Funeral protest restrictions move forward in Iowa Legislature

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Protesters would be subject to 1,000 foot buffer zone

March 3, 2015 | 11:16 am

DES MOINES A bill to extend the buffer zone between funerals and protests from 500 to 1,000 feet won House Judiciary subcommittee approval despite a lawmakers warning the Legislature should not infringe on First Amendment free speech rights.

HSB 157 was proposed by Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, in response to protests by members of Westboro Baptist Church at military funerals.

Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Bondurant, said the bill will help deal with protesters using hate speech and attempting to cover it under the First Amendment.

However, Rep. Jake Highfill, R-Johnston, said that although the Westboro protesters are sick and wrong and I certainly couldnt disagree with them more, the intent of the First Amendment is not to protect popular opinion.

The bill goes to the full Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to meet again Wednesday afternoon.

The bill also provides for liquidated damages for infliction of emotional distress upon military family members of up to $10,000 per person.

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Funeral protest restrictions move forward in Iowa Legislature

Wilton Rep. Kaufmann's funeral protest bill moves forward

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DES MOINES, Iowa A bill to extend the buffer zone between funerals and protests from 500 to 1,000 feet won House Judiciary subcommittee approval despite a lawmakers warning the Legislature should not infringe on First Amendment free speech rights.

HSB 157 (http://bit.ly/1Cq3fWY)was proposed by Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, in response to protests by members of Westboro Baptist Church at military funerals.

Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Bondurant, said the bill will help deal with protesters using hate speech and attempting to cover it under the First Amendment.

However, Rep. Jake Highfill, R-Johnston, said that although the Westboro protesters are sick and wrong and I certainly couldnt disagree with them more, the intent of the First Amendment is not to protect popular opinion.

The bill goes to the full Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to meet again Wednesday afternoon.

The bill also provides for liquidated damages for infliction of emotional distress upon military family members of up to $10,000 per person.

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Wilton Rep. Kaufmann's funeral protest bill moves forward

Linux Top 3: Xfce, Quirky and Tails 1.3

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March 3, 2015 By Sean Michael Kerner

1) Xfce 4.12

After nearly three years of development Xfce 4.12 was released on February 28, marking the first official major version update since the Xfce 4.10 release.

This long period can only be explained by how awesome Xfce 4.10 was. But as all things, it needed some refreshing - and for that we saw lots of new contributors providing valuable feedback, features and bugfixes. As always, Xfce follows its steady pace of evolution without revolution that seems to match our users' needs.

Among the improvements in Xfce 4.12 are:

2) TAILS 1.3

The Amensic Incognito Live System (TAILS) debuted its 1.3 release on February 24, fixing at least 18 different security issues. All of those issues are upstream issues in Debian, which is the base on which TAILS is built and the Tor Browser, which itself is based on Mozilla's Firefox.

Tails is a privacy focused Linux operating system, loaded with multiple types of tools to help users stay private.

Aside from the security updates, Tails 1.3 includes the Electrum bitcoin wallet

There is also an interesting update to support even more privacy on Tor. According to the release notes:

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Linux Top 3: Xfce, Quirky and Tails 1.3

Bitcoin – Cryptocurrency – Satoshi – Virtual Currency – Digital Dollars 2015 – Video

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Bitcoin - Cryptocurrency - Satoshi - Virtual Currency - Digital Dollars 2015
Please "Sucribe to my channel" and "LIKE" this Video! #Repost @victims_of_miseducation Lol sizzla went off in this interview on the world. He also mentio...

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Bitcoin - Cryptocurrency - Satoshi - Virtual Currency - Digital Dollars 2015 - Video

TWIC S2E7 | Europol ISIS | League of Legends | Morgan Spurlock Inside Man | Bitcoin ATM – Video

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TWIC S2E7 | Europol ISIS | League of Legends | Morgan Spurlock Inside Man | Bitcoin ATM
Like and Subscribe! New Episodes every Friday/Saturday (8PM EST/8AM GMT+8) --------------------------------- Top Story: http://www.coindesk.com/europol-bitco...

By: World Crypto Network

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Too soon to change tax treatment of Bitcoin, Treasury says

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The Treasury has been monitoring Bitcoin in Australia both from a regulatory perspective and a tax perspective and believes that it is too soon to change taxation laws to provide a boost to local Bitcoin-based businesses.

"I think we will continue to assess the environment, but I would stress that it is an industry in its infancy, so I think to jump in and suggest that there should be changes to the tax law to accommodate it is a little bit early in that process," Kate Preston, general manager of the Treasury's Small Business Tax Division, said.

Treasury and Australian Taxation Office officials today fronted the Senate's inquiry into digital currencies, which is looking at the regulatory environment governing the use of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies.

"I think the Treasury view would be [that] taxation is not where you start, where there's a lack of a sense from the Tax Office that the current laws aren't working," Preston said.

The establishment of the digital currencies inquiry followed the issuing last year of a set of draft ATO rulings, which have since been finalised, on the treatment of Bitcoin.

Under Australia's existing tax regime, Bitcoin is more akin to a commodity than a currency, the ATO ruled.

The decision has upset Australia Bitcoin businesses, representatives of which at an earlier hearing of the inquiry said that it could drive the nascent industry offshore into other, more-accommodating jurisdictions.

At the heart of the issue is the GST burden incurred by the use of Bitcoin. Under the ATO's ruling, businesses must charge GST when supplying the crypto-currency and when being paid in Bitcoin.

"We recognise in some commercial circumstances there can be double taxation," Michael Hardy, ATO senior assistant commissioner, told today's hearing.

"It's a feature of barter transactions," Hardy said.

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Too soon to change tax treatment of Bitcoin, Treasury says

The car of the future may ownerless as well as driverless

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Since its launch in 2008, most of the public discussion about bitcoin has focused on its potential as a new digital currency that allows people to make online payments without going through banks or other financial middlemen.

But the past year has also seen growing interest in a host of non-currency applications for bitcoins core technology. Innovators are devising all manner of ideas to decentralize commercial and social activity: smart contracts that function without lawyers; stock exchanges without central clearinghouses; financial record-keeping systems that can be verified without an auditor; even tamper-proof voting systems that automatically guarantee one-person-one-vote.

These ideas treat bitcoins all-important blockchain ledger, a fully verifiable public database thats maintained by thousands of independent computers, as a platform on which to build secondary programs that strip out costly middlemen from peoples exchanges.

To many in Silicon Valley, this Bitcoin 2.0 movement also known as Blockchain 2.0 has parallels with the sweeping innovation unleashed by an earlier groundbreaking platform the Internet.

How might this new decentralized future look? The following passage from Wall Street Journal reporters Paul Vigna and Michael J. Caseys new book, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, lays out one persons dramatic vision for a world managed by blockchain-based networks:

Mike Hearn, who worked for three years on security software at Google before quitting to devote himself to cryptocurrency development, offers perhaps the most far-reaching forecast of such potential in blockchain technology.

In a speech at the August 2013 Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Hearn envisioned an economy composed of autonomous economic agents. He used the example of a driverless taxi, one guided only by sensors and GPS technology.

The one-car taxi service would be run by a smart software program plugged into an automated, electronic marketplace Hearn dubbed the Tradenet. There, prospective passengers could post ride requests and receive competing bids from multiple driverless cars. They would choose their preferred taxi based on fare, travel time, and model of car and could negotiate the route based on durations and fares that the service derived by bidding in a separate Tradenet load space market, where variations in traffic conditions would offer differing market-based toll-road prices for each route.

If all that sounds futuristic but feasible, try this additional feature of Hearns imaginary taxi: it has no owner. The car owns itself or, more precisely, the operating computer program owns it. This program would pay the cars running costs and take in its own revenue; all of this would be made possible by cryptocurrency and the invention of the blockchain.

I suspect if I tried to go to the bank and open a bank account thats owned by a computer program, theyd tell me to get lost or theyd think Im crazy and report me to the police, Hearn said. But bitcoin has no intermediaries. Therefore, theres really nothing to stop a computer from connecting to the Internet and taking part [in the bitcoin network] all by itself. All you need to do to generate a bitcoin wallet is to generate a large random number, and pretty much anything can do that.

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The car of the future may ownerless as well as driverless

Psoriasis drug gets stamp of approval from Health Canada

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HALIFAX -Health Canada has given the green light to a drug tested and developed in Halifax that will be used to treat psoriasis patients.

Psoriasis is a skin condition that affects roughly one out of every 50 people; a small percentage of that group has such severe psoriasis that it requires strong treatment.

The condition involves scaly, elevated and red skin that can be physically uncomfortable. Psoriasis can also be emotionally difficult to cope with; doctors say it can lead to issues with confidence and self-esteem. There are also concerns psoriasis may lead to systemic issues such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

Currently ointments, ultraviolet therapy or oral treatments are used to offset the symptoms.

Generally if you have psoriasis involving large areas of the body, over 10 per cent of the body, its very unlikely that creams alone, topical creams or ointments are going to work, said Dr. Richard Langley, a professor of dermatology at Dalhousie University.

Cosentyx is an injectable, developed by researchers who were led by Langley, that targets the key protein causing the skin condition.

Im very excited for patients because patients that have psoriasis can be so profoundly affected, not just physically but mentally. To many of these patients, theyve been unable to get clear before and for the first time, we have a medication that works to this degree, where approximately 90 per cent of patients are having a significant improvement in their skin, Langley said.

Langley oversaw a clinical trial of the injectable last year. Researchers found that there was 50 per cent improvement in patients within three weeks.

The medication then went through a series of reviews by Health Canada, which gave the drug approval on Monday.

The results were incredibly favourable. It means the medication will now be available shortly for prescription by dermatologists in Canada, Langley said.

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Psoriasis drug gets stamp of approval from Health Canada