The worst possible condition of a walkway is created as follows:

1. Let snow fall on it
2. Use a snowplough to clear it up
3. Rinse, repeat.
4. Pack the remaining snow tight
5. Let the temperature be a few degrees above zero Celsius, then let it fall slightly to negative degrees
6. Let it rain water.

The result: smooth, wet ice. What we call ’skull condition roads’ here in Finland. We had that, minus the final rain, and it was very slippery. I was careful, and didn’t fall (but that’s just luck). In other news, chinese cabbage is very juicy indeed.

I won. I completed 50,000 words in time. Of course, only about 13,000 words are directly usable if and when I end up editing the story, the rest will have to be removed – they were imposed by the strict timetable and the explicit leave to lower one’s standards. But, bottom line: I WON! Ps. Please don’t ask to see the manuscript. It’s not that good Pps. My mother won, too. Conga rats!

The GPLv3 process to discuss and decide on the final GPLv3 license is warming engines with today's launch of http://gplv3.fsf.org/. Currently the website is only featuring a Process Definition document, but it does contain the schedule to work on the license. The plan is for the license draft to be released on the 16-17 of January 2006. With the final license agreed upon no later than March 2007. It will be interesting how the FSF and the Free-Software community will come to an agreement on something so fundamental with so many conflicting requirements.

Well, I've switched blog software. WordPress is great, but recently I've been wanting to develop more things to put on the page, and the model that drupal uses is much easier to handle and seems much more flexible. The developers seem to have much more open source mindset - I don't know why, it's just a perception thing. It gives me much more control over which articles which go to different syndication places, like the LiveJournal feed and Planet Debian. Drupal also makes it much easier for users to setup their own feeds for categories, if some people are only interested in say, the book or movie reviews. I also made a new theme which is pretty minimal. I'm hoping to add more features in the near future. A short list, which is probably not comprehensive:

• Book Reading/Review Sidebar
• Movie Review Sidebar
• A little color, possibly some icons
• Revamp the TrainSched page

I was actually very surprised, that this changed - I used to be worth nothing. I wonder what changed?

This essay is part of my Finnish criminal justice series. See the introductory essay for more information and an overview of the Finnish criminal court system. In this essay I will be presenting an overview of the Finnish penal code – the principles, and the measurement of punishments. I will write separate essays on the actual crimes recognized by the penal code. As always: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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John Ringo is known for writing military science fiction. I therefore was a little surprised to find out about Ghost, which, according to what I knew at the time, is a James Bond story, set roughly in the real world. Well, I’ve always liked “special agent” stories, so I read this book. First impressions: Interesting stories; it was more a collection of connected novellas than a novel. Certainly not for everyone: there is a lot of explicit BDSM (read: very rough but consensual sex) and even an explicit aggravated rape scene. Single agent overpowering multiple terrorists. Nuclear explosions (I’ve said it before, a book which depicts a nuclear explosion, cannot be all bad). More than one miracle recovery. A protagonist who certainly is not a good person. An overall first impression was of a former military guy writing out a fantasy, sort of literary self-satisfaction. I didn’t think much good of this book at that time. I later found out that this book was intended to start a new series. Now, I had actually heard of a follow-up book, but I had figured it was more of the same, and I wasn’t interested. Instead, the tone shifts a lot. The Ghost becomes a significant part of the main character’s backstory, but that’s all that it is: backstory. I have now read a part of the sequel, and it has changed my prespective on Ghost. As a standalone book, Ghost is a horrible book, and I would not recommend it, because the brutality in it has no meaning. But as the prequel to a different series, it gets meaning; it becomes a sort of character study of a man who has vicious demons inside him and is barely able to control them, and channel them for doing good (and once loses control of them). So, Mike Harmon is an ex-SEAL, discharged on medical grounds, who is a conservative jerk according to his fellow history undergrads. He likes to stalk young coeds, and one day, as he is doing so, he accidentally witnesses a kidnapping. He follows, and discovers a terrorist plot. He kills the bad guys (most of them, anyway), and follows up on the trail of other, already kidnapped women. He hitches a ride on a plane and ends up … well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. I’ll rate this book 8/10, with the warning that the book contains explicit descriptions of extreme sex and even rape, in addition to the usual jamesbondesque explosions and stuff.

The news today included pictures from a Thanksgiving parade, one of which showed cheerleaders(?) dancing, and bringing up cardboard cutout cars. Cue the anchor’s voiceover: “The Thanksgiving feast originated from a feast thanking for a good harvest.” Yeah, a car harvest.

There’s a reason why I’m going through Baen’s pile of published books. He is the only publisher I know who gets ebooks, I mean really gets them. (Virtually?) all of his catalogue is available in ebook form – with no Digital Restrictions Management! – for a reasonable price, and quite a few are available for free in the Baen Free Library. You can read these books on the browser, or download them to your PDA, whatever works for you. Naturally, you can always buy a dead-tree version, instead. I figure, this publisher is worth the money I pour at him, and hence I pour it in quantity. This is my explanation for having expended six euros for the following ebook. Cally’s War by John Ringo and Julie Cochrane is a sequel to a four-book trilogy by the first author. The trilogy is heavy-duty military science fiction, telling an excellent version of the “aliens invade Earth” story. Cally’s War is set forty years later, and features a minor supporting character from the trilogy as the main character. By the start of the book, Cally is an assassin working for a secret society which wages a secret war against the galactic domination of the Darhel species. The plot of the book revolves around the threat of the secret society being exposed to the opposition, and Cally’s mission in this book is basic counterintelligence: find out the mole and destroy it. However, it would be wrong to think that this book tells an espionage story, or that the counterintelligence plot is integral to the book: the plot is weak, mainly serving as a thin connector between episodes involving Cally’s personal life, or the lack of it, and her sex life (from whose lack she does not suffer). This book, however, seems to suffer from the lack of an editor. There are good ideas, and the storytelling is okay, but to make a really good book, the authors should have regarded this version as the first draft to be thrown away – and rewritten the book completely. There is really no unity in the story, and several good themes worthy of exploration are just skimmed. It is obvious that Ringo did not contribute much prose to this book: the bad politics rants are conspicuosly absent. I think I would have enjoyed the book more had Ringo actually written more of the book, even if it meant suffering through new pro-Bush rhetorics. I suppose this book could work standalone, that is, it does not depend on the reader having read the previous books. On the other hand, there is very little that speaks for reading this book at all, except that it continues the story started in the four-book trilogy. I appreciated the story as a continuation of Cally’s arc, and some of the sex scenes were fun to read, but otherwise it left me wanting. I rate this book 4/10.

(Reposted from old blog) Inspired by Matthew Palmer’s writings (1, 2) on his experiences about the Australian judicial system, I decided to write a series of essays on the Finnish legal system, mostly to contrast it with the universally familiar United State system (even if that universal familiarity is a little skewed by generally having been obtained from dramatizations and not actual court practice). I will concentrate on criminal cases. I will write based on my personal experience as a part of the judicial system, and I will be supplementing the experience with my personal research into law. I am not legally trained, but I have read a fair bit of law and related literature. I am a lay judge in the Jyv skyl District court. I will explain the significance of that later, but I hope it suffices to say, here, that I have sat on the bench, as part of four-judge panels, since March this year, in ten sessions each a day long, and each containing at least two, usually four or five criminal cases. Some highlights:

• There are no plea bargains. With some minor exceptions, every criminal case is tried in a full court session.
• There is no jury. Criminal cases are tried as a rule by a panel of four judges, of which one is legally trained and three are lay judges, each having an equal vote.

Later essays in this series:

• The main hearing in a Finnish criminal trial (November 16, 2005)
• The Finnish lay judge system (November 16, 2005)

Fictional depictions of court cases in this series:

• Driving While Intoxicated – A Glimpse of Finnish Criminal Justice, Part One

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This entry is mostly for the benefit of Martin-Éric Racine, who is having trouble with Blosxom and dates. I'm forced to use this arcane method of communication, since Martin-Éric threatens to charge for any incoming email. I would like to direct your attention to Blosxom plugins for indexing. They allow, for example, to preserve entry dates even when the entries are modified later.

I claimed yesterday that the council of minister looks very much like an upper house of a bicameral parliament. It is somewhat unusual in that the members are not chosen for a certain term but serve by virtue of holding an office in a member state, but it is not a decisive unusuality. Martin-Éric Racine countered: No, it is not. The council is bureaucracy overruling the Parliament, thus invalidating the very principle of democracy. We have seen this in action with the new EU Patents law: the Parliament had passed several amendments to the original proposal, yet the Council ended up ignoring those democraticly voted amendments and passing an even worse legislation than the original draft. This is clearly different than what happens between a higher and lower chambers each examining new legislation before it is ratified. Wouter Verhelst already said most of what I would have said myself; the bottom line is that Martin-Éric is mistaken about the powers of the council of ministers. Does he by any chance confuse the council of ministers and the commission? It would explain his calling the council a "bureaucracy", which it really is not. The power balance between houses in bicameral parliaments varies. My claim cannot be dismissed just because the two organs do not work exactly like the English parliament, for example. An important thing is that the lower house is almost always directly elected and the upper house comprises often representatives of areas or member states. Finally, I would like to note that the bicamerality of the EU parliament system is independent of my claim that the EU is a country; if a non-country can have a parliament, it certainly can have a bicameral parliament. So you don't have to rebut it just because you don't believe in my claim about the countriness of EU. Oh, BTW, Martin-Éric, please don't mess with your posting dates. It makes your postings to appear more recent in PD than they actually are and to float to the top, where they obscure legitimately new postings by others. For example, your response to my previous posting appears much later in PD than Wouter's reply to it.

Some people think that only countries have constitutions. I find that strange, since both write at Planet Debian; surely, Debian is not a country! [Update: As hinted in the comments, I did not get MJR's posting. My bad. Let it be known here that he expresses roughly the same argument I presented above.] In fact, the European Union is a country. It has a bicameral parliament (the council of ministers is sufficiently upper-house-like to qualify as one IMHO), a currency it governs, a passport, and it is the highest authority inside its borders. It is an unusual country in that its meber states have broad powers, but it is a country nonetheless. It possesses all four of the defining properties of statehood according to the Montevideo convention: The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states. The first three are uncontroversial, and though the fourth is weak, it is present. (Okay, that last paragraph is controversial, and I know the arguments are not airtight, but I do believe the case is valid.)

MJ Ray implied that anyone who thought the DFSG only applied to programs, not documentation, was negligent about DFSG and that the only such people who are exempt from that criticism are those who joined Debian before the Social Contract. That is blatantly wrong and bordering on outrageous revisionism. I joined Debian two-three years after the Social Contract was adopted. I read it and understood it (at least thought I did) when I joined. However, there was no "documentation is software and therefore must fall under DFSG" movement back then. It seemed to me then, and I still believe it, that the opposite was a silent consensus. I one uploaded into main a package containing almost nothing but explicitly non-free documents. (The documents have since been freed.) I was sincere in that attempt and in my argumentation at that time, and at least one of the then-current ftpmaster team must have agreed with me, since the package passed NEW checks. (Granted, I also argued that the packages would be later freed, but that should not have affected the decision if nonfree documents really had been deemed to be against the SC.) It seems to me that the current consensus is a recent one, certainly less than four years old. I have decided to honor that consensus, but don't come tell me that I was dishonest when I joined!

Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 03:07:13 +0300
From: Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <gaia@iki.fi>
To: "Debian developers' misc list" <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
Subject: RFC/ITP: Constitution of Finland

On IRC I proposed packaging the Constitution of Finland.  Among other
things, it would be an example of a good Constitution :-)  The response
on IRC was positive; what do people think here?

Since Finnish laws are specifically not protected by copyright (see
Finnish copyright law), the law is free and can go to main.  There is
an English translation at http://www.om.fi/perustuslaki/3313.htm.
I am researching its copyright status.

Assuming people are okay with this, and the copyright issues around the
English translation are resolved, I will package Constitution of Finland
to woody.

-- 
%%% Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho % gaia@iki.fi % http://www.iki.fi/gaia/ %%%

                    I'm moving IRL on May 2, 2000.
               New contact information on the home page

Do you remember this infamous thread? :) For some reason, it has almost completely been censored off the Debian mailing list archives. I digged my own archive and put the thread online in a mailbox. Have fun with nostalgia and AJK-bashing :) Maybe this will help to reestablish the thread in the archives; who knows?

Jordi Mallach expressed fear, uncertainty and doubt about the European Union Consitution. I would like to make the following two points:

1. Much of what is in the proposed Constitution is already in force as part of the current foundational treaties. So, if you read the Constitution and want to bash it, please read also the current treaties. I expect you to find it to be clearer and content-wise quite similar to them. So don't think that this document is an evil attempt to seize power or something (well, it might be that but I doubt it).
2. A change to the current foundational treaties would be necessary in any case. The acceptance of new member states makes decision-making by the current rules difficult, if not impossible.

I assume most of the FUD spring from the grand name of the new document, a Constitution. It deserves the name quite rightly. It is the sole foundational document after it is accepted, replacing quite a few treaties. However, its impact is mostly illusory. A similar change was done in Finland a few years ago, when the three constitutional statutes (none of them called the Constitution) were combined and updated into a single law called the Constitution. (Long-time Debian developers probably remember my ill-conceived ITP from four years ago:) Perhaps this FUD is exactly why the consitution should not be subjected to referenda. I don't doubt that Jordi is not alone in his feelings, and such feelings could easily cause it to fail in a referendum. The only effect of such a failure would be making decision-making in the EU painful, without actually addressing the issues people have, such as Jordi's regional issues.

Can we agree on not calling Anthony Towns AJ? Every time someone refers to AJ in the lists or in Planet Debian, it takes me a few moments to realize it's not me they are talking about. Let's face it, AJ is a fairly obvious nickname for anybody with the (partial) initials A. J. And there are bound to be many of those. I personally discourage people calling me A(-)J, but there still are many people who do so. Since I have been called that by many people since eigth grade (around 1991), I have learned to respond to that name. I personally use it only in the three-letter signature AJK. It took me some time to realize that Joe Wreschnig wasn't calling my reading of the old SC very strange, and even now I cannot be 100 % sure. Update: Joe has updated his post to no longer refer to Anthony as AJ.

If you have a firm opinion about the latest general resolution vote, please publish your ballot, and an explanation of your reasoning, in your blog (and hence in Planet Debian). Note that the ballots will all be published after the vote, so there is no voter confidentiality protecting your ballot in any case, and hearing your arguments will help people like me, who are undecided, to decide. I'm not looking to imitate anyone in my voting behaviour, but after the previous vote, I don't trust my personal reading of the proposals to be accurate or at least to reflect the reading that matters. Julien Danjou already explained his position:

Since I think we have to release Sarge as soon as possible in order to satisfay our users, I have just voted for postponing changes until Sarge is released.

Julien, I would like to ask you to publish and explain your full ballot. There are a lot of options in there, and it is not at all clear, at least to me, how one would order them to bring about a release of Sarge as soon as possible (note that I am as of yet undecided on even whether I want that or not:).

In some EU countries the polls are still open. Remember to use your voting right responsibly. Software patents in Europe can still be thwarted if the new European Parliament is well chosen. Finnish people, if you haven't voted yet, you are almost out of time. Run, don't walk, to your polling place! I recommend Matti Wuori (101) and other Greens (82-101).

It is annoying to receive hundreds of bounces of mails I never sent. I can sympathise with the senders, although there is an effective technique to cutting them (reject mail, do not bounce it). However, when I get a mail asking me to confirm that a mail that I never sent is not spam - when it actually is - I get mad. It is very inconsiderate to send such mails: it is comparable with emptying your garbage bin on your neighbour's property. People who set up such autoresponders probably do get a spam-free zone; however, they do it by offloading the problem on Somebody Else. It is well known that spam return addresses are bogus, sometimes nonexistent but often owned by third parties who have nothing to do with the spam. I get a lot of spam myself, thank you; I do not need yours.