There's also the matter of Stalin killing most of the generals before WW2 and then marching the men without direction to their deaths.

Here in Finland stories about Soviet soldiers who ran toward well fortified gatling gun hour after hour under threat of execution are well known.

Oh, and apparently there was order that Soviet soldiers that surrender are to be killed when returned. Makes you take foolish risks..

Infinity plus seven is still only infinity.

I'm sorry for asking, but I got the impression that America was the "putting the needs of corporations ahead of the needs of its citizens" system. After all, America isn't particularly high in the health indexes and before are many quite corrupt countries. Are you claiming that you could do worse?

And as some previous poster pointed.. if you are not happy with the public health care (which is much cheaper than the American insurance system), you can always augment it with a private insurance. Which would end up being much cheaper as well, because the worst case scenarios are paid by the government, so the insurance company can offer better rates.

I'm a Finn, I have private health insurance and it costs something along the lines of 100-200 euros a year (of course, I'm healthy 25-year old).

I'm not American, but why not just put the scripts online? I mean, you can have problems without your net being totally unusable. The customers can read themselves, they don't need people in India to do so for them. Heck, Verizon might put the scripts online EVEN FOR PROBLEMS WHEN THEY CAN'T GET ONLINE. That would be great and really Kafka. I love it already.

Not 20 hours a week. And according to the article, Verizon tries to pile responsibilities on the "super-users" by creating their own forums for them, thus making working them a moral chain; people depend on them, they can't just quit. And really, I think that game companies pay money for doing that.

Plus retired people always have need for money; after all, they make less than they did when they worked. And, as someone pointed, their work keeps other from having a paying job.

Volunteer effort is great. I try to give as much as possible for Wikipedia - hey, it's a hobby. I also do other stuff to help and bring enjoyment for my peers.
But when people start making money on your free effort - indeed, rely you to do your free effort for the continued success of a company, then you're little better than slave (in that you can at least walk away). I mean, I could still see myself giving advice on a forum if I knew how to help, but this.. these guys are actually connected to the company, right?

And 20 hours per week? Even on poor, minimum wage salary (seven dollars an hour?) thats 140 dollars per week, 560 dollars a month. And if he can really give much better experience than the idiots at Verizon, we're talking at least manager level. What's that, double the wage? Triple?

This thing makes me pretty angry. And those people "helping" are real chumps.

When the copyright law changed in Finland in the early 00s (into really badly formulated lobbyist babble which said that getting around copyprotection was illegal). One guy (Mikko Rauhala, a true hero of the masses) collected seven people, pasted the DeCSS-code for Linux on some messageboards and then walked to police station.

After few rounds in the courts, during which he got lots of press for his case, he was in the end found guilty (didn't get punished though).

That's how you get attention. You find something really stupid and small-time, rat yourself to the police and make sure that the press is there when you do it.

I'm under the impression that most coalition-countries have three big parties; liberals, social democrats and a third one that tries to balance between those two. Together they get about 60-75% of votes (and thus of those three, at least two are in the cabinet at any given time). Very seldom do they have enough manpower to get majority by themselves. So they form a pact with the communists, the greens and/or ultra-liberals (which together are about 20-30% of votes). But the big three are always the same..I suppose because of the "core voters" as Americans say.

The cabinet decides what it wants behind closed doors; they trade not-so-important things for more important things, knowing that in the end the big things get through. This is hell, because even though the Greens only say that the only big thing for them is Environment, in practice they collect followers who find more mundane things important as well. To make it specially hard, Greens from different parts of the country have surpringly different priorities; in Helsinki (did I mention I'm a Finn) the biggest representative is also prominent talker for electronic freedoms and quite liberal.. while up north Greens might have many voters who earlier were rooting for communists (with all the stereotypes).

It's a bit murky where the lines are drawn, but sure, more options. And because of smaller numbers, the parties know better what their supporters want.

I'm under the impression that you're American, so this might not have occured to you; in a parliament-led country the Prime Minister isn't the absolute ruler. The changes to the laws and policies are pushed forward by a minister, who appears in the media frequently pimping and explaining why things get done as they are.
For examble, the minister who was pushing the electronic voting machines (and used really badly formulated phrases when doing so) probably lost all chances of ever getting a minister-seat again.

In the end, I want to note that multiple parties also discourages mud-throwing. Even though you are competing for the same votes, after the elections you still have to work together and maybe form a cabinet together. If you first throw mud against a party and then form a coalition, the voters will see that as betraying all the values you preached just few months earlier (and the next elections are going to be a bitch).

Most European countries are ruled by coalitions. Apart of Italy, they tend to be pretty stable and last at least the four years till the next election.

The party that wins the election tries to find a party that makes it the majority in the parliament. To find such a partner, it has to make concessions and to promise not to go on ideological overdrive. The pressure to rule wisely doesn't come only from outside from the public and the lobbying interest groups, but also from inside the government itself.

I tend to think this is fairly wise way to rule a country. Sure, you can't make fast moves like you can in America, but on the other hand, the changes that happen are well thought out and not apt to be reversed after the next election. The instability of the cabinet brings, maybe contradictionary, stability to the country as a whole.

I'm under impression (which may well be wrong) that you have to be client/member for the collecting agency. Otherwise your share will get divided with other writers.

Also, there was also controversy few years back that the association that handled music compensations refused to pay them outside the country (Finland). If you are interested how book-compensations are handled in Finland, you should probably contact info at sanasto.fi.

I believe there is a lottery involved, so as to make bribery harder.

But keep in mind that in the Swedish system, there are four judges (three professional "everymen" and one trained lawyer) who handle the cases. The decision we ended up with was made in consensus; if the lay-judges were of different opinion than the copyright lobby sock puppet, they could have over-ruled him.

Of course, the sock puppet could have been really intimating, but it should have stopped platant abuse. To decide the case as he wanted, he would have needed support from at least one of the other judges (the lawyer gets two votes and the lay-judges one).

I don't know about the getting copies part, but Sanasto Ry was founded three years ago and the first thing they did was ask money from libraries. Finnish article from 2006

On Sanasto's frontpage, they mention that they got their demands. Sanasto's homepage

(Opetusministeriö on marraskuussa 2008 nimennyt Sanaston, Kopioston ja Teoston tilittämään tekijöille tulevat lainauskorvaukset. Lainauskorvaus on kirjastoista lainattavien teosten lainaamisesta suoritettava tekijänoikeuskorvaus tekijöille.)

TTVK (Copyright-information and enforcement Association) says that renting without rights from publishers or writers is illegal, because the service operates over Internet, and everybody can use it. Source.

How can you possibly argue over so eloquent argument?

Yes, you are quite correct. I got my cables mixed. However, 6000 people are more than enough to support one artist/coder.