Also, if you are an organization that gets a ton of press, you can probably get some pro bono legal advice through a more reliable channel than posting on Slashdot. Plenty of Danish lawyers would like to be able to put Copenhagen Suborbitals on their resume.

Even total Muslim immigration is quite low. It's less than 5% of the population here. Most immigrants come from such exotic places as... Lithuania or Romania.

If the opt-in frontier societies of the American West are a precedent, there is no opt out. Once you're in the company town, you're there for your term of service.

As a resident of a prosperous northern-European country with working infrastructure, a working healthcare system, relatively low poverty and homelessness levels, and generally a decent civil society that we all pay our share towards, I'll take the universal welfare state over some kind of ridiculous experiment in anarcho-capitalism. That's about as likely to work as any other anarchist experiment has worked. I guess America can have fun with it, though.

One way to minimise their PR efforts is to create significant Streisand effects on their work. But some PR companies are so desperate that they would probably even be delighted with that.

Part of the reason there isn't much of a Streisand effect here usually is that in the common case, honestly nobody cares about these articles. A PR company writes an obvious fluff piece about some obscure internet portal or logistics company or for-profit university. If someone on Wikipedia catches it, they might try to tone it down or even delete it. But most of the time: 1) nobody even sees these articles; and 2) it's barely really worth the effort.

If a PR company tries to fluff up a politician's article who's engaged in a high-profile race, or some energy-industry PR people edit an article relating to climate change, or the Turkish government hires a PR firm to edit the page on the Armenian genocide, then people will notice and care. But nobody reads the thousands of articles on obscure companies. The minus side is that they're usually crap articles, but the plus side is that they are relatively uninfluential crap: all they tell you is that some small company exists and thinks it's great, and they get a handful of views from Google. Usually they are not even really linked from other parts of Wikipedia: when the PR companies try to insert spammy links from other articles that people do read, that's when these fluff articles are caught.

You can have a highly customizable UI without making the default bland and impossible to navigate. Having more customization does make some things more difficult, since you can't assume all users will have the same setup, but it's still compatible with a decent default interface.

One thing that may help Helsinki is that it's considerably more compact than Silicon Valley. The region covered by this system is about a 5 mi x 5 mi rectangle, which in Helsinki is actually considered a large area, covering most of the city, and about 750,000 people. Silicon Valley, by contrast, has distances frequently in the 20-30 mile range (say, Mountain View to SFO), and there is no 5x5 mi area that has a population as high as 750,000. It's just too sprawling.

The Daily Show had a pretty good episode where they traveled to Sweden to film a warning about America's dark socialist future...

Eh, it's a pretty colloquialism even in other parts of science to use "speed" to refer to a rate rather than only a velocity.

I could be imagining things, but I think there's actually a slight decrease in ability to carry on these kinds of discussions than there was a half-generation ago. You could assume that most computer scientists in the '80s and '90s had basic ability to use a listserv and carry on a conversation suited to the medium. I think that is less true now: many computer scientists in 2013 have absolutely no idea how to carry on a productive text-based discussion.

If you're trying to recreate a physical meeting, I agree. But it's quite possible to have productive virtual meetings if people adapt to working in a manner suited to the medium. I have a regular group of collaborators who I sometimes meet with in person, and sometimes meet with on IRC. The two kinds of meetings are both productive, real meetings, but with different strengths and weaknesses. However it works because we're all familiar with IRC and how to use it productively, rather than trying to shoehorn some other communication style into it.

Generally true, though the tricky part is that in disagreements between divorced parents, courts sometimes try to take the kids' wishes into account in ways that wouldn't have legal standing outside the divorce context. That's because the court is supposed to do many things in the "interest of the children", and when divorced parents disagree over what that is, they might try to discern from the children what that is (with varying degrees of success).

Here the court seems to have taken the children's wishes into account, but ultimately decided that, when mom and dad disagreed over what was in the interests of the children, medical science was a better tie-breaker.

I haven't worked anywhere that locks the stairs. Not only do I regularly take the stairs, but there are five stairwells (one in each corner and one in the middle), so I can take whichever one's closest.

Man, you people must work in some weird-ass buildings. When I want to see someone above or below me, I just take the nearest stairs up. Sure, there is only one central elevator bank, but there are 5 flights of stairs (one in each corner of the building and one in the middle, near the elevators). Takes not even two minutes.

I've worked in skyscrapers and haven't really found that to be true. Especially within your bank of floors, e.g. if your department is floors 15-20, people treat it as pretty local.