Helsingin Sanomat article.

TTVK:n mukaan vuokraaminen ilman kustantajien ja tekijöiden lupaa on laitonta, koska palvelu toimii internetissä, eli kuka tahansa voi käyttää sitä.

TTVK (Copyright-information and enforcement Association) says that renting without rights from publishers or writers is illegal, because the service operates over Internet, and everybody can use it. Source.

How can you possibly argue over so eloquent argument?

English article from a Finnish newspaper here

Finnish e-voting results annulled, municipalities to hold new elections by Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi), the best summary in English, IMO;
Helsingin Sanomat;
Helsinki Times;
The Brad Blog;
NewsRoom Finland;
YLE; and
Turre (the lawyers that won the case).

The voting system was provided by Tieto and Scytl. In their News Page, Scytl declares: "Scytl's Pnyx.core successfully used in local elections in Finland" Shouldn't they update this...? It is even possible that the 2% of the votes lost was due to the Pnyx.core, instead of usability issues with the voting terminals, as has been commonly assumed - who knows.

Actually the machines were supplied by local company called Tieto.

More about the case in English
Yle News
Helsingin Sanomat
Newsroom Finland

My co worker tells me they have a power plant on site, so tick the electricity box...

The location is right my the sea, and also handily close to Russia. There's a map in this Helsingin Sanomat article:
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Stora+Enso+closing+Summa+and+Kemij%C3%A4rvi+mills+at+brisk+pace+/1135233375617

So basically they can easily lay cable from and to the site, and they can have excellent connections to Russia without actually having to place the hardware there. (Not that I'm sure it would be an issue these days.)

Also, they can literally put the hardware on a ship and ship it right to the location.

Ok then:

http://www.hs.fi/english/print/1135228139635
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lund_Report
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/radical-ewan-maccoll-was-tracked-by-mi5-for-decades-468689.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/big-brother-how-mi5-kept-watch-on-orwell-463837.html

Oops. The English version of the article linked from the Slashdot summary isn't all that exemplary, and it also seems to be dated 14th of November 2008.

Just to clarify -- when I wrote my comments, in my mind I was referring to what I read in the Finnish version this Sunday.

The Finnish version reveals the important points that the proposal is unconstitutional, it was turned down by eight different law professors (when their expert opinion was asked), that the politicians decided to proceed anyway, and that the new law would apply to all community subscribers, not just employers.

  -A Finnish AC

It seems the threat to leave may not have been made. Depending upon who you believe.

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/1135243223086

I live in Finland and I work for Nokia. This is purely a sensationalist article. Please read RTFA before frothing in the mouth about "fuck Nokia." There's this news from Helsingin Sanomat (please use Google translate if you want to read that) The prime minister himself _explicitly_ stated that he has not heard of this threats. What is wrong with you gullible fanatics? In the past few weeks we have LGPLd Qt and you were very happy with that. Now you hear this thing which has no apparent basis and you start whining.

I finally found the video: http://www.hs.fi/videot/1135240559892?kategoria=Uutiset&sivu=1

A commenter on an article dealing with the issue at hs.fi says there were problems with the machines that may have caused this issue:
http://www.hs.fi/keskustelu/Brax%3A+Vaalitulosta+ei+voi+perua+hukka%E4%E4nien+takia/thread.jspa?threadID=148607&tstart=0&sourceStart=40&start=60
username Jones is the commenter, it's in Finnish, so here's a summary:

Commenter says she is a young female with university degree from Kauniainen who tried electronic voting with poor results. The voting machine had responsiveness issues: first the machine refused to register input of the candidate number, and after numerous presses and waiting the machine responded. The commenter then pressed the "ok" button, nothing happened. She pressed it again, harder, and pressed more times, until after several minutes of trying the buttonpress was registered. Then a screen popped up with the name of the candidate and the user was prompted again to press OK to accept the vote. Same problem with the OK button again, but she managed to get it to register after a long time of trying and waiting for the machine to respond.

If this is accurate, it's not unreasonable to think people may have thought the machine isn't even supposed to show the candidate number chosen on-screen after choosing, or that either of the OK presses aren't actually supposed to result in any response from the machine. 2% failures with these kinds of problems doesn't sound so strange.

I searched for a few minutes, and found some pretty reasonable apartments for between two and three hundred. Some of the locations were remote, of course, but that doesn't matter, because this is beside the point. The taxes are heavy, and the social security system isn't perfect, but that doesn't make the country communist, and most people seem quite satisfied. I do actually live here and I must say you have a very peculiar understanding of the resources available to the average citizen.

Apparently you also have reading difficulties, since I never said anything about people who speak out for human rights. Your facts are just wrong. If anyone is a troll, it's you, because the burden of proof is on the person making the extreme statements, not vice versa. I have made no accusation other than that nothing you have said supports your premise. (Speed cameras also don't make the country a police state, even if I agree that they are a bad idea.)

And once again, the filtering is not mandatory. http://www.hs.fi/kotimaa/artikkeli/Osa+operaattoreista+p%C3%A4%C3%A4st%C3%A4%C3%A4+kielletyille+verkkosivuille/1135234066254

Exactly. If you're good enough or have strong enough connections, you don't need to bribe.

I think there may be several players in the field, both in the OOXML case and in general, who largely see supporting (or at least not opposing) MS as a viable political choice. The rationale may include special deals offered for Microsoft systems, or important companies deemed to be important for national economy that are close to Microsoft. Add good lobbying from MS and its partners, and shake well.

I of course tend to disagree with the notion that it would be a good idea to support MS because of apparent short-term benefits. After all, a monopoly isn't beneficial to anyone in the long run except for the monopoly itself even if the deal initially seems attractive. On the other hand, you also have to remember that even if the EU (where most of this seems to be happening) is supposed to be built on economical collaboration, each nation still pulls their own rope. If the decision-makers view something as a national advantage even though it sounds like a bad idea globally, many of them are likely to support it.