Slashdot Mirror

The UK isn't out of the EU yet. It will most likely remain a member for about two more years.

They will certainly remain a member for almost two more years.

Former EU Commissioner Karel De Gucht doubts that the UK will be able to get their Brexit together, and estimates there is "a serious chance" Britain will eventually remain in the European Union.

And since the EU is only now going after a ~35 yr old accounting practice

They should have seen this coming since the late 1990s. I remember that Belgium had a similar tax haven system for international headquarters when I was working for DHL in 1998. Europa was acting difficult about it then, and everybody at the company was well aware that the DHL HQ would leave Belgium over that - which happened in 2009.

If so, is anyone doing something about it?

Not the EU, since Uber bought the former EU commissioner for competition Neelie Kroes - even if she promised that she would not sell out when she joined the EU commission (video interview in Dutch where she gets angry when being asked about that, sorry could not find an English version).

How do you know what I read? http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnie... That's not the same one I read, but was the first hit on Google. She admits riding the illegal bike, and claims she didn't know it was illegal, and thought it was her bike, as it was an exact match for her bike.

She confessed to the infraction and is asking for leniency. At least according to all the articles I've read that weren't linked in TFS.

The violation seems settled. The only question left is the punishment.

In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer. There was a very interesting documentary about it by the Flemish public broadcaster, and it's available with English subtitles (if that doesn't play, there's a lower quality copy on Youtube). It does cause more people to become self-employed though, because they're less afraid of failure and hence are less likely to take on a job they don't like but accept anyway to have income security. And interestingly, those self-employed endeavours turn out to be often quite successful, simply because people are doing something like doing.

Belgians can do anything.

Nope. They have to consult the code on dedicated workstations and it is forbidden to bring in a laptop or mobile phone.

Source: Belgian public television website (in Dutch)

More information on the Belgacom hack.

Neither the US nor the UK has ever signed a treaty, or passed a law, that makes hacking in service of the government illegal.

Well, the UK is part of the EU, and GCHQ did use this trick to hack the servers of Belgacom, the state-owned telecom operator of Belgium:

GCHQ spies hacked Belgacom computers

According to an article in this week’s edition of the German newsmagazine ‘Der Spiegel’, the British intelligence agency GCHQ used the professional networking site LinkedIn to install spyware on the servers of Belgium’s biggest telecoms operator Belgacom.

‘Der Spiegel’ bases it assertion on documents from the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

It was already known that British intelligence was behind the hacking of Belgacom’s servers. Now more details have come to light about how GCHQ was able to do so.

The British intelligence agency used the “Quantum Insert” method to install spyware on Belgcom’s servers via copies of sites such as LinkedIn and Mach (a site similar to PayPal).

Employees at Belgacom were lured to bogus copies of the LinkedIn site enabling GCHQ to install spyware on their computers. Only Belgacom’s cable internet network was hit by the British spies. The telecom company’s mobile network was not hacked.

The hacking enable GCHQ to gather information about the Belgacom as a company and about the individual staff member on whose computers the spyware was installed.

According to the same document, the British used the same method to hack computers at OPEC headquarters in Vienna.

http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/News/131111_GCHQ_Belgacom

Here is an article in Dutch which includes a rendering of the island.

The capacity would be 300 MW, equivalent to a standard gas power station. It could provide electricity for 3 hours a day. This would be sufficient to intercept peak usage during morning and evening hours (1.5 hours each).

One of the contractors would be the Belgian dredging company which also worked on the Palm Islands in the United Arab Emirates. Building of the island would take around 2 years. Price: around 800 million euros.

The summary (and perhaps the article, but I did not RTFA) is wrong:

Het verbod voor de hele Europese Unie werd wel ingetrokken omdat de rechtbank niet bevoegd is om een verbod op te leggen dat de landsgrenzen overstijgt. (source: Flemish (Belgian) public TV/radio)

Sorry for the Dutch, here's the translation: The prohibition for all of Europe was suspended because the court is not qualified to prohibit outside the [German] borders.

About 20% of the potatoes on the field have been destroyed, the researchers who are involved say that the end result is not too bad. There is however a lot of damage on the infrastructure.

The Flemish government will spend 250,000 Euros to keep the experiment on track

One researcher of the Catholic University of Leuven participated in the destroying. She will be punished by the university.

Bart Staes, a member of the European parliament for the Flemish Green Party, called the action "a democratic form of protest" and "civil disobedience". The Flemish Green Party distances itself from his statements.

The scientists have not yet decided if they will sue the protesters. They will decide this after they have seen the police reports.

Coverage in English on Flemish public radio/television. (The word "Flemish" is used so often in this post because Belgium is a federation, and the action was in Flanders.)

In Belgium, "Wiske" ("= Little Louise", comparable to the Big Becky in TFA) today reached the right bank of the Schelde river. Complete video (Dutch) of the arrival of Wiske is here, a shorter English version (not showing the arrival) of the video is here.

In Belgium, "Wiske" ("= Little Louise", comparable to the Big Becky in TFA) today reached the right bank of the Schelde river. Complete video (Dutch) of the arrival of Wiske is here, a shorter English version (not showing the arrival) of the video is here.

Sorry, It's in dutch
http://www.deredactie.be/permalink/1.984013
especially time-index 10:00 - 10:30 is interesting.

According to an article by the official Flemish news service, the beans were already spilled this afternoon in a documentary shown by a Dutch broadcast service (VPRO) on this topic. It's indeed about Mono lake and Felisa Wolfe-Simon. The article also contains a small film fragment in which they confirms that it's indeed about a life form that uses arsenic instead of phosphor (it also contains some sound bytes from the researcher, in English).

Doesn't even need to be a picture board. Awhile back a belgian cardinal was involved in child pornography possession charges, turns out the picture was a cached thumbnail from the frontpage of a news site (it won some photography competition.) of course the whole discovery was blabbed to the press by the cops before they really knew what was going on and the news went around the world causing irreparable damage to the guys image. I wonder what would have happened if the person involved wasn't as high profile and the police didn't have to backpedal as quickly as they did.

It's so easy to get a file on someone else's computer I'm surprised this doesn't happen all the time.

This is from the news site of one of the mayor Belgian television/radio groups (VRT), they have a selection of articles in English.

Belgian investigators expose fraud
http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/news/100724_bank_fraud

The 1783 eruption of the Laki fissure system was mostly basaltic in nature. Little ash was produced, mostly in phreatomagmatic explosions in the first few days. A similar eruption would be bad, but ash wouldn't be the biggest problem.

One of the biggest problems with this ash cloud was an anomalous wind situation and no rain over Europe. Would this eruption have occurred in normal conditions, flight restrictions wouldn't have affected Europe, except for maybe northern Scandinavia. This situation is unlikely to stay in place for 2 years.

The impact of this rather small eruption is so big because of rare conditions and a desire of authorities to err on the safe side induced by the great difficulties of detecting and estimating the effects of a thinning ash cloud. As reports turn out that a cargo plane here in Belgium got damaged on a short regional flight (Google translation), some might say authorities might not have been careful enough.