Have you noticed your mailbox is a lot less full recently? Perhaps you’re not receiving quite so many offers for fifteen minute college degrees, prescription medicine, or suspiciously cheap software? It’s not just your imagination. Worldwide spam fell by sixty percent since Tuesday, when American regulators moved to shut down a rogue ISP in California. …
Monthly Archive: November 2008
Nov 14
Poll Dancing
Brian Cowen must be wondering where it all went wrong. Support for his government and party have slumped to a record low, according a TNS MRBI opinion poll to be published in the Irish Times tomorrow. The polls confirms findings in a Red C poll commissioned by the Sunday Business Post a couple of weeks …
Nov 12
Word Count
It’s been a while since I’ve written about free and open source software, so I thought I should mention the programme I’ve been using recently. According to it’s website, Celtx, (I keep wanting to pronounce it keltix) is ‘the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software’. I can’t say for sure if that’s the case, but …
Nov 12
Off Message
Free speech can be a bugger sometimes. In 1987, Ray Crotty went to court to stop the government ratifying the Single European Act, a European treaty without a referendum. Crotty won, and the government had to hold a referendum. Fast forward eight years to the McKenna judgement. This time, the courts told the government it …
Nov 10
News Of The News
What a busy news day it’s been. The PDs are no more, so Mary Harney finds herself… well, exactly where she was before her party disbanded, at the heart of power in the cabinet as minster for health. The annual hand wringing over the meaning of Armistic Day continues, a bit louder this year thanks …
Nov 07
Word To The Wise
At the end of the day, it comes as no surprise to find that there are cliched phases that tick us off no end. Though each of our personal choices of are fairly unique, a team of researchers at Oxford university has tweaked a few statistics and compiled a top ten list of the word …
Nov 07
Hush
It would appear our parliamentarians are in favour of censorship. Fianna Fáil TD Thomas Burke lost the run of himself at a meeting of the Oireachtas subcommittee on Europe earlier this week, and rounded on Cardinal Sean Brady, demanding that the hapless cleric should ban the distribution of ‘Alive’ – described in one report as …
Nov 06
Yes We Can
While most of the world was following the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States, my own family was much more interested in one of the state contests. Francis Boyle emigrated to America from my home, Gleann Cholm Cille. He still returns regularly to Donegal for his summer holidays, along with …
Nov 04
Acceptable Losses
It was almost as a throwaway item during the 9pm RTÉ News. As part of budget cutbacks, the government has decided not to go ahead as planned with a programme to vaccinate teenage girls, saving ten million euros. The human pappiloma virus (HPV) vaccine protects young girls against a form of cervical cancer. Last June, …
Nov 04
Waterways
In years gone by, politicians were fond of promising, come election time, that they would drain the Shannon basin. Commissions were set up to look into the engineering requirements, committees met to consider the benefits for agriculture in areas prone to frequent flooding, the tourism industry would prosper, and hydroelectric power would heat every home …