Politics.ie – Labour Senator takes to twitter to defend comments, insults all around him : In which Ben Walsh memorably takes on racist/right-wing comments from a Labour senator, and gets told to “go back to D4″. ho ho
(tags: twitter funny ireland politics)

Éire Trea May Be the World’s First Irish-Eritrean Food Truck – SFoodie : Brilliant. ‘The menu lists dishes like battered sausages, Irish curry with chips — Irish curry tastes similar to Japanese curry, Hyland says — and shepherd’s pie alongside chicken doro-wat or vegetable stew served over injera bread. They’ve attempted a couple of fusion experiments, such as shiro (ground-chickpea stew) nachos, and have a few more ideas they’re playing around with, but it’s still early days.’ (via Ben)
(tags: curry irish eritrean food battered-sausages food-trucks)

The best “why estimation is hard” parable I’ve read this week : ‘A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I’ll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.’
(tags: agile development management programming teams estimation tasks software)

Neil Young on piracy : ‘I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.’
(tags: internet filesharing piracy copyright neil-young music)

Why should we stop online piracy? – opinion – 19 January 2012 – New Scientist : ‘There’s no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.’ Good description of ‘dead weight loss’ and the consumer pressure on the industry that illegal competition poses
(tags: piracy new-scientist slate sopa filesharing dead-weight-loss economics music movies)

Does Online Piracy Hurt The Economy? A Look At The Numbers – Forbes : ‘The data simply doesn’t suggest that piracy is causing any serious economic harm to the US economy or the entertainment industry. Heavy-handed approaches to preventing piracy are wrong-headed and reveal a dangerous level of short-term thinking on the part of both lawmakers and industry leaders. Worse, the impetus to crack down on piracy is based largely on industry data that wildly inflates the problem.’
(tags: piracy forbes filesharing politics sopa economics law)

Adrian Weckler confims that “Ireland’s SOPA” will be vague and open-ended : ‘The clear implication from [Adrian's] interview with Sean Sherlock is that the proposed measures will be lacking in any real detail, leaving it entirely up to the judges as to what types of blocking might emerge. (Possibly going beyond web blocking to also target hosting and other services.) This ambiguity — as well as jeopardising fundamental rights — will create intolerable uncertainty for businesses such as Google who might find themselves at risk of business threatening and unpredictable injunctions and will certainly deter others from setting up in Ireland.’ — this is much, much worse than I thought, particularly given the level of technical knowledge among Ireland’s judges (if Mr. Justice Charleton’s performance in EMI v. UPC is anything to go by).
(tags: sopa ireland law filesharing piracy internet filtering blocking)

The Captain of the Costa Concordia is Totally Screwed [OP/ED] : ‘For the most senior officer on board, the one who had been entrusted with the care and safety of this magnificent ship, his job was far from over. In fact the Captain had just added a new job title to his resume, that of ON SCENE COMMANDER. But apparently he didn’t realize it because he took off in a lifeboat, leaving this giant steaming pile to be picked up by the Italian police and Coast Guard who are continuing to search for survivors, and prevent looters from gaining access. The Captain didn’t just take off in a lifeboat, he left the entire scene completely.’ oh dear. (via Tony Finch)
(tags: via:fanf disaster ineptitude maritime boats tourism giglio sea sinking liners safety)

Ultra Slow Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush : 36 minutes long. Actually BRILLIANT
(tags: kate-bush music sloooow 1978 youtube video via:rosco)

Freeman on the land – RationalWiki : fantastically encyclopedic description of the “freeman on the land” pseudolegal gibberish, now being employed in an attempt to evade unpleasant taxes or fees — this stuff is on the rise in post-economic-collapse Ireland, unsurprisingly
(tags: debt legal freemen freeman law taxes ireland recession)

Project HGG: FAQ : Hackerspace Global Grid — ‘We want to understand, build and make available satellite based communication for the hackerspace community and all of mankind.’ Space is the place!
(tags: space ccc satellite communication internet hackerspace)

Skeuomorph : word of the day, via a comment on http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/ : ‘A skeuomorph /?skju??m?rf/ skew-?-morf, or skeuomorphism (Greek: skeuos—vessel or tool, morphe—shape),[1] is a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.[2] Skeuomorphs may be deliberately employed to make the new look comfortably old and familiar,[3] such as copper cladding on zinc pennies or computer printed postage with circular town name and cancellation lines’
(tags: words language history objects ornament design wikipedia)

Punching through The Great Firewall of T-Mobile : well, this is bizarre — it seems T-Mobile UK are blocking encrypted email submission and OpenVPN traffic in their mobile internet access products. Why? Who knows — but at least filtering RST packets evades the block, as in the Great Firewall of China
(tags: china filtering rst internet iptables t-mobile uk payg mobile-internet)

ChessBase.com – Chess News – A Gross Miscarriage of Justice in Computer Chess (part two) : An amazing article, via Nelson Minar — careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering — by many of the developers. ‘Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.’
(tags: chess code games open-source licensing reverse-engineering copyright infringement via:nelson)