That auld triangle is going jingle jangle for Radio blogger, tech lecturer and occasional tech journo Bernie Goldbach, who got thrown in the 'Joy (Dublin's Mountjoy Jail) then deported to the US this week upon returning from his Italian holiday. Tim Kirby at Kirbycom.com has Bernie's blog posting on the experience. They confiscated his Nokia phone and Palm Pilot and put him in the Liam Lawlor wing! (for non-Irish readers, the Irish politician who partook of the Joy's hospitality several times for not cooperating with a tribunal looking into land zoning and planning corruption). Free the Bernie One! More seriously, this is appalling -- surely there should be a holding room or whatever, but to put people in Mountjoy Prison, one of the most notorious in the country, for immigration concerns is, well, a worthy subject for Brendan Behan's mordant and ironic wit, were he still with us and more power to his elbow.
10:28:39 PM  #   your two cents []

"Six months before the first man landed on the moon, a presidential commission urged Congress to use more "fully and wisely" a different sort of vastness, one teeming with life but just as mysterious and far closer to home — the world's oceans.

"More than three decades later, a second presidential commission, led by a retired admiral who headed the Energy Department in the first Bush administration, says the urgency is even greater than when the Eagle landed."

Sobering thoughts, from this article today. This chimed especially for me because I recently finished reading Deborah Cramer's Great Waters: an Atlantic Passage, a worthy successor to Rachel Carson's eloquent wake-up call half a century ago, The Sea Around Us. Cramer offers a convincing argument that the sea's vast physical and chemical cycles and life webs are not only still mysterious to us but are also worrisomely under siege from humans, with consequences not just to treasures like tropical reefs, plankton blooms and lone whales, but to our weather, health and livelihood. The problem goes way beyond fisheries policies and global warming, and we are all accountable, not just coastal communities or fishing fleets but farms and cities far inland that dump pollutants and fertilizer runoff into waterways that eventually enter the sea. This is at times a shocking book; I think of her description of clams on the Gulf Coast that desperately and grotesquely stand stretched as far above the sea bed as they can on their lone foot, gasping for clean, oxygenated water above the rotten sludge of human pollution laying stagnant on the sea bottom. One other highlight of Cramer's book: she makes the infinitesimally slow creep of geological time something live and exciting and glimpsable.

9:14:47 PM  #   your two cents []

Today's cool Irish tech news: the University of Limerick (UL! UL! UL!) will get a new 5-year, €6.4 million research programme on improving software design, headed up by the software design guru Dr David Parnas, who is currently at McMaster University in Canada (I like his rabbit). Besides writing well-known textbooks and giving interesting papers, Dr Parnas is best known for helping scupper Reagan's "Star Wars" defense initiative after he resigned from Reagan's advisory board, citing the inherent unreliability of the software and therefore foolish danger of the programme. I'll have a little piece on the announcement of the initiative, which begins next month at UL, in tomorrow's Irish Times.
6:33:34 PM  #   your two cents []

Lending spammers a helping hand. <<Are you unwittingly helping junk mailers shuttle unsolicited bulk e-mail? Spammers are discovering tricks to tap into proxy servers to send junk mail--with little trace.>> [CNET News.com]
6:23:07 PM  #   your two cents []

Lots of Google news today. There's this: New Google News. <<Google has seriously revamped Google News -- the system automatically gathers today's top stories and finds all the various coverage of them. It's really excellent.>> Link  [Boing Boing Blog]

And also this, below...

6:20:23 PM  #   your two cents []

Hmmm.... type in Google.com from Ireland and it now defaults to google.ie and allows one to choose to search only Irish pages... For those with more than just a *cupla focail*, there's also a Google version in Irish, at www.google.ie/ga!
1:32:52 PM  #   your two cents []

I've a lot of links from the NY Times today -- four, count 'em, four -- but all good stuff! Here's another: Web Surfing at Work? Just the News, Honest! [New York Times: Technology]
9:38:28 AM  #   your two cents []

Want to know how RIAA.org was hacked?. "Elementary, Watson! Mystery solved" [The Register]
9:36:12 AM  #   your two cents []

AKA developers, developers, developers:  'Bad Boy Ballmer': The Life of Microsoft's Monkeyboy [New York Times: Technology] The Monkeyboy is in Dublin this week and will be talking to reporters on Thursday in a roundtable. Last time he was over I got to do the interview, so my colleague Jamie Smyth gets him this time around!
9:34:28 AM  #   your two cents []

Fighting the Nigerian Money Scam [Slashdot]
9:33:53 AM  #   your two cents []

Reporters Find New Outlet, and Concerns, in Web Logs [New York Times: Technology]
9:32:55 AM  #   your two cents []

Copyright Hurdles Confront Selling of Music on the Internet [New York Times: Technology]
9:32:31 AM  #   your two cents []

Charlie McCarthy. "Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy." [Quotes of the Day]
9:31:57 AM  #   your two cents []

Sun unveils integrated strategy. Sun connects desktop, middleware, datacenter dots at SunNetwork [InfoWorld: Top News]
9:31:24 AM  #   your two cents []

Doc Searls has this item on a man in tech news a lot these days, the always-interesting lawyer Larry Lessig:

The Cultural Anarchist vs. the Hollywood Police State is the title of the cover story of this morning's Los Angeles Times Magazine. The writer is David Streitfeld. The subject is Larry Lessig and Eldred v. Ashcroft — the case against perpetual copyright extention that Larry is taking to the Supreme Court on October 8.

9:30:44 AM  #   your two cents []