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NOAA Adopts New Net Policy
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has adopted a
new policy which applies to provision of all National Weather Service environmental information, including forecasts, warnings, and observations. In June,
/. reported that NOAA was taking comments on the proposed policy.
Hundreds of Slashdotters responded. And it made a difference: NOAA will make its data and products available in internet-accessible, vendor-neutral form and will use other dissemination technologies, e.g. satellite broadcast, NOAA Weather Radio, and wireless, as appropriate. Congrats to the Slash community for making a difference and helping to set US Govt policy.
I'm happy because my concerns were addressed. I was afraid that the proposed policy was going to give commercial interests the ability to reqeust the NOAA discontinue a service without review, meaning that if weather.com didn't like the ability of the NWS to issue point forecasts they could behind-the-scenes ask for it to be ended. The modified policy now states they will "Establish... orderly processes for seeking input and suggestions to create, modify, or discontinue products and services".
It's a cool feeling to be a part of a process that actually seems to have worked to our advantage for a change.
John
Just get yourself the WeatherFox extension for Mozilla Firefox to use instead. That way not only is the code of it free (as in beer and freedom), but also the updates come from the Weather Channel and not the Weather Channel rejects that end up working for WeatherBug.
It can never be emphasized enough how utterly valuable a SAME equipped weather radio can be. They do not just allow you to get up to the minute weather reports, but they also act as your first warning of any kind of serious emergency in your area.
Warning sirens are only intended to notify people outdoors, and TVs and radios are only useful if you are awake, the unit is on and you are within earshot and paying attention at the time.
When NOAA or an emergency management agency (NOAA allows them to utilize the system without running the transmissions by them first) sends out a warning message, it is proceeded by what sounds like intermittent static. In fact, the system is sending out a burst of number sequences that are decoded by SAME equipped radios that compare the number sequence to that which the user has previously entered. If they do not match, the radio ignores the message, if they do match however, a generally ear-piercing alarm sounds while the radio interprets the alert code and displays the corresponding text message before the computer voice announcement (or real person if the situation warrants it) from the NOAA station begins to broadcast. The process takes about 10 seconds (this is to give you a chance to get closer to the radio before the voice warning begins).
Here is a complete list of all of the emergency codes
They are not as cheap as a clock radio, but they are worth every penny. I'm still astonished when I come across people who live in tornado-prone areas who don't buy them despite their financial ability to do so and their fear of dangerous weather.
Before anybody accepts this immediately as true, I'd just like to point out that this guy has posted lots of things about his personal achievements and his accomplishments, so much that you have to be a bit skeptical. Besides being the brother of an NOAA analyst, he claims all of the following... (taken from http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131294&cid=109 59811)
Ken Jennings was my roommate freshman year at Brigham Young University
I worked for NASA for 8 years straight out of MIT undergrad.
I'm an editor for Tom's Hardware Guide
I worked for a particular company that denied another company a lucrative contract just because that company's CTO had bullied my company's CEO when he was in high school
I have TWO friends who work at Bungie
I work on LAMP software and deploy to customer's websites.
I obtained a preview release [of GIMP 2.0]
Forgive me for being skeptical, but I have trouble believing all that. A child of the post pointed to above says that the parent poster is a known troll, and a check of his recent comments shows many rated troll.
So perhaps this shouldn't be 5, Interesting?
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Be sure to attend The FTC workshop on P2P networks If you read the adgenda, you would think FTC is trying to convince people that P2P is a threat to consumers. It would make sense to use a spurious issue that pushes congressional hot buttons if you wanted to slap restrictive laws on P2P since protecting copyrights doesn't get out the votes.
Oh, yeah the weather. I bike to work in new england: a very detailed forcast is critical to my saftey so this little victory is a serious win from my perspective. I already paid taxes for this data...be damned if I'll pay twice for it.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
TWC is actually a huge supporter of open source software, to the point of providing full time employment for a FreeBSD kernel developer. We've directly funded some other open source projects too, and try to give back in lots of ways.