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Deadline For Data.gov Arrives, and Delivers
inKubus writes "According to a story carried by AP, as part of President Barack Obama's 'Open Government Directive,' the 24 major departments and agencies that make up the executive branch of the federal government had until Friday to release at least three 'high-value' data sets. Over 300 new data sets have been released on data.gov. There's a lot of interesting stuff on there and more to come." One of the departments required to release data is the office of the US Trade Representative. Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA negotiating drafts?
Meanwhile, back in reality...
Will they mention this on C-Span?
guardian.co.uk: We gave the US the Beatles and all we got back was this lousy data.gov site...
When their bosses find out the information they have spent months hacking for is on data.gov.
Wouldn't it be nice if they televised the entire health care bill debates on C-SPAN as they said they were going to?
Transparency my ass.
Love sees no species.
Hey. I just want you to know...
How is this NOT valuable? Access to this information will change the world! We will FINALLY have government information on the tread wear of tires! SWEET! You can keep your musical revolution, I'm going to bask in the glory of TIRE TREAD DATA.
Love sees no species.
Indeed. Although I can't really say that anyone really feels nostalgic for the "transparency" of the Bush administration either.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
that type of data is wheelie useful
rewriting history since 2109
The Bush Admin was transparent. Many people could see right through their plans.
rewriting history since 2109
Republicans hide the truth, Democrats just flat out lie. It always amazes me to watch each new generation hit their 20s and think 1 party is going to fix all the evil of the other... only to find out 8 years later they had the same plan all along. Tax the fuck out of you and hold onto power. They have no other goal.
I thought they sold to Michael Jackson? And agin re-sold? I just started hearing new covers of Beatles songs in otherwise unremarkable adverts.
Anyway, just buy them back like you did my beloved TR3's. And please repatriate Benny Hill as well.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Wouldn't it be nice if they televised the entire health care bill debates on C-SPAN as they said they were going to?
Yes, it would.
And they would have, if the Republicans had ever shown one bit of being willing to debate. When a major political party's response is "no, just no, I don't care what we said we'd say yes to, we're saying no even if you take our 2004 platform and make it your health care reform", there really isn't any debate to broadcast.
I checked several data sets. All appear to be already available. For example:
Interactive Access To National Income and Product Accounts Tables
Dataset Summary
Agency: Department of Commerce
Sub-Agency: Bureau of Economic Analysis
Category: Income, Expenditures, Poverty, and Wealth
Date Released: Continuously released since 1934
...
... it's that any point of failure completely invalidates other successes.
Be sure to tell your boss or clients, your SO, and your friends.
Tweet, tweet.
If that's all it was, they'd have been delighted to televise the debate, since it would have made the Republicans look really bad.
Personally, I believe they didn't televise the debate because they really didn't want to show the House and Senate leadership bribing their own side to vote for the bills. After all, if the Health Care Bills were so wonderful, why would you need to bribe guys in your own Party to vote for them?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
.... Seriously, what did they use, FrontPage 2007? The top part of the page is almost entirely images of text.
That said, it works perfectly without JavaScript. They did something right.
Please disregard any grammatical errors in the above message. I normally perfectly English just well!
I see they've kept up with the latest in web design. When you go to search for geodata, the search list is constrained to a tiny rectangle in the middle of the page. You have to scroll within that tiny rectangle. On my monitor, the page is about a foot tall, and I'm tediously scrolling in this inch-high box.
I've learned to recognize state of the art web design when I see it. I bet it's even CSS compliant. They're not quite there yet. To be really great web design, it should be a Flash only site.
(close captioning for the sarcasm impaired: this was sarcasm)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
After all, if the Health Care Bills were so wonderful, why would you need to bribe guys in your own Party to vote for them?
Anyone who has lived in a jurisdiction with corrupt officials will tell you that bribery occurs not because whatever you are being bribed to do is a bad idea, but because you have the power to withhold whatever the briber wants. Bribery is about power not goodness or badness of the behaviour you are being bribed to do.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
I've consulted with major research firms who use government data. Universally we find that the data haven't been verified and a little work shows massive inconsistencies therein. When recovery.org was showing jobs in zip codes that don't exist, etc., I wasn't surprise - it's par for the course.
I'll reserve judgment, but making data available is one thing; collecting usable data is something entirely different.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Republicans tax poor people by eliminating social services and giving tax breaks to the people who don't need them. Democrats tax rich people to pay for social services for poor people.
This was going alright - both parties have interests in the society, and there was a balance of power. Then the conservatives started losing ground, and had a miraculous conversion. Turns out there are 40 million Americans who will vote against their own interests at the drop of a hat, if you'll call yourself an evangelical. You may have to do a lot of embarrassing things - pretend you'll overturn Roe v. Wade, praise hopeless idiots like Pat Robertson, pretend that gay people are "evil", and so on. Corporations will give you the money to promote yourself this way, to defeat working class (or "union") money, in exchange for tax cuts at any cost, even during wars.
All of this is perfectly illustrated by the last decade of John McCain. If his VP running mate hadn't been so shockingly stupid, he would have given Obama a run for his money.
Sorry for the nuanced approach. I know it's terribly unpatriotic.
And the Beatles' music was based on American blues, pop, folk, R&B and rock'n'roll, so I'd say we're just getting back what was ours to begin with, albeit with poncy Brit accents and funny hairdos.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
What I do see a problem with is that I contacted my Congressguy McConnell to let him know that my Crohn's disease leaves me deciding to live a relatively normal life with huge debt, or a debilitating painful existence, and his discussions will affect my own personal future far more than it will affect his personal career, and I would appreciate being able to follow it.
I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade (to most Americans anyway - as bad as numbers seem, the financial meltdown, terrorism, and 9/11 combined don't impact a small percentage of those potentially affected by health care).
They're only doing what their corporate masters pay them to do.
Why do you think that every single lawmaker who's in office for more than 10 years leaves as a multi-millionaire? Certainly not on their congressional salaries.
Until we take corporate money out of politics, neither party will be any good, and our real incomes will continue to fall as they have for the past 30 years, since Ronald Reagan took office.
Transnational corporations love it when we spend more than we make. Then, we become more desperate to hang onto jobs no matter how bad the pay and working conditions, and thanks to easy credit, we continue to buy their goods and services. Admittedly, the whole system crashes and burns eventually, which we are seeing with the world economic crisis, but when it does, the corporations will have the resources to start over, and workers will be in an even worse position to negotiate fair wages and decent working conditions.
I'm betting that if you asked Slashdotters if the working hours and conditions at their jobs are getting better or worse, you'd see that they are universally getting worse while their credit card balances are getting bigger. And it's not just big-screen plasma screen TVs that are going on those credit cards, but basic necessities like health care, education, food and shelter. This system lets us think our standard of living is getting better, while we only fall deeper and deeper into debt to our bosses.
The citizens of america.com really do owe their souls to the company store. We should just change the name of our country to AmeriCo.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Which makes the Democrats (the Party of the People) look even worse. You're not doing the work of "the People" when you require a bribe to do your job....
Note that this is not meant to imply that the Republicans don't take bribes. Though I don't recall a case where a Republican majority leader had to bribe his own guys to get them to vote for the Party's bill.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that I've never heard of it.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I went to download 2005 Toxics Release Inventory data for the state of California and the only link was for a .csv. When I went to download it, up comes an .exe file. Why the binary executable?
And...now I guess you expect somebody to list all the influences on blues, pop, folk, R&B and rock'n'roll from "outside" of US?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
The problem is promising something that anyone with a basic understanding of how American government works knows he will be unable to deliver. Had he promised to work as hard as possible WITH the Congress to pass health care reform, that would have been one thing. Promising that it WILL happen is like promising that I'll be giving you my boss's salary. My boss has other plans.
I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade
And yet, I presume those are the people you want to put in charge of managing that issue? How is that better than the evil HMO? You're just a number to either one, if that.
Stop Koolaid Politics
Hey baby, how's your baby? Fair exchange, in my books.
From Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thank to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge, on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.
Quite in the opposite of the World Bank [who rock] it's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in a modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor.
While that is technically true, it's far too facile. Before one can claim that someone else is responsible for a broken promise, one must make at least SOME effort to fulfill it. Where Congress is concerned, he hasn't even tried.
Publish text of bills pror to the vote? Sorry, it's too "urgent".
Veto bills with earmarks? Sorry, "last year's business".
Televise negotiations? Sorry, too "sensitive".
Obama has let the Congressional leadership do whatever they want without even token protest. I don't like his politics, but I had held some "hope" that he'd have the balls to apply "change" to his own party. Turns out whatever balls he had are firmly ensconced in Pelosi's handbag.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
So, if I promise to reverse global warming, accept your donations (or votes or whatever) and rise to power, then mother nature / the environment / the industrialized world fails to uphold, it will be alright with you?