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The Census and Australian Bureau of Statistics websites have crashed on their most important day of the year [Census day for Australians], leaving Australians frustrated and unable to complete their form online. Many trying to log on to the Census and ABS sites were met with an error message on Tuesday evening saying the site could not be reached.
In a first, the census requires a full name to be filled in, though many including politicians are concerned about privacy issues. Crossbench senators including Nick Xenophon, Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young are pledging not to comply with rules for the census will be treated like any other citizen and risk fines of $180 per day, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday.
Some took to Twitter to slam the ABS, with one user sarcastically saying they were "definitely technically competent enough to keep our most private data safe."
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday August 09 2016, @02:38PM
Xenophon
With a name like that I'd feel an uncontrollable urge to ask him to retell his story of the invasion of Iraq by superior western powers.
Frigging western civilization... 3000 years of thinking all we gotta do is march the infantry up to the banks of the Euphrates river at Baghdad and that means "mission accomplished", and every freaking time we end up getting powned and having to run back home.
You could do worse than give a teenage boy a copy of the Anabasis. Worlds first military fiction/action novel. Still one of the better ones. That was the start of my classical education, all downhill from there. I read Ringo's "Last Centurion" some years ago and probably the funniest part of that entire book was how it was an homage to Anabasis.
I'm surprised it was never made into a movie. Sony was gonna do it about a decade ago but chickened out. My guess is Hollywood can't do an Anabasis movie because they don't have a 1980s release to copy and remake, those Fing losers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:18PM
We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @03:34AM
“ISIS did not exist before March 2003, before the American invasion of Iraq,” he told a Q&A audience in Adelaide on Monday night.
“As bad as Saddam Hussein was — and he was a brutal dictator — the US, in a botched strategy, a muddle-headed strategy, made a mess of things and it spawned sectarian violence. We have to avoid the mistakes of the past. We must deal with the existential threat that ISIS is to the West — but we must acknowledge that we cannot bomb our way out of this.
“We must acknowledge that ... what happened in Iraq was a bloody mess. We have to learn from that and unless we learn from it, we’re destined to repeat the same mistakes.”
Senator Xenophon said there had to be a political solution rather than a military one, as “what we have been doing to date has not been working — we’ve actually seemed to have strengthened ISIS and strengthened the terrorists.