I'm a Finn. I know we fought well in WW2. It's what happened after the war that was submissive. It has even own word: Finlandisation

It all started after the war. Politicians knew that we would not be able to stand war against Soviets if we were the only enemy. They desided to play really really nice. Almost everything was OK as long as it did not involve Soviet troops in Finnish soil. It became liturgy to talk how good relations were between our countries. I think this was good idea at first. But then new generation of politicians grew, who thought that this good relationships bullshit was real. Soviets were able to influence our politics a lot. Finland censored talking, books and movies that were negative to Soviets. Some people even started to believe Soviet propaganda that we started the war.

The good part of all this was that we could keep our own economic system and democracy going (even if Soviets were able to mess with it from time to time). The cost of having western lifestyle next to Soviet Union was our pride. Cold war era was bad time for Finns.

Or from two. Heck. From twelve beautiful woman and small team of experts.

That's implementation dependent, but I think most good Smalltalk and Lisp implementations do it like that. If you reserve two tags for immediate integers (one for positive, one for negative), you lose only two bits. Having 64-bit system, and memory access as bottleneck, that's incredibly good solution. Completely future proof solution even.

Filesystem was so big issue in my work that we bite the bulled and tried first Open Solaris and then switched into Nexenta http://www.nexenta.org/ Nexenta is OpenSolaris kernel GNU/Debian/Ubutntu userland. What this gets to you is ZFS and RAID-Z and RAID-Z2. When you get used to the fact that your filesystems has end to end quarantee of data integrity by hashing (even cryptographic hashing if you want, you feel uncomfortable with any other filesystem. In home I still run Linux on my laptop, but I made my own NAS that ruons with Nexenta.