Slashdot Mirror
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.
To think that a massive group like Slashdotters with the combined IQ of a flea has enough power to influence the Government of the United States at the departmental level, I'm floored.
But then I see who is the President there, and suddenly I'm a lot more worried. It's not just dumb Slashdotters making the important decisions in that country.
But the main point of all this is that it is good that the government uses open standards when disseminating information. Even PDF is a little too proprietary for me, I'd prefer releases in plain text or even RTF. But PDF and HTML work great for this kind of thing and enough freely-available software exists to decode those formats, so I'm temporarily satisfied.
Just to bring you down from your euphoric thoughts that the Slashdot crowd carries any political clout, I leave you with this quote....
Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
only old people NOAA bout the weather.