Yes, the comments to this and the first post are somewhat lacking in empathy. A disabled person gets humiliated and beaten up by restaurant staff - in front of his family no less- and the responses range from "attention whore", "the elitist jerk had it coming" to "they must have been blacks or arabs". Way to go..

It didn't surprise me in the least. I've been there a dozen times, worked there for a few months, and imho it just isn't a very civilized place. Of course I've met plenty of friendly, polite people, but antisocial behaviour, mysogeny, verbal abuse, threats and even physical violence just seem part of daily life there - and not just in Paris either.

I'll spare you my stories, but this should give you an idea: I know a french woman who came back after a few years abroad, and only now does she realize just how bad it is. She witnessed an assault on a shop owner, an old woman, already in the first week, and that was just the start. I guess people accept such things as normal if they see them every day and have never experienced different ways of life.

So, watching the toilet flush is not good enough for Your Highness, huh?

Just to provide some context, I present to you the waste of cowpat that is mr Gucht:

He is under investigation for insider trading in connection with the breaking up of ING bank. He has not been officially accused (nor acquitted) so far, so it looks like he will walk because of statute of limitations. It says a lot about the EU that such a person can remain Commissioner of Trade.

He is suspected of tax evasion. Transparency laws for Belgian banks have become stricter since 2011, but he and his wife are fighting the new laws in court. He refuses to give the IRS financial information, because "the new laws are sloppy" and "they should respect my privacy".

He has been slammed for anti-semitic comments such as "Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best organised lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics – no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats." and "Don't underestimate the opinion of the average Jew outside Israel. There is indeed a belief – it's difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that's difficult to counter with rational arguments.".

Hire a hacker to document your undocumented projects!

Seriously, I see this all the time: an outsider is tasked with documenting a project, several years after the fact. Not a job any self-respecting 'hacker' (=highly skilled developer?) would be interested in, but of course the whole story begs the question: why would a highly skilled developer want to join your company in the first place? Are all the other employees dolts? Weren't all the problems caused by clueless PHBs?

Signs point to yes.

Hey, I think it's great you can write your Minesweeper clones in Visual Basic on XP! Too bad MS sends the *user* 'critical' XP updates that break 3rd party firewalls, break Wordpad backward compatibility, or install an unwanted new version of IE. It makes you hold your breath every time you boot, and keeps you on your toes.

Oh, and by the way, I just LOVE flamewars about a soon-to-be obsolete OS with random slashdot posters!

ROFL Hardware agnostic? Fairly open? Friendly? You must be a Microserf.

Have you ever heard of Windows Genuine DisAdvantage? Upgrade your graphics card and The Allseeing Eye of Redmond decides to cut you off from the eternal stream of XP patches.

The only way to lift that spell that is to drop all of your XP licenses in the fires of Doom Mountain. Not easy, since "one does not walk simply into Redmond".

So it's probably already patented.. That, and we'll all be forced to run Windows 9 on our quantum computers. How is that cool?

A lot of it was actually plundered from the rest of Europe by the Nazis. They exchanged the gold for Portuguese wolfram ore.

http://gold.greyfalcon.us/gold6.html

"Allied intelligence concluded Portugal had received $143.8 million of gold from the Swiss National Bank, about half of the increase in Portugal’s gold reserves reported earlier in this chapter. Of this amount, the Allies were certain that $22.6 million was from gold looted from Belgium and of the remaining portion 72% was looted by the Nazis."

Anyway, it can't be used to pay of portuguese debt. It can't be sold in any significant amount, since that would seriously disrupt the gold market.

In Europe, church taxes YOU!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

I saw this presented on Dutch TV a few hours ago, and this thing does NOT have a parachute. The testpilot was wearing one for the test flights though. Not sure how he planned to get out and avoid the rotor and propellor.

To answer some questions in this thread, this is STOL, not VTOL. The rotor is sort of powered, but nor for lift. It just spins up before take-off to get in the air ASAP.

The company plans to get these things on the market in two years. They expect the police to use these as a cheap alternative to choppers, and there was speculation about civil use in countries with lots of space, like Australia.

So, yeah, meh.

Pay your tithe you heathens!
http://stuffgodhates.com/2010/09/87-cheapskates/