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UK Gov't Spending Details Now Online

Posted by timothy on from the I'll-have-what-they're-having dept.

krou writes "The UK government has released a treasure trove of public spending data in an effort to lift what Prime Minister David Cameron calls the government's 'cloak of secrecy.' 'The first two tranches of data are from 2008/09 and 2009/10. The Combined Online Information System (Coins) includes what departments were authorised to spend, what they actually spent and what they are forecast to spend in future.' Since the government admits that 'some degree of technical competence' will be needed to use the files, they have asked the Open Knowledge Foundation to help make it 'more accessible,' and have also promised 'more accessible formats' by August. The datasets can be downloaded from data.gov.uk." And on a similarly happy note, reader mccalli writes "Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise, and the result is that these texts will be made available to all."

4 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Advanced by jez9999 · · Score: 1, Funny

    "Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise, and the result is that these texts will be made available to all."

    Wow, they texted at Bletchley Park? They were truly ahead of their time!

    --
    == Jez ==
    Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  2. Re:nice to see Torrent links by Wowsers · · Score: 4, Funny

    What they should have done is rename the file something like "Britney Spears entire album collection", then waste the RIAA's bandwidth on them downloading it, and lots of their time decompressing it and checking the files out to see if it contains WAV / FLAC / AAC / MP3 files.

    --
    Take Nobody's Word For It.
  3. Re:nice to see Torrent links by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Just use an obscure music format. Like ogg

  4. Questionable Accounting by Iyonesco · · Score: 3, Funny

    From the site: "The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file."

    70MB at 1MB/second = 600 seconds!?!? This left me rather concerned as to the reliability of the figures on the site. I never went on to look at the data but I can imagine it would be something like this:

    Expenses: £100,000,000,000.00
    Bureaucracy: £500,000,000,000.00
    Propaganda: £25,000,000,000.00
    Big Brother: £50,000,000,000.00
    Foreign Wars: £10,000,000,000.00

    Total: £1.23