Why You Need to Create a Will

Why You Need to Create a Will

The thought of passing away is enough to cause many Australians to put off creating a will. However, unless there is a formal declaration regarding property, assets, and final wishes, many problems can arise. Below are some of the most pressing reasons for you to make a will as soon as possible.

Legal Definitions of “Spouse”

A new Succession Act in NSW (The Succession Amendment (Intestacy) Act 2009) has expanded the definition of “spouse” to include anyone who is a domestic partner to the diseased when they die. This not only includes wives or husbands, but partners and de facto spouses. Because of this new definition, it is possible for someone to die while having more than one spouse. Trouble can easily arise here, especially if there is no solid will to sort the matter out.

“Sweet Equity”

Imagine that a father has owned a family business for decades, and the daughter has helped to operate that business for the past 10 years. The father has been promising to pass the business to the daughter, as she has been there to help it thrive. But what if another child, the brother, has recently gone through some terrible debts? The father changes the will so that the son receives half of the business, assuming that the daughter will understand the situation. The daughter is outraged by this, since the son did nothing to help the business in his whole life. Through a series of challenges to the re-written will, both the brother and sister are left with much less money than they had after the father’s passing. By simply seeking out the appropriate legal representation, the father could have included something that dealt with his verbal promise to the daughter. This would have saved each of the siblings a lot of grief and money.

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How to Make Your Website Attractive and Competitive with Good SERP Rates

How to Make Your Website Attractive and Competitive with Good SERP Rates

To start your business, you need to be emotionally strong discarding weakness and other negative elements for expecting faster success. Take advice and performance specific guidance from experts to design your e-commerce websites for message delivery, product promoting and business expanding.   In the matter of website creation, you need better conception with innovative expertise in the site optimization. Your websites must be qualitative with good online visibility to attract visitors.

Make Your Site Innovative

For pulling huge online crowd, the website you design must be unique, dynamic, stylish and result-oriented.  The business expansion naturally depends on the product promotion to capture customers. Therefore, the website should be competitive to find the niche in the digital market. Right now, entrepreneurs recover the goodwill of their companies by changing the methods of product promotion.  Comparing to basic websites, their stylish  website are more enriched with decency in graphic design, picture displaying and content management Instead of sending written messages, the entrepreneurs like to use  lot of  video clips ,images and dynamic ‘picture galleries to motivate thoughts of customers. Visitors should understand what type of business an entrepreneur needs to launch. Well, the competitive and qualitative website fills up the gap by showcasing handy demos, series of slideshows and animated theme based video clips.  A customer gains inspiration when she visits the site to check content. The innovative site designs are lucrative and customers are easily convinced to pull up the web traffic. Responsive website designs are enticing newcomers in the online e-market because entrepreneurs get positive customers in short time without making much investment.

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E-Cigarette Report from World Health Organisation Leads to New Laws in QLD

E-Cigarette Report from World Health Organisation Leads to New Laws in QLD

The Queensland Government has submitted a proposal to amend smoking laws in the state. If brought in, this law would make e-cigarettes and personal vaporisers fall under the same regulatory laws as tobacco products. If passed, the amendments would take effect on in 2015. This would make Queensland the first state in Australia to pass legislation regarding e-cigarettes. There are no regulations for the popular devices in any other part of Australia. However, there has been much criticism for the new laws, since there is no concrete evidence about the effects of using e-cigarettes.

A report that was released by the World Health Organisation (Electronic nicotine delivery systems) is claimed to be the driving force behind the new legislation in Queensland. The devices are not going to be banned, but selling them to minors, or even advertising them for sale will be against the law. In addition, it will be illegal to use them in any place where smoking tobacco is already not allowed.

What Are the Amendments?

In keeping with the laws regarding the advertisement and sale of nicotine products in Queensland, it will also be illegal to advertise or sell e-cigarettes without legal approval. E-cigarettes are generally advertised as being a good aid for people who want to quit smoking. The problem is that there is not enough evidence to suggest that there are any health benefits to switching over to these devices, instead of smoking tobacco.

It is also believed that they will start to work as a gateway product, leading people to eventually take up smoking. It is thought that their availability will go against governmental efforts to make smoking seen as not normal. The World Health Organisation’s report claimed that e-cigarettes pose a threat to legislation that is intended to control the use of tobacco.

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Stop using IE6

In the course of my daily interchange with other denizens of the web, I was informed that my blog looks like poo in Internet Explorer 6. More specifically, the lower content in the main column – the Highlighted, Overheard, and Randomized modules – moved up and overlapped the rotating Featured content. I had established a fix that should have prevented this, and it did – in modern browsers. Frankly, I hadn’t concerned myself with IE6, and why should I? Who still uses a browser that is insecure, that doesn’t comply with modern web standards, that has prompted the creation of a veritable cottage industry of hacks and workarounds by developers? Who still uses a browser that is now close to being two versions obsolete? Prison inmates, perhaps. People toiling in workplaces too glacially-minded to upgrade their software once a year. And the lazy, of course. Mustn’t forget the technologically lazy.

“Whatever,” I thought, and went about my business.

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Cold hard cache, and WordPress 2.5.1

Casual browsing at Airbag Industries directed me to a Coding Horror screed protesting the lack of built-in caching in WordPress. For those of you in a hurry, the highlights from the diplomatic Jeff Atwood:

… incredibly scary… completely unacceptable… appalling… absolutely irresponsible … naive… brainlessly stupid…

Stately, measured prose! Reminds me of the last office meeting I attended. Good times.

Having already experimented with WP-Super Cache last week and found that no matter which URL visitors clicked, they were always delivered to the front page of the blog, I opted today for the older WP-Cache instead. Things seem to be running smoothly. We’ll see what happens the next time I get actual traffic. In the past, this blog has been Deadspun, Wonketted, MichaelMoored, TalkingPointsMemoed, and DailyKosed, but never tested by an extinction-level event (Digg or Slashdot). It’ll happen, though.

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WordPress 2.5 Goes Gold

The new iteration of the platform that powers this weblog and a handful of others was pronounced good to go today by Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Dallas. I wonder how many WP users just dropped whatever they were doing – doing chores around the house, perhaps, or interacting with family and friends – and rushed to WordPress.org (given a shiny new interface in conjunction with the new edition announcement) to snag the new hotness? This being Saturday, though, a lot of those folks may not yet have heard.

Add WordPress.org: It looks good. Much better than before, and I assume that the usability pros at Happy Cog were behind the redesign. (Wrong! It was Matt Thomas who did the redesign. Thanks to Matt Mullenweg in comments for the correction.) The new look extends throughout the site, even to the forums. The Codex remains a unregenerate holdout, but not for long, I hope.

Must admit that I like the new look for WP.org better than the new look for WP 2.5. Shhh! Don’t tell anybody! But we’ve talked about that one aspect of the new edition before and won’t belabor it today.

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First upgrade on the new frontier

I had heard earlier about the frequency of incremental upgrades to the WordPress platform, and so was unsurprised last night when WP issued a directive to upgrade to version 2.3.3 – an “urgent security release,” something about a flaw in their dechyon-field infrastructure or something equally unintelligible.

Well, better to be safe than sorry. I had some spare time for the upgrade today, so opportunity costs weren’t an issue. On the other hand, I did have private trepidations, and not merely because I’d heard that many WordPress users put off upgrades out of fear, uncertainty, and confusion. I have a rather checkered career of blogging platform upgrades (see: Movable Type), as readers here maywell recall.

There being nothing for it, however, I set about carefully following the rather bleak expanded upgrade instructions…and in the words of Canadian philosopher Alanis Morissette, everything’s just fine, fine, fine. The procedure was indeed more dreaded than dreadful; lots of steps, but each one completely unambiguous.

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Where is the Missouri press on Roy Blunt and the Mark Foley scandal?

Stand up, Mr. Blunt, and tell us what you knew

It’s Monday, and leading Missouri papers like the St. Louis Post-Dispatchand the Kansas City Star have yet to ask GOP Majority Whip Roy Blunt what he knew and when he knew it regarding the Mark Foley predatory email and IM scandal. Where are the investigations from vaunted “news leaders” such as KSDK? Blunt was not only part of the Republican House leadership at the time the story was first broached to that same leadership, he was in the top chair as interim Majority Leader and fighting to keep the position, as the National Journal‘s Hotline reports:

It’s important to note that when the House GOP leadership first apparently learned of something amiss with Foley and a page, the GOP leadership team was in flux. Roy Blunt was the acting Majority Leader fighting with John Boehner to keep the job permanently.Did the House GOP leadership vacuum that was created by DeLay’s departure lead to a situation where no one was calling the political shots? And did that sense of chaos create anxiety, preventing Republicans from taking the steps necessary to protect these underage pages?

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It’s because of their black blood

Following recent examples of politicans and celebrities making deeply stupid racial and cultural remarks, the Governator expounds on the legendary Cuban and Puerto Rican “hotness.” To sum up: They got it in their blood, boy:

Schwarzenegger: Cubans, Puerto Ricans ‘all very hot’Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger apologized Friday for saying during a closed-door meeting that Cubans and Puerto Ricans are naturally feisty and temperamental because of their combination of “black blood” and “Latino blood.”

He said the tape-recorded comments “made me cringe” when he read them in Friday’s Los Angeles Times.

“Anyone out there that feels offended by those comments, I just want to say I’m sorry, I apologize,” Schwarzenegger said. He added that if he heard his children make similar comments, “I would be upset.” […]

“I mean Cuban, Puerto-Rican, they are all very hot,” the governor says on the recording. “They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.”

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Underwhelming

Why does the DLC always make one think of this bit from The Empire Strikes Back?

Han Solo: All right, Chewie, let’s get outta here!
Princess Leia: The Empire is still out there! I don’t think it’s wise to—
Han: No time to discuss this in committee!
Leia: I am not a committee!

Sigh. Is it so very wrong to long for bold direction and decisive action from those who carry the official Democratic banner? Or is it simply naive? I must admit to being throughly underwhelmed by the latest pronouncement from the Democratic Leadership Council – hey, we’re all about commonsense! Yeah, there’s a banner for you. May the Force – or for the Barack Obamas out there, a merciful and nondenominational Providence – save us from leadership-by-committee:

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