Slashdot Mirror
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."
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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