At least here in Finland the experience in educating everyone in an integrated setting has provided pretty good results. It does not seem necessary to segregate the special needs ones.

I was one of the gifted pupils back in the day, and I guess school might have been a bit boring at times, but then again the time I did not need to spend studying was well-spent educating myself on my own time...

It's a somewhat vague label; even some Finns who have a very "Nordist" political inclination insist that we should be called "Scandinavian" even though even the Scandinavians themselves have never done that. The more appropriate geopolitical term is "Nordic".

But, as we might share a lot historically and culturally, the Winter War we definitely don't :-)

Well, I am Finnish and I'd like to point out that the Winter War is historically and culturally very much specifically a Finnish thing. The Scandinavians (Nordic countries west of Finland) had nothing to do with it, they don't consider it "their" war and they do not remember it as a substantial part of their history. The cultural image of "skiing and shooting" is equally as much Finnish.

Jolla is Finnish, the first device sold was in Finland, it's being sold in Finland...

Not even assembly is no longer a real representation of "what is really going on". While I have a pretty good sense in general what goes on in the emulation of a x86 processor that runs there in the hardware, I've never really thought of it as contributing that much to the way I approach programming in higher-level languages. Exposure to things like Lisp have been much more instructive in that regard.

I was wondering about that as well. I am pretty sure that almost all the time after the iPhone's launch to the after-effects of the burning platform memo, the actual smartphone world leader was Nokia. The E-series was the business phone of choice at least here in Europe, and I still have never seen a Blackberry in my life.

I never understood why BB was so popular in the US with their weird infrastructure choices. Nokia's phones integrated straight into your corporate networking infrastructure via VPNs and did proper email without there being any middleman servers. I guess the US phone network infrastructure was just simply so bad back in the day that special solutions were required?

Actually, looks like the Swedish economy is growing at quite a nice clip. Finland has a problem with the eurozone which causes issues with competitiveness due to too strong a currency; and there's a bit of a demographic challenge as well. But I wouldn't say that it's the fault of the Nordic welfare state.

Brilliant. A bit like Finland these days :-)

I really can't say I agree; if the application is accessed through the web, this introduces all kinds of particular technological issues to be handled. It's a bit like a having a GUI library that is quite opinionated about how you need to be architecting your application -- of course depending on what kind of a separation you want there to be between the layers. But if you're web-programming, you'll have to take these things into account. It really is not just HTML...

"Web programming" does not mean restricting yourself simply just creating HTML documents, which, I'd have to agree, is not programming.

The web part really is just what faces the user, and even that is these days often a small application. The stuff I "web-program" currently is 95% in the back-end though, and that stuff has its own challenges.

There will be no "vote on copyright law that is drafted by citizens". Some committee will just say that there are legal reasons why this can't happen and that's it. All this stuff does is stir up public discourse, which is IMO a good thing though.

Sometimes it seems difficult to tell the difference in these cases.

There's lots of talk in Linus' responses about "singing around campfires" and not offending feelings. It's not about being suffocatingly PC by playing carebears, it's just about removing the aggressive posturing whose communicative function is to put the other person on the defensive to begin with.

The common ground generally means that there's some shared standard of what goes and what doesn't, and it seems to me that here it's pretty much to be found on Linus' terms. I tend to be pretty thick-skinned myself in the sense that I bother parsing the actual (possible) point being made even from the midst of an obscuring shitstorm, but it doesn't mean it makes me reflect too well on the person generating such communications.

I read that and understood it. However, "working together despite differences" is not necessarily about pleasing each other in the strawman way Linus suggests. In any communication there has to be some shared ground as to what constitutes acceptable behaviour and this does NOT mean some kind of totalitarian mind control in order to make all feel happy about themselves. In situations like this I much prefer going for just making my point instead of peppering it with expletives for added effect.

Sure it was historically like that -- but it certainly is being used even today to very aggressively push a certain point of view and agenda. It's almost like a nice weapon to have at your disposal when talking about modern times. And of course in the end they see it as a matter of "the other people" not being quite as legitimate as they are.

Having followed related issues for a long, long time and having tried to reason with them to no avail about them (it's probably the most intellectually impossible and taboo political topic I have ever encountered), I might say that I do have a remarkably good picture of how the Fenno-Swedes expect to be seen and how they push this expectation. It is a very real phenonemon and a dislike of that has nothing to do with things like anti-Semitism. If you came across the rather jealous protection of these "particular qualities" and senseless ad hominem attacks against your person whenever you're "disrespectful" of them, you'd get it as well. Nobody is oppressing them, a lot of us would just like to be treated with some respect.

They might be my "fellow countrymen" but that matters much less to me than how I'm expected to live with them in this state of "fellowship" -- it is actually very difficult to live in the same society with an ideology like theirs that allows no consideration that maybe even other people are even ethical parties to the conversation to begin with (to allow that would be offensive to their world-view). The really funny part about this issue regarding Linus is that he rants against feel-good minority rhetoric -- my suspicion is that he'd be in agreement with me on this.