Obama To Agencies: Optimize Web Content For Mobile

CWmike writes "President Barack Obama has ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year, in an effort to embrace a growing trend toward Web surfing on mobile devices. Obama, in a directive issued Wednesday, also ordered federal agencies to create websites to report on their mobile progress. The websites are due within 90 days. Innovators in the private sector and the government have used the Internet and powerful computers to improve customer service, but 'it is time for the federal government to do more,' Obama said in the memo. 'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"

Comments

That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

This president sure has some really scatter-shot priorities. It's like he's just shooting at everything and hoping that by the time he's out of office, SOMETHING is going to stick.

I'm sure this will be entirely reasonable, too. It won't be broken like ready.gov and all the other sites they spent tens of millions on. And I'm sure it'll only cost tens off millions more to make the accessible via mobile.

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash. This isn't 2001, when phones required customized web-content to display it properly. This is just a giant hand-out -- to some buddy, no doubt. Bush had Haliburton to hand sweet deals to and Obama has... whoever.

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

Oh, quit your hate rant. He's trying to drag the government into the 21st century. He knows that mobile phones are everywhere and wants to make the government more accessible.

Re:That'll go well.

[LoadWB]

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash. This isn't 2001, when phones required customized web-content to display it properly. This is just a giant hand-out -- to some buddy, no doubt. Bush had Haliburton to hand sweet deals to and Obama has... whoever.

I recall that the EBS is to be retired from TV and radio, which are ubiquitous technologies, to cell phone communications, which are not. If that does happen then cell phones will become a safety necessity and more phones will have to be given out (subsidized.) More than likely, these won't be Android phones or iPhones but rather feature phones (which still exist in 2012 and still hold a large part of the market) which do not have full browsers built-in. To accommodate those phones and provide essential gubment services to the masses, the websites will have to offer mobile versions.

Then the masses will have quick access to features such as flag@whitehouse.gov and so on.

Re:That'll go well.

[jc42]

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.

Yeah, you can get it, but there are still discussions about how the iPhone's Safari screws up ordinary text. My wife has an iPhone, but doesn't use Safari much because of this. The problem, of course, is Safari's practice of formatting a text page for a window a lot bigger than the iPhone's screen, then shrinking it to fit, making the font size so tiny as to be illegible. Or you can enlarge it, but then you have to pan left and right for every line of text, making reading it a PITA.

When the first iPhone came out, I noticed this quickly while testing sites formatted for mobile devices, and asked about it on a number of forums. The only "solution" anyone knew was to test the UA string for "iPhone", and if found, add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> to the header section. This worked as long as all iPhones had the same screen width, though it only worked for portrait layout, and gave an too-large font size for landscape. But eventually, new iPhones appeared with smaller pixels, so that kludge no longer works.

So is there a known fix for this problem with current iPhones? If the web had been developed by a sane community, we'd have long ago required that graphical apps like browsers send their window size to the server, but that has never been done. We'd also refuse to call things that misrender text this badly a "browser", since the primary design goal of the original browser was to format text legibly in whatever screen space they had available, but that seems to have been forgotten.

In any case, the iPhone's default browser fails the "It Just Works" test for ordinary text, and nobody seems to know how to fix it. Of course, I could be wrong, and a fix exists now. I'd be happy to hear this, if someone could tell me (or my wife ;-) how to make it work right.

(I've heard rumors that with html5, JS can detect the window size and adjust for it. I'm currently trying to discover how this can be done, but I haven't yet stumbled across anything more that claims that it's possible. That isn't very useful if you can't find the details that make it work. If it is doable, that would be yet another reason to switch to html5 right now. ;-)

(I've also encouraged iPhone users to install Opera, which doesn't have this problem, but only a few have paid any attention. "I don't listen to Opera music." ;-)

Re:That'll go well.

[Sloppy]

I'm sure this will be entirely reasonable, too. It won't be broken like ready.gov and all the other sites they spent tens of millions on. And I'm sure it'll only cost tens off millions more to make the accessible via mobile.

Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.

OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.

90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done. (30 days would be better, though.)

The constants above are obviously an over-generalization; the Apollo Program couldn't be done in 90 days better than in one year, though doing it in one year just might be better than doing it in ten years. But for making websites modern-touch-mobile friendly/formatted (as opposed to merely "working") setting the deadline to a few weeks is .. about right.

Re:That'll go well.

[arth1]

More likely, he's mostly accessing internet from his smartphone, and is looking out for number one.

If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.

But as I said, he cares about number one and not the public. He's a career politician, for cripes' sake, so that should go without saying.

Re:That'll go well.

[jellomizer]

Yes every decision the president makes has this huge political meaning...
He was probably at a meeting, and one of his aids tried to look up the data on his phone and couldn't access it because it was flash... And Obama was like. Why don't we make sure all the government websites work on mobile browsers?

When asked people they didn't come up with a good argument against the idea so he put it into practice.

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really not suspect that you're completely out of your mind with Obama derangement syndrome?

It's absurd to suggest that the change was mandated so that he could personally access stuff from his phone.

Re:That'll go well.

[jdgeorge]

Any president would do this, regardless of party, for the same reasons Obama is: People want it, it's entirely reasonable, it's politically inoffensive, and both parties support it.

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

I wish people would make fun of your "religion" like they do mine.

One more "religion" to add to the list, AGW, anti-AGW, Anti-Nukes, and Obama.

The OP didn't say anything that people didn't say against Bush, hell he even said something bad about Bush.

WTF are you talking about? I didn't make fun of any "religion" - unless your "religion" is one of spouting hate - the only thing I put down. If you think there aren't Obama haters out there - who will say anything no matter how ridiculous - then you must have your fingers in your ears and your your eyes closed. I don't think that this tiny detail is worth ranting against ANY president.

Re:That'll go well.

[thomasw_lrd]

And you missed the point.

Re:That'll go well.

[million_monkeys]

Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.

OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.

That's a great point. I've noticed that as well. Only objection I'd raise is that injecting a project with a short deadline causes delays in every other ongoing project as people have to stop whatever else they were working on to get this done. Of course if you happen to have people sitting around doing nothing, then you're not interrupting anything.

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

And you missed the point.

Which was?

Re:That'll go well.

[KlomDark]

The answer to your question is CSS3 Media Queries, which allows you to determine the viewport size and use CSS specifically designed for that viewport size.

I know this will twist your iPhone into knots, but here's a good walkthru (including iPhones and Androids) on Microsoft's site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/hh882445.aspx

Re:That'll go well.

[cayenne8]

90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done.

90 days? Are you insane???

90 days is barely enough time to gather up some people to form a committee to pick the board to evaluate the letter head logo design contractor bids (ensuring , of course...that these contract bids being considered are ONLY from minority, female owned companies)....

What are you smoking??? Care must be done to do this correctly....the Federal Way!!

Re:That'll go well.

[AtomicAdam]

Any president would do this, regardless of party, for the same reasons Obama is: People want it, it's entirely reasonable, it's politically inoffensive, and both parties support it.

Sounds like a disaster in the making.

Re:That'll go well.

[JWW]

Lucky for you the Republicans just happened to pick a small soap dish to run against him.

Re:That'll go well.

[TheSpoom]

Which government agencies use Flash?

Re:That'll go well.

[Nadaka]

.And I would vote for anyone but Obama if anyone wasn't enthralled by the cult of Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers.

Re:That'll go well.

[mcgrew]

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.

My old feature phone could show YouTube videos. You're not going to be watching any TV or listening to much radio on your iPhone without installing apps for each one, because almost all the video and radio station streams use Flash.

But my old phone won't properly display many HTML web sites because they misuse CSS; there are no scroll bars on the phone.

And WTF? Obama does something to cheer about and you still bash him! He's by no means a great President, but he's not bad, and he's a hell of a lot better than the last bastard that lived in the White House (who was arguably the worst President in history and certainly the worst in my lifetime). And from what I've seen of Romney, Obama's a better President than Romney will be if he gets elected.

This isn't 2001, when phones required customized web-content to display it properly

"There's an app for that!" I'd rather visit a properly designed site any day on on any device rather than have to install an app to view it.

Re:That'll go well.

[chill]

Uh, you do understand the 90 day deadline is for the agencies to have a website that shows their progress. It isn't referring to actually getting the job done.

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash sucks. That's why it's disappearing from Android, too. GET OVER IT.

Re:That'll go well.

[jc42]

Thanks. I've seen references to CSS3 Media Queries, of course, but so far I haven't found a sample of code that actually does the job I described.

Actually, this one didn't quite work, either. The URL gets the response:

502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server. There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed. When the Web server (while acting as a gateway or proxy) contacted the upstream content server, it received an invalid response from the content server.

Maybe it's been slashdotted? ;-) The error messages aren't very helpful.

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dubya: "Is that pronounced mo-bile like the stuff you taste when you're gonna puke, or mo-beel like that place down in 'Bama?"

Re:That'll go well.

[Bigby]

You are probably correct, but you left out a step. "When he asked people" includes some White House polling service. It was determined that X% of Dems and Y% of Repubs agree. It also show that Z% of people ages 25-35 agree, while A% of people ages 50-60 agree. After all this, it was seen as a "Good Thing" and minimal negative impact, and so it was made public.

This is how much overhead there is on something so simple and basically common sense.

Re:That'll go well.

[mcgrew]

Anybody coming into office with the worst economy in over hallf a century and fighting two wars isn't going to do miricles. It took Bush eight years to raise gasoline from a buck five to four fifty, get our country attacked by ignoring the pervious President's warnings and his own FBI agents' warnings. You expected Obama to clean up the mess Bush left in half the time it took Bush to make that mess?

Obama's not a bad President. His only problem is he's not a great President. He's better than half the Presidents that have served in my 60 year life.

Re:That'll go well.

[KlomDark]

It seems to be up again, just tried it. :)

Re:That'll go well.

[cayenne8]

You know...after over 3 years, the "blame Bush" for everything is getting a little old.

After all this time, he has nothing to crow about other than "it is Bush's fault"? Ok...he got Bin Laden. Nice...however, that hunt had been put in place a long time ago.....hey, guess that was started by Bush, so, ok...he's still on that kick.

You'd think after over 3 years, Obama would be trying to run on his amazing record and accomplishments for his presidency....but no....all's quiet on that front.

[crickets chirping]

Re:That'll go well.

[jc42]

Yup; it's there now. Maybe I should try to capture the pages that seem informative, so they don't go away again ...

Re:That'll go well.

[ichthus]

unless your "religion" is one of spouting hate

The word "hate", just like "racist", has lost all meaning in today's discourse. Being diametrically opposed to someone's viewpoint is not hate. This overuse of the "hate" label is evidence of one party's inability to form a coherent argument in response the opponent. "I don't like what you said about my guy, and I'm too lazy or unable to counter your argument, so... that's hate speech."

Weak.

Re:That'll go well.

[Sloppy]

What are you smoking??? Care must be done to do this correctly....the Federal Way!!

I was smoking ObamaYesWeCan. I saw "90 days" and thought maybe he had ordered them to not do it The Federal Way.

I was wrong. Whoever modded you troll, was wrong too. Turns out there is no (real) 90 day deadline. The president isn't serious. Again.

Re:That'll go well.

[cdrguru]

Well, you do understand that things like some AM radio stations are designated as information sources for emergencies and are required to be on the air during such emergencies, right? This means that such radio stations have to have backup power and diverse antenna systems so they really can stay on the air.

Cell phones, on the other hand, have no such requirements today. The network is pretty robust so if one cell site goes down the impact isn't all that great. But, there are no requirements for how long sites can be down, which can mean in a rural area that a cell site can be down for a couple of weeks. Unlike land lines, there are no tariff requirements for uptime. Which means that cell service is available when it is available and when it isn't, ... well, it isn't. No requirements means it is completely unsuitable for emergency use.

Example - land lines are powered by 48V DC and a good part of a CO is the banks of batteries that are required for long power outages. They have backup generators as well, but I believe they are required to have TWO DAYS of battery power. Contrast this with a cell tower that might have 15 minutes on a UPS. I suppose we could expect the government to simply mandate that power outages not occur...

Once cell service is tariffed like land lines are today, then we can talk about how cell phones can be used in emergencies for informing people. Until then, it is silly to even think about such stuff - it would mean virtually cutting people off. We have lots of interesting gadgets today, but for emergencies we haven't really moved from where things were in 1960. And every proposal centered around eliminating some aspect of this support infrastructure is from people that simply do not understand the role of fairly low-tech but extremely reliable systems in emergency information and communication.

Here's another one for you. You can receive AM broadcasts with a batteryless receiver - unless of course they eliminate AM broadcast in favor of some digital technology that makes it impossible to receive such emergency broadcasts in this manner. What happens when the batteries run out? Well, better hope that doesn't happen, right?

Re:That'll go well.

[coinreturn]

unless your "religion" is one of spouting hate

The word "hate", just like "racist", has lost all meaning in today's discourse. Being diametrically opposed to someone's viewpoint is not hate. This overuse of the "hate" label is evidence of one party's inability to form a coherent argument in response the opponent. "I don't like what you said about my guy, and I'm too lazy or unable to counter your argument, so... that's hate speech." Weak.

My point was not hate as in "hate speech," but hate as in "spewing unsubstantiated claims just to put down a particular person or idea" - such as Apple Haters, Android Haters, or Microsoft Haters. The OP's post qualified as it was just an unsubstantiated spout of sarcasm with no point except to bad-mouth the president (note it was quickly down-modded to troll).

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://whattheheckhasobamadonesofar.com/

Have fun.

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's old is that we still have problems that Bush is responsible for. People blame Bush for the wars (and attendant insane amounts of money spent) because they are directly his fault - imagine that! Now, I believe it is extreme simplification to either credit or blame the President for the economy, but if you advocate doing that, then the economy tanking happened on Bush's watch while he spent money like a debutante; how do either of these magically become Obama's fault? The maid isn't to blame when you spill wine on the white carpet, even if she couldn't get the stain out. As for the hunt for Bin Laden, that was actually ended by Bush; Obama had to start it up again. You could probably come up with a good argument that Obama shares blame with Bush, but that's about as far as you can reasonably take it; Bush doesn't get absolved for his mistakes just because some time has passed - we are still paying for his mistakes.

I can dig that you don't like Obama, but credit (and blame) where it is due.

Re:That'll go well.

[cayenne8]

Whoever modded you troll, was wrong too.

Whoever modded me troll above...has obviously never worked within, or for a federal agency or project.

What 'should' be funny in my OP....is, sadly, WAY too close to the actual truth.

Re:That'll go well.

[datavirtue]

I hate it when people tell me what a politician "wants to" do. You don't know what he really wants. All you can comment on is the action and behavior, don't spout-on about his intentions.

Re:That'll go well.

[thrich81]

Besides the fact that the economy has turned around since near collapse in 2008, I don't know how many big projects you've worked on but 3 years is not a lot of time to get a huge turnaround going, especially with half the middle management (Congress) actively fighting you.
And, the last time a president had to clean up a mess like this, Roosevelt didn't have much to show after 3 years either but he got reelected 3 more times!

Re:That'll go well.

[Kreigaffe]

No, no that's not what this is about at all.

The majority of the web is accessible on mobile devices already, without dedicated mobile sites being required. As time passes, mobile devices will become more capable, and soon there will be no need for a specialized mobile site -- there will be ONE standard, period. That's how it SHOULD BE, anyway.

Now, some companies and sites may currently wish to optimize a version for mobile viewing -- that's a business decision, a short-term solution. Government should be looking more long-term. 5, 10 years from now, our phones will be quite able to display any and all web content no differently than today's home computers.

This would be a large expenditure of money for a small niche of society that will only be relevant for a short period of time..
it's feel-goody everyday-typical politicking. that's all.

Re:That'll go well.

[WillAdams]

Somehow that leaves out the State Department blocking the return of WWII-surplus M1 Carbines (the M1 Garands were apparently imported) so that they could be sold by the Civilian Marksmanship Program

Re:That'll go well.

[tepples]

The answer to your question is CSS3 Media Queries, which allows you to determine the viewport size and use CSS specifically designed for that viewport size.

For one thing, a lot of devices lie because they really want to present the zoomed-out version over a mobile-specific version. For another, you generally want shorter pages on mobile than on desktop because of the different scrolling paradigms, different amounts of text that can fit above the fold, and different amounts of information that can fit in each item of a list.

Re:That'll go well.

[cayenne8]

Besides the fact that the economy has turned around since near collapse in 2008

Really? Seriously?

You see the current economy as having been turned around and working for us again in the past 3 years?

Wow...wish I had your magic glasses to look through...I still see high un-employment, high gas prices, higher food prices....and more debt piled up by any US president (even Bush)...with nothing to show for it.....

Re:That'll go well.

[Anonymous Coward]

all types of state agencies do. In fact, I was shouted down in committee last year for criticizing some for that reason.

The only thing that got them to give a fuck was when one of their daughters got an ipad for christmas and they shouldn't show their new $2M site to her on it

Re:That'll go well.

[ktappe]

This president sure has some really scatter-shot priorities.

You HONESTLY have a problem with this?? The directive is completely common sense, needs doing, and is so non-partisan and useful that you have to be an ultra-partisan to have any notion that it's in any way wrong. Grow up.

Re:That'll go well.

[ktappe]

He definitely cares about himself first. He care about getting reelected. He wants the younger generation vote. The younger generation is more likely to use smart phones. Obama is probable thinking if I do something that the younger people like/want they will vote for me.

I doubt Obama is reading slashdot but anyway...

It is the economy! Work on that first!

It sure is interesting how anyone opposing this directive somehow thinks we can only work on one thing at a time. I suppose because your brains can't parallel process, you can't fathom the concept of others parallel processing? Oh, and there's no chance that this and other directives might actually be part of improving the economy?

Re:That'll go well.

[ktappe]

My old feature phone could show YouTube videos. You're not going to be watching any TV or listening to much radio on your iPhone without installing apps for each one, because almost all the video and radio station streams use Flash.

Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound, not knowing that every iPhone ever manufactured can play YouTube out of the box with no extra apps installed? Or that YouTube has an ongoing effort to move away from Flash? As do an awful lot of other companies?

Re:That'll go well.

[uigrad_2000]

Yeah, if he used his phone for browsing much, then he'd know that most "mobile-accelerated sites" are worse than the originals.

Chances are, he wants to look like a prez that actually gets young people. He wants to be hip, so that people don't catch on to all the cronyism behind the curtains.

This mandate will provide more ways to spend even more money that the government does not have, and no doubt will give out some nice fat government contracts to web-development companies that have funded his campaign. Good catch!

Re:That'll go well.

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

If u had Android, u could get Flash too!

Re:That'll go well.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

This is just a giant hand-out -- to some buddy, no doubt. Bush had Haliburton to hand sweet deals to and Obama has... whoever.

Actually Obama frequently gives no-bid contracts to Haliburton, and so did Clinton. In fact there were a few times that Haliburton lost in a bid proposal but Clinton still gave them the contract anyways. In fact, Haliburton is crediting the Obama administration for recently having record breaking revenue last quarter.

The only reason Haliburton got a bad name under Bush is because Dick Cheney happened to own stock in Haliburton (which he sold early on during the Bush years.)

Re:That'll go well.

[CodeBuster]

You know...after over 3 years, the "blame Bush" for everything is getting a little old.

Indeed. What did Nikita Khrushchev say about blaming your predecessor? Sit down and write two letters

Re:That'll go well.

[mcgrew]

The economy's no longer in free-fall, unemployment is starting to go down (yes, partly because some just slipped off the rolls rather than becoming employed), the Iraq war is over, the Afghan war is winding down, gasoline is a buck cheaper than when he took office (yes, that has little to do with him), housing foreclosures are down.

Look how long it took us to come back after the mess it took Coolige and Hoover to make. Imaging how bad things would be now under someone as bad as Carter. Like I said, he's by no means a great President, but he's better than most I've seen.

Re:That'll go well.

[Nadaka]

Not really. Just the "fiscally conservative" folks who claim that tax cuts for the ultra wealthy will balance the budget, educate the children and secure national security. That isn't fiscal conservatism, it is a radical attack on this nation that will bring us to our knees so that the yoke of plutocratic oppression can be placed on our shoulders. That is of course assuming the Chicoms don't take advantage of the opportunity before the plutocrats can.

Re:That'll go well.

[Politburo]

The unemployment rate has nothing to do with unemployment benefits or "rolls". If you don't have a job and are actively looking for one, you are unemployed. The reduction in labor force participation has much more to do with demographics (baby boom retirements) than the economy.

Re:That'll go well.

[Politburo]

You appear to be using a very unorthodox definition of "truth", as President Obama has addressed the American people many times, the last of which was just a couple of weeks ago.

treat the symptom not the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.

Re:treat the symptom not the problem...

[fiannaFailMan]

The fact that users are forced to navigate a labyrinth means that the government is trying to do to much.

Yeah. If only we could have the same government that a small chain of pre-industrial agrarian settlements had on the East coast a few centuries back. That'd work so much better in today's world, right?

Foresight?

[mcwop]

"I applaud the government for having the foresight and initiative to develop a comprehensive strategy to advance of some of the most attractive attributes of today's communications solutions," he said in an email. "The strategy that they have developed, in collaboration with industry, clearly emphasizes the need to provide reliable, secure, and cost effective access to mission-critical and citizen-centric services anytime, anywhere."
.
Dude, the mobile revolution has been going on for years.

Re:Foresight?

[Grave]

Yeah, a couple of years. Not decades. By government standards, taking action now is actually pre-emptive!

Re:Foresight?

[Jack9]

> Dude, the mobile revolution has been going on for years.

This is not a long time in terms of technology maturity. This is not a measurable amount of time in the eyes of the US Government.

Re:Foresight?

[mcwop]

I would disagree. 1) Been 5 years since the iPhone came out. 2) Mobile growth has been exponential both in adoption and pace of innovation compared to almost any personal technology I have seen. Sure we are still in the early innings, but I hope anyone involved in tech recognized the potential at least one year after the iPhone release.

Beauacracy

[MikeMacK]

'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"

Or perhaps we need to simplify the number of "programs", that might help too.

Re:Beauacracy

[Anonymous Coward]

So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help? How would eliminating farm subsidies help someone find information on WIC checks?

Knee-jerk anti-government responses may be great for karma-whoring, but there's no substance there. There may be a few edge cases where programs aren't pulling their weight and should be cut, but the vast majority of the government's efforts go into very important programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Dragging those programs into the 20th century is commendable.

Re:Beauacracy

[sycodon]

People like you have been bitching about knee-jerk anti-government responses for decades.

Now look what we have...an annual budget of over three trillion dollars (thanks to baseline budgeting, it's here to stay).

I have a better idea. How about YOU make a case for the programs you want to keep. All of them.

See ya next decade, 'cause it will take you that long.

Re:Beauacracy

[MikeMacK]

My response was not anti-government, it is pro-efficiency. I was simply responding to what the President said. He is saying that someone has to get "information across different government programs" in order to find the info they want. I don't see how creating mobile apps helps that, seems like simplifying the number of programs a user interacts with would. As to which to "ditch", that's a completely different argument and one we've all been having for decades, and probably will continue too.

Re:Beauacracy

[artor3]

People already made the case for them, that's why they're law. If you want to get rid of them, you have to make a case for that. We don't just reset the government every time some asshole demands it.

If you don't like any of it, then you're free to leave. I'm sure you can find yourself a utopia without any government services.

Re:Beauacracy

[Phelan]

Yeah, screw poor children! Why don't they get jobs.

Re:Beauacracy

[RobertLTux]

it would help if the different agencies had a single Standard Form and did things like share info (as required) where they overlap. What needs to be done is map the different agencies as to what they do and if an agency has say 85% of its duties done by other agencies then close that agency (reassign the balance to one of the other ones).

Re:Beauacracy

[Scarred Intellect]

I just changed my mailing address with the VA. The phone call took me over an hour (had to wait a half hour on hold only to make an appointment for them to call me back later). The man informed me to change my address for any medical benefits or education benefits, I'd have to call them (was a bit vague on who "they" were..) because it's three separate databases.

WTF?! It's all the Department of Veterans Affairs! Why do they have my data stored in THREE different databases?! And why can't this guy submit the request for it to be changed in all three?

Re:Beauacracy

[Anon-Admin]

So which programs do you ditch, and how would it help?

How about all of them?

We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence. It has to provide supporting data that the job it is doing is needed and accomplishes the goals it was created for.

Farm Subsidies and WIC are easy things picked by most people as an example. Take a look at The U.S. Agency for International Development, Or the federal grant for $765,828 that was given to bring an International House of Pancakes franchise to Washington, D.C, and there are thousands more. The number of wasteful programs outweigh the number of good ones.

Re:Beauacracy

[JestersGrind]

Beauacracy: governed by boyfriends?

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc.

One simplification is to make SS and M like the food stamps program..... a needs-based system designed to help the 20-30 million poor persons. Those of us who have money will buy our own retirement through saving, our own medicine/insurance, and our own food at the store.

Re:Beauacracy

[thomasw_lrd]

Actually my thoughts ate a little more complicated than that.

To get rid of food stamps would actually cost more most under my plan in the short term.

The first step is to hire more social workers to actually visit food stamp houses. They would buy the food for the children and possibly even cook for them. The parents would not be allowed to eat unless they actually needed the food (truly disabled, people who are honestly trying to better themselves,other edge cases) the parents would then be forced to find work, or attend some sort of educational training. 10 to 20 years of this and the food atamp program would be greatly reduced in a perfect world.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

If you look at Ron Paul's plan to cut 990 billion dollars, that's essentially what he does. The bulk of the savings comes from stopping the killing of foreigners, while the last third comes from merging departments together for greater efficiency.

But ya know..... Paul is nuts. Why would we listen to a nutty idea like promoting peace & increasing efficiency? It's craaaaazy. So the Cable News tells me. ;-)

Re:Beauacracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Impossible. The Cable News are part of the media, and the media are purposely not covering and reporting Paul and keeping people in the dark.

Or so the Paulites on slashdot tell me. They're focusing on the delegates man!

Re:Beauacracy

[mpeskett]

Given a non-zero probability of parents in that situation getting belligerent about the idea of a stranger coming into their home and feeding their children, that sounds like it's fraught with the potential for either abuse/assault of the social workers involved, or at very least for it to be a really stressful situation for them.

You also seem to be assuming that they'd universally have adequate cooking equipment in the home.

I guess you could send someone to drop off pre-made meals, but enforcing a rule of the food being exclusively for children is always going to be difficult if the parents aren't co-operative.

Re:Beauacracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of food stamps.

And tax breaks for capital gains, and bailouts, and subsides, and H1Bs, and rubberstamped patent/copyright laws.

The poor aren't the only ones living off welfare. Feeding the poor is a drop in the bucket compared to the tax dollars spent propping up failed business models.

Re:Beauacracy

[thomasw_lrd]

Yeah, it would take a perfect world to make it work, and in a perfect world, nobody would be on food stamps.

I think the idea has merit (of course, I do, I made it up), but I know it could be improved upon. Just not smart enough to figure out how to make it work.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>the media are purposely not covering and reporting Paul and keeping people in the dark.

99% true. But the other 1% of the time, when they actually do report on Paul, it's to tell tell us he is either nuts or unelectable, and he doesn't stand a chance (even though he's in a solid second place in the delegate count). Do I think Paul will beat Romney?

No. But he did do better than the other 15 candidates... he came in a strong second. The TV media's decision to tell everyone that Paul should be ignored was a violation of their journalistic oath. They are supposed to REPORT the news, not tell us how to think. Or try to rig an election.

Re:Beauacracy

[Brett Buck]

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, etc. Dragging those programs into the 20th century is commendable.

      All of those programs should be terminated with as much haste as possible.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

You are a fucking asshole.

My daughter came around before I was financially ready to have kids. (Which happens to a LOT of people) If it wasn't for food stamps, we'd have starved. Having a kid to support put me in hyperdrive. I learned as much as I could at college, quit to start a company, company luckily went pretty good (Till investors chewed me up like the naive kid I was at the time.), still got enough money out of the deal to pay off my student loans, put a down payment on a house, and the experience was better than a stupid degree for getting me into the corporate world. (They want results, not pieces of paper) I've since worked for several Fortune 500 companies, architecting huge projects. The peak taxes I've paid in a year (The year I got bought out of my company) was about $100,000. So I've more than paid back the food stamps and the time welfare paid to fix my car, although the guy who owned the repair place was such a "republican" so he threw a big fit about it being government money and really did a shitty job.

So shove your "Let's feed on the poor" up your ass. Next time it will be you that is poor. This life or the next.

The "Well if they can't afford to have kids, they shouldn't have kids" is the lamest cop-out of a non-realistic solution to a wide-spread problem. You ought get your ass kicked for saying something so stupid and selfish.

Basically you are saying my daughter should have been taken away from me back in the day? You suck shit. I raised her right, she's 22 now, has been thru college, just started her first career job making more money than I made at her age, and never got pregnant while a teenager.

I wish I knew who you were so I could beat some sense in your vacuous head. The world has changed, and you are not part of it...

Re:Beauacracy

[KhabaLox]

How about all of them?

We de-fund all of them, then each program has to come back to congress and justify it's continued existence.

I have a great idea, everyone. The Federal government is too wasteful - they're always making reports or wasting our money on things we don't need. So let's make each federal agency present a plan justifying it's existence to Congress. Every two years when a new Congress starts, each agency will come in turn to prove their worthiness with power point presentations, graphs, and spreadsheets. I know this will work, because we do it for Congressmen. They have to justify their existence to the voters every two years, and it's not like they have more important things to do in Washington than scrounging up donations and campaigning for 18 months in their districts.

Re:Beauacracy

[KhabaLox]

One simplification is to make SS and M like the food stamps program..... a needs-based system designed to help the 20-30 million poor persons. Those of us who have money will buy our own retirement through saving, our own medicine/insurance, and our own food at the store.

Well, Medicaid is already for the poor.

How would this work for SS though? I'm upper middle class, my wife an I contribute to our 401(k)s, etc. So do I get a pass on my SS tax? Or do I pay into it without the expectation of getting anything back? What happens if the market tanks right before I retire, and the $1m I expected to have is now $500k? Am I eligible for SS to make up the difference? I don't think you've thought your plan through (or at least, not described it very well).

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>Rob the middle class so the rich can have even more tax cuts.

Actually I think the rich's income (over $10 million) should be taxed 100%. And capital gains tax should be a graduated tax just like income tax... the more you make the more you pay. Make Warrne Buffett pay more.

AND I think the first $100,000 should be 0% income tax (though you still have to pay state and sales and gas and electric tax). So your attempt to paint me as some kind of anti-middle-class, pro-rich republican has failed.
And for the record: I also hate corporations.

   

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>do I get a pass on my SS tax?

Simple. Do you get a pass on the Welfare or Food stamp or Unemployment taxes, even though you never collect? Do you get a pass on Government school tax, even though you never had kids, or you sent your kids to a private school?

Re:Beauacracy

[Anonymous Coward]

"I wish I knew who you were so I could beat some sense in your vacuous head."

"You ought get your ass kicked for saying something so stupid and selfish."

Threats of physical violence huh? Invalidates every point you were trying to make. Sorry moron you are the one who chooses not to be part of civilization. Screw you. And no doubt you are lying also.

cayenne8 is absolutely correct.

Suck it up.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

Oh and the eligibility would be based on lifetime income. If you fell short at the end of your life, or had a period of unemployment in the middle, you would fall below..... say $3 million ($60,000 per year per person) then you could collect SS.

Re:Beauacracy

[dtmancom]

Too bad you never got any government money to address your anger management issues.

Re:Beauacracy

[SuperKendall]

Yep, cutting USAID and its 0.5% of the federal budget will definitely solve our problems and in no way decrease our standing in the world community.

You have to cut somewhere. And yes that WILL solve our problems if we cut a whole bunch of 0.5% programs...

As for world standing, the world would never know. The contribution from private U.S. charities is far greater than the actual help USAID delivers (which is small, after all we ARE talking about a government program here with the tremendous overhead that entails).

Re:Beauacracy

[CastrTroy]

This is basically what breakfast and lunch programmes are about at schools. Ensuring that kids get at least 2 good meals in them during the day so they aren't hungry and can pay attention at school. Maybe it could be extended to provide a meal before they leave school as well. Of course, they'd have to start offering good healthy food for it to have really great benefits instead of sugar coated cereal in chocolate milk for breakfast, with a burger and fries for lunch.

Re:Beauacracy

[drinkypoo]

Too bad you never got any government money to address your anger management issues.

Enjoy your Lunesta, tax-producing droid. CONSUME! CONSUME!

Anger is useful. Not enough of us are getting angry enough at the right things. Of course, if all you ever knew of anger was getting mad at whatever Faux News told you, I guess you might think it was useless.

I'm mad as fuck at someone who says we should just cut our most important resources — our people — adrift when they are in need of assistance. That's how we got where we are now, that and fake-ass entitlement programs that cut you off when you start to get your shit together. If you have money in the bank they take away your assistance. Are you supposed to keep the savings you hope to use to better your situation under the mattress in your tinderbox tenement?

Re:Beauacracy

[shutdown -p now]

Threats of physical violence huh?

Threats of physical violence are fully warranted against someone who threatens to take your kids away.

Re:Beauacracy

[datavirtue]

It was called for; the guy made a stupid shit sucking lame-ass comment and he got flamed for it. No big deal, right?

Re:Beauacracy

[vawwyakr]

There is this perception that all welfare recipients are these irresponsible drags on society who do nothing and just pop out kids. There certainly are these cases but I think they are more likely your outlier than you realize. There is this narrative that anti-government people like to use where the welfare people are all these drug using urban people living off the government teet but I think anyone believing this should step back and think about how reality works in these sorts of narratives. The world is not this simple black and white place and the easy things to believe are not usually the correct ones. Educate yourself on how welfare programs work and what good they do before you offhandedly judge everyone involved.

One interesting article on the topic:
http://womenslawproject.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/debunking-the-myth-of-the-%E2%80%9Cwelfare-queen%E2%80%9D-who-actually-receives-tanf-benefits/

Re:Beauacracy

[thomasw_lrd]

I wonder if the money on the national food stamp program might not be better spent on public boarding schools for low-income families?

This way, you could cut the parents off foodstamps, and give them a way to go to work. Let the kids come home on the weekends and during holidays. This way the children are guaranteed to get three square meals a day, and maybe a decent chance at an education. There could be many programs to keep the kids occupied from sports, to computer literacy to programming, possibly even teach them things like tutoring skills, engineering. Probably wouldn't cost much more than we already spend.

Re:Beauacracy

[vawwyakr]

You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Learn some things about what AID does before you go around spouting off. Heck if you want to eliminate the vast majority of that 0.5% of the budget just stop having wars and stop supporting Israel (since the vast majority of their budget goes to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Pakistan).

Re:Beauacracy

[vawwyakr]

They already spend a large amount of time on negotiating their funding and proving their worth. Every year they have to spend a lot of time justifying their budget and working to keep programs alive. So many people think the Government is just a rubber stamp on more money every year (and I'm sure in some cases that exists) but for the most part it doesn't work like that. I agree we need to work on improving government efficiency but the freak out that people are having on the subject is leading to a lot of misunderstanding.

Re:Beauacracy

[geek]

Typical liberal with the name calling and threats of violence.

Firstly, I don't believe a word of what you said. I don't see why anyone would with your horrid attitude. If you're willing to "beat some sense" into someone what's to stop you from being the typical lying leftist occupy wall street type?

Anyway, as for welfare, food stamps etc. Maybe you should kept it in your pants and not burdened the tax payers? If what you say is to be believed then where is the mom to help out? Where was your family? If you're honest and did do all of those things, why hadn't you gotten your act together before that? Why should I or anyone else pay for your bad behavior?

Good for you if you got it together later. I had a kid young also. I've never collected so much as a dime fromt he government. I'm rather proud of that fact. It's a shame you're proud of the opposite.

Many people do benefit from these programs. J.K. Rowling for example wrote the first HP book while on "benefits" as they call them in the UK. But people like her are an extremely small minority. The majority turn the safety net into a safety hammock and leach off society for multiple generations.

Re:Beauacracy

[geek]

I truly feel sorry for you.

Re:Beauacracy

[dunkelfalke]

Pride goes before a fall.

And no, the majority uses the safety net exactly as it is supposed to be used - as a help for bad times - and pay more than their fair share back for the good times. When you are writing about the majority abusing the safety net, you are writing out of your arse, the proof being the fact that only a minority of the potential workforce is unemployed.

And well, frankly, I'd rather have some people abuse the safety net than a larger percentage of people around me having such a low standard of living that they'd start being criminals.

The libertard paradise - Russia in the 1990ies - was not a nice place to live at all, for exactly that reason. And if you think you can protect yourself with firearms, just remember that criminals would have no scruples to do Han Solo to you.

Re:Beauacracy

[drinkypoo]

I truly feel your mom.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

Thank you :)

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

I really don't care what you believe, but it's very much the truth. I guess I could show you my resume, but you probably wouldn't believe that either. (Hell, looking back at it, I'm pretty amazed myself that I got this far in the corporate world with nothing but a GED, some college, and a lot of determination.)

As far as the "beat some sense" comment, so it's only OK if some idiot Tea Partier like Ted Nugent said it? I dunno where else to go with this sub-argument, but it strikes me as hypocritical.

I view the social safety net as a great accomplishment of our species. Nothing ever goes as planned. To me, the whole point of a "society" is to increase the living conditions of all who partake in that society. I understand and fully support that now that I've gotten my shit together that I have to pay into that same society that helped me when I was in need. I don't hide behind the facade of "the taxpayers" when I make my point either. I'm a tax payer, you are a tax payer, and a whole bunch of other people are taxpayers. Right now, I just hope that the miniscule amount of my taxes that go towards people in need of assistance are going to people using it as a temporary jumping point to get their lives together too, and not the stereotypical lazy slob. You act as though most of the money you pay in taxes goes to welfare recipients. It's a fleeting drop in the bucket compared to funding the "privatized" wars/industries/prisons that we've been suckered into, so I'm not sure why you're assigning it so much importance.

I don't see where 'pride' fits into the issue either, at that point it's do or die. I could have given up, I could have turned to crime, but instead I took the money essentially as a loan against my future. I've paid that money back about a hundred fold since then too, so you've got zero right to give me any shit.

And your weirdest points: Where was the mom? Where was my family?

Well, the mom was right next to me for the first few years, finishing her senior year in high school, working a job, and we both made it work. We eventually broke up, but are friends these days.

My family? They went with the standard conservative Christian Republican mindset: Ostracism. It was all on me since I'd 'embarrassed' the family by having a child out of wedlock. Made me turn against that whole mindset. It is evil at it's core.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

How is it "entitlement" (A bullshit numb term if I ever heard one) if I've paid back 100x what I took out?

Re:Beauacracy

[mcgrew]

They got rid of food stamps years ago, where have you been? Oh, right, you don't know any poor people. Let me hand you a few clues.

They use LINK cards now, there are no stamps. Most people with LINK cards have full time jobs, often two of them. The poor aren't poor because they're lazy, they're poor because YOU refuse to pay a living wage, Mr 1% (or idiot tea partier, I don't know which). Raise the minimum wage so 40 hours of work will feed a family of four and there will be few people in need of food stamps; the handicapped and those unable to find work would be the only ones receiving them.

Your "let the children starve" attitude is disgusting. Your "let people go hungry so McDonalds and Wal Mart can make even more shitloads of money" is even more disgusting.

I certainly hope you don't consider yourself a Christian, but I fear you do; most right wing assholes claim to be Christian. If you are, YOU are one of the hypocrites the man you call your lord and savior trash talked to and about. Unless you're athiest or Muslim, read your damned bible.

Re:Beauacracy

[cayenne8]

There is this perception that all welfare recipients are these irresponsible drags on society who do nothing and just pop out kids. There certainly are these cases but I think they are more likely your outlier than you realize.

Tell you what...YOU come down here to New Orleans, and look around at the projects around town...and see how much you think the worthless welfare crowd is the outlier of the spectrum.

I see it all the time....and it is a vicious circle of poverty, and no will whatsoever to get out of it. It has been so instilled here for generations...even Katrina flushing out the city...couldn't get rid of that welfare culture. It came back. It came back along with the drug thug life and violence that accompanies it.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

Can't beat me so you're resorting to picking apart my choice of words? How lame.

Being from severely Christian families, and being young, there was no way to have a serious conversation with our parents about responsible sexuality. See that law of unintended consequences in action there with your bullshit social conservative mentality. Maybe I should have had sex with the farm animals instead? Would that have been better for you.

There was no ignorance of biology, simply bad aim.

Since 20 years ago, when has anyone but myself been supporting me? I've paid probably a million dollars in taxes in the last 20 years, so if anyone's supporting anyone, that would be me supporting you.

Is that all you have for an argument, or is your world view really that small?

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

Violence is not always the answer, but when it's impossible to have a battle of wits with such a brainwashed individual as yourself, there's really nothing else a dummy like you understands.

I wouldn't say I'm violent, but I don't suffer intolerant fuckheads like you with much patience.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

How is "I feel sorry for you" in any way a relevant reply to what he just said?

My anger is managed well, but that doesn't mean I'm not angry, it just means that I don't physically act it out. But I'd be willing to make an exception in your case...

You should change your handle to Dweeb, you are no Geek.

Re:Beauacracy

[thomasw_lrd]

Just so you know, I do know they use a card. I also know more people who abuse the system, than people who need the system.

Hell, I've been on food stamps before. Raising minimum wage is not the answer. If you live in the US, and you can't find a job that will pay your bills, then you are a lazy fuck. I've worked two jobs (one of them at minimum wage, the other manual labor), I've worked full-time (doing manual labor, no less), and went to school full-time to make a better life for my family. Oh yeah, while I was doing all of this, my wife was also in school full-time. And we had at least 3 children the whole time (We now have 7). Now i sit on my ass 5 days a week, and enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I've busted my ass, taken advantage of the welfare programs when I could. But that's right, anybody who says get rid of foodstamps is a self-righteous, rich motherfucking asshole.Oh wait, they aren't, they are probably the average working class American who is sick and tired of propping up lazy fucking asses, who don't have to improve their lot in life, cause the govt. pays for their food, house, clothing, and everything else they fucking need. Sorry if I am one of those people.

But you go right ahead and vote for the liberals in the next election, and when the US no longer exists, don't come crying to me, cause I won't have anything to give to you.

Re:Beauacracy

[geek]

My family? They went with the standard conservative Christian Republican mindset: Ostracism. It was all on me since I'd 'embarrassed' the family by having a child out of wedlock. Made me turn against that whole mindset. It is evil at it's core.

Hard to see why they would abandon such a warm, intelligent, lovable person like you. I'd probably ignore you too. In fact, watch me do it right after this post. Enjoy your misery.

Re:Beauacracy

[mcgrew]

Take people's kids away because they work at Wal Mart? That's right, asshole, every one of those Wal mart and McDonalds employees are on LINK (there is no such thing as food stamps) and would go hungry without it. Some people who work in those places live in homeless shelters, because they can't earn a living even though they work 40 hours a week! I'd be willing to bet you'd like to get rid of the minimum wage, too, wouldn't you?.

Oh, and to decrease your ignorance a little more (or not, your kind seldom listens), AFDC was abolished fifteen years ago. It was replaced with TANF -- the T stands for "temporary," has a two year limit, and is not an entitlement like AFDC was.

You might want to get your news from someone other than Rupert Murdoch once in a while, you'd be far less ignorant and look a hell of a lot less like a total asshole.

You know what those poor people are going to do if you take away their LINK? They're going to break into your house and steal your shit and sell it for food money. Think about that, dumbass.

Re:Beauacracy

[TuringTest]

So your position is than anyone who has bas luck of any kind should drown in shit?

Re:Beauacracy

[ktappe]

'For far too long, the American people have been forced to navigate a labyrinth of information across different government programs in order to find the services they need.'"

Or perhaps we need to simplify the number of "programs", that might help too.

...until they "simplify" ("eliminate" if I am reading your intent) the program you happen to use. Then you will scream bloody murder.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

Um. No. I said that Buffett was NOT raising taxes on the capital gains, and that he is doing that in order to give himself a loophole to avoid taxes. Basically he's being unfair. That's why I believe that BOTH income and capital gains tax should be higher..... to get all the rich, including Buffett.

Re:Beauacracy

[KlomDark]

Ha ha, Geek lost.

Re:Beauacracy

[cayenne8]

So your position is than anyone who has bas luck of any kind should drown in shit?

Hey...life is tough. You have to learn to deal with it....bad luck and all.

Is it "my" fault someone has bad luck? Is it my responsibility to make up for someone elses bad luck?

Re:Beauacracy

[cayenne8]

Temporary?

The population in the projects down here in New Orleans it permanent...same people, generations of families...welfare mothers and families, often with no jobs...

Sorry, I don't buy that they eventually get cut off....you have people there living off the social teet for a lifetime, in a vicious circle that breeds new generations living the same bad dream.

I have to pay for people's bad planning?

Minimum wage jobs are for kids in school to make some extra money...it isn't meant for grown adults trying to raise a family?!?!

If you're too stupid or shortsighted to try to excel and learn something in school, I have to pay for your bad educational and vocational choices? Where in the constitution does it say I have to be my brothers keeper?

Re:Beauacracy

[Ksevio]

Paul isn't nuts - he's just has opinions that the vast majority of Americans disagree with. In the Republican party he has a select group of supporters, but it's capped at around 20% of Republicans.

The media doesn't cover him because he's not very interesting. His extreme views mean he's not going to win, and his solid consistency means there's rarely anything new to report on.

Most people will say they're in favor of cutting down the military, but pulling out and creating a vacuum might just put the Taliban back in power or leave the door open for Iran or North Korea to attack other countries.

"Increasing efficiency" sounds great at first look too, but it would be very unpopular if the nation's top employer (the government) laid off most of the employees and at the same time cut back the social safety nets.

I like most people enjoy having the services that the government provides, like roads, schools, protection, etc.

Re:Beauacracy

[DNS-and-BIND]

"I believe that now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them."

-- Margaret Sanger, 1950

She's the founder of Planned Parenthood, by the way. You know, the respected organization that has a ton of clout in our political system nowadays. Wait, aren't they on the Democrat side? Sounds like you need to clean house.

Re:Beauacracy

[fiannaFailMan]

. He is saying that someone has to get "information across different government programs" in order to find the info they want. I don't see how creating mobile apps helps that,

Well then you're very silly.

If this was a corporation creating mobile apps to make information more accessible there would be no controversy about it. But as soon as the government applies the same modernizing technology the anti-government knee-jerkers just can't help themselves but get another little dig in.

PS, this interweb thing you're posting on? Government invented that.

Re:Beauacracy

[fiannaFailMan]

I just changed my mailing address with the VA. The phone call took me over an hour (had to wait a half hour on hold only to make an appointment for them to call me back later). The man informed me to change my address for any medical benefits or education benefits, I'd have to call them (was a bit vague on who "they" were..) because it's three separate databases.

WTF?! It's all the Department of Veterans Affairs! Why do they have my data stored in THREE different databases?! And why can't this guy submit the request for it to be changed in all three?

I see you and I raise you. Before I defected to a credit union, any time I made a dreaded call to Bank of America customer service I typically had to spend over an hour on the phone with them. Every time I spoke to someone new I had to start at the top, beginning with identifying myself and proving that I was who I said I was. On one call I got passed around five departments (one of them twice) because nobody had a fucking clue who was doing what and who could help me.

Oh and my local DMV works with efficiency that would put any bank to shame. In and out in 15 minutes without an appointment, 5 minutes with an appointment, and most services available online and eliminating the need to go into the office. Not bad for a service that only ten years ago was a half-day ordeal for even trivial transactions.

Bottom line: there are efficient private businesses and inefficient private businesses. There are efficient government departments and inefficient government departments.

Re:Beauacracy

[10101001 10101001]

If you look at Ron Paul's plan to cut 990 billion dollars, that's essentially what he does. ... while the last third comes from merging departments together for greater efficiency.

So, Ron Paul thinks he can save $330 billion simply by merging departments for greater efficiency? Yeah, the only way I can see that working is if that translates into firing a lt of federal government employees. Even presuming that'd actually work, what sort of system do you think will be left? It sounds the same sort of "greater efficiency" you see when companies merger for greater "synergy", the CEO fires 30%-60% of employees, and then the company becomes a hollow shell of what it once was as the staff that are left are entirely incapable of expanding into the expected new roles--as that's outside accepted budge considerations--while being so severely understaffed to even perform anything but the most basic of expected tasks, and even then with ever growing queues and constant delays.

In short, it's a recipe to "kill the beast". Now, if you're one of the people who already think the government is a beast, that's a good thing. If you're on the fence, this will make you think of it as a beast--as now you're paying effectively for a crippled system which fails to deliver yet still costs a lot of money. And those on the opposite side will see it for what it is, either an ill-conceived plan by a person who thinks they know better and can selectively trim the government like it were a bonsai tree or an intentional attack that looks good on paper for a few years but by the time the shit hits the fan they'll be out of the system and someone else will be left to pick up the pieces.

So yea, Ron Paul is crazy. Increasing efficiency is great. But it's insane to think you can have the sort of efficiency gains proposed without some serious chopping of functionality. And if that's the plan all along, then it's just a grand lie, promising to have our cake and eat it too. I mean, as much as--a great example, I think--we spend on Medicare/Medicaid (covering the old and poor)--with private insurance being equivalent money spent for everyone else covered--and the whole point that it per capita is equivalent to a lot of socialist healthcare systems (covering everyone); yet, I think that even optimistically, if the US were to create a universal health care system that merged Medicare/Medicaid into it, it'd take a minimal of decades before the per capita figures for the new universal health care system were remotely in line with other countries And given Ron Paul can't be in office that long and there's not enough support for a long-term transition...

Re:Beauacracy

[Velex]

I'll stand with the assholes on this one.

I have never understood this. How do you have a child unintentionally?

No, seriously. I want to know. No thoughts about birth control or condoms or gee, maybe I'm not ready for this yet? I don't know your body parts. Was it a case of you not being able to keep your dick in your pants or not being able to keep a dick out of your pants? I really, really don't get it.

I've only had one sexual partner in my life. If I could have kids, I would have definitely given that a "ok, blowjob for tonight, but I at least need to be on the pill, honey" (or let's go get some condoms, baby, which ever intact body part I could hope to use to have kids of my own). And yet you same straight assholes are out there saying that people like me have thousands of sexual partners and are the reason marriage is falling apart? Look in the mirror.

One additional data point before I move on. It turns out that the guy I fell in love with isn't gay. He was just attracted to my androgyny, and it was good while it was, but all things must come to an end. Now, he's an athiest like me but also practical. He says he never uses condoms. He's had tons of sexual partners. Now he wants a wife and wants children. All those sexual partners and no accidental children. Just lucky? Who knows.

And now for something completely different.

Ok, here's the thing. People make mistakes. That's why I used to donate to food banks before I learned that all I was doing was helping people who want to turn me into a second class citizen (if you define marriage in terms of male and female, your next task is to define male and female at the great risk of turning people who "just are" female into legal males because biology is messy, and don't even start with fundamentalist bullshit, because simplistic bullshit is all it is no matter whether it works for 90% or 99% of the population or not. There will always be counterexamples.).

So, you had a beautiful baby girl, the system worked, you got help, and everybody won. That's excellent. I wish I knew more stories like yours.

Unfortunately, your story, if it is to be believed, is a severe outlier. I've been exposed to many females who have chosen the single mother lifestyle, a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paychecks. I even had a passing interest in a guy who had 3 kids and was having child support issues. The issue is that he had never worked a day in his life, literally. His entitlement complex, the way he talked about his welfare cash assistance as "his money" and the indignation that the economy collapsing meant that the state was going to cut some of "his money" was just too much.

The devil is that I have to agree with the person you responded to. Yes, I would rather live in a world where your daughter would have been taken from you. The advantage is egalitarianism and encouraging people to think ahead before they make big choices like having children. It simply isn't right that people who take the awesome responsibility of creating human life trivially get privileged over other, more responsible people.

As a footnote, I'm not suggesting that kind of egalitarianism would enable me to adopt kids. I'm in no position to have children yet. Some day I may be, and maybe I'll find the right person and maybe there won't be too many Jim Crow laws to get in our way and maybe I'll adopt when Mr. Right and I are ready. Not a moment before. I suppose I should be glad at my sexual worthlessness, but there is no sense in giving people leave to have babies just for the sake of having babies and leaving people like me with the bill. The opening to the movie Idiocracy makes my point better than I ever could hope to, having established that the question of having kids has been taken out of my hands by messy biology and even messier superstitions.

Re:Beauacracy

[Velex]

a couple lesbians even who decided to find sperm donors to turn into 18 year paycheck

As a sidenote, my ex made an interesting comment the other day in support of gay marriage. I was bitching about lesbians, and he noted that in a legal framework with gay marriage, if a legally married lesbian couple has children, then can you legally hold the man who had a one night stand with omg lesbians responsible for child support? The contention is that in such a system, one could not, because the law must needs assume that two women who would invoke a sacred thing like marriage to form a life-long bond had invited the man into their bedroom for the sole purpose of conceiving a child.

Of course that's mostly sophistry. I'll be shocked if any of the DOMA laws are repealed before I die. Giving niggers equality, that's one thing, but I guess giving faggots equality is asking too much.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

>>>pro-life creationist libertarian doctor. In other words, an amoral, confused idiot.

Way to insult most of the U.S who are religious.
Don't run for office.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

Pay attention. It's pretty clear Paul will have more delegates by the the end of June than either Santorum or Gingrich managed to win at their peak (230). I'm estimating he'll have 1/3rd of the total, or about 700. Not bad for someone who is "unelectable" and "has no chance". These lousy reporters should quit their job, because they're no good at it.

As for "15 candidates" I just made a guess based-upon how many people I saw standing on last summer's debate stages.

Re:Beauacracy

[drinkypoo]

When I posted my above comment he foe'd me, so I guess he nurses his anger alone in the dark, like his genitals.

Re:Beauacracy

[butchersong]

Interesting article (ok it's USATODAY but still) about the real deficit this year. Note that the number is FOUR times the officially reported number... http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-05-18/federal-deficit-accounting/55179748/1 I think we have a little bit more than a few edge cases where programs are not pulling their weight. I don't know what else to say to try to get through to you. The official number is INSANE and if the real number is FOUR times the official number we are well and truly screwed.

Re:Beauacracy

[roman_mir]

Your daughter is not anybody else's problem, it is your problem, not mine, never was, never will be. Same thing in reverse - my daughter is only my problem, has nothing to do with you and caring about her should never be forced upon you by the threat of violence.

Re:Beauacracy

[noobermin]

A wise physicists once said to me:

A perponderence of anecdotes is not evidence.

Instead, follow the numbers. They tend to be less biased.

Re:Beauacracy

[noobermin]

#Shit, I have nothing witty to rebuttal, just insult him then, that'll work -.-

Re:Beauacracy

[mcgrew]

The population in the projects down here in New Orleans it permanent...same people, generations of families...welfare mothers and families, often with no jobs...

Sorry, I don't buy that they eventually get cut off....you have people there living off the social teet for a lifetime, in a vicious circle that breeds new generations living the same bad dream.

You know these people personally, do you? You work for a social service agency, do you?

PRWORA replaced AFDC with TANF and ended entitlement to cash assistance for low-income families, meaning that eligible families may be denied aid even if they are eligible. Under TANF, states have broad discretion to determine who is eligible for benefits and services. In general states must use funds to serve families with children, with the only exceptions related to efforts to reduce non-marital childbearing and promote marriage. States cannot use TANF funds to assist most legal immigrants until they have been in the country for at least 5 years. TANF sets forth the following work requirements in order to qualify for benefits [16]:

Recipients (with few exceptions) must work as soon as they are job ready or no later than two years after coming on assistance.
Single parents are required to participate in work activities for at least 30 hours per week. Two-parent families must participate in work activities 35 or 55 hours a week, depending upon circumstances.
Failure to participate in work requirements can result in a reduction or termination of benefits to the family.
States, in fiscal year 2004, have to ensure that 50 percent of all families and 90 percent of two-parent families are participating in work activities. If a state meets these goals without restricting eligibility, it can receive a caseload reduction credit. This credit reduces the minimum participation rates the state must achieve to continue receiving federal funding.
While states are given more flexibility in the design and implementation of public assistance, they must do so within various provisions of the law: [17]

provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes or in the homes of relatives;
end the dependence of needy parents on government benefits by promoting job preparation, work, and marriage;
prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies and establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and
encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.

Minimum wage jobs are for kids in school to make some extra money

Kids don't need the money. If an adult can't get a job, it's just wrong to hire a kid instead. I worked as a teen, but the economy was a hell of a lot better in 1968.

If you're too stupid or shortsighted to try to excel and learn something in school, I have to pay for your bad educational and vocational choices?

Not my choices, I've been working for almost half a century. You take a kid born to an alcoholic teenager (which causes mental retardation) who has no father, whose mother has no work history, you expect that kid to make anything of himself? Is it his fault that his mother drank him stupid? Is it his fault that he wasn't brought up right?

There is one form of welfare I absolutely hate, and that's welfare for the rich. Farming subsidies, oil subsidies, grants to Kodak and IBM, a minimum wage so low that I have to suppliment the workers at McDonald's with LINK cards, that is all welfare for the rich, and it's an abomination.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

Pay attention to the still-ongoing race. It's pretty clear Paul will have more delegates than either Santorum or Gingrich managed to win (230), meaning he will be in second place out of the 10+ candidates that originally started a year ago.

I'm estimating he'll have 1/3rd of the total, or about 700. Not bad for someone who is "unelectable" and "has no chance". These lousy reporters should quit their job, because they're no good at it. They are not there to tell people, "Ignore this candidate. He can't win." They aren't there to try to fix the election; they are there to report the events and let the viewers decide.

Re:Beauacracy

[cpu6502]

The government has been spending 1/2 to 1 trillion (per year) more than it takes in..... and it has been doing that for a decade. The national+state debt is nearing 20 trillion, which is almost $200,000 owed per American home.

If you think this can continue without making cuts to government departments, then YOU are the one who is crazy not Paul. We are headed for a EU-style collapse caused by our debt (just sit back and watch that continent... it's our future).

Re:Beauacracy

[Politburo]

Most programs are already approved on a yearly basis, via the budget process.

Re:Beauacracy

[Politburo]

That is actually a very poor article. It is not the "real" deficit.. while we are borrowing a lot of money, we are not borrowing that amount of money each year. What we borrow is the real deficit and it is close to the number reported in the budget (supplementals usually don't count in the budget but are debt). You can check the Bureau of Public Debt and do the numbers yourself if you don't believe me.

The article talks about the deficit calculated per standard accounting rules. It's a rather meaningless number, which is why it isn't usually calculated by OMB, CBO, etc.

Re:Beauacracy

[10101001 10101001]

And I never said we could continue without making cuts to government departments. The difference is Ron Paul tries to paint a rosy picture that those cuts will be substantially through efficiency gains, not outright loss of functionality. Meanwhile, I and most people realize that tough choices and sacrifice are necessary to make the sort of cuts that are necessary. Meanwhile, taxes will probably have to go up. Now, it could be said that Ron Paul doesn't say these things because that'd make him unelectable. But, then, that's the problem with all the other politicians as well.

Re:Beauacracy

[TuringTest]

No and yes.

It's the only reasonable position for the case that you yourself get bad luck in the future. It also happens to be how our society evolved from the lower life forms.

90 Days!?

[na1led]

What a Laugh! The Government can't even update their websites in less than 90 days. They are too inefficient to complete a task like this within a few months.

Re:90 Days!?

[Billly Gates]

Why?

All they need to do is create CSS for mobile apps. Now their internal apps that require IE 6 ... that is a different story.

Re:90 Days!?

[pympdaddyc]

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.

That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P

Re:90 Days!?

[47Ronin]

To be fair, as a supplement to the President's memorandum, the U.S. CTO and CIO are leading programs to stop the proliferation of .gov sites and focus on converting all the PDF and static website content into machine-readable data so public/private services can communicate create content via APIs. Your sites won't need updating if the data coming from the government is being streamed into an embedded visualization app. You'd be able to consume whatever report or graph you need in whatever form you need it in, using the scope you want.

The video for the the CTO/CIO announcement (more for the Slashdot crowd): http://fedscoop.com/video-vanroekel-park-announce-new-government-digital-strategy/

Re:90 Days!?

[armanox]

For some offices that shoudn't be a problem. Some of them (or at least part of some of them) I can say with confidence no longer require IE at all, and give the users a choice of IE or Firefox (and supporting IE6 was dropped as a requirement over a year ago!).

Re:90 Days!?

[gl4ss]

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.

That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P

which really might not be enough for some agencies to contract subcontractors for the work of creating a blog.

Re:90 Days!?

[Sloppy]

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months.

Shit! Oh well, never mind what I said here then; it really is a boondoggle after all.

Re:90 Days!?

[chill]

This has been done before. You're over thinking it if you suggest a blog might be used. The HSPD-12 implementation status sites are most commonly a single HTML page or a single PDF document linked off an agency website.

For example, the U.S. International Trade Commission. Go to their main page at http://www.itc.gov/. Scroll all the way to the bottom and click on the HSPD-12 (PDF) link.

THAT is what is being mandated.

Re:90 Days!?

[na1led]

My guess is they will have it only available for Black Berry Phones, knowing BB will soon be bankrupt.

Re:90 Days!?

[datavirtue]

Quick! I need this done before election time.

Election year

[nurb432]

When politicians pretend to care about random voting/donating blocks of citizens, when they really could care less.

I'm all in, but ...

[medcalf]

The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?

Re:I'm all in, but ...

[Billly Gates]

It is already finished.

This is external websites for the public and not complex intranet apps. They are already finished and just need CSS for mobile to work. The content is standard HTML and the processes are already finished and there. Only the CSS is optimized for desktop work that needs work.

This shouldn't require extra paperwork and website design from scratch.

Re:I'm all in, but ...

[dkf]

The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper. The thicket of laws and regulations is such that any government process becomes bogged down in irrelevancies. You WANT a bureaucracy for things like making passport issuance regular, but is our online passport application going to come with a must-accept click-through with a paperwork reduction act notice?

Now we're going with apps, we can make it an unskippable video describing how this is reducing paperwork instead. Go, go, government progress!

Re:I'm all in, but ...

[KhabaLox]

The government's problem isn't technology. You can't automate well a process you cannot do well on paper.

Maybe we're doing it backwards. Maybe if software engineers (helped) design government processes they would be more efficient.

I'm not a software engineer, but I do have that kind of logical thought process, and I know this has helped immensely in my career as I spec out business processes and design/refine the way of doing things (i.e. processing information, moving paperwork, reporting data, etc.)

Re:I'm all in, but ...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Agreed. As someone who's worked for the U.S. federal government, the amount of effort required to comply with various directives, even to accomplish the most basic of tasks, is maddening.

For example, suppose you needed to order some laptops for your developers, and some compilers as well. Private sector: 4 hours to shop around, and you'd have the order fulfilled in about 3 weeks. Most of that delay would be for custom builds of the laptops by Dell, HP, etc.

In the government: 20 man-hours gathering competitive bids from 3 vendors who agree to work under the pricing schedule your agency requires. 4 man-hours / 2 calendar days ensuring the order complies with Clinger-Cohen and Section 508 regulations. 20 man-hours / 2 calendar weeks getting permission to place the order from one approving authority. Another month going back-and-forth with another approving authority. Then the order gets placed.

The opportunity costs and labor costs associated with the effort and delays in getting s**t done in the federal government is mind-numbing. When feds get bashed for having, in some cases, more costly compensation packages than the private sector, there's one factor that rarely comes up in conversation: any competent software developer will demand a pay premium in exchange for putting up with this soul-sucking crap on a daily basis.

The meat of the memo...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

The meat of the memo is on page 16: Shift to an Enterprise-Wide Asset Management and Procurement Model
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government-strategy.pdf
"GSA will establish a government-wide contract vehicle for mobile devices and wireless service"

The rest of this is just window dressing.

I couldn't agree more.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

it is time for the federal government to do more

Too bad this is completely missing the mark.

It makes me proud

[rssrss]

to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea, ...

Re:It makes me proud

[Jawnn]

Suits me fine. If the Republican'ts want to continue their stated strategy of doing nothing whenever possible, let the Executive Branch take initiative where it can. When all parties want to quit the grammar school, partisan bullshit, let's talk about tackling the "more important" issues.

Re:It makes me proud

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, of course, the government only does one thing at a time, and the President can't possibly diversify priorities.

You can pretend that a focus on the big stuff is good, but that leads to the small stuff being ignored. Or worse yet, delegated.

Sometimes it's important for the President to check minor things and to lead his support for them.

Besides, this is clearly just a speech or paper, the President probably read the report, signed off on it because it seemed reasonable, and hasn't thought more about it than going to the toilet.

Re:It makes me proud

[tepples]

Maybe you can talk to Reid about moving on all the jobs bills and budgets languishing in the Senate.

Is it the fault of Sen. Reid or the fault of enough Republicans to make a filibuster?

Re:It makes me proud

[slimjim8094]

Frankly, if my President is too stupid to think about more than one thing at a time, I don't much want him as my President. The rest of us have multiple "really important" things that we deal with all the time; the President should be even better at it than the average Joe.

Re:It makes me proud

[JackieBrown]

Then let the vote come and be done with it. How is what he doing different than the Republican's filibustering?

Re:It makes me proud

[GodfatherofSoul]

Ah the refrain of the uninformed. Here's your homework assignment. Watch 1 hour of CSPAN. You'll notice that Congress and the Executive are dealing with more issues than the new scycle headliner of the day. Just because your attention span doesn't hold more than 3 storylines doesn't mean that our government is only dealing with 3 topics at once.

Re:It makes me proud

[fiannaFailMan]

to know that Obama can pay attention to the really important stuff while he deals with a trillion dollar budget deficit, a factious Congress, the European Debt crisis, the Iran nuclear crisis, China's disputes with the Philippines in the South China Sea, ...

... preventing women from accessing contraception, preventing consenting adults from getting married if it offends your religious sensibilities, giving teacher the right to teach nonsense in science class...

You seriously think the Dems are the only people who can multitask?

Obfuscation

[Art Challenor]

An excellent opportunity to double the amount of babble presented making it twice as difficult to find the information you want and hide the fact that many things that we should know are just omitted.

As scientifically minded people, we have tendency to model systems. The only model that really fits most democratic systems is extreme cynicism. The politicians may not be exclusively power- and money-driven with just about total disregard for the will of the people, but if you apply a model based on that you can fairly accurately predict outcomes.

Re:Obfuscation

[sycodon]

To start with, creating a government website is like trying to index the contents of a land fill. So much trash in so many places.

Now, take the task that's virtually impossible with a full blown browser and make it work on a 3"x2" screen with a touch pad interface.

Yeah. All the tech people in the government have a complete WTF? look on their faces.

Re:Obfuscation

[Art Challenor]

To start with, creating a government website is like trying to index the contents of a land fill. So much trash in so many places.

That's a feature not a bug.

Now, take the task that's virtually impossible with a full blown browser and make it work on a 3"x2" screen with a touch pad interface.

Much easier to make information difficult to find. A good start. Will still take a little spin go justify why all the text and important images have to be supersmall, but the name or photo of any politician who has a finger in the project will be easy to find and large, but that's not that difficult.

Yeah. All the tech people in the government have a complete WTF? look on their faces.

What? No, their real job, not the job we'd expect them to be doing, just go a lot easier.

And for Blackeberry too...

[stanlyb]

Don't forget, he has BlackBerry Storm. So, guys, don't waste your time for iPhone or Android and instead of, start learning Qnx and BBX (BB10???).

This seems like another make-work project

[holophrastic]

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love driving your mountain roads that go from nowhere to nowhere and have absolutely zero traffic for hundreds of kilometres. Certainly a beautiful way to waste money. This seems like the very same thing.

Mobile devices such as these have been around for about 5 years. That makes them new technology, especially in government circles. What's going to happen after the 90 days? Will the next order be to improve the sites to support the next big mobile browser? Oh wait, that's what this is -- wasn't it just two years ago that he ordered everybody to make their services available online in the first place?

Government's always been required to make things available to the widest audience. If everyone could access the government services from a desktop, that'd suffice. It needn't be better than functional. You don't need to pay your taxes from your shitty smart phone -- especially because 10 years from now your smart phone won't be so shitty.

Re:This seems like another make-work project

[tepples]

wasn't it just two years ago that he ordered everybody to make their services available online in the first place?

Yes, and a lot of them ended up implemented in Flash, Java applets, or something else that doesn't work on Safari for iOS or Android Browser for Android.

Re:This seems like another make-work project

[drinkypoo]

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love driving your mountain roads that go from nowhere to nowhere and have absolutely zero traffic for hundreds of kilometres.

Because you drove them in part of the season when there was little traffic you can't see their value? You don't get why you might want to have paved roads in places that have occasional significant traffic? In any case, our road system is a military asset.

You don't need to pay your taxes from your shitty smart phone -- especially because 10 years from now your smart phone won't be so shitty.

I'm just hoping that in ten years we're still allowed to access a peer to peer internet.

Re:This seems like another make-work project

[holophrastic]

nah, those roads aren't main roads. they are west virginia beautiful mountain roads, long and winding. they are a tourist attraction for car clubs, certainly. but that's about it.

don't get me wrong, ask me what I want, and I want a road. but it's certainly not worth the expense. You've got some roads that go six thousand feet up a mountain, to reveal nothing more than a look-out point and an out-house (seriously). Must have cost a nice ten million dollars to build the road. I'm just saying that money could have been spent elsewhere.

Maybe I'm not the norm

[sunking2]

But personally there is practically zero information that I need to get from the government. I understand there are exceptions, but I think the norm for my government interaction should be filing my taxes and filling in the fasfa for my daughter once a year. I'm probably over stating, but it does bring into question exactly what the return is on spending all of this money.

Re:Maybe I'm not the norm

[sunking2]

The question is why do we need to spend money so that people who are on food stamps can use their smart phones to get them.

Where the US Gov uses SWF

[tepples]

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.

Guess what the National Weather Service's radar loops use.

Re:Where the US Gov uses SWF

[fiannaFailMan]

Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.

Guess what the National Weather Service's radar loops use.

I give up. What do they use?

Re:Just a CSS change, right?

[game kid]

The former is how it should and easily can be. Sadly, between the "app" "revolution" and the lack of mention of HTML, I see more sites like m.fbi.gov in our future.

A bit more interesting to me is the "requiring agencies to use web performance analytics and customer satisfaction measurement tools on all '.gov' websites" line in the PDF release. Will those be some sort of in-house thing? Will they end up tripping Do Not Track or IE's Tracking Protection because they're sending the info to Google Analytics or whathaveyou? If it's just a glorified hit counter instead of full-on analytics services, then why haven't they already been doing this--do they need a contractor to count their own damn pageviews?

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[Ultra64]

> java script is not allowed anywhere ever.

this isn't the year 2000

Optimize for mobile

[Culture20]

Doesn't mean "make it 200x300". Make it a normal website, just take out the mouseover crap (this means you slashdot). I can't select text on /. To quote someone when using my iPhone because there's some stupid detection JS when you click regular text.

Amount of information per page

[tepples]

Ditch the piles of eye candy and put information there and it should work fine.

The problem is that one generally wants to have more information per page on desktop than on mobile because desktop's screen is big enough to display more information.

Re:Amount of information per page

[silas_moeckel]

For a mobile browser I want the same to more information per page sine 3g and 4g the latency to get things going is fairly high while the end device has plenty of room (I am not talking about J2ME type handsets). Since if it's well written it can render the page with very little of it actually downloaded.

Re:Is this the end of flash, crappy ajax and frame

[tepples]

Flash is "bleeding edge"? Have you been in a coma for the past 15 years?

SWF is still the fastest way to display vector animation, and Flash is still the best-known way (with I'd guess monopoly market share) to edit vector animation. Let me know when animated SVG comes near the frame rate of SWF for a similarly complex scene. Do you want me to link you some benchmark pages with which to test?

Two key services to do first

[Animats]

• The National Instant Criminal Background Check System. This is what's used to check who can buy a gun. It's currently a kludge, works differently in some states, and is up only 17 hours a day. (It's down on Xmas.) There should be an app for that.
• E-Verify , for checking whether someone is authorized to work in the United States. There should be an app for that. Then there would be no excuse for not checking.

One app for the left, and one app for the right.

Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual specs.

[Medievalist]

If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.

Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?

It's really good advice, though. A website that is minimally styled and standards compliant lets the endpoint device determine optimal format, which means that end users can judge the quality and personal applicability of their devices by how well they render your content. Everybody wins - except crap vendors who can't deliver a good web experience without special coding on the server side, and crap web designers who over-specify their presentation layer or drive navigation through nontextual blobs. And frankly, we want the crap vendors and designers to lose, it's part of how the web is supposed to work.

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[cayenne8]

If the web site is accessible it will work well on mobile. Ditch the piles of eye candy and put information there and it should work fine. PS flash and java script is not allowed anywhere ever.

However, they must bring back the BLINK tag!!!

Re:You seem to want to imply they use flash....

[_xeno_]

From the looks of things, they're nothing but animated GIFs.

That's only the national ones. If you use a local one, and make it animate, they use Flash. For example, the Boston area radar loop.

Which is actually a step up - they used to be a Java applet. The Flash version is a massive improvement. Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't be done using HTML4 (no need anything HTML5 adds), but they're not.

Accessibility

[Quila]

he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines

That's known as Section 508 compliance. In addition to basic accessibility, the law says an access board will further establish guidelines, and among them are adherence to standards and ommission of non-compliant plug-ins.

In case you want to slap a party label on it, this was introduced by Democrats during a Republican-controlled Congress and passed. The cynical (and usually right when it comes to politics) side of me says that because this was introduced by two California Democrats, one of them the rep for Silicon Valley, there was motivation to funnel money to the tech companies that would likely be haired to overhaul sites to compliance.

Re:Accessibility

[arth1]

In case you want to slap a party label on it

Why would I want to do that? Whether it says Dreyer's or Edy's, it's the same company and similar product, just presenting to a different public.
I stopped bitching about a two party system once I realized we only have one party called "Janus".

Re:Accessibility

[Quila]

Why would I want to do that?

Only if you are partisan as so many are. Only Democrats would care about accessibility, supposedly. Kerry being rich on unearned family wealth is okay, but Romney with a fraction of that wealth self-made is evil because of it. Bush passing a stimulus was good, Obama passing it was bad. Etc.

Re:Government is To BIG

[jc42]

What we need is a "Kill Switch" ...

Well, we do "power cycle" the government every 4 years (or 2 years for Congress). But when we plug it back in, we tend to power up the same power-slurping setup that we'd previously installed.

Sometimes you just need to retire the old components, and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[KlomDark]

JavaScript is required for AJAX to work. AJAX is what we're all used to and expecting these days.

You want to go back to form submits and page flashes while reloading ALL the HTML for each tiny update on a page?

You are teh dumb. Turn in your geek card. Go sit in your mama's room and suck your thumb.

Dept of Education

[Quila]

That's a quick and easy one. The federal government doesn't educate anybody, that's the job of the states. If you want info on education in your state, or a state you're looking to move to, get it from that state where the education is being managed and performed.

At what price ?

[fluffythedestroyer]

Going on the web with a mobile device ain't free and it's usually bandwith limited. I don't know if those websites will be heavy or light but I hope they take that into account. It's true that a person wont go on those websites everyday but I'm just saying mobile web surfing aint free. Some of those are very high prices actually.

That assumes the sites use CSS

[Quila]

A lot of government pages are way behind the times, and often still use tables for formatting.

Opti-my-diction

[Quiet_Desperation]

If "optimize for mobile" includes preventing zoom, they can just stop right now, thanks. Seriously, there's web design help sites where people discuss how best to stop people browsing on hand held devices from zooming in. And then they all set their font sizes to about 4 point. Evil, evil people. :-P

Re:Government is To BIG

[Quiet_Desperation]

and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.

We do. The alpha sociopaths who dominate the power structure in this country are getting smarter and more successful every year.

Hope is not a strategy.

Benchmarks of HTML, Canvas, SVG, and Flash

[tepples]

I ran this particle system on a desktop PC running Windows XP and Firefox 12. For DHTML, I get 10 fps. For Canvas, I get about 20 fps. For SVG, I get less than 3 fps. For SWF, I get a solid 40 fps.

Re:Benchmarks of HTML, Canvas, SVG, and Flash

[shutdown -p now]

In Chrome 19, I get 60 FPS (and it seems that it's capped that way due to vsync) in both Canvas and SVG. DHTML gives 40 FPS. Flash gives 50 FPS.

In IE10 (the version in Win8 CP). I get 75 FPS in Canvas, 50 FPS in SVG, and 30 FPS in DHTML (which is broken because it shows squares rather than circles). Flash gives 55 FPS.

It seems that the problem is Firefox.

Re:Benchmarks of HTML, Canvas, SVG, and Flash

[Grygus]

That is an interesting page.

In Chrome on a Windows 7 desktop: DHTML 80 FPS; Canvas 60 FPS; SVG 120 FPS; and SWF 59 FPS.

I also looked at the tests with shadows since you mentioned complexity being a factor:

Canvas 31 FPS; SVG 110 FPS; Flash 58 FPS.

Not very convincing for your argument; you clearly have variables other than the animation technology to consider.

Re:Just a CSS change, right?

[Bigby]

A mobile website typically has completely different usability requirements than a tablet/desktop website. People that try and pack a website into a phone shouldn't be making mobile websites. The business analyst should assume that someone on a phone is on the move and doesn't have an attention span longer than 10 secs or at most 1 min.

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[Hatta]

No, we should go back to native client server apps. They simply work better than web apps.

Obama thought three years was enough time ...

[drnb]

You know...after over 3 years, the "blame Bush" for everything is getting a little old.

"That's exactly right. And, you know, a year from now I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. But there's still going to be some pain out there. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition."
Barack Obama
Feb 2, 2009
NBC Interview

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[CityZen]

I agree. I think it's silly to create two different versions of the same website. Higher complexity for both implementers and users benefits nobody. Just make a single version that happens to work well on a big screen or a small screen.

Wait for OS publishers' approval of updates

[tepples]

It's also harder to publish updates to a native client-server app than a web app because you have to wait for Apple to approve the new version for iOS and Microsoft to approve the new version for Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8.

Re:Just create accessible web sites

[silas_moeckel]

Oh please for the love of no.

Can we throw in some animated gif under construction signs while were at it?

Yeah, if you use a magnifying glass

[tepples]

the end device has plenty of room

Yeah, if you use a magnifying glass. 960x640 on an iPhone 4 is not comparable to 1024x600 on a netbook because the physical sizes differ.

Re:Yeah, if you use a magnifying glass

[silas_moeckel]

And if you coding your pages well they do not care. How something looks is a end device issue, you just need to give it enough contextual information to be useful not play typesetter.

Re:Yeah, if you use a magnifying glass

[tepples]

How something looks is a end device issue

How many "somethings" are sent to the end device in each round-trip is a server issue.

you just need to give it enough contextual information to be useful not play typesetter.

Except as I understand it, one has to play typesetter when the large-screen and small-screen use different numbers of lines to convey the same meaning. For example, in movie listings, the title, rating, and showtimes would be on the same line in large-screen or on two lines in small-screen. Or the listing might include a still from the movie visible at page load in large-screen or a tap-to-show still in small-screen.

Oh the irony

[Solandri]

Way back when the web first took off (1994ish), 800x600 was the standard PC screen resolution, many people still used 640x480, and 1024x768 was a luxury. Since then, screen resolutions have increased and web designers / graphics artists have increased the "best viewed at" size of their web pages from 640x480, to 800x600, to 1024x768. Now with mobile browsing being the hot thing, we're trying to push the best viewed at size back down.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, the whole point was to transmit the information in a free-form format so that the recipient's computer could decide how to best display it in whatever was easiest for viewing at that end. That's why on less "designed" sites, you can change the width of your browser and the text will flow to match. But then the idea got subverted by web designers / graphics artists who wanted to strictly control over how their website appeared on everyone's computer (their pinnacle being the flash website). So now we're stuck with a bunch of websites which look fine at desktop or laptop computer resolution, but which suck on mobile devices. And lots of extra time, work, and money will be wasted creating and maintaining a duplicate website optimized for a different resolution.

There's a lesson here for music, movies, and ebooks. If you let the content producers strictly control how those are distributed and viewed, it's going to lead to lots of inefficiency and wasted work. You have to let the viewers have a say in how they want to watch/listen to those products if you want an efficient distribution system.

Pres. directives only effect Executive Branch.

[RKBA]

The President's directives and Executive Orders only apply to the Executive branch of government. The President has no authority to order Congress or the Judicial branch of government (or anyone else outside the Executive Branch including US citizens) to do anything whatsoever because of the separation of powers that provide Constitutional checks and balances between each of the three independent branches of government. The fact that the President has been issuing orders that are effectively laws enacted without any participation of Congress is not only unconstitutional but is deeply troubling because of its dictatorial nature.

508 Accessibility standards upgrade

[handy_vandal]

The 508 accessibility standards are getting a major upgrade.

http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/refresh/draft-rule.htm

http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm

Re:You seem to want to imply they use flash....

[DaleSwanson]

From the looks of things, they're nothing but animated GIFs.

That's only the national ones. If you use a local one, and make it animate, they use Flash. For example, the Boston area radar loop.

Which is actually a step up - they used to be a Java applet. The Flash version is a massive improvement. Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't be done using HTML4 (no need anything HTML5 adds), but they're not.

Note the link, near the upper left, to the standard version. It's a gif:
http://radar.weather.gov/lite/NCR/BOX_loop.gif

iPad

[T-Bone-T]

Will it be able to tell the difference between iPhone and iPad Safari? Some websites present mobile versions to my iPad and it is really annoying, especially if there is no option to view the full site.

Re:Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual spe

[arth1]

Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?

Who but career politicians should know something about everything?

It's time that voters opened their mind and started voting for polymaths instead of someone they can identify with. The latter is invariably a recipe for failure. You want someone who can make informed decisions about things you don't know about, not just those you feel for and the candidate claims to agree with.

Re:Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual spe

[Medievalist]

It's time that voters opened their mind and started voting for polymaths instead of someone they can identify with. The latter is invariably a recipe for failure. You want someone who can make informed decisions about things you don't know about, not just those you feel for and the candidate claims to agree with.

In principle, you may well be right. In practice, well, in my state that's not an option.

That's because here in my state, write-in votes are no longer tallied or counted in any way. And of course there's no way to know what people actually voted for anyway, since we were the first state in the nation to have completely non-auditable voting machines. I vote, and I even volunteer to staff a voting booth, but I am not convinced that any citizen's vote is ever really counted at all. I just do it out of pure cussedness.

Re:Hopefully Obama won't be writing the actual spe

[hobarrera]

If he were genuinely interested in making the government more accessible, he would have told them to adhere to strict HTML standards without vendor extensions, and W3C accessibility guidelines, so they work with any browser, whether mobile or not, or not even existing yet, instead of tailoring it to specific clients or types of clients.

Did it occur to you that a career politician is unlikely to know any of that?

Politicians have advisors for this sort of thing, so they don't call shots about thing without knowing the technical details.