This isn't due to a ridiculously low corporate tax rate in Ireland (it's 10% or more according to wikipedia, depending). The country with ridiculously low corporate tax is Cayman Islands (no corporate tax). Ireland's subsidiary pays licensing fees to the subsidiary in Cayman Islands, so that on paper the Ireland profit becomes miniscule, and thus the tax sums are low too.

If you want to go in any other direction than where the wind is going, you need a keel to go with the sails. So sails is not really a solution here, because there's no way to have a working keel.

The above was written by me. Ah, didn't notice I was logged out, didn't mean to post anonymously. Not that it matters.

Correct about downloading being theft (of sorts).

But how bad of an issue it is? I recently saw a comparison here from someone who said that as crimes go, downloading content could be considered about the same as jaywalking. Jaywalking is also wrong, but people don't get confined to their home or get huge fines for it. The reaction should be proportional to the severity of the issue. Because of that, the impact to the sales is a relevant point.

As far as I am aware, there will be no more Nokia phone manufacturing in Finland in the future, only "tailoring" (my choice of word). I do not know how long the transition period is while manufacturing will still go on, but probably no longer than a year (my personal guess only).

That doesn't mean that Nokia won't pay attention to the manufacturing workers' conditions, as well as the materials supply chain. I'm biased, but I feel pretty good about the phones manufacturing. These are difficult issues to solve, but at least I see Nokia as trying to make changes for the better, industry-wide. It's the kind of things that usually don't make any sort of news ever - and also, which take persistence and a long time to come to fruition. Of course, there might be similar initiatives going on in other companies, and I wouldn't know about those.

Disclaimer: I work for Nokia, although my work has nothing to do with the manufacturing or such.

This is not the first such UI, there's already an existing gesture UI for Nokia's N9 phone. Relatively simple and experimental, but still.
http://store.ovi.com/content/214364
I have not tried it myself.

Full disclosure: I work for Nokia, even though I've not had anything to do with this particular software.

They are still probably the most open phones that are available in the mass market. (Not that I have read or done any studies on that.) You can replace the kernel too on the N9, if you want, even if it does have an impact on some of the features.

Full disclosure: I am a Nokia employee.

I don't know if this idea is new or old (likely anything I can think of has been thought of before), but how about allowing multiple axis of scoring in the moderation? One of them could be "agree - disagree". That would give people the way to vent about not agreeing with what someone says, and it wouldn't then impact the "quality" evaluation.

The browsing score preferences could then be set for both/each axis separately. If you don't want to read posts which most people did not agree to, you could.

I don't think it's that many. There's a graph in an Finnish online news article, and while the text is in Finnish, the graph should be pretty clear. The figure was about 120,000 employees in 2010 according to the graph. It probably ends before any of the current wave of layoffs have been included.

In the graph, the big jump around 2006 is probably when Nokia-Siemens Networks was created. If so, including the NSN employees is a bit misleading because generally NSN is thought of as a separate entity, and they have their own layoffs etc. which don't impact the phone manufacturing. Also, in 2007 Navteq was bought. So that's maybe about 60,000 "non-Nokia" people, with "Nokia proper" having about 60,000-70,000.

I haven't kept count, but by now the total reduction is about 10,000 if not even more. So that's 10,000 out of the 60,000, not 10,000 out of the 120,000.

I was just recently organizing the cables in the back of my entertainment media setup in the living room, and ended up using flexible plastic pipe that I cut open lengthwise. I picked about 1 inch diameter pipe, but it's easy and fairly cheap to find any diameter that's needed. Supposedly it's possible to find ready-split pipe too, but I couldn't locate any where I live.

Using the split pipe keeps the cables nicely together and avoids dust collecting between them. It also adds a bit of extra insulation (distance) so that power cables don't create interference to signal cables where they are running close to each other. Doing this was probably a bit more work than using velcro straps (splitting the pipe using scissors, getting the cables into the pipe), but IMO works well for those places where cables run on the floor and are likely to attract dust.

This method is not an universal solution by any means. For instance, it's not that good for cables hanging in the air, or going short distances. My recommendation is to use velcro instead for those situations.

I posted about this above, but I guess I'll repeat:
As far as I know, he's now sold all MS stock and has invested in some Nokia stock.

The information was in the local news, though obviously it didn't make as big headlines as the original "controversy".

Not true anymore, MS stock sold and Nokia stock purchased. What's more, doing so before the partnership announcement might have been illegal due to inside knowledge trading laws.

It might still be predictable, sure.

I used to have a Nokia phone (6320 IIRC, US model naming may be different) that lasted well over a week with one charge. Of course that dropped with the years, but it was still several days at the point when I replaced it.

I would imagine similar phones are readily available these days too.

Oh, did you want a phone with web browsing, GPS etc.? Those things drain a lot more power... Still, even for them, I imagine it would be possible to put some super-efficient batteries that would enable long-lasting battery life, for the price of merely a few dozens of thousands of dollars. :)

*raises hand*

I run three servers with Debian stable. One has some backports packages (that's my home server), but the other two are plain stable (remote hobby servers). One of those used to have PHP5 installed from some non-stable repository, but with Lenny I could get rid of the extra apt config line.

Of course, it depends what you want your server to do. For me, it's as simple as eg. Apache, MySQL and PHP. You could argue that no "real" server can be that simple, but .. well, it depends on your needs.

I don't think what I do is really that rare.

How does MITM help in stealing?

The service appears to provide in effect 5 pre-defined accounts (your own), between which you can transfer funds. You can't transfer funds anywhere else.

With a MITM attack, you could alter which account is the source and which is the destination, but you still can't get money transferred outside of those pre-defined accounts. There's potential for someone being a nuisance to you, but not stealing.

I probably wouldn't use this service even if my bank offered it, but it doesn't look like it's the big security hole regarding transfers many commenters seem to think it is.

The other issue is whether you'd want balance information etc. available in this manner. It can't be used directly to harm you either, but I guess it could be valuable to someone eg. for deciding on who or which account to target.