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US Government Wants To Start Charging For Landsat, the Best Free Satellite Data On Earth (qz.com)
The U.S. government may begin charging users for access to five decades of satellite images of Earth. Quartz reports: Nature reports that the Department of Interior has asked an advisory board to consider the consequences of charging for the data generated by the Landsat program, which is the largest continuously collected set of Earth images taken in space and has been freely available to the public since 2008. Since 1972, Landsat has used eight different satellites to gather images of the Earth, with a ninth currently slated for a December 2020 launch. The data are widely used by government agencies, and since it became free, by an increasing number of academics, private companies and journalists. "As of March 31, 2018, more than 75 million Landsat scenes have been downloaded from the USGS-managed archive!" the agency noted on the 10th anniversary of the program.
Now, the government says the cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it. Advocates for open data say the public benefit produced through research and business activity far outweigh those costs. A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity, compared to an $80 million budget for the program.
Now, the government says the cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it. Advocates for open data say the public benefit produced through research and business activity far outweigh those costs. A 2013 survey cited by Nature found that the dataset generated $2 billion in economic activity, compared to an $80 million budget for the program.
But will they also return the tax money that was used to operate the satellites that took the pictures?
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
"cost of sharing the data has grown as more people access it"
Cost of sharing proportional to user count? Bittorrent is just eliminating this exact problem. If only two users are interested, you can serve them at low cost. If there are a few hundred thousands, they will serve each others.
for non-academic use?
Companies that make money from this service should probably be paying something.
And if enough people get peeved about having to pay, I'm sure some private companies would be happy to launch some private satellites.
It's not free though, the American people already pay for it with taxes.
What they're after is a second check so they can steal the tax money, just like they try with every "welfare reform", "social security reform" and "medicare reform"
When someone starts trying to shift costs of tax funded items, you should be deeply suspicious of the person trying to do so. It's never worked for the better of the users or the people funding it.
The usgs national map viewer for some of the landsat data has recently moved to AWS and it is immensely faster and much more reliable. On AWS you tend to pay per bit though, so I suspect bandwidth charges are now a larger/variable portion of their costs vs before, which was probably a fixed line bandwidth cost which was constant.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
The reason why we offer military protection to some countries such as Japan and Germany is because we don't wan't them to develop an advanced military that can compete with ours. It's one of the ways we guarantee that we have the best military in the world. On top of that we don't need competition from countries like Japan and Germany developing and selling advanced arms thereby competing with us in that marketplace. We already have enough competition from the British and French in that space and now Israel is starting to enter that space more aggressively. They buy their arms from us == we profit. So be careful what you ask for and understand the reasons why things are the way they are before you start calling to change the status quo, and know the repercussions of what you are asking for.