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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.
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.
63 - In Soviet Russia the weather updates you.
19 - Notices that this service is already provided by Goatse.cx
3 - Requests to add a feature that notifies you anytime Natalie Portman comes within 50 meters of hot grits.
16 - Pondering what a beowulf cluster of these might be like.
48 - Blasting the NOAA because Microsoft is secretly behind bad weather.
27 - Claimed the request was a dupe and cited existing services provided by the NOAA.
16 - Only old Koreans use the weather.
19 - Claims that "1 0wnz d4 w34th3r cuz 1m s0 133t"
193 - Users suggesting the NOAA needs to rely on perl, python, BSD, Linux, MySQL, PHP, emacs, vi, haskell, or ruby for all future development efforts.
1 - Comment suggesting the weather should be properly called GNU/Weather (thanks RMS!)
11 - Requested a change for notices about clear sunny days. The new notice will read, "Nothing to see here. Move along."
13 - Requesting that the raw weather data and weather forcasting software be sent as part of an ebuild that they could emerge and compile the report anytime they wanted, because they've got their Gentoo system totally tweaked out for this type of application.
27 - Asked for help getting WeatherBug to work correctly on Linux w/ Wine.
9 - Posts about how Netcraft had confirmed it, weather is dead.
1 - Comment with made up statistics about how important changing was.
1 - Comment with made up statistics about how important not changing was.
32 - EA employees asked for pictures, b/c they've never seen the light of day, a blue sky or snow lit by daylight.
1 - Comment that read...
Quite an impact.
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.