What Aliceinreality (#100) said.

Silva @ #21: A heavy metal Porto was my first thought, but no: turns out that Pörtö is an island east of Helsinki. "Ö" is Swedish for island, but I have no idea what "pört" is supposed to be. A fortified wine for metalheads?

There are several honor system vegetable stands along quiet country roads in the area where I spent my childhood summers in South-Western Finland. The owner of one stand says that they generally end up with more money than expected: buyers assume that there's a certain amount of theft, feel bad for the farmers, and leave extra money to compensate. Also, the money goes into a cookie jar, so it'd be easy to steal that too, but it never happens.

I wouldn't say that a public transport system works on the honor system if there are occasional inspections and fines: I think the fear of fines and public humiliation is what counts there.

@57, Takuan:

Wikipedia:
Outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease have resulted in the slaughter of millions of animals, despite this being a frequently non-fatal disease for adult animals (2-5% mortality) (...) The destruction of animals is primarily to halt further spread, as growth and milk production may be permanently affected, even in animals that have recovered. (...) Critics of current policies to cull infected herds argue that the financial imperative needs to be balanced against the killing of many animals[28], especially when a significant proportion of infected animals, most notably those producing milk, would recover from infection and live normal lives though with reduced milk production.

Happy birthday, Mark's Grandmother!

I think I'll now call my grand-aunt and see if she wants to go for a walk or something.

Noen, I don't know you, but I am so sorry. I hope you've found, or will find, other people that you can call family - that deserve to be called your family.

#24:
1) Vikings didn't come from Finland.
2) This law has nothing to do with making babies.

Perhaps this should be seen in the context of Finland's already existing vacations, such as the week-long "ski vacation" in February. I've never gone skiing on my ski vacations, yet I don't feel like I've somehow disappointed the government by not living up to the week's official name. The name is more like a friendly suggestion, a public service for those who have a hard time planning their holidays: "How about skiing? Or some sex?"

Maurik @#4, I don't get your point about Italy. It has an extremely low fertility rate, just like other Catholic countries in Southern Europe. Sure there are differences between the countries, but population science does tend to look at Italy, Spain and Portugal as one block. All of those countries have experimented with parental rewards, and there's often a racist undertone in the related public discourse.

Eric Scharf @#9, yes, childcare is universal enough that it doesn't need to be mentioned here. Of course usually kids leave daycare when their parents start their holidays - I guess in this case the point is that they wouldn't.

Mannakiosk @#17: Again, this story has nothing to do with that, but indeed immigration is a natural solution to that problem. Finland already has an abnormally high rate of love-related immigration (mostly because there's few other reasons than love that would make one want to stay here, but I like to think that my charm explains some of it) and this could only increase if the word spreads about our crazy sex vacations.

It might be a good idea to keep the ideas of relationship-tending and fertility-increasing apart. As far as I know, Tabermann's initiative never had anything to do with making more babies - that's just the connection that Cory made.

Finland's population is not decreasing: immigration (which we could use more of) compensates for the lower birth rates; and anyways even those are reasonably high, there's nothing like the decline seen in Southern European countries. Cory, your friends were making that up. Sorry.

I second Squashy's point from a slightly different point of view: usually, when a government starts to worry about fertility, it's the fertility *among middle-class white people* that they're worried about. Italy recently (Berlusconi era) offered a cash reward for couples who have their second baby. Embarrassingly, they had to withdraw the plan when they realized they'd have to give money to Muslim couples, too. They even went to one couple to ask them for their money back: "Sorry, we weren't talking about brown babies."

And Tommy Tabermann, the father of this commendable initiative, is pretty the crappiest poet you can imagine.

To all of you who are now considering moving there, I recommend the Corn Islands, a couple of hours' boat ride from Bluefields.

Bluefields is a sad little town in the middle of swampy nowhere. Corn Islands (Little Corn and Big Corn) are paradise, and there are plenty of white lobsters to be caught there, too - or so I was once told by an excited American guy who had just spent four months on Big Corn Island and couldn't remember any of it.

Another person who had lived there told me that the main causes of death on the islands are cocaine overdose and being hit by a falling coconut.

I wouldn't say "capitalism eats itself"... Capitalism as an economic system or an ideology hasn't taken a hit here, just the idea that Americans are its chosen people. The US is choosing isolation, while other countries merrily continue to trade with each other.

Both capitalism and democracy (or one, or the other - I don't believe in a divine link between the two) will continue to exist without the States' participation. It's just a shame to watch a nation punish itself like that.

@ 16
Why hasn't any other countries retaliate yet against USA by making US citizens to go through long-time-wasting forms and drills and such?

Brazil does that. Their reciprocity policy requires American citizens to go through the same hassles that Brazilian citizens go through to visit U.S. — consular interview, expensive fees ($130 for Americans, $20 for Europeans), photograph and fingerprinting at the border, and a special slow-track lane for U.S. citizens.

Needless to say, both countries are wasting a lot of money on this, innocent travelers suffer, and it's not going to make the US change their requirements. Yet somehow it's nice to see that one country has the balls to do this - and I'm tempted to visit Brazil just so I can take the fast lane at immigration and ogle at the poor American tourists being fingerprinted.

Or typing with his toes.

A year ago I met Adelino, a wonderful guy who had spent 3 years riding his bike around Europe and subsisting on donations and odd jobs. (He was aiming for 6 years, some sort of a world record apparently.) He didn't exactly abhor money, but never had much, and his journey was going well. Of course, he was also probably both the toughest motherfucker and the most trusting person I've ever met.

Good luck, Mark Boyle.

@#17:

Both are correct! I think.

@#11:

A Random John,

you're complaining to the wrong person. It's a quote from Cory Silverberg's post.

And anyways, condescendence is just not nice.

It looks like the people who did it enjoyed doing it and the people that witnessed it enjoyed witnessing it. I think that's awesome.

Then some people on the internet opined that it was uncool because it has been done before, and someone else worried about a hypothetical person who could find it threatening, but I guess those happy, fun-loving people who participated in the action or witnessed it couldn't give a rat's ass.

Not exactly an "oral surgeon-turned-nurse-turned-organlegger" - the story talks about a nurse, Lee Cruceta, and a former oral surgeon, Michael Mastromarino. It looks like BB got these two mixed up.

Also, neither one of these is a woman, like the first commenter assumes.

Please chill out, Noen. When I read about a lonely, sexually obsessive guy that has harassed telephone operators with 10,000 phonecalls, sure I feel compassion - but most of it is reserved for the women he targetted.

No one said that the guy doesn't deserve treatment or should be shot. On the other hand, you said some wacko shit about a 37-year-old outliving his friends, so yeah, people thought it was silly.

@ NOEN:

Your worry about lonely elderly folks is surely justified, but I don't see what it has to do with this case.

I've dealt with serial callers. Some of them are genuinely lonely, and a stranger on the phone might be their only chance at social interaction that day. Then there are the crazies: the ones with an urge to tell someone, anyone, about the conspiracies and aliens and murderous in-laws that populate their delusions. And then there are those whose sexual fantasies require the non-consensual participation of strangers. I'd say this guy (at 37, he's hardly "outlived his friends", I hope) falls into the third category.

@#6:
Applause.

I've worked in a couple of news organisations and they all have pet callers like this. Some want to be chided like this man - I imagine it turns them on - and others just need someone to talk to in the wee hours of the morning.

One guy used to call with movie trivia questions: "Excuse me, miss, but I can't seem to remember who played Jim Morrison in The Doors." Nice fellow. Night shifts were ridiculously quiet and that particular phone line wasn't needed for anything, so I usually indulged him.

@#17:

I think the rule that Antinous was talking about ("You do realize that those rules would shut down BB comments?") was the eighth:

"Do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself."

As a Finn living in Portugal, I take a very small amount of offense at the map on the book cover. Did they really have to crop both of my countries - both featured in the book - off the map?
Damn the inconvenient shape of Europe.

@#2: Those are not your regular Chantrelles but Yellow Foots (Cantharellus tubaeformis), just as delicious as their better-known cousins and even more fun to pick. We take our mushrooms seriously in Finland!

Chiming in to brag: I've danced with this guy. He came to give us a dance class, a bunch of ungrateful 4th-graders in suburban Helsinki in 1990. Lovely old feller.

I foresee a future full of cookie-scented candles hidden in parliament corridors by cunning lobbyists.

but when an entity that is not out to make a profit is a cheaper alternative (how is that possible!?!), they bitch and whine about unfairness.

...and demand more regulation to promote deregulation.

Alisong76, the NZ case sounds cruel, but couldn't the couple stay together despite the forced divorce? As long as they're both allowed to be the legal guardians of their kids, and they're considered each other's next-of-kin (as brother and sister instead of husband and wife) - is there a reason why things couldn't go on as they were? (Apart from, of course, the kids going through hell at school, if this was a public case.)

Crash, I'm thinking nobody could if they wanted to. This is a politically motivated leak from a judge to a politician with the aim of changing the law; confidentiality stops the judge from discussing the case in public. The only directly involved people who could do that are the family.

rhorvitz, great reply.

Something still doesn't match: you say that the European Commission allows state-funded wifi networks in poor rural areas where there is no corporate competitors. However, there are many examples of state-funded wifi in wealthy urban areas: Oulu, Finland, houses one of the fastest-growing IT sectors in Europe, but (as far as I know) there never was any talk of the free network being unfair competition.

(Their FAQ states that "PanOULU does not compete with commercial services. It does not offer extensive user support nor same reliability than commercial operators.") http://www.panoulu.net/faq.shtml.en

Same here in Portugal: the towns that are now building their free wifi networks are small to mid-sized, none of them particularly poor.

I second what Antonio Silva and Justin Mason said: there are dozens of towns in EU countries with free, council-provided wifi. Oulu in Finland has had one for almost 4 years now; I'm currently living in Portugal (across the river from your parents, Antonio) and these are popping up in small towns everywhere.

"Oh we'd love to provide this service, but unfortunately Brussels won't let us" is a classic cop-out in any EU country.

Sometimes Google mistakes a person for a bot, and it sucks to be that person.

For some reason, which I don't think Google wants to share with us, the likelihood of this happening seems to increase a lot if you happen to be in a 3rd world country.

This reminds me of another problem I've had: emails getting stuck in spam filters. Almost every time this has happened to me, the sender has been in Africa or Central America (while only a tiny fraction of all of my email correspondence has to do with those regions.) An African colleague nowadays pokes me on Facebook every time she sends an email - just to make sure I'll notice if it gets lost.

I've tried to temporarily work under those conditions and it's awful. You never know if the important document you sent reached each recipient, you never know if you'll be able to use Google when you need it. You end up making a lot of phonecalls to apologise for delays and to make sure people received your mail, and your 1st world colleagues will think that you're making excuses because they never have these problems.

There are ways to go around this, but your average user won't be familiar with them, and that's just not a good enough solution.

I'm sure a lot of spam comes through African and Central American IPs, but treating all African and Central American internet users as spammers is not the right way to solve the problem.

This BBC article has some good points:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7115821.stm

For one, it appears that many Muslims wouldn't have a problem with naming an inanimate object Mohammed (as long as it isn't done with the intention to insult), but the Sudanese tend to be unusually rigid on this stuff.

Also, one of reader comments makes this important point:

"What we really have here is a non-Muslim teacher in a school run by a non-Muslim board that allows Muslims and non-Muslims to educate and be educated together. While some would applaud this, I am sure that many "Islamists" in Sudan would be appalled at such a thing and have been waiting for an excuse to close the school down."

"I think all presidents have an entourage thats this size."

Um, no. Some presidents do, sure: Putin definitely brings quite a crew with him when he travels. Most others, certainly not.

From the few reports I read, this case seems to be getting quite a bit of attention in Sudan, which must've amounted to a fair deal of pressure on the government to make an example of her to other foreigners. It could've been worse: flogging or a longer jail term.

I'm not saying that I agree with the sentence, but I see this as a case where the Sudanese government was uncomfortable with the international outrage, but couldn't afford the domestic political cost of letting her go scot free. Two weeks and a deportation is a compromise that lets the government appear strong and decisive, yet won't really piss anyone off too much. Also, her deportation will keep all potential vigilantes away from her.

Again, I think it's a stupid misunderstanding and no one should ever be jailed for naming teddy bears. But given the apparent domestic pressures around this case, it could've had a much nastier end for the poor teacher.

The student didn't "show some considerable creative promise", he stole his review from a blog. For that, not for his choice of movie, he deserves a zero.

"Virus aquariums" exist and indeed have to have all outbound traffic disabled. Anti-virus companies, for example, use them for research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_(computing)

Aviewpoint, your chronology is seriously flawed.

Eduard Shevardnadze stepped down in 2003 after a bloodless US-backed revolution. Shevardnadze, a Cold War leader, has always been pro-Russian and was never in particularly close terms with the US government.

Pro-Western Saakashvili replaced Shevardnadze in 2003 and has been in power since. Initially hailed in the west as a romantic revolutionary hero, he's since been criticized for monopolizing power, using excessive force to quell protests and organizing a putsch against the supporters of the old regime.

The BBC story you link to is from 2003, before the revolution - that's why Saakashvili is described as the leader of the opposition.

It does seem likely that the sonic blasters come from the US, as it wouldn't otherwise be very likely that a cutting-edge crowd-controlling technology would surface in Georgia, of all places. It does look a bit like a human experiment: now, when the US police introduces this controversial (and potentially dangerous?) new technology in the States, they'll be able to refer to other (friendly) governments history of using that same technology with success.

"Hacking into accounts" in Habbo Hotel means asking other users for their passwords, and is ridiculously common. The users are young, many in their early teens, and this is how they learn about password security.

Sure it sucks to lose a virtual jacuzzi, but at least the victims of this crime are less likely to fall prey to more serious phishing in the future. (Unlike some grown-ups, who get their first lesson of this sort through a Nigerian letter.)

In most cases the value of the furniture stolen from one individual user must be negligible - a couple of euros, a couple dozen at most. If some of the victims had actually spent more than that on make-believe stuff, maybe it's time for parental intervention.

This Dutch kid should have to return the furniture to its rightful owners, and then be given a medal for teaching those kids a lesson.

Tonye:
There are plenty of Swedish-speakers here, surely someone would've called hoax already if the English wrap-up didn't match the Swedish sources.

There's no way a Swedish paper could publish names in a case like this, it'd be against a bunch of privacy laws.

The father-in-law's email to the FBI was anonymous, but he was tracked through his IP. He denied sending the email at first, but confessed later, saying that his son-in-law had pissed him off. He also said that the guy's lifestyle and computer games had led him to suspect involvement with al-Qaeda.

During the interrogation, the son-in-law realised that the tip-off couldn't come from anyone in the US: he had a habit of growing a "cop moustache" as a joke whenever he prepared for a trip to the states, but the photo attached to the tip-off showed no moustache. He suspected the parents-in-law, since they had threatened him before, but thought that they wouldn't be stupid enough to send false tip-offs from their home computer. Turned out they were.

The Swedish stories come with plenty of background info, including quotes from both the guy and his father-in-law; I see no reason to call things a hoax just because you don't understand the language of the original documents.