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Submission + - Australian Bureau of Statistics doesn't like direct downloads of census data (itnews.com.au)

Bismillah writes: The ABS has released the census data for the country under a Creative Commons license, but instead of making it easy to get, they've put in Javascript to obfuscate file paths and more. http://www.itnews.com.au/News/339819,abs-hobbles-census-data-downloaders.aspx All commented in the source code of course.

Submission + - FAA draft environmental impact report finds no impediment for Texas space port (examiner.com)

MarkWhittington writes: According to an April 15, 2013 story in the Brownsville Herald, the FAA has released a draft version of its environmental impact statement for the proposed SpaceX space port to be built near the city in the southern part of Texas. The FAA found that while there were a number of potential concerns, there was nothing that would cause SpaceX to be denied a permit to build the space port.

Comment Re:If you wanted to know about humans, (Score 2) 450

I agree with you, there are a lot of people in America who can not afford health care, and thus do not make use of the system. However, the problem with healthcare cost is directly perportonal to our governments involvment. Our social forms of insurance (medicaid and medicare) are right at the top of the list for reasons that our health care is not affordable. The Government set the "cost" of a procedure at a level were almost no profit can be made, and then only pay on average half of that "cost". The net result is that health care providers have to charge everyone else extreme prices just to stay in business. To sum it up our governments current involvment in our health care system IS the problem, and increaseing their involvement will only make things worse. Private insurance is just as bad as the governments insurance programs. Private insurance companies (at least in the US) exist to maximize their profits. That means that their primary function in our health care system is to be a leach that draws cash out of the patient care environment. It is therefore most ironic (moronic) that the latest batch of legislation aimed at fixing our healthcare system mandates that everyone must get insurance. They could have passed a law that mandated paying your medical bills and at least the health care provider would see the money, but instead Obama, in his great wisdom, mandated an increase to our problems.

Comment Re:If you wanted to know about humans, (Score 1) 450

I did not intend to say that the government directly tells the Dr what to do. Rather, by vertue of saying 'we only have so much money' they in effect dictate the quality of the health care that is available.

This is seen in the Patients to Dr ratio as compared between Canada and the US.
Canada - 470:1
US - 390:1
But, even if your system in Canada is better, by some metric of measuring health care, I still do not want our inept federal government messing up what health care we do have.

Comment Re:If you wanted to know about humans, (Score 1) 450

For many of us Americans, The debate over health care is not about quality or availability, but rather it is about who has the power to control quality and availablility of our health care. Socialized health care gives the government the power (through cash flow) to prescribe what our health care should be like. Given our current negative cash flow in the federal budgets I am not very optimistic about what health care will be like if we were to socialize that part of our society.

Our roads and schools receive most of their funding from state and local taxes. To sugest that this is an example of what Federal socialized health care would be like is very misleading.

Comment Re:It's a good start, but... (Score 3, Informative) 176

I do not know if the grandparent post was refering to insecurity from the clients point of view or the servers. However, if the website depends on js for input validation then the website is fundamentaly insecure. If we are looking at security from the users perspective then I am mindfull of cross site scripting, an attack method that is #2 on the OWASP top 10 list. JS can be done correctly but the user has to trust not only the site they are visiting, but also every advertizement or other object that the page has requested from some outside source. As a web developer I know, as I think you do, that js can be made safe. You are technicaly correct that js is just a language. But, I suspect that even you realize that simply trusting all js that is loaded into your browser is inherently insecure.

Comment Re:Provoking (Score 3, Insightful) 1130

Mod parent up. This is one of the most insightful post I have seen. There is no way that shooting blanks over our own cities (or real bullets in foreign cities) is going to make anyone love our government or the millitary. Our millitary has testing grounds to fire real bullets at. The only reason to perform this exercise over civilians is to get some form of reaction from the civilian. It has worked. There are now many of us who believe that those who previously were considered crazy, are infact right. I am now convenced that our government is actively against us. Who could have imagined that the day would come when I would be affraid of my own government?
News

Submission + - Machine gun fire from military helicopters flying over downtown Miami (miamiherald.com) 1

Okian Warrior writes: Multiple police agencies and the military are currently (Monday night) conducting training exercises over Miami and elsewhere in the county. The exercise includes military helicopters firing machine-gun blanks while flying over highways and buildings.

This YouTube video shows helicopters strafing highways with blank rounds near the Adrian Arts center.

There are reports of similar actions in Houston

From the Houston article: "if you see the helicopters or hear gunfire, it's only a drill."

Not to be alarmist or anything, but, um... WTF?

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