No law has been passed yet, this is a "proposal for a parliamentary resolution" (þingsályktunartillaga). Which basically means that parliament has expressed formal interest in getting legislation drafted to implement this.
How that legislation will look will depend on a lot of committee work down the road, and what parliament actually ends up passing is another open question.
Still, this proposal has the backing of several ministries, so there's a large change that something good will be passed. But whether it'll fulfill all the promises of the IMMI plan remains to be seen.
Ok, so I wiki'd what patronymics are (your "last" name is based on your father's name), but could you elaborate. Did the author use "Jónsdóttir" incorrectly?
Yes. Birgitta Jónsdóttir is properly referred to as Birgitta Jónsdóttir or just Birgitta, or by her first and middle name if disambiguation is required. Jónsdóttir alone is meaningless as far as name goes. Icelandic phone books are ordered by first name.
edit: although to be fair, in the context of an article written in English aimed at a general audience this is not an easy situation. Properly using just the first name might throw off people who don't know about the Icelandic conventions (that would be most of them) who might then consider this use as strangely personal. On the other hand, repeatedly using the full name might look weird too. Personally I'm not convinced these are worth the trade-off of being culturally incorrect, but I'm not the one making the calls.
I read a ton of articles that routinely use a persons first name, why suddenly should proper formality be artificially upheld in context of a culture that uses patronyms? They use first names as names, and in the context of an article they can use a first name without it getting confusing.
But in certain areas and with certain publications this clashes with house style. For example the tabloids/red-tops are happy to refer to Boris Johnson (London Mayor) as BoJo or simply Boris, the broadsheets would say Boris Johnson first and then use "Johnson" to refer to the person as using a first name is considered impolite and/or disrespectful in formal writing (which the broadsheets tend towards at least in non-editorial pieces).
More in depth or higher class pieces that are not expected to be widely consumed may well then go a step further and assume the reader has detailed knowledge of name systems (for example Chinese "Family Name, Given Name" ordering).
So to reiterate the expression of one of the parent posts they appear to be writing to their audience. Be offended or confused if you like.
The reason you'd call someone Mr. Smith in the English speaking world is because surnames are culturally significant. Because they group entire male lineages together.
That's not the case with patronyms, so this usage has never developed. In Iceland you'd never use just the patronym. It's not a proper name, just an indication of parental lineage.
Many have some sort of same-sex unions, what Iceland did recently is eliminate all occurrences of "man and a woman" and replace them with "two persons" in their laws.
Most countries that have same sex unions have a different set of laws for them, usually for religious and political reasons. The Church of Iceland opposed the recent change, but it lost that battle.
Regarding Jóhanna, it's sad that the first openly gay head of state is also so openly incompetent :)
First of all, under normal circumstances she never would have been anywhere close to being prime minister. The only reason (seemingly) that she got the job was that after the collapse of the previous government the new leftist coalition needed someone to pass the buck to, and she was pretty much the only uncontroversial figure they had.
Her coalition government's only redeeming quality has been to suck less than their predecessors which facilitated the giant ponzi scheme which took down the economy. They're wasting a lot of effort on the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
One shining moment of incompetence was the press conference right after the president announced that the Icesave debt repayment bill would go to a public referendum.
She announced (well, mumbled actually) that the government was "disappointed" in the President's decision to bring the matter to a vote in a rushed international press conference hours after the announcement.
What they should have done is explain calmly that this was part of the democratic process in Iceland, and how the result might affect any future debt repayment.
Examples like these and countless others have shown that her and her government can't think two steps ahead, manage PR and foreign diplomacy horribly, and generally seem more interested in their pet leftist issues (which they can finally shove through, now that they're in power) rather than solving the problems facing the nation.
But what do I care, I moved abroad shortly after this all went down.
right, so previous icelandic governments brought down the country by dancing to the tunes of the banks, but it's the current government that is incompetent and only shoves through its pet leftist issues.
how unbiased. leaves me wondering if those previous governments had any pet rightist issues of their own. something to do with banks, do you think? bringing down the entire economic system, perhaps?
pet leftist issues don't sound so bad after all. i should look up which they are. i might even like them.
Maybe a bigger issue: What will it mean for file sharers? A private, anonymous server that can't be shut down by foreign powers sounds like a file sharer's dream come true.
I thought part of the problem there is that, while they declared themselves independent, nobody would recognize their independence, thus they were still effectively under the laws of the area they were in.
If Iceland, an already-recognized nation, decides to do this, trying to get things shut down without their consent could / would be seen as an attack, and it becomes a far larger issue than simply enforcing laws within your jurisdiction.
Iceland may be a sovereign nation, but it has no armed forces. It's fair to say that its defense consists of its alliance with NATO, i.e., with the U.S., which implies that if the U.S. says "jump!", Iceland will ask "how high?". Considering that the U.S. government is owned by interest groups, I don't see how Iceland can become a data-haven.
I doubt the US will ever invade Iceland. It will have massive consequences for the US government, it might be controlled by interest groups, but they are not all powerful, the people still do have a say.
It will be much more difficult to convince a Kentucky farmer that the US should invade Iceland with it's white Christians, as supposed a strange-sounding nation with non-white non-Christians(sad, but true).
And though Iceland doesn't have a military, it does have friends who do. It is interesting entertaining the idea of a US invasion of Iceland. It would result in an immediate hostility towards the US from many nations, as it would be to attack a friend(if they attack Iceland, they can attack us), especially from the Nordic region(whose commercial powers are not to sneeze at).
Dude, seriously... who's talking about invading Iceland? Are you out of your mind? I never even suggested that!!!
Did the MPAA / RIAA mafia need the U.S. military to invade Sweden to shut down The Pirate Bay's servers a few years ago? That's right, they didn't. They merely contacted their obedient, corrupted "friends" in Washington D.C., and had the U.S. government pressure the Swedish government, and the Swedish government had the Swedish police raiding The Pirate Bay... even though Stockholm is way out of U.S. jurisdiction.
Sweden has professional armed forces, defense and high-tech industries, natural resources, land. Sweden needs the U.S. less than Iceland does. This means that the U.S. can pressure Iceland whenever it wants, and Iceland will obey because the small and the weak don't make the rules. International relations are, essentially, bullying. It sucks, but being in denial won't help.
How that legislation will look will depend on a lot of committee work down the road, and what parliament actually ends up passing is another open question.
Still, this proposal has the backing of several ministries, so there's a large change that something good will be passed. But whether it'll fulfill all the promises of the IMMI plan remains to be seen.