• Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to JurGradi

    And since yesterday night, we suddenly have two big new taxes: packaging (praktically every product you buy will become significantly more expensive) + smoking (half a dollar per package extra taxes).

    BTW: Some facts about the belgian minister of budgetting Freya Van Den Bossche:

    - she is the daughter of a notorious socialist, which helped her of course to become minister at a extremely young age.
    - in her first election campaign, she lifted her skirt, which also helped:

    http://www.zorra.be/Ads/2000/Gal_verkiezing_Freyavdbossche0900b.htm

    - When she became minister of budgetting, she was asked in an interview what the square root of 25 was. She could not answer the question and said she has always been terrible at mathematics. She also said that, as minister of budgetting, she should only know how to add and how to subtract.

    - Her party, the SPa, accepted huge bribes (2 million $) from the weapon industries in 1994. The leader of the socialist party at that time, Frank Vandenbroucke, proclaimed that he knew about the bribes but said that he had ordered to burn the money (which of course never happened). This man is now our minister of education. Hooray.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/162802.stm (this is not a Wikipedia article which anybody can write/modify themselves) 


    Does it surprise anybody that these socialist politicians try to find an 'enemy' that they can use to move the attention to whenever needed? Thanks to their hate campaign against Vlaams Belang, they always manage to stay in power, no matter what they do (even after the aforementioned scandal).
     

     

  • Frederik (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:

    John is right though. There's no longer a thing like 'freedom of speech' in Belgium, which is why you will often find outcries of despair on international forums. Here's a link on the podcasting case:

    http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/12/26/2142242.shtml?tid=153&tid=219 

    As another Belgium, let me get the facts straight. Quoting  Slashdot as a prime source is quite troublesome in the first place ;)

    Law says that politicians cannot own "media", such as tv stations, newspapers etc. It was ruled that a podcasting is media, (the podcaster, by the way, was doing a talk show and was an old radio maker). If you listened to it, it was clear that it was very, very close to a normal -but politically coloured- talk show  

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    in her first election campaign, she lifted her skirt, which also helped:

    http://www.zorra.be/Ads/2000/Gal_verkiezing_Freyavdbossche0900b.htm

    I was just trying to imagine any of our (US) prominent female politicians pulling the same stunt...  which now of course makes me want to vomit.

  • It's me remember? (unregistered) in reply to torajirou

    Wellll Mr another Belgian, how exactly do you store a '*' in a numeric field? (or is you highly paid consulting company another one that uses all varchar(8000) fields?)

  • (cs) in reply to Ewww

    I would have never guessed that Alex had this many Belgian Readers, it must be half the IT industry over there.

     

    :)

     

  • jbange (unregistered) in reply to Anon Coward
    Anonymous:

    I'm with you.  As I remember it, the bomb fell where the coordinates told it to fall - it was not an equipment failure.  The problem was that either the wrong coordinates were sent to the bomber crew or that the bomber crew entered the wrong coordinates.  I think it was the latter - one or more of the less significant digits were transposed so the bomb landed too close to the friendly forces.

    This story has clearly been twisted many times in the telling. I know nothing of the original story, but (having been in the same position as the supposed ill-fated ground forces) I know enough about smart munitions to deduce a few things. First, smart munitions need to be mounted in an exposed position on the aircraft, as they need to be able to "see" the reflected signal from the laser designator. Additionally, there are no bombers in the US inventory where the crew actually has the kind of access to the bomb load such that they could "change the battery" in a laser designator, even if it was loaded internally*. This being the case, and the story not mentioning the back seater in a Strike Eagle crawling out on the wing with a pack of Duracells, it can be deduced that it was the ground crew loading the weapons at the airbase that made the error. What, exactly, this mysterious "offset" is, I have no idea. You'd have to ask an Air Force bomb loader-- I was just a lowly infantryman. It is perhaps a variable that changes depending on the bomb casing size (500, 1000, or 2000lb), or maybe the plane it's loaded on (F-16, F-15, etc), or perhaps even a geographical variable (if it wasn't in fact a laser, but a GPS or INS guided weapon). In any case, I certainly feel for all parties involved.

    * you can get to the bomb bay in a B-52, but I'm told the bomb racks are self-contained automated systems with no aircrew serviceable parts...   

     

    But I do remember another story.  In the last days of the first Gulf War, a Scud landed on some military barracks, killing something like 30 soldiers.  The problem was traced to a failure of the missile interception system.  I believe the manufacturer indicated that the computer had to be rebooted every 10 days (or so) - this rule was followed during testing and everything worked fine.  When it was deployed in Saudi Arabia, the crew left it running.  The computer subsequently didn't detect the Scud and didn't launch the interceptor missiles.

    True, but the compounded range gate error was only one part of it. The problem was, the Patriot system was designed to shoot down mach 2 aircraft or cruise missiles, not mach 5 ballistic missiles. It was pressed into ABM service with several hasty software patches, but that failed to address several unchangeable "hardware" issues (one of which being the "reboot" one-- the Israelis reported the range gate would drift by 20% in 8 hours!). Even if the Patriot had been able to fire and intercept, that barracks was probably toast anyway. The proximity fuse for the warhead was timed such that, by the time it detonated, the warhead was at or even PAST the ass-end of the SCUD. An intercept of that nature leaves the warhead on the SCUD intact. At best, such an intercept could conceivably knock the SCUD "off course" by a couple hundred meters (a very generous best-case scenario), but given that SCUDs are little more than one step removed from their German V-2 ancestors, and have an accuracy measured in kilometers, this amounts to little more than spinning the roulette wheel a little harder. Not a single Patriot intercept took out a SCUD warhead, which is the only part that mattered. The SCUD intercepts were really just morale boosters. In Israel the attempts to intercept actually did more harm than good. Not only did they not prevent the SCUD warheads from hitting the ground and detonating, but in several cases Patriot missiles that missed over populated areas came down and added destruction of their own.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Frederik
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    John is right though. There's no longer a thing like 'freedom of speech' in Belgium, which is why you will often find outcries of despair on international forums. Here's a link on the podcasting case:

    http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/12/26/2142242.shtml?tid=153&tid=219 

    As another Belgium, let me get the facts straight. Quoting  Slashdot as a prime source is quite troublesome in the first place ;)

    Law says that politicians cannot own "media", such as tv stations, newspapers etc. It was ruled that a podcasting is media, (the podcaster, by the way, was doing a talk show and was an old radio maker). If you listened to it, it was clear that it was very, very close to a normal -but politically coloured- talk show  

    Yeah, but at the same time several other politicians also had podcasting on their website. The only difference was that they were in power and the politician that was sentenced was in the opposition. And it's of course a stupid law that was only voted by the powers that be to limit the freedom of speech. Why shouldn't a politician be able to have a podcast on his site?

    if you listened to it, it was clear that it was very, very close to a normal -but politically coloured- talk show

    So what? Does it matter that it sounds like a talkshow? One of the arguments the government used was that the podcast started with a 'jingle', which makes it 'a professional broadcast'. Do other countries forbid podcasts just because they 'sound' professional? Today you can add a professional jingle with freeware tools on any dirt cheap PC. Aren't these pathetic excuses to pester political opponents?

    In Belgium, you are apparently only allowed to podcast if there's not the slightest chance of hurting the interests of the mighty and powerful. The situation in Belgium is very comparable to that in Russia or China. Some politician already proposed a nationwide firewall, like China has.

    In Belgium, a politician that would make a critical movie like Al Gore made, would probably be locked up in jail (unless of course, he's a member of one of the ruling parties). Especially, if the movie starts with a jingle and ends with end credits (which makes it a professional political movie, which is probably also forbidden!).

    Why can't you just admit that the Belgian government lacks any decency and respect for democracy and free speech?

     

     

  • jbange (unregistered) in reply to Dazed
    Anonymous:
    ...Unfortunately, just as the bomber commenced its approach, the battery in their smart-bomb controller ran out. Fortunately they had a spare battery which they could change in a few seconds. Unfortunately the enemy position was reported as an offset from the controller, and on power-up the offset was set to a default value of ... zero

    OK, now that I re-read it, I get what the story says. The poorly--defined pronoun "their" refers to the grunts on the ground with a laser rangefinder-- probably an AN/PED-1 or the like. The laser rangefinder, combined with the internal GPS allows you to "shoot" a target with the laser and have the unit tell you the position of the target. Well, if the battery crapped out before they could read the calculated GPS coordinates of the target off the unit, I can see how they might change the battery, restart the device, and continue reading off the grid coordinates on the screen. Unfortunately, you have to re-shoot the target with the laser if you do that, because when it powers up it only displays the GPS position of the unit itself. They basically forgot to re-calculate the target position. The bomber crew couldn't have helped what happened. The guy on the ground screwed up and directed the bomb onto their heads. Like they say, war is dangerous.

  • Magnum (unregistered) in reply to Ben
    Anonymous:

    Well being from the Dutch speaking part of belgium (that's about 50% of the population over here) It was big news. It was headlined on all tv stations and news papers. So I guess most people even IT people knew about it :-p

    From another Flemish Belgian ...

    Sure it got a lot of media attention for a couple of days but then again who cares ? In Belgium the fiscal laws contains as many holes as a Swiss Gruyere cheese and therefor only idiots commit fraud in Belgium.

    We rank amongst the smallest countries in the world, but we probably have more politicians per square mile than all other European countries combined. In order to get admitted to the political supremacy in Belgium you must must fulfill certain criteria, which I'm sure also applies to certain other countries :

    1. Be eloquent while producing hours of BS.
    2. Willing to pay your way to the top and once the top is reached, you turn corrupt to collect your ROI. Some lady politicians made it to the top,probably by    
    paying in 'Natura'!
    3. Must be a good beer drinker (also applies to women politicians, of which we  have the brightest specimens in the world - NOT!).
    4. Look and act dumb whilst having obtained a top university degree
    5. Be willing, sooner or later, to sit around the table with the neo-nazis of our extreme right parties.

    And yes, we still have a lot of IT people working in this miserable little country of ours. Why? Because of all the large IT multi-nationals wanting to establish their European headquarters in Brussels! Why? Answer lies in the 2nd paragraph here above.

     

    Thank God we have good beer, chocolate and easy women in this country, else I would have moved long long time ago.
     

  • (cs) in reply to Volmarias

    Volmarias:
    evanm:
    If the system was reporting people with income of almost 100 billion, shouldn't the over estimate be more than 883 million? I mean even if only 2 returns were unreadable, and Belgium has an effective tax rate of 1%, then that really should be 2 billion of revenue for the government, when, in reality, a few 10's of thousands is much more likely.


    Looks like you're missing a couple of 9's in your estimate there, pork chop. It's 10^7 euros - 1 cent, not 10^10 euros - 1 cent.

     Since we're being picky, it's 10^8...
     

  • Luc Verhelst (unregistered) in reply to John

    "BTW: that Wikipedia article you refer to is not exactly 'trustworthy'. If you look at its history, you can see that most changes are made by a certain 'Luc Verhelst', who happens to be one of the leaders of the leftwing party Groen! This is so typical."

     Wow, I really made it to leader of Groen! yet ? Last time I looked, I was just a small time local politician...

     
    BTW, you forgot to tell that the Vlaams Belang receives a state subsidy of 1 dollar per inhabitant per year. Imagine an American opposition party or the KKK receiving an annual subsidy of 250 million dollars. What were you saying about the Belgian state trying to suppress the Vlaams Belang ?

     

    Luc Verhelst
     

  • Jarco (unregistered)

    The real wtf is the writer still think Belgium is French speaking. Its 60% Dutch speaking... And for your political fighters above. WTF :s WHO CARES ON THIS PLACE WHERE PEOPLE COME TO LAUGH? Do you really need us to look more bad then we already do?

    ps @ Luc. Please stop editing encyclopaedias to reflect your subjective view on things. Makes you look cheap...

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