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Timothy found a profile of Carl Malamud up at The American Prospect, characterizing it thus: "Carl Malamud — underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible, but that often are not practically accessible. The man should be up there on the list with Wikipedia, Wikileaks, the big Free Software projects, and the Creative Commons."
What a bewildering summary. I await with great anticipation the comments that slashdot is able to generate without reading the article.
Back in 1993 (pre WWW), I had an internet account. My college girlfriend was doing a paper on Nafta, and I was trying to help research. Some congressional staffer gave me the FTP address to his private hard drive where I picked up a copy in .ps format or something. All 9000 pages of it. I could see all his files.
Good times. In those days, there was a rule: never meet anyone from the internet IRL. That used to be condsidered a good way to end up in a bodybag. Nowadays everyone meets everyone that way (me + my wife for example.)
I think he smoked too much crack, just random dribblings.
But there's a few of us who know who he is (by reputation ... I actually know Roberta Shaffer, also mentioned in the article, and I think I'm on a mailing list or two w/ Aaron Swartz)
But I hadn't heard anything since the election and his trying to be appointed to the head of the printing office ... it's a shame he didn't get it. He's been a big force in getting government documents from behind paywalls.
Read the article if you don't know who he is -- he's done a lot of public good.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I only glanced through the article. Isn't this just a shout-out that this guy is available for a government job? Don't we have job boards that take resumes that do the same thing without wasting my front page "NEWS for Nerds. Stuff that matters" websites?
god I wish he would stop approving shit.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I got a $200 fine for walking ACROSS a railroad track behind my house, there were no trains within sight I should add. I didn't have to climb or open anything to walk across the tracks to the main road, there are no signs either. These cocksuckers have the nerve to run trains by my house at all hours, horns and all, and expect me not to cut across the tracks to save 30 minutes of my trip to work.
Note that a large part of the reason they impose such fines and over-use train horns is because of the insane over-litigatiousness of American society.
People do really stupid things, and get themselves (and in many cases their friends/family) squashed/crushed/roasted by trains. Then their surviving family turns around and sues the railroad. "How could my honey-buns have known there might might trains on the railroad track! He was sleeping! The train clearly should have sounded its horn just in case there was somebody sleeping on the track!" And wins. So the railroad adopts whatever practices it can to defend itself against such societal stupidity, and yeah unfortunately there's a negative impact on that small portion of society which isn't stupid.
Of course then the people that just recently bought a new house near the railroad tracks (which have been there for 150 years) turns around and sues the railroad because it's sounding horns too often...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Make you a deal sir.
You have the info but maybe not the distribution, which given your post is a tiny tragedy right? I've meanwhile spent 6 months building a mirror system (not yet coral-cached, still manual).
Slashdotters, here's a fast & dirty mirror of Garcia's data - except I WANT you to download it! If nothing else, "fight the man". But also it's a very early bandwidth test at the "25% readers are finished" comment level, which I guage as some 10 times below full RTA effect.
http://taophoenix.babblehost.com/MVTA%20Rider%20Data.html
Everyone get a copy! Makes great Father's day gifts! Hehe.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Not to mention that some times, accidents can block the railroad traffic for hours (or even derail the trains themselves).
You might not remember it, but Carl has been on Slashdot quite a few times. Basically, he's trying to gather up all that government data that's supposed to be publicly accessible (but isn't) and make it conveniently accessible on the web. Problem? There are a lot of people who profit from this and they're not so happy. Also, you have to deal with tons of red tape.
Here are some past appearances on Slashdot:
Getting us free access to copyrighted CA laws
Putting 1.8M court records online
I think he also has a Slashdot account, though it seems little-used.
Also the top comment on this old story is interesting:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/14/1158247/Firefox-Plugin-Liberates-Paywalled-Court-Records
Carl Malamud -- underrated work shedding sunshine on the sort of things that 'sunshine laws' may make legally accessible
Silver birds flying on wings of fog above the many things that may compete for my attention.
Burma shave.
Uh, I full and well recognize how sue-happy the USA is, but I think the reason that they're strict with the rules and blare their horns is because people do really stupid things and get themselves chopped up by trains. Not because they get sued afterward. Remove litigation entirely, and they'll still blare their horns because they do not want to kill you.
The scenario you describe has certainly played out, and there are playgrounds that have been castrated, but it doesn't apply here. Also, trains have ALWAYS blared when passing through residential. It's not new. And the people who live by the tracks know that. There was a reason the house was so cheap.
haha... yeah I skimmed the article as well... didn't get an inkling what all this "sunshine law" was all about. Far as I can tell, from a poorly written article with an even crappier introduction and non-summarizing first paragraph, is that it's about some guy's battle to get some posting to the Gov't Print Office by the Obama administration.
The DOT highly regulates what a train must do for an at-grade train crossing.
There are things that can be done that makes horn-blowing not necessary at certain intersections, but that can cost $20K-$200K per crossing, from what I understand. I know they have put a few in around my area.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Why was this voted Insightful? It should be troll or off-topic.
Ok. I'm not seeing the problem here.
They're not everywhere? Of course not, they're expensive. Now, if you could show that people sued about loud trains to get these things installed, then I might cry myself to sleep a little and I'd see your point. But otherwise, the trains are made to be safe because people get chopped up, not because people sue. Even if people have sued to get quieter trains, that's just getting them to be safe in a different, more costly way.
I'm sorry, but maybe you're just not getting it. There is a need in society. There is a danger with running trains through cities. A function is performed to make them safer. People perform that function (either horns or these expensive safety crossings) not because of the threat of litigation, but because of a long history of minced meat on the track. This has been established since before people started suing for every little thing.