Stop thinking "need" and start thinking "it's cool". I don't "need" a new computer right now, I would do fine with this laptop at least 2 more years (already 2 years old). Still I'm buying one. Where would we be today If everyone was just thinking about what they actually needed?

Living sustainably on a healthy planet?

My experience with a cheap 64GB SSD (Kingspec) is completely different. I replaced my laptop's original 5400rpm Hitachi HDD with it. The boot time was reduced from circa 25s to 6s and most programs start without noticeable delay. And this is with low end SSD that connects to PATA interface. Boot performance seems to be mostly about low times for seeks and small reads in which pretty much any SSD runs circles around mechanical drives (seek times are generally 100-200x lower on SSDs). Low total bandwidth of the interface is really non-issue for most of my use. (no large copy operations between drives)

Did you align your partitions to the erase block boundary? Otherwise your SDD performance could be severely degraded as the drive has to do two read/modify/write cycles when one would suffice. These things (or the partitioning tools) are not yet plug and play.

Ted Tso has written informative article about aligning FS to erase block size, which can be found here.

Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, âCome, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

What happens to the goats?

Gedit uses Ctrl-f for find.

Many plants rotate their leaves to follow the sun (to maximize photosynthesis) and orientate them vertically during the night (in order to shade or protect them during the resting period). I know this from watching my chilli plants grow. For them this action is more profound when they are young and growing fast. Older plants seem to be much lazier and slower in orienting their leaves. Maybe leaf quantity becomes quality of it's own and following the sun movent accurately becomes unnecessary or wastes more energy.

Really? Czechoslovakia was a Soviet satellite state, but Finland - while not in NATO - was not. I suspect the Soviets woudln't have dared invade Finland as it would have had a severe risk of military confrontation with the west. Likewise, I doubt NATO would have done anything to Finland to avoid a confrontation with the Soviets.

Yes really. Everything you say is correct though.

this article is interesting (I'm not able to check the validity).

So where does it say anything about listening posts and surveillance tech imports to Finland? I'm Finnish and knowing our history I find it very unlikely.

Even if what you say is true, (Which I very much doubt) why didn't US use that advanced tech and it took Nokia to commercialize it? Here everyone and his mom had a small mobile phone while in the US they were priviledge of rich juppies (and even they had big luggable ones...strech to call them mobile).

Nokia (and Swedish Ericsson to some extent) had a good head start in mobile phone business during the 90s. Rest of the world catched and finally passed Finland in the mobile tech only during few recent years. Now Microsoft practically owns Nokia so we can say goodbye to any new innovation in mobile tech. It was fun while it lasted. :)

A Wikipedia article claims that "the U.S. promised to provide military force in aid of Sweden in case of Soviet aggression. Knowledge of this guarantee was by the Swedish governments kept from the Swedish public until 1994, when a Swedish research commission found evidence for it" - unfortunately without source.

And to our horror USSR promised Finns the same thing, which Finland politely rejected. NATO's plans (which Finnish military was aware of) were to obiliterate Finlands transportation network and airbases with tactical nukes in case Soviet forces crossed the border. During Soviet force movements and military excercises near the Finnish border bombers on the British airbases were fueled up and on standby.

The US gov't spent billions per year in Scandinavian investments during the cold war to spy on Russia. Much of the early Nokia research was an excuse to put up listening posts in odd places. Now all new funding is from retirement funds dumping cash they must invest every week. As a society are we making progress?

Did you just make that up yourself?

Nokia was making mostly rubber boots, tires and cables during the cold war era. Also as others have noted Finland was on wrong side. While it wasn't part of Warsaw pact it had very close relations to USSR from 1944 to 1990 so much that any military collaboration with US would have been extremely unwise and would have only hurt finnish national security. Having US listening posts in Finland would have been simply out of question.

By close relations I mean the situation where finnish politicians had to be constantly on their toes not to displease Soviet leadership. What happened in Czechoslovakia 1968 was fresh in everyones minds.

Not to troll here, but Hitler and Stalin were both atheist AFAIK.

Christians are eager to mod you up even if your claim has no base in reality. That's so typical of religious folks.

Hitler was Christian in his public life. His mother and father were Catholic, but he personally identified more with teachings of Martin Luther. Maybe this was because Luther had very anti-Jewish views. In his book Von den Juden und ihren Luegen (On the Jews and Their Lies) Luther described jews as:

Seems like Hitler found a soulmate in Luther.

In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:

Those aren't words of an Atheist, are they?

Problem is that these super bees could potentially outcompete all other pollinating insects creating sort of a monoculture. Then species dependant on these other pollinators would suffer or even go extinct (birds, parasites etc.). It would damage the ecosystem in unpredictable ways.

It's much safer to have 100 different species pollinating our plants than one. Imagine if there is only one species that does all pollination for our plants and for example a new disease wipes out all it's population.

I can't remember arn't birds sometimes considered to be a kind of reptile? (I think I saw that on XKCD.)

No. Birds are the only currently existing clade of dinosaurs and are warm-blooded while reptiles are cold-blooded.

Oh, and Israel came into being by international convention, not of its own accord, and as a result of near extinction of the race.

Jews are not a race. It's a religion. Though many jews are at least partially of semitic ehtnicity (same as arabs). So basically what you have is two groups that share common ancestry fighting eachother due to slightly different religion.

Why should any outside power support either one?

No, you'll find half broken apps that sort of do the same thing and haven't seen an update in years, but feel free to continue living in your imaginary little world where GIMP is as "good" as Photoshop, Blender is as "good" as Maya, Jahshaka is as "good" as Avid, LMMS is as "good" as Ableton Live and Tremulous is as "good" as TF2..

So GIMP and Blender haven't seen update in years? Good to know. ;)

I like Linux mainly because it's more resource efficient and doesn't get into my way. I have a good ultraportable which is already over 6 years old (Thinkpad X41 with SSD drive), boots up Debian in 7 seconds and runs all software that I need. Operating system itself with X.org and fluxbox takes ca. 200MB of disk space and doesn't reserve too much memory for itself. So almost all resources can be in use by the apps that I need.

Windows 7 would be slow on this machine and all the bloat that comes with it is useless for me. It would be just waste of resources.

I happen to use GIMP on this system together with ufraw and it's quite fast and works good enough for my photo editing needs. Windows + modern enough Photoshop would be terribly slow and I prefer GIMP UI because as I'm more used to it and also because it fits better to my idea of window management (Though on OSX Photoshop works quite similarly). Choice between GIMP and Photoshop is just a matter of taste unless you are a professional photographer. Then Photoshop has it's selling points such as support for 16-bit images. With ufraw+GIMP this is possible too but with not such fidelity. (You need those 16-bits mostly for lossless adjustments in exposure and white balance which you can do in ufraw or in number of other raw editing software dcraw, darktable, bibble pro etc.) .

My favorite media player MPlayer is native on Linux and hands down better (more resource efficient, better hardware and codec support and better image quality) than any of its Windows only counterparts. Irssi is still the best IRC client (nothing comes even close on Windows) and Pidgin with XMPP works for my all other messaging needs. I can talk to friends at Google talk, ICQ, MSN, Jabber and so forth by using single client which connects to single server to handle all these connections.

I could go on and on, but you probably get the point. There are lot of resource efficient and good apps for Linux. And you can get new version of most these apps daily by grabbing a snapshot from svn/git.

I think your exchange was interesting. If there are more people like you at Nokia, then they still have some hope.

Nanometers, micrometers, millimeters, centimeters, decimeters, meters, decameters, (hecto... hm.), kilometers, megameters... hey wait. I guess meters and flops are just differently-prefixed. Sometimes. *sigh*

What do you mean? Prefixes are always the same:
...Gm (10^9m), Tm (10^12m), Pm (10^15m).
Same goes for flop/s. Prefix is only a multiplier.

It's correct to say that Sun's average distance from the Earth is roughly 149.6 gigametres. (149,600,000 kilometres).