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Tag Archives: politics
Jane Fonda is an Inspiring Woman
“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak, or woke. And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
While I have your attention, watch this video, where Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson interview Jane Fonda. It’s a great interview where you’ll learn about her activism and her life.
Who will you vote for?
Thanks Reddit.
This Ireland Does Exist
A rather depressing montage of the the low points of Irish politics over the last number of years. Mostly since the 80s, but you gotta get Dev in there preaching about our morality too.
I still don’t know why they put the “This video does not exist” message over it. Anyone enlighten me?
Meanwhile in Hell…
Bye bye Maggie! (via)
The Stability Treaty: How are you voting?
Like all the other European treaties the Irish public is being threatened with doomsday scenarios by both sides of The Fiscal Stability Treaty. Reddit user cianomahony posted the photo above in response.
The Government says that the country won’t have access to any money if we vote no, but the Sunday Times asked the IMF and the Department of Finance if that was the case and they both said the country could apply to the IMF regardless of the outcome of the Treaty. It’s just the ESM we won’t have access to. Today’s Sunday Times goes on to say that Ireland will have to pay 1.27bn Euro into that fund if the Treaty is ratified. Where the hell does that money come from? We’ll get a loan ..
Campaigning has been going on for only a week so far, I haven’t listened to much of what the No side say but right now I want to vote No. I wonder if the Government will rerun the Referendum if we vote No the first time? Fianna Fail and the Greens did it twice, time for Fine Gael and Labour to do likewise?
Sherlock and Smith and copyright images
Remember how Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA, used a copyrighted image for his website’s background image without permission? Sean Sherlock, the junior minister preparing Ireland’s SOPA did something similar on his website (which is currently down).
Stop Ireland’s SOPA
Before the end of this month the Irish Government will introduce a very vague copyright protection law. It won’t be debated in the Dáil as it will be enacted by a ministerial order. Protection of copyright is a laudable endeavour but when so little is known about the amendment or how it’s implemented it’s impossible to figure out how it will affect us. Once IRMA get a whiff of any more power or influence you just know they’re going to abuse it! Remember the infamous “3 strikes” rule?
Before I go any further, here’s how you can help. Sign this petition or use this contact form or this list to contact your local TD to express your misgivings and anger at this law being pushed through so quickly.
From the stopsopireland.com website:
SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, recently proposed in the US. It caused an Internet-wide outcry due to its far-reaching implications; way beyond simply closing access to outlaw file sharing websites, it would have enabled law enforcement to block access to entire internet domains due to infringing material posted on a single blog or webpage.
A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.
Instead, the law is being enacted by ministerial order. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.
As I mentioned in my Wikipedia post, this law might already be illegal:
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a landmark case for protecting free speech in the fight against online piracy. In a decision issued today on the Scarlet Extended SA v SABAM case, the Court stated that web filtering systems used to prevent illegal downloading on peer-to-peer networks was incompatible with fundamental human rights.
Minister Sean Sherlock will be on drivetime (RTE Radio 1) after 6pm this evening to talk about this law. I hope he comes to his senses.
Oh, it is very easy to bypass any spying the music and movie industries force on Irish ISPs. All you need is an encrypted tunnel to a remote host outside the country. If Irish ISPs ban users from using tools like that then you can say goodbye to a huge number of IT jobs. I rely on these tools every single day of the week to do my work.
More links:
- Ireland’s SOPA FAQ plus comments here
- An Irish SOPA: More haste, less speed?
- Boards.ie: Possible Irish SOPA Law? :/
- Stop SOPA Ireland WordPress plugin
- NoSOPAIreland on Twitter and follow the #stopsopaireland hashtag.
- SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy
No doubt piracy is costing the content industries something—or they wouldn’t be throwing so much money at Congress in support of this kind of legislation. If we could wave a magic wand and have less piracy, obviously that would be good. But in the real world, where enforcement has direct costs to the taxpayer, regulation has costs on the industries it burdens, and the reduction in piracy they’re likely to produce is very small, it seems important to point out that the credible evidence for the magnitude of the harm is fairly thin.
On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.
Next in the firing line of laws that will limit consumer freedoms is ACTA but let’s get one bad law stopped before we move on to the next one, ok?
The image above taken from No Shit, Sherlock website. Thanks Sean Sherlock.
Moriarty Tribunal in Text
The Moriarty Tribunal cost the Irish tax payer more than 100 million Euro and all we got was a 2,400 page protected PDF.
If you view the report’s PDF files you won’t be able to quote from it by selecting and copying text. You’ll have to manually type out anything you want to extract because the files are protected.
Value for money eh? Anyway, I ran the pdf files through the tool “pdftotext” and came up with m1.txt and m2.txt.
Use the original PDF files to read the report but for your convenience these text files will be much easier to quote from.
Please don’t link directly to them, mirror them on your own site if you write about them!
Here’s a Wordle tag cloud of the findings created by Jamie Lawrence.
The Lisbon Treaty: reasons for voting yes
Last year I voted no to Lisbon and despite reading about the controlling superstate in “Vulcan’s Hammer”, as a consequence of the fictional Lisbon Laws I’ll be voting yes today.
More than anything else, the “No to Lisbon” campaign has convinced me to vote that way. Thanks.
