Go Ask Me Bollix

Minister Eamonn Ryan TD

Eamonn Ryan needs a reality check.

Speaking from Shanghai he quotes from the Comreg quarterly report that broadband subscriptions experienced

an increase of 19% on the same period in 2009

and that

This success is down to progressive policy on the part of Government and significant investment by the private sector. In the last three years almost €1.5 billion of public and private monies has been invested in Irish broadband.

I’m curious:

1. How much of that €1.5 billion came from public monies?
2. Why is he trying to take credit investment by private companies? Private companies invest in order to make profits – that is their reward, not a big pat on the back by Eamonn.

From the same Comreg report:

Mobile broadband subscriptions (512,381) have been the biggest net broadband contributor since Q1’08, increasing by 9.7% in Q1’10

What a cheek! To call mobile (3G) “broadband” is insulting. And how many of those subscribers are using 3G internet because of the shite rate of broadband penetration in Ireland? Of a total of 1,615,032 internet subscribers, 512,381 – 32% – are mobile. They can’t all be sales reps!

Let’s compare Eamonn Ryan’s auto-back-patting exercise to some recent figures on broadband quality by Ookla

They tell us that Ireland ranks:

• 48 out of 152 countries on download speed (behind information age giants like Andorra, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Portugal, Iceland, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Poland, Malta among othes)
• 62 out of 152 countries on upload speed (behind Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Ukraine, Rwanda, Belarus, Faroe Islands, Macedonia, Uganda, Armenia, Honduras, Azerbaijan and others)
• 61 out of 63 on Quality of broadband (besting only Egypt and Bahrain)

So who is bullshitting us? Eamonn or Ookla? I know what my best guess is (not at all influenced by my previous post on Eamonn’s efficiency on broadband – which, by the way, looks unchanged today!)

Shame on you Eamonn!

Israel and its IDF gave ample warning to the 800-person strong ‘flotilla’ not to trespass into governed waters and offered to transmit any ‘humanitarian aid’ via its own usual routes for transporting the usual huge quantities of fuel, food, water and medicines provided by Israel on a daily basis to Gaza.
While the flotilla, a PR exercise sponsored by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Quaeda, continued to ignore Israel’s warnings and its offers of assistance, it moved ever more towards its target and so brought on itself the proper defence against this potential threat the protecting forces of the state of Israel.
The cry of ‘Khaibar’ was heard raised against the defending Israili commandos, so signifying the truest adherence to the 7th century cry of the alleged Muhammed, whose rallying ‘Khaibar’ presaged the genocide of the final living populace of Jews alive in Arabia.
Israel is the only secular democracy extant in the Middle East, where you can choose between going to an opera or to a strip-joint. The countries which orbit this tiny globe of secular sanity are intent, in their Islamic insanity, and in their paucity of pleasure, entertainment, freedom of expression and thought, on eradicating Israel from the face of the planet, bound up as all their despicable religious expressions are with unfathomable levels of anti-semitism.
It seems that Israel is the only country on the face of the planet which is not granted an automatic right to defend itself. The despicable doctrine from which all anti-semitism has spewed, so placing Israel in its typically internationally bullied state, is the worst man-made religion of them all, Islam.
The media’s global condemnation of Israel over the last 48 hours is an absolute disgrace and underscores a hugely shameful lacuna in awareness of the true face of Islam.

From a written answer in the Dáil on March 2nd. (Averages calculated by yours truly):

If you were to be fair the cost of employing someone (employers PRSI, up-yer-bum levies, etc) account for about 10% of the average per staff member) but the averages are pretty bewildering.

For example, FÁS (which employs LOTS of clerical staff) still manages an average salary of almost €50k, so are they:

• overpaid
• highly skilled
• management heavy

Compare this to the average per staff in a company in the private sector who doesn’t get within an asses roar of that!

Pretty sweet huh? Even with your pension and pay levies!

Wankers!

Normally I get a bit irate at spamming bastards from hell, but this one made me laugh. In my INBOX from Silverarm Solutions on behalf of Falcon Travel:

So not only are you niaive enough to think that spamming me will work, you are actually stupid enough to think I’ll click through to read more spam!?

Now I send email campaigns out and when I do I send them from my own domain. I don’t hide behind a .info domain in case someone blacklists me. However I am a tad more responsible than these stupid fuckers, so perhaps I shouldn’t comment.

By the way, check out what Silverarm Solutions are charging Falcon Travel for this “service”!!!

To Falcon Travel: If you would like to put a comment on this post and let us know what great deals you actually have we will give you the advertising for free. Just please don’t give my email address away to snake oil merchants!

This really says it all. From the Minister with responsibility for IT:

broadband.gov.ie screenshot

Minister Eamonn Ryan TD

That is the official website of the Irish government for disseminating information about broadband to members of the public. As Minister Eamonn Ryan proudly states (in his welcome message on the old site courtesy of archive.org):

Broadband is an important tool for everybody in the 21st century

Couldn’t agree more Eamonn – glad you’re on the case!

According to figures released to Fine Gael Senator Paschal Donohoe in response to a parliamentary question, the broadband.gov.ie website received 67,694 unique visitors last year. It is a shame negligent incompetent to allow that amount of traffic to just die – as any web dude or even SEO snake-oil vendor knows you do not allow links to disappear, let alone a complete site!

So how much does this crock of shite cost you? Well Paschal Donohoe has it all (bear in mind that these are only running and maintenance costs):

So who is visiting these broken sites? And how should it cost so much to maintain sites that nobody visits? And why are so many of them unmaintained or broken?

Maybe you should go back and ask, Paschal – the only question I have is:

How do I get on this IT gravy train?

Update 12/02/2010:

Damian Mulley has a story of a €4 million government website on his blog – I’m too stunned to comment.

Now you would think that you would watch out for stuff like this if you were going to have hyped-up product launch…

…especially when you are in a city where the average January low is +3^oC ish…

Fucking Cold!

A few days ago, I was asked by a colleague what I made of the overturning of the ban on Geert Wilders’ entrance to the UK for accepting an invitation to show his film ‘Fitna’ before the House of Lords. He asked if it was really ok that the ban should have been lifted on the man.

Before I offer my reply, take a look at what all the fuss is about. Make sure you’ve a stern enough stomach to watch this.

http://file.wikileaks.org/file/fitna-flash-video/index.html (The film comes and goes, depending on the stomach of the hoster, so be prepared to hunt around for your turn at savouring a moment of free expression and speech, uncensored, if this link doesn’t work.)

Never one to use one word where two might hammer home a particular point, I answered:

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Of course the ban should have been lifted, just as it should never have been imposed in the first place eight months before.

The reasons given for the ban relied on wilful misrepresentation of ECHR law, as Jacqui Smith pursued her fearful road of capitulation to the Islamist maniacs in her midst, which law purported to show that Wilders exposed himself to restriction of freedom of speech on ‘national security’ grounds. It didn’t wash (the underlying application of law seems to have been faulty) as the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal has now found.

The Government’s capitulation, in effecting this ban, to Jihadist violence – such violence as was threatened by Lord ‘still driving?’ Ahmed in terms of his promise to mobilise 10,000 Muslims to protest Wilders’ entrance – was far from this country’s finest hour. For not only did it do away in one unprecedentedly cowardly swoop with the notions of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, it also horribly showed up the latent bigotry of the Government, a bigotry far more sinister than the bias some ignoramuses incomprehensibly find in Wilders’ film. For the Government’s decision was predicated on the perception that Muslims as a whole would be offended by Wilders’ film such that violence would necessarily ensue, therefore immediately granting that all Muslims are in fact represented by the most extreme, unreasonable and fanatically intolerant and vocal Muslims in the UK.

Ironically, such bias worked precisely for and not against the welcome granted by the UK to Ijaz Mian, a fanatical Muslim preacher to whom no banning or censure was offered by the Government when he said:

‘You cannot accept the rule of the kaffir. We have to rule ourselves and we have to
rule the others… King, Queen, House of Commons: if you accept it, you are a
part of it. If you don’t accept it, you have to dismantle it. So you being a
Muslim, you have to fix a target. From that White House to this Black House, we
know we have to dismantle it. Muslims must grow in strength, then take over…
You are in a situation in which you have to live like a state-within-a-state -
until you take over.’

The banning of Wilders was, I think, not only a dark day for freedom of expression but an enormous condescension and insult to Muslims in general, who were despicably considered by the Government to be incapable of controlling themselves and of thinking for themselves. The British Government simply endorsed the entirety of Wilders’ filmic proposition by doing worse than ever Wilders had done in his attempt to show, correctly, the canonical basis of Islamic violence – they simply lumped all Muslims together and genu-jerked fearfully at their imaginings of collective and potentially deliberately imposed Muslim mayhem. By banning entry to the UK of the potential victim of this mayhem and violence, who was miscast as its potential instigator, a serious second offence, encompassing sheer cowardice and insult against liberal and enlightened values, was contemptibly committed.

If it had been the case that Muslims were considered by Smith and her cohorts to be ‘genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat’ as to require Wilders to stay away, then the Government may have been on to something at least arguable and honest. As it is, these quoted words refer not to the Muslims feared to be capable of violence, but to Wilders himself, in a letter sent to him by Irving Jones, under the aegis of the Home Office. I submit that the twisted logic of this is very hard to follow.

In such a circumstance, it becomes even more important to listen to the one person who wishes to speak. Christopher Hitchens correctly says that it is not only a question of that individual’s right to speak, but of our right to listen. As I consider the Wilders case, and his despicable treatment at the hands of a scared and integrity-lacking Government, I can’t help remembering a passage on the Danish cartoon fiasco of 2006 from a splendid book called ‘The Fall Out’ by Andrew Anthony, a British columnist and author, which I hope you don’t mind my quoting:

‘[A]s British liberals raced to point the finger of blame at Denmark, Islamists took to the streets of London in protest at the cartoons that had never been published in this country. Standing outside the Danish Embassy, they held up placards with such legends as ‘Butcher those who mock Islam’, ‘ Behead the one who insults the Prophet’ and ‘Britain you will pay, 7/7 is on its way.’ Despite the incitement to violence and murder, no arrests were made at the demonstration. ‘Those gathered were well natured and in the main compliant with police requests,’ said a Metropolitan Police statement. A few weeks later I would watch as a group of six or seven senior police officers agreed on the urgent need to arrest a solitary man holding up an image of one of the cartoons at a demonstration in favour of freedom of expression. The man, an Iranian refugee from religious tyranny, was in good spirits and completely unthreatening but he was swiftly hauled off by several policemen’.

Whatever one may think of Wilders’ wish to see Islamification of his own country be abolished and restored not by overtly secular tenets but by a curious and in my opinion wrongheaded notion of ‘Christian values’; whatever one may think of Wilders’ call to ban the Koran in his own country, which is maintained by his supporters to be a call simply for an equally applied hand in circumstances where ‘Mein Kampf’ is banned, and which is used by his detractors as a ‘Gotcha!’ accusation of freedom of speech hypocrisy; one may in some sense compare him – given his lack of criminality, given his general courtesy and given his wish simply to speak before an audience which invited him to do so in the House of Lords – to the lonely Iranian taking a stand against the forces ranged against freedom of expression and democracy.

Both suffered at the hands of a cowardly, capitulating Government, hatefully appeasing to both Islam and Muslims, a premiership which is supposed to protect rather than threaten the very values of free expression both Wilders and our mysterious Iranian endorsed and publicly promoted.

This was the first time that an elected politician from another member state of the EU had ever been denied access to Britain and the date of its imposition should be committed to memory as an example of just how fragile our hard-won rights to freedom of expression really are. I propose a few moments on the 10th February spent each year remembering quite how the British Government shamed and dishonoured our difficultly acquired, enlightened rights of freedom of speech and expression, so to ensure that we value them all the more.
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I trust any and all readers agree.

Styrer

Check it out: between 37 and 52 percent of Muslims residing in the state want Shariah law to be imposed on us all.

Fort Hood is an example of quite how fundamentalist Islam can sneak beneath the radar, be granted all the rights a multicultural society thinks are necessary to be PC, and then destruct a major (no pun intented) part of the society which saw fit to welcome its wannabe nemesis into its midst.

Take a look at this, if you think there’s nothing much to worry about, even in Ireland:

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/the_third_jihad/

I sent this, expecting no reply and of course getting none:

Dr Jasser

 Your film was devastating: informative as it was terrifying. Congratulations on presenting this film such that small individuals like me can see it.

 It is often held that Islam is incapable of going through a reformation in the way that Christianity did, because its canonical dictates are that it is the final and unalterable revelation.

 I have read the Koran and the Hadith. Once the belligerent, bellicose, kuffar-attacking parts of the Koran are excised, there seems to be little left. May I please have an answer from you as to precisely what kind of Muslim you are. Do you still rate Muhammed as the perfect example of humankind? Once the most aggressive parts of the Koran are excised, may I ask what remains to believe in?

 In order for you to follow this religion, quite what is it that retains your adherence?

 I am genuinely puzzled as to how you can make of a despicably aggressive document – the Koran, as I’ve read it – a benign, life-embracing, loving way of seeing it. There really seems to be little left.

Styrer

——

Let’s not forget quite what an apostate Muslim, living under constant guard, because the crime of Islamic apostasy is death, had to say about this:

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/news/cfi_releases_statement_from_ibn_warraq_in_response_to_fort_hood_tragedy/

What is absolutely unbelievable is that there are still those who promote the vacuous nonsense that Muslim terrorism lies in some dispute about political advantage, or that those crying ‘Alahu Akhbar’ before they blow up countless innocents along with their vile selves actually have any geo-political concerns whatsoever. Until it is understood that the fuckers whose morality has been entirely corrupted by the Koran and the Hadith such that they want to fight their beloved texts’ enforced war of jihad and martydom against the kuffar – regardless of geo-political aims and against all of us little non-believing pissants in Ireland – then we’re never going to understand, let alone be able to combat, the evil in our midst.

I refer you to one of the best video clips I’ve ever come across to get across this point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V_KiPlZYYQ

It’s Christopher Hitchens, and I suspect he needs no introduction to any who actually know a little about what’s fucking going on out there.

The average of 37 and 52 is 44.5 percent. This is far, far too much. How the fuck have we let this maniacal element grow in our midst? It is a fucking disgrace.

Styrer