I am not really sure I understand why special relativity wouldn't count as a revelation -- it was quite impressive how Einstein was willing to accept the speed of light being a constant regardless of observers' movement in relation to each other, and everything then just followed from there. I'd say the relationships between time and space, the idea that the Galilean perspective is fundamentally wrong and the mass-energy equivalence are not just a minor antecedent to something bigger and better.

GR is the application of similar kinds of thinking to gravity -- being inside an accelerated box is the same thing as being in a gravity field and so on.

I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the idea that the USSR sought to destroy national identities and replace that with the new "Soviet human"...

There really seems to be something going on about that comment, I don't know what it is. It's probably the "national suicide" formulation that is a negative trigger for some people who do not understand the background; but national suicide really was what the USSR about for its constituent peoples. If it wasn't forced relocation, it was branding anything "Fascist" that wasn't pro-Soviet enough.

There were certainly positives to our ability to keep the Soviets at bay and maintain our democracy during the Cold War; President Kekkonen in his younger days was a remarkable diplomat and statesman, and being overtly uppity would have just triggered "help" from Moscow. But I can well understand the deep frustrations of those people who just wanted to call a spade a spade when it came to our "friend" to the East.

The really bad part is that Finlandization works across generations in a culture; we're still sheep, scared of the displeasure of those we consider our superiors, and all too afraid of and eager to participate in the collective shoutings-down by people who believe they're superior because they're in the ideological in-crowd. The Stalinists won at least when it comes to that.

As a Finn and a recently returned Nokia shareholder, I actually agree with you. Of course I was unhappy with this blatantly obvious Elop theater when it was going on, but let's face it -- smartphones are commodities as devices, and if you've lost out on the ecosystem, the best you can do is offload your manufacturing for someone who is dumb enough to pay a fair amount of money for it.

The remaining parts of Nokia are at least a healthy company with many options open for the future... it wouldn't be the first time the firm reinvents itself since the 19th century.

I wouldn't call Nokia a patent troll if they enforce their patents more aggressively. So far they have been remarkably docile on that front. Nokia's patents are genuine inventions that the patent system is supposed to protect; if Nokia is not allowed to do that, we could just as well do away with the whole system.

Hey, I'm Finnish, we've got experience of having Russians next door. Germany is far superior culturally as an European overlord, as long as they're not killing off their inferiors.

This has nothing to do with Communism. This is Russian nationalism and imperialism that is, for some reason, the way they just are.

You know, if there hadn't been all that racial mythology and Holocaust shit, that would have been good for everyone back in the mid-20th century. I would, for one, been all for Deutschland über alles...

It pains me to think that for at least a generation or so, you will still be able to just buy your educated workforce from other countries that have invested in their public education as infrastructure. Otherwise you'd collapse much faster with all this nonsense.

How about child pornography? It's perverted stuff, and the underage participants are duly protected from having their pictures from being posted online for "informative" purposes. Just see how well your defense of "I forced myself to watch it because I want to remind myself of how vile it is" would work if caught with the material.

As far as decapitations go, I can well imagine it's gruesome stuff. I don't need to see someone lose his life like that just out of sick curiosity.

You wanting to reserve space for the big numbers of the large, personal things called cars, both in terms of parking space and having to cover half of the city in asphalt, with the subsequent growth in distances between points (because of lower density), makes the city less accessible by anything other than a car and deprives others of their ability to just walk or bike their way around, is less aesthetic and causes air pollution... and besides, you couldn't just rebuild the central Helsinki area (which is quite fine as it is) for cars for everyone (in particular building the underground parking caves is hideously expensive).

Outside of the city, you can go driving all you want, there's a lot of road in the woods in Finland. Personally I live in one of Helsinki's exurb towns which is your typical place of single-family houses with big yards... I guess you'd like it here. I have the pleasure of driving to work every morning and I'm not all that certain it's such a great sign of my freedom -- I just get to operate the controls in a certain fixed sequence twice a day. The place also has this distinct sleepy sense of nothing ever happening, so I find myself heading to the city whenever I want to actually get some action.

Do not ignore the most important basic service that we're trying to reorganize for efficiencies of scale, healthcare... it is remarkable how long it can take to get an ambulance in Lapland.

Still untrue -- the MeeGo plan was the supposed future and the pre-Elop Nokia was full-on backing it. The Nokia N9 was the best mobile device I had owned, and then Elop came in and didn't give it a release in any major markets.

There is also a legendary internet phenomenon with kinda your surname. I would not recommend googling for it.

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...