I'm not talking about J2ME but native applications. I'm not completely sure how S40 is regards to this, but seems like the first S60 phone hit the US market in 2002.

I suspect the reason why our classical liberals are "real" liberals is that the social-liberalism side in Europe is mostly taken care of already :-)

A small point about Nordic nationalist parties; at least here in Finland, the "Finns" party (formerly "True Finns") is clearly leftist economically... they tend to be social-conservative otherwise.

The welfare state model is rather sacrosanct here, the only people seriously questioning it are genuine classical liberals, and they are not in parliament.

That's how it is here in Finland; it's pretty difficult to get into a teacher's education, and they all have Master's degrees. Sure, once you are a teacher it's a very steady government job and you also have lots of autonomy, but this tends to foster pride in what they're doing and a desire to do it well.

I love the concept as I know exactly what he's talking about. This is not only limited to religion, but appears in many guises over other political causes as well. For example, I've been involved in debating Finnish language policy pretty much all my life, and our Swedish-speakers are a prime example of this -- they have probably the most well-protected position as a language minority in the world, but they essentially scream holocaust every single time everyone does not do EXACTLY as they say, and most importantly, they truly insist on living in a world of their own construction when it comes to political rhetoric -- anything and everything positive is somehow connected and comes from Sweden, by extension them and their language, and on the other hand, all critics can be accused of all manner of wild negatives that we must then defend ourselves over (that is, we're uncivilized, lazy, "un-Nordic", "un-Western", hate the minority, are closed-minded, oppose school/studying languages...) so essentially all your time is spent defending yourself against crap like this if you don't jump when they order you to.

I really am not talking about emerging markets -- the E-series devices have been corporate workhorses outside of the USA for a long, long time, and they do a lot more than RIM ever did.

I never quite undestood why RIM was so strong in the American corporate market while in the rest of the world it really was all Nokia and Symbian, which has great corporate integration. Nokia's predicament actually comes from ignoring the consumer... Windows Phone is also a step backwards in the corporate sense, but let us hope MS at least leverages Office there.

Well, I'm a Finn, so we count as a "Socialist medicine" country, and as a somewhat severely disabled person by birth who still has been patched up to be a happy taxpayer, I certainly count as a huge and probably never fully profitable beneficiary of our system, but anyway...

I frankly do not believe in the "UHC people do not care about the cost to benefit" argument. At least in civilized countries, people will have some common sense that even when they might totally destroy their health, it's not going to be fun even though they might get healthcare in the end. You'll want to avoid getting an organ transplant in general even though it might be paid for. When there are obvious public health concerns, such as the generally excessive alcohol intake in Finland, educating the public is a relatively small "totalitarian" cost as the objective benefit is so easy to see. Pure Libertarians will of course always disagree, and I can appreciate that.

The benefit of general social insurance not only in economic but ethical terms just outweighs any abuse concerns. Those who would, really deserve the pain that comes with the unfortunately necessary pain that comes with the condition they put themselves into, regardless of the healthcare they're getting.

And when it comes to actually *how* to provide the healthcare, it's all actually mercifully objective -- it's not like buying a car. Medicine is a science. We know that certain treatments work, in a scientific sense, and others do not. Hospitals do not need to be hotels. During my lifetime, I've been treated by incredibly skilled and compassionate public-sector doctors and nurses who have done their best -- and yet I've always been glad to be out of the hospital, as that means I'm getting better. And the outcome has been pretty good so far, yet I'm not so sure after all the cuts that are being imposed at the moment. Even the public sector can't run on thin air :-)

Mind you, nothing actually could describe Fenno-Swedes better, either. We must be assimilated into "Norden", and if we don't agree, we violate their human rights.

LoOoOoOooOoooOooooOOOooL

Yeah, but how many people with the actual surname "Suomi" do you know anyway... :-)

As a Finn, I'm glad to have "Finland" (in Finnish) up there in orbit :-)

Well, programming language design and compiler theory and so on are a subfield of CS, but otherwise I'm in agreement. Personally I've learned a lot from the more academic languages such as Lisp and Haskell although I don't really use them in my day to day job.

How awesome that Swedish civilization is finally reaching Slashdot too. Here in Finland we've been at the receiving and of you for a long time and it's just getting "better" all the time. Nowadays the required dogma is that we're a bunch of barbarians if we don't take it in deep when as young as possible while we're still soft and malleable so that we don't develop "attitude problems" by getting this idea that we might actually have a "right" not to suck it and love it.

But anyway, glad to see you're bringing the gift of your awesomeness to here as well. Too bad I'm sure you'll be oppressed by being modded down, but don't be discouraged; by finding other minority-rights minded people, I am sure you will be able to demand a change in Slashdot's policies so that everyone will have to actually read you, and perhaps in the future, also have the right to produce exactly the same kind of material, so that they will not be oppressed by the future equal-rights rules of actually having to post exactly like you!

Well, code readability and maintainability often mean a good design, which means that the problem is understood correctly and that the program can be seen to be correct. These are very good qualities in a language if it helps in achieving this.

Productivity is just a side-effect of a good language; for me this issue is more philosophical than that. The actual conceptual features of higher-level languages outright produce better thinking about issues...