June 12, 2014

Facebook on trial for infringing Dutch patent

Filed under: Online by Orangemaster @ 10:58 am

More than a decade ago, Dutch computer programmer Jos van der Meer originally thought up and eventually patented his Surfbook site in 2001 and 2002 before Facebook launched it site in 2003. Surfbook let users share their information with selected people, approve posts using a ‘like’ button and link to external information. Van der Meer passed away in 2004 aged 44, but in Feburary 2013 the patent holders, Rembrandt Social Media run by his elder brother Wil van der Meer, filed a lawsuit against Facebook for infringement just as the latter hit the stock market. Van der Meer said that it is about recognition, not about the money.

Although Facebook usually swats its opponents out of the way like flies, this case has made it all the way to a federal jury trial in the US, which is extremely rare. And even though Rembrandt Social Media can prove it was first, Facebook can claim that the market was going that way anyways and swat another fly. If RSM were to win its case, it would probably be paid money for damages and the Dutch could lay claim to Facebook down the pub.

US sources read as if RSM is just a patent troll trying to make money off the Van der Meer family and that Facebook is so big it does whatever it wants anyways.

(Links: phys.org, www.nrc.nl)

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June 11, 2014

Government still misleads masses with digital ID system

Filed under: IT,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:39 am

For years, local governments have been mistakingly pointing tens of thousands of citizens if not more to an advertising agency called Digi-D in Waalwijk, Noord-Brabant instead of to the Dutch national government’s digital identification system called DigID (no hyphen, and ID in capitals), indispensable for filing taxes and other matters nowadays. In October 2012 10,000 people sent their details to Digi-D. It’s June 2014 and the wesbite the agency set up to tell people about this serious cock-up counted 40,805 mislead people on 6 June.

Digi-D the agency has been around since 2002, while DigID started up in 2005. The government’s game plan has been to strong arm the agency into changing its name, but the agency claims that it would cost them 110,000 euro to change their name, never mind lawyering up for something they didn’t mess up. To make it worse, the agency is being forced to store all this data to prove that it is a nuisance to them, but if ever the data leaked, the government would blame the agency for it!

(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl)

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June 10, 2014

HEMA to hit London high street this week

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:20 am

If Amsterdam can embrace major British retailer Marks & Spencer, then it seems only fair that London gets its very own HEMA. HEMA already conquered Paris in 2009 and has been a staple in Belgium for years, although France has more stores than Belgium. HEMA also exists in Germany, Luxembourg and even Spain.

HEMA’s unique Dutch designs are surely their best selling point, not just their low, rounded off prices — none of that ‘£1,99’ business. And despite the odd controversies HEMA gets itself into here, like plagiarising wine labels and encouraging children to cheat at school, HEMA was considered by 81% of the population as an essential brand in 2008.

I like their tea towels, socks and travel make-up, and sometimes even their food.

(Link: www.independent.co.uk, Photo by Hans Vandenbogaerde, some rights reserved)

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June 9, 2014

Amsterdam’s rich district Zuid throws money in the trash

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 11:08 am

coins-sarah-joyLast January garbage collectors found 46,000 guilders in old office furniture that most likely came from the offices of Amsterdam’s district Zuid (‘South’).

The money was found by an HVC employee in Hoorn who was busy compressing a container full of wood when money boxes started popping out, revealing the banknotes they had inside. The district told Parool that they never missed the money. The district ordered the money to be returned. The paper doesn’t say what legal grounds they have to do so.

Amsterdam Zuid is home to the richest residents of Amsterdam, so it’s quite ironic that they could lose tens of thousands of guilders without noticing it. Residents of some Amsterdam Zuid neighbourhoods are so wealthy that when they get fined for double parking, they prefer to call their expensive lawyers rather than paying a small fine.

The Netherlands replaced the guilder by the euro as its legal tender in 2002.

(Photo by Sarah Joy, some rights reserved)

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June 8, 2014

Dutch nicknames for cars

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 9:59 pm

citroen-ds-klugschnacker

Here is a short list of car nicknames the Dutch and Flemish use.

  • Kever (beetle): Volkswagen (1938)
  • Kattenrug (cat’s back): Volvo PV444/PV544 (1944)
  • Eend and Lelijke Eend (duck and ugly duckling, the Netherlands): Citroën 2CV (1948)
  • Geit (goat, Belgium): Citroën 2CV
  • Snoek (pike) and Strijkijzer (clothes iron): Citroën DS (1955)
  • Rugzakje (backpack, the Netherlands): Fiat 500 (1957)
  • Bolleke (ball, Belgium): Fiat 500

Note that the car later officially branded as Volkswagen Beetle used to start out as simply Volkswagen.

I’ve ordered the nicknames by the year the car was introduced. As you can see, there appears to have been a sort of golden age of nicknames in the two decades following the Second World War.

I’ve tried Googling for more nicknames with the inevitable result of ending up on car blogs where the bloggers asked their readers if they knew more than the usual suspects. The readers would then comment that “the X is also called Y” while curiously omitting the phrase “in my family”. German and English lists can be found on the web.

(Photo by Klugschnacker, some rights reserved)

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June 7, 2014

The Hague court wants less female judges

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:30 pm

In 2009 for the first time ever women made up the majority of judges in the Netherlands. This year even 64% of the judges of the court of Utrecht are female.

In response, according to Algemeen Dagblad, the court of The Hague (56% female judges) wants to give preferential treatment to male candidates. The court fears having too many women could influence the way the public views the courts’ impartiality.

The court’s plan received support from celebrity lawyer Theo Hiddema in Trouw who warned that you wouldn’t want to create a situation where a male rapist would have face three female judges and a female prosecutor. “Imagine,” Hiddema told Trouw, “that the suspects come from a different culture. Imagine the shame and humiliation when an all-female court tells them their behaviour is not of this time!”

Institutional mansplaining, who would have thought? Only job market news site Werf& appears to have noticed that what the court of The Hague wants is very much against the law. The site points out that affirmative action is only legal when used to help disadvantaged groups.

Although women form the majority of judges in lower courts, as late as 2006 they were still in the minority in appeals courts where a majority of two-thirds of the judges were men, as Trouw wrote back then. Judges that were ‘foreigners’ (allochtonen, Dutch code for people of colour) were in an extreme minority, the paper reported.

According to a Metro article of 2011, sociologist Bregje Dijksterhuis explains the preference of women for judicial robes because an appointment as judge is for life and because it is a job that combines well with having a family. Men on the other hand prefer higher paying jobs as lawyers.

The Dutch Council of Women quotes De Groene from 1947 after the appointment of Johanna Hudig as the first female judge in the Netherlands: “Courts have the reputation of being bastions of conservatism. The greater is our satisfaction at seeing how the court of Rotterdam has stood as one man behind the candidacy of this woman, giving a shining example of a broad and modern vision towards the judicial office.”

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June 6, 2014

Whale uncovered on 17th century Dutch painting

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 10:56 am

Whale painting - after

A painting on display for some 140 years at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, United Kingdom by Dutch painter Hendrick van Anthonissen entitled ‘Gezicht op Scheveningen’ (‘View of Scheveningen sands’ in English) from 1641 has recently been restored, uncovering a stranded whale.

One of the men in the painting seemed to be hanging in mid-air when in fact he was sitting on the whale. Someone at some point in history thought it would be good to paint over the whale, but nobody knows why. Conservator Shan Kuang has apparently not been able to date the extra layer of paint, though she suspects it may be from the 18th century and done because an owner thought the whale was repulsive or that a dealer thought the picture would sell better without it.

Here is a video made by Cambridge University featuring Shan Kuang, the conservator who made the discovery.

(Links: www.theguardian.com, historiek.net, Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK)

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June 5, 2014

Major UK Mondrian exhibition opens in Liverpool

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 10:11 am
Mondriaan_huis_Amersfoort_2.JPG

On June 6, The Tate Liverpool museum will be opening the exhibition Mondrian and his studios, a huge UK Mondrian exhibition, including a life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio, all commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Dutch painter’s death.

I first saw his paintings as a 14-year-old when I travelled to New York City on a school trip from Montréal. We had visited the Whitney Museum of American Art and I had bought a few postcards of his work. Back then, I knew he was from the Netherlands, but what I found odd was writing ‘Mondrian’ instead of ‘Mondriaan’, even if that is how the artist wrote his name to make it more international. And today, the most banal of products, including hair products, have the Mondrian touch, truly making him a household name.

Closer to home, the Mondriaanhuis (Mondrian house, pictured above) in Amersfoort is surely a much more solemn experience, but very authentic, as I remember. The Mondriaanhuis features works from the artist’s early figurative period as well as artwork from other contemporary artists. In other words, more of his drawings of flowers and less of the primary coloured squares. The folks who work there will talk your ears off about their local international artist, don’t you worry about that.

Check out the Facebook group with Mondriaan-related things.

(Links: www.bbc.com, www.mondriaanhuis.nl, Photo by Elly Waterman, some rights reserved)

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June 4, 2014

Women dressing up as men to ask for a pay raise

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

“Are you a woman? Then you deserve € 300,000 more”, says Women INC in collaboration with Loonwijzer, a site that helps people calculate what they should be making. Loonwijzer claims that a woman could make on average € 300,000 more — I’m assuming in their lifetime.

The YouTube film below (in Dutch) starts off with the statement, ‘Where is my € 300,000?’. The gist of the video is, as one of the women says at the beginning, “enough is enough, I’m asking for a raise!”. The rest is quite self-explanatory and looks like a Smack the Pony sketch, and in fact, one of the women, Margôt Ros, is well-know from a comedy show called ‘Toren C’ (Tower C), which is a bit of a Dutch equivalent. Basically, if women want a raise, they need a beard and a fake penis to get one, which is funny, but also quite sad. Employers and politicians are the ones being lobbied to close the gap between the earnings of men and women, something nobody has ever solved in the Western world. Of course, the reason why women are paid less come down to much more than a costume change.

Just remember that the Netherlands ranks in bottom 10 performing countries for women in business and Some 60% of women cannot earn their own keep.

(Link: www.deondernemer.nl, Illustration: public domain version of the symbol of feminism, via Wikimedia Commons)

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June 3, 2014

Donald Duck is getting married! Or is he?

Filed under: Comics by Orangemaster @ 8:52 pm

Donald Duck magazine is such a national institution in the Netherlands that when editor Thomas Roep quit after 39 years, it made the national news. The on-again off-again relationship between Donald Duck and Daisy Duck (called ‘Katrien’, or ‘Catherine’ in Dutch) will soon be a thing of the past here in the Netherlands, although the story line was bought from Denmark. In fact, the Netherlands and Denmark are the world’s biggest producers of Donald Duck stories.

Will the wedding actually take place? Who will Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie (in Dutch, Kwik, Kwek and Kwak) live with now? And what will Scrooge McDuck (in Dutch, Dagobert) cough up as a wedding present?

Way back when Disney was running Donald’s life in the 1950s, Daisy was portrayed as Donald’s long-term girlfriend, but after some nightmares Donald got cold feet and ran off to join the French Foreign Legion. Daisy then had other boyfriends, mostly sailors who eventually had to take off to war as well.

The Dutch press and surely the fans are worried that if the pair do tie the knot, the comic strip will come to an end. The Danes were inspired by the 1998 British-American film Sliding Doors, which features two separate story lines. Parodies of Dutch celebs will also be featured in the comic book, as they often do. And there are also spoilers that even I won’t read or tell you about.

(Links: www.nrc.nl, en.wikipedia.org)

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