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Should Taxpayers Pay Twice For Weather Data?
theodp writes "Thanks to O.M.B. Circular A-130, taxpayers now enjoy free access to SEC, Patent Office, and IRS data over the Internet. Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
This is gonna kick up a storm.
Government: Hmm, hurricane heading towards Alabama.
People: Hmm, it's rainy all of a sudden. Let's check the weather....what? What do you mean we have to pay? Dammit, screw that.
Several thousand deaths later...
1) Make weather data available on net. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
We shouldn't even have to be paying once, weather data acquisition should be handled by the private sector and only the private sector. Really everything except for national defense should be handled by the private sector.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As the weather changes for the worse recently, freely available weather data could possibly save lives.
Highlighted by a recent incident where heavy rain fell, a river rose, and 700 people were evacuated at 1am in a camp ground. On the news a 10yo kid recounted how the water was ankle deep in his tent, when the family was woken for evac. Some hours later only the tent tops were visible.
The commercial weather incumbent couldnt warn these people. A camper in the internet cafe might of.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
How timely...
w .n ytimes.com/2005/01/23/business/yourmoney/23techno. html
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://ww
They'll skip options one and two and head straight to Option Three:
Declare the weather a matter of national security, and order that it be classified as sensitive material immediately.
i already get free weather reports on my xbox via xbmc. weather.com also has free weather. i dont see what the deal is. /doesnt pay taxes/
Those indigenous tribes that survived the tsunami did just fine without a weather report or the internet. Big ups to making it with two sticks in the nature.
This is just confusing -- the article briefly mentions the same thing:
"Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
Eh? Isn't the information already free? Go to the NWS website. Everything is all there -- I visit it all the time. Seems like the decision has already been made, and the trade groups are arguing after the fact. Who cares if violates an agreement -- it's their right to change it? What does the Bush Administration have anything to do with this when the decision has already been made?
The info should be free, especially if the info being made available over the Internet. If hardware is an issue, I'm sure Congress can spare selling off a couple of $500 toliet seats to get a nice Linux server and a fat pipe installed.
As for all these "pre-Internet" agreements, the times are a changing and the agreements should have a mandatory upgrade. There's no reason why the federal government should be subsidizing backward-thinking industries in the 21st century.
Data our taxes pay for, is public domain.
I don't think the courts would allow it any other way (should it get that far). If it does... think about what this could lead to:
- private companies like lexis-nexus being the only access to things like the Library of congress?
- private news networks the only way to read bills proposed on the state or federal level?
- Law Student need to read cases? Be prepaired to pay CourtTV several hundred dollars a month for access.
The Supreme Court is pretty conservative by any account, and tend to favor business over citizens rights (in the past 10 years)... but there's no way even they would let this one slip by.
Even their statements: public domain.
Data government creates is for the people.
http://www.weather.gov/ isn't good enough? they list all a crap-ton of weather stations, all you need to know is what city you want.
the ones that apparently got more or less wiped out. Yeah, some may have survived by following their instincts. But a) that's easier on a sharply-sloping, underpopulated island than in a flat, crowded Indian town and b) that doesn't mean we can't try to do better. And tribes in general only exist cos either we don't want their land or we're too namby-pamby to go in and wipe them out. That's industrialisation for you.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Is it just me, or does this sound like scare tactics? Would the National Weather Service hire fewer meteorologists or invest less in necessary equipment, instead spending the money on these public services? Or could public appreciation of the services actually mean better funding for the NWS, recouping the costs?
If anyone knows, has there been real criticism concerning the tsunami and the weather service? And secondly, what's the cost of these public services compared to the total budget?
I think this is just FUD, but if anyone has facts that say otherwise, I'll listen.
"This is gonna kick up a storm."
Hopefully no trailer parks will be harmed.
I see this as boiling down to a discussion as to the specific roll of government, and, as a possible precedent-setter for anything that deals with private/public conflicts.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
He added that the weather service might have done a better, faster job of warning about the southern Asian tsunami if it had not been distracted in this way. Sen. Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, where AccuWeather is based, has supported the industry group's position.
There's an argument here that suggests that the national weather service should provide one roll, monitoring and predicting weather, and leave the dissemenation of that information to the private sector.
The increadibly fallacious support for this is that (paraphrasing) "if the NWS is taking time to dissemenate their information, then obviously they aren't spending enough time predicting natural disasters,"
That's a crock, frankly.
Instead of charging heaps of money for the info via private sector (as a poster from Oz pointed out has heaps of humal life risks), simple (uh oh, here comes a dirty word) *expand* the NWS to include a whole division for making its findings available. Hell, even bring on some of the private sector people to lead that devision.
At the end of the day, our tax dollars are going to collect this data, we should be able to see it, and the Clinton-era protocols that call for it to be available at "no more than the cost of distribution" seems perfectly reasonable to me.
The roll of our government shouldn't be to garauntee corporate profits, *especially* where human lives are concerned.
They already do this: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/CTZ005.php? warnzone=ctz005&warncounty=ctc001
(noaa.gov)
how do these votes even come up? what idiot senator or whoever sits around and says hey lets double charge the citizens thats a great idea! our goverment needs a watchdog group that makes sure idiots stop coming up with ideas like this.. to bad those people would proably be just as corrupt.
I am able to retrieve all I want from the NWS for free already. I have no idea how Accuweather can sustain itself much longer. All the NWS needs to do is work with the cell providers and provide a free (airtime only) app for retrieving weather on cellphones and there ya go. WAP sites are nice, but Java and BREW apps are more capable the most WAP sites.
Gorkman
This article had nothing to do with making current weather information free! It is allready free, the US has the best weather service in the world, is the top country in the world for weather research, and its all FREE!! Check out MeteoFrance's website, you have to pay for info. Before you have a knee-jerk reaction: RTFA.
Personally, I don't think its a big issue, the only people who need a CD of archived data for the whole US would be researchers. As far as if you were curious about old weather data for your hometown you could probably go to your local weather field office and ask them for it (or check their website).
Now only the rich get to be saved from tornados, floods, and tidal waves!!!!
This implies, but doesn't state clearly, that its information should be made easily available to all
What I don't get is what exactly the NWS provides to the commercial weather services, and what exactly the companies do that they believe is being "duplicated" by the government.
My understanding was that the NWS simply collects raw data and feeds it to the companies. The companies do not actually collect weather data independently. Prior to the new rules, the NWS data was only available to said companies, which packaged it up with fancy graphics or some such nonsense. Now, anyone can download the data and set up their own service. Is this all true?
So, if the NWS is making fancy weather websites (and hence, directly competing with the companies), I agree that this might not be entirely fair (although I've seen this argument extended too far on occasion). On the other hand, if some random private individual wants to set up their own website to interpret the public data, what possible argument is there against this? I'm not clear on what exactly the industry association is objecting too - it sounds like a combination of both cases.
I found a Wired article from last month that made it a little clearer:
"Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [some weather company honcho] said."
That sounds like bullshit to me. Why should private companies be discriminated against? They're taxpayers too, at least in theory. The government shouldn't force them to go through some hideously expensive service to get the same info that the public receives for free. (Actually, though, this practice is unfortunately very common in academic sciences, largely as a way for universities to supplement their grant income.)
You could argue that the government shouldn't be in the business of collecting weather data at all - although I think there's a very strong case for the NWS even for libertarian types, since the primary role of government should be to protect our lives and property. So, assuming the NWS is a justified agency, there's no possible case for restricting access to the data to a few private companies.
pay the government for anything, let alone weather data. The National Weather Service, like any other government entity, is unconstitutional and should be abolished. There are private entities that already do the same things as the NWS. This just shows once again that the Republicrats just like to spend money that they don't have. The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans are DemocRATs are "Tax and spend" to where the RepubliCAN'Ts are "Borrow and Spend".
Vote Libertarian and people will have money to get everything that they want and don't have to pay for sh!t they don't want.
To the Mods, before you mod this down, this is not Offtopic, this is On-topic because it shows that the US Economy "Particularly the National Weather Service, a bunch of fucktards that can never get the past data let alone forecasts right to begin with" is in need of Libertarian Control, because they are the only ones that can pull of a true balanced budget, Clinton lied about having a balanced budget and Bush just doesn't give a fuck about a balanced budget. If you mod this down in any way, that proves that you're just a cowardly Republicrat bot that believes anything they tell you, instead of thinking freely on your own.
No, we shouldn't, but thanks for letting us know that we have another thing to bitch to our congresscritters about.
[o]_O
Last I checked, we had captialism. When did we switch to corporate communism? Captialism works just fine. I own a small biz but I hve no right to profits, only the right to provide a service that may or may not provide a profit.
the u.s. constitution text was only available for viewing in a proprietary file format you needed to buy a license for to just read?
Serenity now, insanity later.
I say that if the weather industry doesn't like, maybe they should pick up the bill themselvs and pay it completely. Why should my tax money fully fund something I'll have to pay for anyway?
Why am I not surprised? Where have I heard that word before....
Oh yeah....
Santorum!
He hates anal sex when it's someone else having fun, but when he gets to buttfuck the American public, he's all for it!
Is this slashdot.org or slashdot.org.us?
Don't assume "taxpayer" is well defined, 'cos it aint. Only some of us live in the USA.
I'm a student studying meteorology. I've got a lot of data and software available to me when I'm at school that simply isn't available when I'm not there. It's frustrating to search for certain data and find that it's unavailable.
The private weather industry reached an agreement with the NWS before the internet that defined the seperation between the two. There were certain things that private industry would not do that the government would. It set the responsibilities for both. However, with advances in technology and lower costs, private weather can perform many tasks that the government legitimately does. Thus, NOAA believes it's time to redefine the boundary between the two. Presumably this would allow for some overlap.
Government has always been responsible for things such as soundings, radars, and issuing watches and warnings. There's many other things the NWS does as well. NOAA has attempted to make data available to the public whenever possible. For example, you can get a lot of radar data shortly after it's received from a NOAA ftp site. This is a good thing.
The way I see it is private industry has spent lots of money investing in things the NWS already does. Instead of just accepting this, they want to make money by taking over things that are normally done by the government and reducing the government's role.
Research is rarely profitable in the short term. It's an investment. Research in the meteorological community is ongoing. Constantly, work is being done to improve the data collected, our understanding of the weather, and the methods used to analyze the data. By taking things such as radar out of the hands of the government, we sacrifice the research that is currently being done. Remember, private industry isn't going to make the investment in research that the government is. After all, research doesn't make a profit quickly and doesn't impress investors.
IMHO, private industry is overstepping their bounds here. They're infringing into things the government already does. And they're pretending to be the victims in this.
If private industry gets their way, everyone who doesn't have a financial stake in this loses.
Right. The "duplication of service" is duplication of distribution to the public. The companies in this business receive the data free from the NWS and resell it at a large markup to the public. If the NSW provides weather data to the public, it will be duplicating the companies' service. In short, duplication is not a real issue here. What is at issue is that certain companies have made a business of getting information free and selling it and they don't want their business undercut by everyone being able to get the raw data.
ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
If Wx data were publically available, we run the risk of weathermen like this instead of the highly trained media professionals we have now.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You're absolutely correct. But this is about more than disseminating data.
Private industry wants to take over actually collecting the data. They can't tell the NWS what to do with data the NWS collects, but they want to take collection of data out of the NWS' control. That's what the article is saying.
What's so wrong about this is research is rarely profitable in a short period of time. Industry is about impressing shareholders as much as it is about producing a product. I'm of the opinion that taking data collection out of the hands of the government will stifle research to improve our ability to collect this data.
This is extremely important, especially in areas such as radar. The WSR-88D radars, many of which were deployed in the early 1990s, were developed through years of research. They have the important feature that their predecessors don't of being able to detect motion, not just reflectivity. This allows meteorologists to detect things such as rotation and better issue warnings (particularly tornado warnings)! It's important that this research continue.
That's really why private industry's stance on this is dangerous and flawed.
let's just be sure it is accurate.
I'd like to know exactly how that comment was a troll...
/. agenda pansy who's every scoring action is nothing less than jigoism. I guess the political views of you and your fellow moderators are so weak that they cannot withstand arguement. I feel sorry for your freinds, if you actually have any that can stand your one-sided viewpoints for very long.
However, slashdot moderators have proven time and again that their moderation has no basis in fairness at all. Simply put, their behavior is like a group of kids in high-school that are often referred to as the "in-crowd". If your opinion does not agree with theirs you will be moderated down, whether or not that moderation makes sense.
Mr. Moderator, you're nothing more that a
Why did the parent get modded down? It's factually correct while making a couple of good points.
Really, that's fine with me. The poor (and trolls) are such a bother anyhow, and it's a lot cheaper than dispensing bullets.
I don't see this in the article. It just talks about dissemination. Am I missing something? Where do you get the idea that the private companies want to take over collection of the information?
I remember when a local locksmith sued the city to stop police from unlocking cars for people who had locked their keys inside, on the principal that the city was unfairly competing with his business. Now the cops only do it in an emergency (like a kid inside, or the engine is running). I agree. A government doesn't have to conform to market pressures like a for-profit business does. Taxes can be used to subsidize the government offerings. It can be very unfair "competition." Nevertheless in some cases, it is proper.
I sympathize with a business who has the government come in and compete or give away something that destroys his business model. I think the goverment should only do this when there is a compelling need or it is a necessary government function. Otherwise a security company would complain that the city police are "competing" when they do neighborhood patrols or accompany store managers to banks to make night deposits. Sometimes, a particular services becomes so important that i migrates from private providers to the goverment providing it. Fire protection is like that... 160 years ago is was largely privately provided (often by insurance companies) but now it is chiefly provided by government. Schools are another example.
I think NWS data falls in the latter category. NWS data is a legitimate government function like fire and police services. What the private sector needs to do is offer a better or different or added-value product that people will want to pay for, or get into another line of business. Like the security company that offers private security guards by offering services the police don't.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding that, but that's how I took it.
BTW, private industry has invested in this sort of thing. Just look at all the local TV stations with doppler radar and that run their own computer models.
Well, considering if they are charging for the data, thats a revinew source for the NWS, if they gave it away for free, they would have to get money to support them another way, which would basicly mean they would have to request more money from the government, thus people would pay higher taxes.
Considering most people get their weather from the news stations, or things like the weather channel, they arn't really paying for it as is, so weather or not it's free to them doesn't matter.
It's not like the mass populace is going for this data and generating their own forecast. To say this puts peoples lives at risk is pure insanity, people will just check the news as they always have.
The important thing is that the government make data available, weather or not it's free does not matter. Infact I prefer the government to make money off data that is only important to companies that use it to make money. Let companies subsidize the cost of government.
Yes, they should. Might make the tax funded part less for those of us who don't use this data
I think they just mean dissemination, not collection. Look at the preceding paragraph:
That says that the government should continue to do the collection but not disseminate the information to the public.The information that local TV stations collect is different. It's current, local information.
Reading this article brings several things to mind when it comes to "free" weather data for the public. Yes, taxpayers have already payed for their taxes (hence, service) for the NWS. The NWS primary responsibilty is to protect life and property, but in doing so, a huge amount of data is amassed. Yes, much/all of this data is available in *real time* from sources such as www.weather.gov . I believe the big arguement is acquring 1) historical data, and 2) certified data. Acuiring historical data is done through the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), located in Ashville, NC. There, they specialize in the collection and storage of not only data that is recorded today, but data that has been collected over the past 150 years (or more). If a person wishes to receive some forms of historical data, they will have to go through NCDC. I feel that that is wrong, and that you, the taxpayer have already paid for the information, and should be given it for free. But, issue 2 brings up many valid arguements of why to pay for data. Certified data is often used in litigation, and is recognized as being official weather data in the court of law. Litigation issues could range from being paid for non-workable days in the construction industry, to insurance payments from destructive weather forces. I believe that paying a nominal fee for certified data IS acceptable. There needs to be an official source afterall. The larger issue at hand though is, as some have mentioned, the fact that several companies are making large amounts of money reselling free data already provided by the NWS. Many wishful thoughts I have heard from the private industry is that the NWS only collect the data, and issue warnings (and maybe not even issue warnings). People in this country need to have an OFFICIAL source of weather information. Could you imagine trying to get a Tornado Warning that was ISSUED by television stations? Channel 12 may issue a tornado warning, but Channel 8 may not. Which one do you listen to? And what about liability issues? These are just some of the thoughts I have with the issue of gov't/private weather industry. I think alot can be gained from the arangement that was developed between the NWS and AWS. I hope others in the industry realize that by sharing the large amount of data between all players, we can do a great job of serving the public as well as further the field of Meteorology.
Data our taxes pay for, is public domain.
Data isn't "public domain" - it's free, because you can't copyright data at all.
What MAY be covered by copyright is a PRESENTATION of data - i.e. a photo, diagram, map, etc. I can freely distribute a list of temperatures at various coordinates if I can get a copy of it no matter who first obtained that data, but I can only distribute a color-coded map of that data with permission from that map's creator.
paintball
It's kicking up some cool innovation. If you use Firefox, you can use the WeatherFox extension that uses this service. Now, I have nifty icons in my status bar and other information telling me my weather forcast.
This is very helpful for me, as I'm on a farm where weather changes are very important to know. I'm quite happy I no longer have to look at weather.com and its horrid layout.
The companies in question are NOT paying for the data, the taxpayers are. Perhaps, if the companies are intending to collect their own data, the NWS should be disbanded and the savings returned to the taxpayer? Or perhaps the NWS could be funded by charitable donations, instead of under threat of imprisonment?
Well let me see... citing the legal precedent of taxpayers paying twice for everything else... I think I can predict the outcome of this one. :(
You may be correct. But I've found this quote from the CWSA's site where they actually discuss the 1991 agreement:
"The NWS will not compete with the private sector when a service is currently provided or can be provided by commercial enterprises, unless otherwise directed by applicable law."
TV stations are a form of private weather. What's the difference between a doppler radar operated by TV stations and by the NWS?
Also, the article talks about the NWS being distracted by certain responsibilities and they would do a better job issuing warnings if they weren't distracted.
For what it's worth, there's already a lot of data from the NWS not distributed in an easily viewed form. Try, for example, looking through the NWS sites for a radar image of radial velocity or storm relative radial velocity. You'll find the raw level 3 data on an FTP but you won't find an image.
My college class took a trip to our local NWS weather station.
The guy working there said the data is currently available to people at essentially media cost. They just don't have it on the internet yet.
This is where your local weatherman gets their report. The NWS runs models for up to 3 days in the future. Then AcuWeather and others take the result and digest it some more to get your extended forecasts. They do this because the NWS has the most reliable data gathering equipment (several thousand data poings on the GROUND alone in Indiana). They said the satellites are one thing, but they don't tell the whole story.
The problem is that the redigesting companies don't want the NWS to essentially give away the information that they're selling (which they get from the NWS for a small fee...) Woohoo for lobbyists!
Like the great CS professor Mike Atallah said: If many pay and few benefit, it will pass. If few pay and many benefit, they'll scream bloody murder and it won't happen.
boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse
Tragedy struck this morning as famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman was struck by a fairly harsh breeze. His wife's ghost, Miss Ingrid Bergman, has confirmed that Ingmar himself is alive and well, sustaining only minor injuries to his hat.
But if they decide to individually tax us (in addition to our current taxes), that's going to hurt some people. If they really need the money so badly, put something like this on their webpage... "If you wish to see this service continue, please consider donating by clicking here. Our goal is _amount_ by _date_. Thank you."
For example, Environment Canada has tons of information available, including:
Please note that most of the time the above linked pages state "CDROM", there is a link near to an ISO! (e.g. the line For those with a high speed Internet connection a HYDAT CD-ROM image (105MB ZIP) is available for download.")
Then I have to mention that I abhor the subsidizing of these private companies by using the money we taxpayers have used to create this network of weather sensors.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
...the words "SEC", "Patent Office","IRS" and "Bush administration" aren't very clearly defined either, how the hell are we supposed to know what country this article is talking about?? On behalf of all Slashdotters, we thank you for lodging this very valid complaint sir!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
The NWS offers WAP services at: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/wml
http://okmij.org/ftp/papers/Scheme-Metcast-paper.p s.gz
s .gz
http://okmij.org/ftp/papers/Scheme-Metcast-talk.p
Getting weather data using Scheme.
What "most people" do doesn't matter. What a few people can create based on this matters a lot.
If the information is only available privately, why should I as a taxpayer pay for any of the collection of the information? I'm not interested in subsidizing something I can't use.
Restricting information generally limits its usefulness. Suppose, for example, I want to make an OSS program that displays the temperature or cloud cover at the user's location. Or maybe something for amateur astronomy, that looks at the cloud cover to predict whether or not the skies will be clear all night long. Or, I want to study past weather data just to see what I can come up with.
It's very shortsighted to expect that the best way to increase revenues is to have companies pay. The best way is to stimulate growth overall - open information and new ideas create jobs and tax revenue.
And exactly why should the gov't be in the business of creating high-quality images of storm relative velocity? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that a free-market would be in a better position to provide? BTW, the NIDS structure is open and available. You can, realtively easily, write your own ftp ingest process and image creation. It should only take about 3-4 man-weeks.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
"You'll find the raw level 3 data on an FTP but you won't find an image."
OpenDX is your friend.
There are java programs out there that get the raw data and put it in a useful form. You're going to have to google for this. It's been awhile since I had to work with weather data at that level.
With such a contentious issue like this, it's a good thing the title of the story isn't biased in any way. I really appreciate how Slashdot serves to be such a mediating influence.
That data is generated by NWS radars and NWS computers. They already provide base reflectivity, composite reflectivity, and 1 hour and storm total precipitation totals. Why shouldn't they include radial velocity images along with it if they're already producing those products?
And for what it's worth, I already do exactly what you're describing. But that doesn't mean that most people are going to do that. I'm an atmospheric science major and many of my fellow students know very little about programming.
Nobody is stopping you from going out and collecting your own weather observations and selling that data to whoever will buy it. However, the government does some things because it is more efficient to do so. Could you imagine if the government didn't do weather and private companies were the only source of information. No hurricane alerts for Florida unless you pay for the information. No crop alerts for the mid-West unless you pay for them. Don't even think about going surfing in California without paying for a report on where the weather is best. Yup, that is what capitalism is about - ripping off everyone you possibly can and screw common decency.
Of course, free-market capitalism is really all about competition. So if you didn't want to be ripped off for weather information you could have 10 companies all collecting the same information (er, Fred, what's the temperature in Dubuque?) - yeah, that's smart - more like a waste of money.
In sum, it makes sense for the government to do some things and provide the information for as near to free as possible.
This decision has already been made, in the first week of December.
Not only that, the already-made decision has been covered by slashdot, not once, but twice! (If a duplicate story is "dupe", perhaps an incorrect triplicate story should be referred to, appropriately, as "tripe".)
And the answer is a resounding no, taxpayers will NOT have to "pay twice" for access to weather data.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open-access XML format, alleviating concerns that commercial providers would continue to play a dominant role in how weather data gets to the public.
"The public should not have to pay twice for access to basic government information that has been created at taxpayer expense," wrote Ari Schwartz, an associate director of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, in a July 28, 2004, essay.
Earlier this year, NOAA made the data available in XML as a test, called the National Digital Forecast Database. After receiving comments from the public and commercial providers, the agency made the decision permanent this week. Now anyone can get information in an XML format directly from the National Digital Forecast Database website.
Full story
slashdot coverage #1
slashdot coverage #2
Of course, this information has always been publicly accessible: it's just a matter of ease. The National Weather Service now makes its weather feeds accessible to anyone in open formats, like XML and RSS. Of course the commercial weather reporting industry is against it: surprise, surprise.
Yup, that is what capitalism is about - ripping off everyone you possibly can and screw common decency.
First of all, your idiot for trusting the government over the free market being that it's the free market that provides polititions with profit you might not otherwise be aware of. At least in a free market, you can vote with your wallet. In government, you should only have to vote with your voice via ticket.
Life is not for the lazy.
That used to be correct. You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA. The policy the commercial weather firms arranged with the NOAA fourteen years ago was a statement that the NOAA wouldn't compete with the commercial firms, in terms of providing "finished" content.
I think the "competition" you were asking about occurred in 2003 when the NOAA started experimenting with making "point forecasts" available to the public: the weather firms cried foul. The NOAA decided to revisit their policy last year, and they requested public comment. The public outcry was loud and clear: if the NOAA was processing data at public expense, the NOAA was expected to make the processed data available to the public. And, surprisingly enough, it became their new policy despite complaints from the commercial firms. It's called the "Fair Weather Policy".
So, the point forecasts are now available on-line. How has that changed things? Not much. People still turn to the local TV station for weather in the morning, and they tune in to The Weather Channel if they're heading to the beach or the mountains.
I think where the main effect has been felt is in the industrial sector. For example, concrete companies typically rely on a very precise two hour forecast to ensure their new sidewalks won't get rained on. They used to pay lots of money to private meterologists who "insured" their forecasts (for $499.00 we'll guarantee you'll see no rain in the next two hours or we pay you $10,000.) But with NOAA point forecasts available, as a concrete company I'd be likely to take my own chances regarding rain.
John
"classify material that shouldn't have been?"
Answer is, depends on what "you" think should or shouldn't be hidden. And any two "yous" would give a different answer.
Generally speaking, they want to classify more data, and restrict it, it's been in the news a lot off and on.
You are not signed in, so I will only provide one generic example for you, the case of Sibel Edmonds. (scroll down the page or run your own search on that name) So there ya go. In this case the feds want to classify, or to re classify the testimony of one of their own-a serious whistleblower- who gave credible and detailed evidence of (some aspects thereof to be accurate) government prior knowledge to the 9-11 attacks and some other related crimes.
There's more, google, intelligently selected keywords and phrases and paying closer attention than the median-norm to the news on a *daily* basis, beyond the headlines I mean, works quite well for answering US political questions like that.
There is absolutely no need for tin foil hat isms, the US government provides all the bona fide strange conspiracies and crimes that anyone could ever use. All the evidence of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is hiding in plain sight,a huge variety, hence they are desparately trying to get a handle on that evidence, without appearing to do so, and to get it re hidden back buried down deep in the bowels of chronically and criminally corrupt bureaucracy, by more advanced obfuscation, either by outright law,agency dictate, e branch edict,or merely because "they can", and just mumble "national security"..
They got caught with their pants down by the rapid rise of the internet and the way information is able to be found, even by "the common man", so they want to stifle it. It is by the slow boiling frog technique, but the fire is lit, and the frog is sitting there enjoying the hot tub action. It's up to people who have an interest in the rapidly approaching archaic and close-to anachronistic concepts of "freedom" and "honesty" to help wake the durn frog up, and get him to abandon the heated pot of boiling "political awareness" obscurity.
Of course taxpayers should be forced to pay twice! America represents government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. The people don't get a look-in.
On a similar note DRM schemes and region coding are obviously good things, because corporations want them.
And Linux is a cancer invented by communists. Bill Gates says so, so it must be true.
2004 just called, and it wishes to point out that information is no longer scarce, nor costly to disseminate.
Taxpayer funded information should be freely avaiable to every citizen. We have paid for this information with our taxes. We should not have to pay twice.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Is this like one of these advertisements that says you can get it for only two easy payments of 9.95?
Seriously though, you're going to pay for it one way or another. What's the difference between paying once in taxes and again to use the information and just paying it all in taxes? People complain about the strangest things.
What are you talking about? This?
You do understand the computer requirements to provide such a thing at all right?
154 radars X 20 some products a scan X 10 scans an hour = a whole shitload of data. About 500,000 files a day.
The gov't isn't doing enough making this data reliably available via NoaaPort satellite feeds and CRS and FTP, but now they should process all that data, plot it over base maps, and make it available to the public? Just so a few dumbasses in atmospheric science don't have to program? Your perception of reality, and the perception of the reality of all this data, and the value of programmers and sys admins time, is severely warped. Enjoy college.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
it's free printed money. Thanks repubs! You controll all 3 branches now, no excuse.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Seeing as how they were evacuated before they got flooded out, it sounds to me like they did get warned and spared the disaster.
TV stations, radio stations, desktop weather applications, government siren towers -- all provide warnings. If no one in the camp was running a TV, radio, or computer, and they weren't within range of a warning siren how do you propose the "weather incumbent" *or* the government have alerted them? Obviously they were warned somehow since they got out while it was still ankle-deep.
Also, don't forget the use of Doppler radar for weather was invented by a TV meteorologist, a commercial provider, not by the government (Gary England at KWTV in Oklahoma City).
Before you bash the commercial providers, you better take a real hard look at what we do. We take early notification very seriously and constantly work to improve the quality and lead-time of the notifications. I work work for a weather and notification software company, and we've gotten letters from people whose lives were saved by alerts given by our software -- people that left their houses because of a warning we sent, and returned later to find their houses destroyed by the very tornado we warned them about.
This message brought to you by the Ayn Rand School for Tots.
Are they running their own models? Or are they just buying some subscription to something that got lightly customized to make it look like it was done at the station?
Nice reply.
The data is already processed. Those images you see are just representations over level III data plotted over base maps. They already produce all of that level 3 data.
So, the only thing they would be doing is plotting data they've already got.
By the way, you're also incorrect about the government's priorities. After posting, I examined the NWS site and apparently they're creating new images for some radars which plot the data over a view of the terrain. And they've also produced some radial velocity images along with it. This data isn't available for most of the radar sites, but it is being developed.
Furthermore, not too long ago, the NHC was requesting comments on modifying some of its images issued to the public.
If the NWS didn't feel these things were important, would they be doing these things?
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/3/04
We have taxation to pay for infrastructure and services that individuals and small communities cannot afford alone. In my country we have the highest level of taxation as a proportion of GDP ever, but still have an increasing amount of "user pays" charges, and a noticable decline in services.
Look, there would have to be some new PROCESS to get the data to this "simple" image plotter. So they would have to further "process" the data before creating the image. But let's not split hairs.
My question involved your understanding of the computer requirements to provide highly available, high quality radar images via the web. You answer is obviously a resounding 'NO'.
Furthermore, the NHC shit has to do with where and how early they issue warnings, because it affects toursim. Or are we talking about different NHC shit?
Lastly, I'm not one to speculate on the intentions of the NWS. I'm happy for them and you that they are developing cool new images, but I wish their ftp servers were snappier, and had less problems with multiple computers behind a NAT. Their load balancer is teh suxor.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
Yes.
If they are going to process it at all (which they already do) then the resultant data which we the taxpayers paid them to process should be freely available to us. That's what the original article said, it's what OMB Circular A-130 requires, and it's what the NWS acknowledged in their Fair Weather Policy of December, 2004.
John
I hope the parent was trying to be funny. The person who modded it Insightful has just stepped out to polish his Yugo.
Don't you know that weather is a considerable factor in military operations?
Indeed. One can write state secrets on a paper napkin with a #2 pencil too. Should the Government take over production and distribution of napkins and pencils now?
.... but I miss the days of BBS weather.
The cruel irony is that we're paying to subsidize these private businesses that Senator Santorum (R-PA) is "protecting" in his district from government competition. All the weather services get their weather data from the taxpayer-funded NWS, rather than pay to generate their own. Now Santorum is frothing about how the services the businesses do provide must prevent the NWS from providing, even where the NWS provides superior services. Some of which save lives, not just money. It's like Santorum thinks the NWS exists just to subsidize AccuWeather, not to improve Americans' ability to cope with the weather when AccuWeather isn't good enough.
--
make install -not war
Actually I do understand the computer requirements. It's a lot of data and a lot of bandwidth. That's true.
And as far as the NHC, I'll show you what I'm talking about.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphicsprototypes.shtml
Lastly, the NWS is constantly modifying their site. The colors on the map on the front page of weather.gov were changed, they've introduced gridpoint forecasts, experimental graphical forecasts, and several other things within the last year or two. Some of the offices go farther, such as the Norman, OK office which has an enhanced page displaying information about severe weather in the area. And at times new forecasts and new graphics are added. For example, it hasn't been too long ago, a few years or so, since the SPC started producing a day 3 convective outlook.
I agree too about their issues with servers. You'll get no argument from me there.
By the way, I just used radial velocity images as an example of data that's produced but not distributed. NCEP distributes some data produced by computer models, and it's very useful, but stuff like forecast soundings aren't distributed AFAIK. My original point was there's lots of data they're already not distributing and as someone who's thankful for what they do distribute, I hope the private weather industry doesn't cause some of those products to go offline as well.
Back around 1990, the FAA was spending large amounts of money providing flight planning and weather briefing services, most often to private or charter pilots - the big airlines already had their own services.
So they contracted with several companies to provide on-line (dial-up, 2400bps) weather data. Taxpayers got angry because they didn't like providing free computer service to pilots, everyone got a black eye.. so they went back to the old, expensive way.
Should Taxpayers Pay Twice For Weather Data?
A better question would have been "Should anybody pay twice for anything?" and the answer, of course, is "No, you idiot."
Prisoner: Who are you?
Number Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Number Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man.
[Source]
As the foregoing demonstrates, the grade of the pencil determines a man's station in the security state: Number Two has power over Number Six, but not vice-versa.
-kgj
-kgj
It isn't a revenue source for the NWS. The federal government doesn't work that way. All of the money collected by the NWS, or any other government agency, goes into the general fund. The only way for the NWS to get money from the general fund is through the congressional budget process.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You, Private Citizen, have always been free to collect the raw data from the NOAA.
Ahhh, I see now - the new XML feed is actually the weather forecasts. So, I guess the obvious followup question is, does the government have a legitimate interest making these weather forecasts or is NOAA just doing it because some of their meteorologists thought it'd be fun or wanted to compete with the commercial services? It certainly makes sense that if these forecasts are being made already we should have equal access, but what was their original purpose?
Although written in the exact format as the traditional Slashdot "such-and-such is dead" offtopic trolls, and posted by a GNAA member no less... Johnny Carson is actually dead according to MSNBC which makes the parent post actually quite funny, in an ironic sense.
Slashdot: Where explaining the joke still won't make it funny, but it might make it +1 Funny.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Can't count how many folks I connected on C64s at 300-baud with the promise that if they kept at it, someday they'd have access to all the NWS and NASA data right on their screens, with a graphical joysick to move around between, in just-about real-time from when the probes/satellites fed it to us. I banked on personal experience having built some of the damned probes... They bought it, too. Some lie, eh?
The weather service has had RSS and XML data feeds available online for over a year.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/
Although they term this as "experimental", there's nothing experimental about it as many information services use this feed to RESELL to their customers.
Many of the weather alert paging services you find on the Internet also use these feeds.
FURTHERMORE, the data has always been freely available to those willing to buy a satellite receiver (Zephyrus) and point it to the right geosyncronous bird. The software to make sense of the binary data (particularily NEXRAD and composite radar data) is not free.
... is available at http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/.
It doesn't matter if we pay once or twice, there is a flow of money in to productivity such as this:
Money
Productivity
Weather data.
If there is less money comming in one channel(charging after the fact) there needs to me more money comming in the other channel(taxes) in order to keep the same amount of weather data at the same productivity. Learn economics before you try playing politics.
What are you guys talking about? This stuff is available for free both from NOAA FTP servers and via satellite. Where do you think Weather Underground gets their data? (I know, I've talked with them.)
What is at issue is that certain companies have made a business of getting information free and selling it and they don't want their business undercut by everyone being able to get the raw data.
Exactly, as far as I understand it. As far as I'm concerned, the public should be the direct benificiary of tax dollars spent.
Logic, macros, and more
Let's turn this around - what would the Bush adminstrations say if Accuweather could either only disseminate its information through the NWS and allow the government to collect the profits or pay a tax on revenue made from distributing information to compensate the government for lost revenue? I'm sure the neo-cons would agree that propping up an inefficient government agency and discouraging private innovation in this manner is a bad idea..
So then why is the converse so hard to see. The NWS provides accurate information. In addition, this service needs to exist for other reasons (security, emergency response etc.) So is it not more sensible then to encourage the NWS to disseminate its information at a very marginal cost rather than propping up a parasitic enterprise with a flawed business model? If Accuweather does provide value added in more efficient data dissemination - then shouldn't it be able to make a profit without having to depend upon the indulgence of the NWS?
Seems someone is hiding (and profiting of course..) behind the mantra "government is bad, private is good" again and the taxpayers will foot the bill...
The world's best research sees its first incarnation on bar napkins across the globe.
Bar napkins in strip joints, if we're lucky.
-kgj
-kgj
Around the time of the American Civil War, and the Gilded Age that followed:
-kgj
What's new here is the technology allows the NWS to provide forecast data for an exact location. It was simply a byproduct of producing an accurate forecast. The NWS simply stuck on a web front end to allow everyone access to it.
I still think the industry is not going to serve themselves well by pushing this into Congress. Right now, the vast majority of the public is blissfully unaware that if they type weather.gov instead of weather.com into their browsers, they get good local information with no advertising. Once the Commercial Weather Services Association starts raising a stink in the Senate, I think the NWS is going to make a lot of front pages around the country. I believe the NWS will get a lot more customers at the expense of The Weather Channel.
John
In a truly free market you get to hand your wallet to JP Morgan or any of the other robber barons that used to dominate America.
...? Why the past tense?
... and so on.
What do you mean, used to
* Prescott Bush and Union Bank
* Savings and Loan Scandal
* Ken Lay and Enron
-kgj
"As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."
-- Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864
[Source ]
-kgj
charging for it is against the law
The internet weather companies, and their front organization, are continually propagating the lie that "these services already exist" in the private sector. The fact is that they are trying to steal the commons and then charge the community for access to it. They DO NOT launch their own weather satellites, NOR do they build and man their own NexRad radar sites. They get the weather data THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDES AT TAXPAYER'S EXPENSE and repackage it with talking heads and lots of ads, except that the product they deliver is often 15 or more minutes behind the actual weather, minutes that can mean the difference between life and death when a tornado is bearing down. NOAA NextRad sites are usually less than 7 minutes or less behind the actual weather. I can access the Omaha site and determine the approaching weather within 7 minutes of accuracy. The Weather channel makes available only 75 access points to cover the entire country. Lincoln is not one of them, so I am stuck with a North Central regional map. Not very handy if I wanted to determine last spring if the F4 tornado that hit Hallam 20 miles to the south west was going to roll over Lincoln or pass south of it. The desktop access app from the Weather Channel would cost me $60/year and is a box smaller in size than the NOAA nexrad animations, but it is surrounded by tons of ads which cycle constantly, eating bandwidth and slowing response time for the actual weather information update.
The reason why the weather companies are taking this political tack (Part Duce) is because they lost a recent PUBLIC battle to persuade NOAA sites to shut down public access. NOAA requested public input on the question and recieved over 1,400 responsible replies. The response was in favor of continuing free public access to NOAA weather sites by a ratio of better than 99 to 1. Now they are working behind CLOSED DOORS lobbying congress and , no doubt, buying with 'campaign donations' what their poor logic couldn't win in the court of public opinion.
This statement reflects a misconception about "data" and "grants." I'm amused to be repeating an argument that I made nearly 20 years ago, while a grad student.
If I write a proposal to NSF to run an experiment and "get some data" then it is true in a sense that the US citizen/taxpayers "paid for that data." But that doesn't mean that they get to see it. You see, the point in these experiments is to "get data" and then "analyze it" and then "make some interesting conclusions." Typically the funded grant did not have a budget item "salary for a WWW-dude and disk space to distribute all this data to who ever wants it."
As it happens, many people these days (including me) work pretty hard to make our raw data available. But very very often the effort to do that is completely donated effort, done at midnight, on weekends,
Believe me, there is nothing the science community would like more than money for new IT salary lines, which we desperately need. But as long as Congress keeps shafting NSF, it simply isn't going to happen.
The general public often has unrealistic notions of what "raw data" is anyway. Our instrument can generate 20 GBytes/day if we turn on all the bells and whistles. I know of instruments which generate several GBytes per second, and radio astronomers are thinking of ways to generate TBytes/second. For data rates like that, SneakerNet is still about the only viable distribution mechanism.
While I *do* agree that if U.S. taxpayers are already paying for the govt. to research weather conditions, then we have the right to see all of that info -- I also think private industry should feel free to "infringe" on any of these govt. functions they like.
I don't think private industry should have any legal leverage to try to force govt. not to perform some of the functions of weather forecasting they're doing today - but I see absolutely no harm in them opting to compete with them either.
If some private firm can prove they're consistently more accurate in their forecasting than the NOAA, then great! Weather forecasting is still FAR from perfected, and the more people who want to work towards improving it - the better off we'll all eventually be.
Granted, the costs per person will be tiny, wait, I take that back, we'll make future generations pay off the costs at whatever inflation is + interest... Anyway, the government's going to be facing higher bandwith bills, speeds will go down because the servers will be accessed more. Since speeds go down, that uses up more of my time, which is priceless.
Im sorry dickwad, you missed it by a long shot. Either do it right or go get a fucking life.
saying "Obviously they were warned somehow since they got out while it was still ankle-deep." is like saying someone who got mugged already had warning after getting hit on the head. a warning isn't worth jack shit if it comes after the fact.
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research. That used to take the form of funding for publication and travel to conferences, but some grants now include some money for publishing the data. Of course, how expensive that is varies considerably from field to field.
There's no shortage of gross, inexcusable fuckups by Bush. Whatever the govt's eventual position, this doesn't even register.
But sure, go ahead and paint all critics as desperate nitpickers. Good luck with that. It's almost as good as the much cherished "straw man" technique.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
... and this parent's comment is correct. The point is, if the proposal is funded, and doesn't promise dissemination of raw data, then dissemination of that raw data is not obligated. In my corner of NSF, dissemination of raw data is widely encouraged ... and rarely funded. Our (enlightened, and broke) program managers encourage us to do what we can, w.r.t. dissemination of raw data, but do not expect miracles.
You want to make us pay twice? You want to make
us pay twice? Well, well, we will just we will
just repeat everything repeat everything twice
in the amount twice in the amount of paperwork
of paperwork you have to do you have to do,
and require you require you to do the same thing
to do the same thing. You will also have to
you will also have to do any task you do twice,
do any task you do twice.
You won't get double the pay, though.
But why should WE, the United States taxpayer be paying for stuff free for the rest of the world to look at? Canada/Mexico/etc aren't paying taxes to fund NOAA, but Candians/Mexicans/etc can look at the data for free. But if NOAA gets into a budget crunch, will the governments of those countries pitch in to help? The same goes for other government data, such as NASA's.
Should Taxpayers Pay Twice For Weather Data?
Uhm.... yeah? (ducks)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Let me think...
You're taxed for making money...
You're taxed for saving money...
You're taxed for spending money...
and if you should give it away when you die, it's taxed again...
Seems to me they're slipping with the weather if they're only taxing you twice.
Genda
Parent's point is well taken, but not entirely true. NSF grants, at least, often do include some funds for dissemination of the results of the research.
Parent's point was entirely wrong in many circumstances. In the specific cases I was thinking of, grants are explicitly given to further the development of various software packages that are useful to a given field. In my case, structural biology. The actual title of many of these grants reflects this. The explicit expectation is that this software will be available to the scientific community - the NIH isn't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars so some professor can hoard his code or soak the rest of academia with outrageous costs. They most certainly are being paid to disseminate their research, since it's technique development rather than pure basic research.
However, the rules also permit them to apply a seperate (very harsh) commercial license to the software. Hence, a package which is legally available as source to academics is only available to companies as a binary from some company that in many cases has done little more than slap on a proprietary interface. The bulk of the program was developed with public funding. I've seen the end result of this system when it doesn't work, and it was a disaster. Unfortunately, it's pretty much standard practice. (Personally, however, the presence of closed-source academic software pisses me off much more, especially when I find bugs in it but am unable to do anything about it.)
ignoring complaints from an industry
The Bush Administration? Ignoring complaints from industry lobbyists?
Maybe I'm cynical.... but get real.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
if we are talking weather data, then you all have a midlife crisis to deal with. i deal with it by going to groovybooty and checking out all the young hot chicks. no kidding but a midlife crisis is a very serious problem!!
I read "its terrorists.."
Traditionally, the data was in formats that required a lot of work to do much with... model data, radar data, even a "simple" METAR - a current observation - can be a bitch to decode.
Now technology has developed - XML - that makes it easier for a programmer to use the data. This actually lowers the cost of entry for someone to do something cool, useful or profitable.
Only the old-time commercial weather companies have a vested interest in keeping the status quo - after all they invested a lot of money writing decoders for wx data.
It's been long said if you business case is reformatting NWS data, you have a crappy business case. True value adds include:
* integrating other data that NWS doesn't have to NWS data. Things like pollen counts;
* running stats against NWS data to create new products - providing hourly or 30 minutes temperature curves.
The technical point is NWS traditionally diseminates their stuff in some pretty complex formats that require a good amount of code to decode into something useful. Some of these formats - some are even mandated by international treaty - go back decades (WMO requires the use of ALL CAPS for example ... a throw back to the age of teletype machines).
Now technologies like XML come along that lower the cost for someone to do something cool that might make a profit or do a public service.
If you are Accuwx, you might be a bit pissed that all that money spent writing decodes might go down the john.
So what they are really trying to do is stifle other private sector companies from getting in on the action.
IMHO, lowering the cost of entry will only improve service to everyone.
Two words that sound the same ("wether" and "weather".) Mistakes follow.
...a storm in a teacup...
And whose fault is it, that he makes himself so emminently bashable?
This is just another step in the privatization parade. The rationale will be to make government smaller (at least the parts that aren't spying on us), but the effect will be to replace civil servants - who can't legally lobby congress or contribute to political campaigns - with private interests that can. The Repubs get a massive patronage system funded with tax dollars, and we will get government services that are designed to benefit the providers, not regular citizens.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
The internet weather companies, and their front organization, are continually propagating the lie that "these services already exist" in the private sector. The fact is that they are trying to steal the commons and then charge the community for access to it. They DO NOT launch their own weather satellites, NOR do they build and man their own NexRad radar sites. They get the weather data THE GOVERNMENT PROVIDES AT TAXPAYER'S EXPENSE and repackage it with talking heads and lots of ads, except that the product they deliver is often 15 or more minutes behind the actual weather, minutes that can mean the difference between life and death when a tornado is bearing down. NOAA NextRad sites are usually less than 7 minutes or less behind the actual weather. I can access the Omaha site and determine the approaching weather within 7 minutes of accuracy. The Weather channel makes available only 75 access points to cover the entire country. Lincoln is not one of them, so I am stuck with a North Central regional map. Not very handy if I wanted to determine last spring if the F4 tornado that hit Hallam 20 miles to the south west was going to roll over Lincoln or pass south of it. The desktop access app from the Weather Channel would cost me $60/year and is a box smaller in size than the NOAA nexrad animations, but it is surrounded by tons of ads which cycle constantly, eating bandwidth and slowing response time for the actual weather information update.
The reason why the weather companies are taking this political tack (Part Duce) is because they lost a recent PUBLIC battle to persuade NOAA sites to shut down public access. NOAA requested public input on the question and recieved over 1,400 responsible replies. The response was in favor of continuing free public access to NOAA weather sites by a ratio of better than 99 to 1. Now they are working behind CLOSED DOORS lobbying congress and , no doubt, buying with 'campaign donations' what their poor logic couldn't win in the court of public opinion.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I don't think alot of people realize how little of their taxes is being spent on the National Weather Service... $749 million (2005 Budget) That's a cost of less than $3/yr for every man, woman and child in the U.S.! So what does the NWS do with that money? -Support 123 offices across the country. -Maintain/expand autmoated surface observation stations across the country. -RADAR maintanence. -Provide 7 days forecasts atleast 2/day, usually more for the entire country, including PR and Guam. -Prodive aviation forecasts 4 times/day -Issue warnings (Tornado/Severe Thunderstorm/Flood/Hurricane/etc). -Constant training of staff (meteorology is still a relatively new science). -And much more... I think that as far as bang for your tax buck goes, the National Weather Service may be the best.
Oh, that's right. Someone wants to do it for a profit and eliminate the free competition. I know where I'd put my wager!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
One of the big issues behind this is public safety. If NOAA does close up the access to their data, many residential users will have to go with the generalized information they retrieve from the Weather Channel and similar sites.
As an amateur storm chaser, this is a huge deal to me. I don't want to have to go back to using Unisys' feeds, or Yahoo Weather feeds. I like the timeliness and accuracy of the NWS and SPC information. It allows for me to know when I should start watching the sky, when to start really worrying, and when to head out to report dangerous weather conditions so that the local residents don't get wiped out by the "finger of God", should it ever happen.
I know for one thing, I will be contacting the NOAA represenative that I dealt with prior on this issue, and voice my concerns, AGAIN. My tax money goes to fund their activities, so why should I have to pay again for something that should be freely available?
We aren't funding the creation of completely polished weather reporting with taxpayers dollars, we are only funding the raw data collection. If we are asking them to do new things... it has to come at some cost.
I didn't RTFA, or any FA for that matter, but this is nothing new for taxpayers and consumers to be paying twice for the same service in other sectors:
The National Institute of Health gives grants to individuals and departments for biomedical research and those entitites are entitled to patent discoverys, which can be resold as pharmaceuticals, devices, reagents, etc.
Not sure what policy the NSF has.
The IEEE isn't run by government, I imagine medical journals aren't either, your analogy is flawed.
And exactly why should the gov't be in the business of creating high-quality images of storm relative velocity? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that a free-market would be in a better position to provide?
I think that the correct question is: Does the weather prediction and data dissemination industry take upon itself the liability associated with weather forecasts?
The answer is no, they don't and they never will. The free-market is not applicable to a field where ALL of the significant costs and risks are born by the Federal government. The challenges associated with downloading and ingesting data are inconsequential compared to maintaining the Nexrad and satellite systems and launching soundings twice a day from ever weather station. Private industry is incapable of providing that more cheaply than the government does.
And the same goes for graphics. The government has the data in house and the expertise regarding the data in its research centers. Making a pretty picture from raw NWS data is not nearly as difficult as you have been making it sound, nor are the computational requirements particularly high. Furthermore, there are plenty of tools (many of which came out of publicly-funded research projects) out there that reduce the development time for someone already working in the field to a few hours rather than the weeks you cite. Sure, someone who is a good programmer but isn't familiar with the science will take longer. Why should the public pay for that when the expertise is in house? The NOAA pages in question are not made by the forecasters, they are built by researchers and NOAA contractors to serve requests of forecasters and the public.
I work in satellite meteorology and I am quite familiar with what private industry considers to be a value-added product. A lot of it is cool looking, but I have never seen an example where private industry was actually creating something *new*. The reason is two-fold: collecting data to make something new, to create new knowledge, costs a lot of $$$ and there is risk involved with providing what amounts to an experimental product.
Untrue. I just finished reading Tuxedo Park and it was amazing how much fundamental research in physics was funded by private citizens. Of course, that was back when private citizens had more money to throw around, too.
I could find out for certain, but I believe somewhere between 2 and 6 Dell rack mounted workstations (P3 Xeons or something to that effect) do the processing of the radar data and then it all goes into whatever NOAA's webserver system is. Operational NOAA products (especially the newer ones; some older products are not so good) generally must require a minimum of oversight. I know because I designed and coded one.
I concur that dissemination has not been a priority for the government. But the graphical products you want private industry to create are the responsibility of a different group than the dissemination. The people who need to be motivated to improve the dissemination are mid and high level managers. The graphical products are approved by them because they are cheap and easy ways to provide the data and improve the public perception of NOAA and the NWS. Dissemination of raw data costs more and isn't as sexy. If you want it to change, talk to your congressman. It appears you work in the private weather industry, so I presume he or she would listen to you for that reason if nothing else.
Actually, the NWS uses hydrogen in its balloons...unless they've changed their policies in the last 4 years. I don't know why they would.
That's just Libertarian Nonsense. The general welfare of the nation benefits by having some services provided by the public sector. Scientific research that doesn't immediately translate into marketable product is one example. Public education is another. I advocate that ALL medical care should also fall into this category. I think that would be at least as efficient as our current policy of distributing medical care upon the basis of the ability to pay for it. Our nation may need defending from ignorance and disease more than from terrorism.
But to get back on topic, the weather service may have an obligation by its previous arrangement with commercial purveyors of this information, not to present the general public with anything other than the raw data that the taxpayers have paid for. But we are free to take that information and provide it in a usable format to the public free of charge and without advertizing if we wish. If commercial weather information purveyors want exclusive access to it, then let them fund it instead of the taxpayers. It may well be that this is a type of scientific research that would be better served by the private sector.
Some Republicans are kinda serious about actually stopping the US debt from growing. Thanks to Dubya's spending, that means they gotta come up with around a trillion dollars in budget cuts or new taxes in order to just break even! Even if they do manage to get near this target, despite the fact that the adjustment is long overdue, is going to have an interesting impact on our already fragile economy...
Hello? http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecasts/DCZ001.php?warnc ounty=DCC001&city=Washington
Catch up people.
It's hard to draw the line sometimes as to where the government has a compelling interest in doing something, and where it should the the marketplace decide.
For example, in this case, the collection and archiving of weather data seems to be something it would be useful to do once. Having the government do it also protects against the volatility of companies that go out of business, taking their data with them.
But the publishing of the data on the web in various interesting ways might better be something that commercial enterprises could duke out for themselves in the market, competing to have the best analysis, friendliest interfaces, etc.
I don't think NOAA should try to become another weather.com; just make the raw data accessible for download via FTP or a very spartan-looking web page. Let companies decide what to do with it and how to add value.
Well, as long as we agree that they don't do the best job at what they're supposed to do. . .
But that's just my point. If the American taxpayer wants quality weather info in a format that they can understand, what chance does the NWS have of providing that? People really want to turn the weather into the DMV? Take a number, you're forecast will be ready by the next model run, assuming the load balancer doesn't take a crap, and bandwidth holds, etc, etc, etc. I think it's clear that the free market will serve the public better in that specific arena, but only if they aren't directly competing with the NWS.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
Well, that would be a "good" question. I was in /. mode before(equivocating, bating, etc.)
Of course they are not going to assume liability.
But the same does not apply to graphics, or web content, or e-alerts, or any of the other things weather vendors provide. As much expertise as the NWS has in house, it is equally naive to believe that they will make the best, prettiest, and most economically efficient graphics(government agencies are notorious for wasting money). I think it's quite clear that the best products will arise from free market competition.
But let's be clear: anyone in the US can get the same weather data as any weather vendor via the same means. If you put in a T-1 and a router and a computer, you can get on the CRS multicast. Weather vendors are not trying to change that. However, this discussion does serve NOAA's purpose to move the discussion from facts about their performance, mission, and expenditure of taxpayer funds, to one that confuses the issues. Which I think you alluded to in another post. And which I have alluded to in other posts. If their data dissemination is any indication of the NWS technical expertise, I think it would be better for them to not compete with commercial weather vendors in reaching the public, for the simple free market economic reasons. (Yes, because I work there. My job can go away. NWS jobs are here to stay, regardless. But it's good tech work, writing custom software, etc, that can't be outsorced.)
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?