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Groklaw works fine for me. Unless you are a finnish user of Soner ISP ( in which case read the - finnish - resource: http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id=33177 ) I have no idea.

Translation of the original comment in finnish*:

October 1st, 2007, 22:03 by Jaakko Lehtinen
Re: Wrong opinions

Can it really be, that Microsoft would be involved in this decision as well.

I question what caused this lack of trust. We don't know that, as we're not told. This however causes suspicion regarding the SFS.

You see, I was there at the SFS's ooxml decision meeting, which ended in very even votes for and against and where the state's votes also were 2-2 — first even 3-1 against ooxml.

Mr Nirhamo handled his role as chairman in a very professional manner. He kept the discussion tightly within the agreed 'frame', to use contemporary wording. Some [attendees] tried to start for example comparing the existing standard and the suggested standard against each other, but that was ended immediately, as it was not on the agenda for the meeting. No kind of deviations to other subjects were allowed. Not even from Microsoft.

And it was a very well handled decision meeting, I dare say as someone who has been in meetings with hundreds of pretty big decision makers.

Rarely — hardly ever — have I seen and experienced such a great performance by the chair.

Further about speaking one's mind, he made it clear at least twice, that the SFS doesn't have and can't have any other opinion that the decision of that meeting.

Due to Microsoft's pressure he separately inquired if he can put forward his own opinion of the matter. The representatives of the SFS who were present gave him permission to temporarily diverge from his position as chair and to state his own opinion.

He then showed the facts, that he based his opinion on. These arguments could not be denied by Microsoft either. There are errors and contradictions in the ooxml-suggestion.

I am very sorry about how Mr Nirhamo has been treated and disappointed at the SFS's way of handling the matter, if the alleged lack of trust was due to that meeting.

In that case, the SFS does not deserve my trust.

This looks like a full-blown scandal at the SFS to me. Certainly, the SFS under managing director Pekka Järvinen, can not be trusted to create standards according to the SFS's charter (link in Finnish), which among other things says that the SFS is an independent organisation and that it should represent the interest of Finland.

____________
*) Although I believe this translation to be very good, I'm not a translator by trade.

A friend is attempting to try "30 days of Linux" for office use for a total Linux newbie (but experienced Windows/DOS user). Anyway, he's having a blog of the attempt at http://blogit.tietokone.fi/linuxinjaljilla/ (in Finnish). At first, he naturally asked for recommendations on what distros to use, and Ubuntu/Kubuntu was most popular, so he went with Ubuntu.

So far encountered problems seem small but trivial: His monitor (CRT) remained at 60Hz and he couldn't find any setting to change it to higher refresh rate. Eventually, with lots of help, he was able to edit xorg.conf directly and get the thing working.

To me this seemed very odd - I remember back in 2000 or so when installing Suse Linux and SaX pretty much auto-configured everything and allowed the settings changes too.

Today, another issue surfaced - no auto-mounting existing ntfs volumes. He eventually had to manually edit /etc/fstab to get the Windows partitions to show up. I thought that if you have a "clickety click" installer that they would automagically include existing partitions in fstab and create mountpoints...

Anyway, so far my perpection of Ubuntu as a friendly distro has plummeted and I think I'd now recommend Suse's corporate instead (Personally, I'm using Gentoo, and love it, but for someone looking for an user-friendly and easy-to-learn distribution...).

just using the word "radiation" presents bias -- people assume this equals the same kind of radiation they've been told to fear from nuc plants and atom bombs.

    Maybe that bias is countered by the fact that this study is partially funded by Nokia. Reference in Finnish is at http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id= 26235&tyyppi=1 - if someone can find english version then post.

This information is outdated!
There's more to read (in finnish only, sadly) at the homepage of Jyrki Kasvi - an elected techie (yes, they exists!) http://kasvi.org/index.php?278.

The link in the parent also contains more updated information in finnish, they haven't gotten around to translating that yet.

The links on that page lead to transscripts of the finnish congress (don't know the exact word in english) discussion regarding this law.

As one can see, owning a device for breaking encryption is no longer considered a crime in the new version of the law - because this would have made for example permanent markers illegal, as discussed in the links above.

What's truly worrying though is that the Finnish consumer rights department - a government organ - asked to be heard regarding this law, but the workgroup headed by our minister of culture Tanja Karpela (yes, she's considered Evil from now on) was not interested.
http://www.tietokone.fi/uutta/uutinen.asp?news_id= 24773 (text in finnish)

So the law that's beeing passed is better than the one describes in english, but it still sucks, as it is still illegal to break encryption to make personal copies. The grounds for this, as can be read from the transscripts, is that next-generation copy-protection can allow consumers to make a few personal copies (inferior quality is not mentioned, as far as i can see). The result is that it's left to the producers to arrange for copy-once-material. The effect of this law is supposed to be monitored, and if it threads too much on consumer rights then it's supposed to be "updated" in a couple of years.

To my understanding (i'm not really into lawmaking, and have mainly followed this through news media) the big change is in encrypted media. It's still legal to download divx-movies and mp3:s as before. What's changed is that copy-protected content that "requiers an effort to circumvent" cannot be opened for your own use (someone clearly knew about the press-shift-stuff). As before, distribution of copyrighted material to a not-closed group is illegal.
Linux (the kernel) is not illegal, linux-programs (and others) that can read non-music cd:s are not illegal to own, but if they are difficult to work then use of them is questionable.

Conclusion: let's all make user-friendly rippers!

People burned by that one could go for a class action lawsuit against either Mastercard their service supplier or the software vendor or a combination. There's no excuse for using tools known to be defective in a networked context.

Increasingly that said same vendor has been associated with breaches of security and failures. A year ago it was voting machines now this...

Just talk of dropping MSO will get Ballmer or Gates on the way soon. Right now Gates is running around the yard in Brazil trying to get President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvan back on the leash.

A certain finnish computing magazine has a policy that there will be no capitalization of ANY term. That's right, all acronyms (GPRS, VoIP, LAN, ATM) will be in lower case (gprs, voip, lan). If it's a product that has some weird-ass capitalization (iTunes, iMac) they just do it all-lowercase. (How would you use iTunes in beginning of a sentence, anyway? ITunes?). However, names are not in lower case, ever. IBM is still IBM. Actually, if you check out the page now, you can see in the left pane a blurb about Gmail (in uppercase) and video at VGA resolution (in lower case).

I gather that they originally came to this decision because lots of writers started to ask the questions that how are they going to write all those L33TAcRoNyMs that everything that is nice about language, and they made a blanket decision. (Again, how do you use iTunes in beginning of a sentence...).

This sometimes pisses the more technical engineering crowd off because they prefer the original form, but they have stuck to their line. (Oh, and I'm not a subscriber :))

However, even they have not touched names. Internet, The. There are also intranets, extranets and internets.