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Weather Service Becoming More Tech Friendly
awgy writes "The National Weather Service recently began offering XML/RSS feeds of their
alerts,
observations, and
forecasts. Now the Tulsa, OK
Forecast Office is experimenting with
offering forecast files
for Google Earth. It looks like the
National Weather Service is quickly becoming one of the most geek-friendly
government agencies."
but they need to also use it on Europe. It;s always late.
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
Weather Girls? Man, I must be showing my age but to me Weather Girls are these ladies
When I think of the behavior of today's civil rights organizations, I often think of the March of Dimes. In 1938, President Roosevelt helped found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to fight polio, an epidemic that crippled thousands of Americans. The name March of Dimes was coined by Eddie Cantor in his fundraising effort asking every American to contribute a dime.
Since 1970, polio has been eradicated in the U.S., but the March of Dimes lives on, and they're asking for more than dimes. When they accomplish their mission, most organizations don't fold the tent; they simply change their agenda. The March of Dimes now raises money to fight against birth defects, premature birth and other infant health problems.
We'd probably deem them stupid if they continued their battle against polio in America. Why? Because polio has been eradicated.
What about civil rights organizations? Last week, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a march in Atlanta to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Bush administration and House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner have already said they intend to support full reauthorization of its provisions set to expire in 2007.
Speakers at the march used some of the most vile rhetoric in their criticism of black conservatives and the Bush administration. Harry Belafonte explained to reporter Marc Morano, of Cybercast News Service, in obvious reference to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, "[If] a black is a tyrant, he is first and foremost a tyrant, then he incidentally is black. Bush is a tyrant and if he gathers around him black tyrants, they all have to be treated as they are being treated," adding, "Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Color does not necessarily denote quality, content or value."
Comedian Dick Gregory opined, "They [black conservatives] have a right to exist, but why would I want to walk around with a swastika on my shirt after the way Hitler done messed it [the swastika symbol] up?"
Moreover, Gregory explained, "So why would I want to call myself a conservative after the way them white racists thugs have used that word to hide behind? They call themselves new Republicans." Complementing Gregory's remarks, Jesse Jackson rhymed, "Race baiters and discriminators may go underground, but they never move out of town."
There were less intemperate speakers at the march, such as House of Representatives members Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel, John Conyers, Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters. Their remarks consisted of attacks on the president and vice president, accusing them of stealing the 2000 and 2004 elections, wrongly invading Iraq and a poor civil rights record.
Like the March of Dimes' victory against polio in the U.S., civil rights organizations can claim victory as well. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the same constitutional guarantees as other Americans. Now we do. Because the civil rights struggle is over and won doesn't mean that all problems have vanished within the black community. A 70 percent illegitimacy rate, 65 percent of black children raised in female-headed households, high crime rates and fraudulent education are devastating problems, but they're not civil rights problems. Furthermore, their solutions do not lie in civil rights strategies.
Civil rights organizations' expenditure of resources and continued focus on racial discrimination is just as intelligent as it would be for the March of Dimes to continue to expend resources fighting polio in the U.S. Like the March of Dimes, civil rights organizations should revise their agenda and take on the big, non-civil rights problems that make socioeconomic progress impossible for a large segment of the black community.
There is a lot of corporate greed in America. A terrible amount. I agree that not all corps are bad. From what I understand, slashdot doesn't really even make enough off of ads to support itself. (Thanks OSDN for keeping the train rolling!!) Google and a few others immediately come to mind. Hell even Billy Gates is a philanthropist, but then again, what smart monopolist isn't? Andrew Carnegie? That's what I thought. I'm not pro-republican of course, and I surely ain't pro-democrat. Either side is equally as bad as the others. The republicans we once knew are long gone, and the effects of pro-democratic social welfare are a whole different story, but I will say that it wasn't all bad and that this country needed the New Deal to keep itself afloat. Of course, World War II changed all of that and led to a huge boom in the 50s.
I don't care personally who the youth votes for. It might be enough, however, to stem the tide. We don't need 80+ year old senators who are so far out of touch of the needs of their constituents its downright pathetic. They sure as hell know what their local corporations need though, all the while these companies line their pockets, as you pointed out. With less than 50% on average of the populace voting, nobody is even remotely winning by a so called "popular" vote. When only 25% of the population at best is deciding who is making the rules, we have a huge disconnect between what happens on Capitol Hill and what is happening in people's neighborhoods and towns.
Representative democracy aka a Republic may very well be the best model we have going considering the complexities of managing a federal government, but it needs to get back to the representative part. Seriously, does anyone even bother to pay attention to what these people say? If the people in my state heard him saying over and over again that people deserve absolutely no privacy and that their is nothing in the constitution to protect their privacy, they would all cry foul. Unfortunately the 5.6 seconds the local daily news spends on politics glosses over such terrible admissions.
And that, is the heart of the problem. The media. We have a vice president that may be guilty of war crimes, a member of the president's staff that revealed the identity of a covert agent in a time of war (and needs to be thrown in jail) and yet the media has simply glossed over all the facts and moved on to the next big story. Hell, the president getting a blowjob got 100x more media than the attrocities we have committed. Oh wait, we aren't supposed to talk about them because it makes the terrorists mad. Well, don't they have a right at this point to be mad? Remember Abu Gharib? We hung Japanese and German soldiers for doing what those american soldiers did over there. Raping little boys in front of their parents? I cannot think of anything more terrible, short of maybe letting MP K-9s eat people alive, which also happened there. The whole thing reeks of coverup and when the abuses there and at Guantanamo Bay start to surface, it makes me sad that the public could probably care less and would likely assume that those people are all terrorists and probably desrved what they had gotten. Yeah, some english teacher that was pro-democratic and a non-combatant is finally released from the Bay in a wheelchair, after soldiers broke his back and refused to give him surgery. I surely hope a lot of World War II vets are apalled that the country their buddies died for has become a terror state.
When they asked Cheney about the prison in the bay, he responded that they have it pretty good down there. They live in paradise and they just built them a whole new facility. Since the US government and the dept of justice has already tried to legally exempt themselves from the Geneva convention because Afghanistan was not an internationally recognized country, all of these people will likely be held indefinately unless the ACLU can (and they have been) get these people representation with some legal teeth to sink into the whole mess.
Sorry for th
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