Alexander Mikhailian

«When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather a scornful tone, it means
just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less». © Lewis Carroll

Check out that article from Metro. Seems like the text was written by the Belgian anti-piracy association, and the title — by a Metro editor who tried to please the public by indicating that some still like belgian music and movies.

Now, do the numbers given in the article make any sense to you? What would have changed if they were divided by 100 or multiplied by 1000?

Belgium has a multitude of e-government solutions. Local residents have now ID cards in the form of a banking card with a chip, there are services to order certificates online with these cards, pay taxes and check for medicines.

Last week, I was struggling with the Intervat, an online system for entering various VAT declarations. I had no clients outside belgium, so I tried to enter an empty declaration for inter-country transfers when the application displayed an error saying that "the declaration has to contain minumum one client.".

To make sure, I asked the support whether I should send an empty declaration, and got the reply that I have to resubmit my declaration. To top it all, the reply was in Dutch, although my question was in French. I am still trying to figure what to do, and the deadline for the declaration is today.

Гл. сьцяг уверсе.

First appeared in westartup.eu

The eID is not only a small piece of plastic that replaces your old cardboard national ID card, but a means to electronically sign legally binding documents.

The law that enforces the equality betwen the handwrittend and electronic signature passed in 2001.
Put aside legal considerations,a poll that collects 20.000+ votes where each voter is legally authentified as a citizen and can be traced by his eID card number has much more impact than a poll of 20.000+ anonymous internet users.

Originally published in westartup.eu.

As usual, the US is ahead of the rest of the world with the law.gov initiative that formalizes and makes available in a useful way all existing information pertaining to the country's legal system. It is important to change the lawmaking processes so that they create data in ways that are immediately useful by services like law.gov.

The pilot project may combine ⅓ of software development and configuration activities with ⅔ of training, support and follow up.

The money is made in long-term projects maintenance and support projects that will be a joy to run once the shift is made.

Target customers: Ministry of Justice, DG Justice, standards bodies, big companies with evolved internal standards and ever failing formal verification and validation procedures run over tens if not hunderds of Microsoft Word documents stores on SharePoint servers.