Residents from St Fintan’s Villas and Park and surrounding estates in the Stradbrook area will hold a demonstration tomorrow, Wednesday January 13th at 4.45pm outside the January meeting of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown Co. Council to protest against a mobile phone mast recently erected on the grounds of TEK FC. read full story / add a comment

Only a few years ago I felt pretty good at geography and potential statehoods when I wrote that the West's sponsorship of Kosovo would logically lead to us thinking about Abkhazia and Ossetia & knowing full well the average reader would have a better idea of where to hunt almasties than point out those two places on a map. It only took a short while for both those latter places to be wrapped up in a short little war between Russia and its southern neighbour Georgia exactly one year ago. Yesterday users of Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal & blogger.com all suffered serious denial of services. Today we learn the cause was a sustained and concentrated attack on the cyber profile of one individual. He or She operates under the name "Cyxymu" which is a dinky phonetic rendering of Sukhumi which we all know is the capital of Abhkazia. read full story / add a comment

This is it! The finale, the show to end all shows. We intend to fill every single surface with art! How many artists can you exhibit in one fifty-three foot room? Wall to wall creativity, the biggest independent gallery show this summer.

Opening: 5-8pm Friday 7th August 2009

Then: Thursday - Saturday 10am - 4pm and Sundays 11am - 4pm

Until: Friday 28th August 2009

Closing party: 4-7pm Saturday 29th August 2009

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Anarchists want to change the world. Instead of the present order – capitalism – with its focus on inequality and profits for a few, we want to build a new society based around the principles of participatory democracy, freedom and production for need not profit. For anarchists the type of society we want to build is best summed up by the slogan: ‘To each according to their needs, from each according to their ability’. read full story / add a comment

The Healthcare Informatics Society of Ireland (HISI) spoke out today, in advance of their 13th Annual Conference, about the need to increase the confidence of political and management decision makers in using and investing in information and communication technology (ICT). HISI also identified the need to raise public awareness of how critical a role ICT plays in the current delivery of services. In today’s economic climate HISI stresses that technology is crucial to the drive for efficiencies and effectiveness within the sector because it underpins and supports the development of services. read full story / add a comment

Can corporations censor the Internet? read full story / add a comment

Prof Paddy Cunningham exposed as biotech industry lobbyist read full story / add a comment

Politics.ie, the popular internet discussion chat board, has been taken offline in what is said to be a serious hacking incident. Users of the site complained that personal information and private messages had been hacked into earlier this week, and some also complained that their avatars (the colourful flag or party emblem they use to indentify each other) had been changed without their permission.

Yesterday at lunchtime the site stopped loading onto users' computers, with all requests timing out. People have speculated that productivity in certain government departments has since shot up. read full story / add a comment

Anarchism has traditionally been hostile to all religions because by their very nature they tend to be authoritarian. A supernatural creator who sets the rules is naturally considered to be the ultimate source of authority. And its authority means humanity’s obedience. If there is a god, it would, in the words of Bakunin, be necessary to abolish him. But a creator doesn’t exist, so we are left with the more mundane task of spreading the good news that values aren’t handed down from on high, but emerge from human society.
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This scandal came to a head after one of the paper's co-authors, Shane Morris (an Irish biotech scientist with a degree from NUI Maynooth who is advising Fine Gael on GM food and farming issues), threatened legal action against the GM-free Ireland Network and GM Watch after we exposed him as a Canadian Government agent and reported that his paper has been described as "misleading" and a "flagrant fraud". For details see http://www.gmfreeireland.org/morris read full story / add a comment

Yesterday night the switch was flicked on one of the largest satellite arrays on the planet. Named after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen the system brings together his dilletentism or whims as a mega-geek & the anglo-saxon culture industrially vital world of SETI and the very murky US involvement in deep Space radio telescope exploration in one project with one stated aim :-

The search for intelligent Alien life.

I'm going to treat today's "system booting" as a piece of tech-news & come at it from the ever reliable anti-trust angle. Thus I hope to raise awareness of the capitalist & philosophical elements of the project rather than spurn the "tinfoil hat" brigade onto anything sillier than they've achieved mostly not by being too suspicious or paranoid but rather by not putting their theories in social or historical context. To that end I'll mix news with a bit of analysis & bit of opinion. read full story / add a comment

ThePirateBay is best known for hosting trackers for distributed file-sharing and getting raided recently by the Swedish police at the behest of the US MPAA. They've been making noises about a couple of new ventures, and one of them has gone live: a completely uncensored image hosting service. read full story / add a comment

YouTube (now owned by Google) have launched what they say are "localized" versions for 9 countries: Brazil, Japan and seven EU countries including Ireland. The Irish version appears bizarrely to be localised in English. read full story / add a comment

Iraq's powerful oil workers' trade union today expressed alarm as an
arrest warrant was issued for its leaders, in an attempt to clamp
down on industrial action.

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The Minister for Communications, Marine, Energy and Natural Resources, Mr Noel Dempsey TD, visited Clogherhead today to perform at 2.30 p.m. the official opening of the refurbished Port Oriel harbour. read full story / add a comment

The Inter-Faith Roundtable is a loose affiliation of people of different beliefs (from Christians, to Muslims, Hindus to Sikh etc) who seek to promote peace, tolerance, respect and understanding between the creeds and those of none. We believe that integration is an essential part of that process, as the lessons of Europe so starkly indicate. read full story / add a comment

FDA tried to have manufacturer indicted and revoked the petition for approval of aspartame, until Don Rumsfeld called in his markers. Then Dr. Adrian Gross, FDA toxicologist told Congress aspartame violated the Delaney Amendment because it causes brain tumors. When Dr. Soffritti of the Ramazzini Institute did the prestigious cancer study showing aspartame to be a multipotential carcinogen flacks tried to rebut the study. Dr. Soffritti has now done another study even using lower doses - aspartame once and for all is shown to be a multipotential carcinogen that should immediately be removed from the market. It has caused a global epidemic, Aspartame Disease. read full story / add a comment

A new ‘probability-based’ report, prepared for England’s Ministry of Defence by Rear Admiral Chris Parry, warns of the dangers to political stability which may present themselves during the 2030s. Competition for scarce resources and climate change in a context of growing population will fuel the continuing conflict in the Middle East and possibly give rise to conflict between Islam and an economically-vibrant and still-atheist China. ‘Terrorism’ will be facilitated by technological developments.
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I attended some of Marxism 2007. This is my account of proceedings. read full story / add a comment

Contract researchers are forming an association to improve their lot read full story / add a comment