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:
"base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth."
Seems like Hitler found a soulmate in Luther.
In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote:
" The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will. "
Those aren't words of an Atheist, are they?
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.
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:
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).
The only thing that troubles me is Intel's video driver. They just can't or won't write decent drivers for Linux, so performance takes a hit.
Intel drivers used to work great just few years back. IIRC it was a major rewrite of Xorg and introducing KMS that has caused the regression and the need for rewriting much of the driver code. (anyone who knows better please correct me). I think worst of that is already behind and the drivers are improving even for my old i915 chip. Some font or other rendering artifacts still appear now and then, but the performance seems to have improved lately (it was really pathetic few months ago, even glxgears was stuttering)
Debian has been running so well on my 6 year old Thinkpad X41 that I haven't even considered buying a new laptop. I'll probably use it as long as the hardware lasts, be it another 4 or 6 years. After upgrading to SSD and aligning the partitions correctly to erase byte size it boots up to desktop (Fluxbox) in 7 seconds and basically everything that doesn't require heavy calculation from the CPU happens instantly. In practice it's much faster in all CPU non-heavy actions than any Windows laptop I've ever used (I know SSD has most to do with this). It's also ecological to buy stuff that lasts and not replace computers every another year.
I've been repairing windows laptops lately (mostly Windows 7, some Vista) and my feeling is that almost without exception they are laggier and slower than what I'm used to. Even if these things have quadrupled amount of RAM compared to my old laptop, it really doesn't show in any meaningful way. Windows Vista and 7 seem to use atleast one gigabyte of RAM in order to just keep running as there is so much useless bloat loaded at any given time. Also many of these Windows 7 laptops seem to have audio issues on high CPU load. Even after fresh install audio will stutter when the machine is under heavy load (Ie. calculating primes).
So why would I make a jump from provenly trouble free Linux on this laptop to Windows 7? Would it not be slow to run Windows 7 on 6 year old laptop with 1.5GB of RAM? Would the SSD be as fast using windows filesystems? Would the suspend and hibernate actions work correctly and as fast as they do in Linux (suspends in one second, resumes in one)? Why would I use Windows 7 as I even don't know how to use it's user interface (how to move and resize windows without grabbing window borders with mouse?). How about most of CLI tools that make my life easier? Would I be able to use most of my favorite software on windows? (On Cygwin maybe, but why the trouble?)
.Wrong. As the other dude pointed out, it's a LOT older than that. And it's spelled "Iraq" I don't know about Irak's WMD, but Iraq's WMD were quite real. Then stop surrendering, Frenchy.
And this is why rest of the world sees US as arrogant, self important smugs. Only arabs' israeli bashing comes close when you talk about people insulting foreigners on the internets. Grow up.
My big issue with this thing is that keyboards are seperate from PCs for a very good reason. If I spill cola on my keyboard (we've all done it), I really dont want to have to buy a new PC to replace the damaged A key or even strip down and repair the keyboard. What I want to do is buy a new $25 peripheral.
I haven't quite grasped why cheap keyboards are so popular nowadays. Afterall it - together with the screen - is the interface you most interact with and something you actually notice. It's sad to see people invest shitloads of money into computers with highest possible specs and then using it with the cheapest crap keyboard and screen available. Things have got to the point that it's very hard or even impossible to find a good quality keyboard without ordering it from the other side of the globe and paying an arm and a leg for it.
It wasn't always like this. Consider IBM Model M, which was probably the most numerous keyboard in the 80s. Liquid spills are rarely a problem. Just take it to the shower or put it into a washing machine, let it dry before plugging in and it will most likely work just fine. Also it's better to type on than 95% of todays keyboards. Mine was made in 1987 (soon 25 years old), I got it for free (school was throwing old keyboards to the dumpster) and after all these years it's still as good as new. Aside from being a joy to type on they are basically indestructible. At most you might have to change new springs (or swap them around) after 10 years of use if you are picky about even input force.
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Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
