I see what you did there. Nice!

I would like correct some misunderstandings that several readers seem to have after reading the article title. This does NOT mean that every Finn will be getting a government-financed 1Mbit broadband starting next July (doh..) but rather it's something of an obligation to the government imposed by itself on itself, to provide every single address in Finland (including the extremely rural Northern villages in Lapland) with the readiness to start using a moderate broadband connection by next July. The customers will definitely still have to pay their TelCo of choice a monthly fee for providing the actual service (actually, I personaly just renewed my contract with the Telco for 24 months - I guess they would have said if broadband was going to be a free commodity by next year :).

The assumed logic behind this is, that as more and more of government functions and media are moving from physical media to the Internet, the technical readiness to access the Internet from one's home should be a civil right, just like running water, a telephone line and snail mail delivery. After this, the government can start moving more of its stuff to the Internet (e.g. some tax-money financed television content produced by the national broadcaster is already available only on-line), and they can rest easy that no one will file a complaint that a broadband Internet access is something of a luxury product (like it was in the early 90's), or that the government is giving priority to the South where broadband access was a few years back more abundant.

Of course, in practice 1Mb connections have been available in all urbanized and even less-urbanized areas for several years. I think this law will simply mean that the government will pay the TelCos some subsidies to build the last-mile cable even in the far, rural North, and in the very few Southern villages that are still without 1Mb broadband cables.

I wonder, what titles are these exactly? What popular Windows software lack a viable Open Source/Linux counterpart?

The NSA developed SELinux, yes? Which is supposed to be an insanely secure Linux for the paranoid (who of course wouldn't download something written by the NSA...).

Since Linux could be written to do pretty much, well, anything, a better investment would be an organization that writes custom OSes for departments. ATTLinux (Air Traffic Control), for example. It can do what it has to do and nothing more. No web browser, for instance, or if it had one only certain ports would work period.

If they keep stuff like this feature-light it would be trivial to program seperate versions for the departments that really need it (IRS, FBI, Pentagon, etc.) by using a basic, stripped-down version of Linux as the starting point.

This glitch occured in Finnish municipality elections, where it is not uncommon to loose or win a seat with a margin of a few votes. In one of the municipalities, which trialed e-voting, a party could gain a seat with as few as 130 votes. More importantly, in the voting list sytem the people who actually go into the office (from their respective parties), is decided by their relative popularity on the party list. Therefore, even a single vote can easily (and commonly) change *who*, from the party gaining the seat, actually becomes a representative, and a bunch of votes could easily change the power-balance of the parties in a small municipality (and even decide if a minority party gets their single seat). No wonder most of the people who appealed to court were candidates who were a few votes short of gaining an office in the municipalities with problems.

Actually, user space filesystems are nice, but they are way too slow for implementing a high speed server and/or even a decent desktop machine. They are good for experiments and pioneering work though (like GMailFS and SSHFS), but having a good set of fast, basic filesystems in the kernel is just obligatory AFAIK.

Basicly Wikipedia is already what he is looking for - an online collaborative academic wrting software. The format is just encylopedia articles. It supports LaTeX off the shelf, at least the mathematical formulae are formated in LaTeX. Now with the addition of the PDF converter, the only new thing needed to do would be to rewrite the PDF converter to format in the standard scientific paper format. Editing would take place as an online MediaWiki page. It has most of the tools you'd need for a sensible academic writing software already, like adding citations and references.

And there's another reason also. Many people who work in the scientific field are already familiar with MediaWiki notation because many have contributed to Wikipedia, and if not, the learning curve is rather gentle.