Wie zegt: “wat van mij is, is van mij, en wat van jou is, is van jou” is een …
Wie zegt: “wat van jou is, is van mij, en wat van mij is, is van jou” is een …
Wie zegt: “wat van mij is, is van mij, en wat van jou is, is [...]

Georgieboy is to name Paul Wolfowitz to lead the World Bank. Obviously we are in a heap of trouble if he does replace Wolfensohn. -sohn may have been a fanatic neoliberal, -witz is a rabid idealist, and high-ranking among the Straussian cabal. He was an original member of Team B, who are in no [...]

Although Microsoft is more secretive about their intentions than Google, some stuff is beginning to leak, and apparently it’s all good. IE will include an RSS reader, this will most certainly accelerate the adoption of newsfeeds as a mainstream technology. And hopefully improve the user experience of today’s Windows RSS readers. IE will also have [...]

Hell is other people removing your cigarette
France’s National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
Sartre himself would have been appalled by this. The guy smoked two packs a day. Being French I imagine him smoking Gauloises, essentially pocket sized factory-chimneys. [...]

Since our Belgian government once again proved to be too chicken to hold a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty, our best hope of killing the dog is arguably the French.

Paris exhibit shows Sartre as a man of his word
Two things I didn’t know about Sartre:

He was born on the exact same day as my grandfather.
He used amphetamines to improve his writing. The manuscripts of these writings hardly contain any corrections or alterations. This hardly surprises me. The phenomenological viewpoint where one has to [...]

Free trade working too well
It’s a race to see who can impose the restrictions first: China or the EU/USA. So if you are wondering why your clothes were cheaper for a couple of months before they became more expensive again, this is the answer: because countries are competing over trade barriers, not on products and [...]

We no need yo stink’n guns.
Chinese officials have suggested their country has no money and appetite for “useless” and “expensive” European weapons.
A nice spit in the face of European hypocrisy, and very well put, courtesy of Li Zhaoxing. You have to hand it to those Chinamen, they have a great sense of humor.

Against all reason, and apparently also against their own rules, the Council Presidency declared the Software Patent Agreement to have been adopted. Despite the fact that the EU Parliament had already rejected it.
There is no economic evidence that software patents work, quite on the contrary, they actually damage independent developers and stifle creativity and technological [...]

Commission moves to calm services row
Mr Whitehead believes the country of origin principle will survive the rewrite but with many safeguards written into the law and that areas such as healthcare would be fully exempted.
So, we can have Polish cleaners, but no Polish nurses. No, sir, don’t want those unqualified Polish sticking thermometers up my [...]

IMF Executive Board Concludes 2004 Article IV Consultation with Belgium

This Barroso character, I don’t trust him one bit. First he’s rejecting the European Parliament’s request for a renewed referral of the much-hated Software Directive on patents. Now he’s going to take some time to re-write (read: obfuscate) the country-of-origin principle, presently written into the services directive. What to expect from a former prime-minister of [...]