If all you know of great authors and thinkers is the quotable soundbites, you're missing most of the information they were attempting to convey.
Take Nietzsche. Everyone here has heard the enduring sound bite "God is dead.".
Now read the full text: Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why? is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub.
The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrify! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!
How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.
Quite a different mental landscape is painted, isn't it?
some fanboys won't be happy until we're eating Google brand noodles
With the general education level of the folks that work at Google, I'm guessing they have like 8000 man years experience in Ramen. Google Brand Instant Ramen(R) would own the market once they get it to that $0.10/package price point most college students base their food budget on.
Super Milk Chan is a dub-job of a Japanese series, it's not a product of the Adult Swim folks.
Most of the humour just goes "whiz" over the average viewer because it's a gibe at japanese pop culture and television. If you don't know who Mister President is doing a half-assed impersonation of, it's just not funny.
Depends on the type of door and they type of lock. Most doors with true magnetic locks (Electromagnet on metal plate) are entry/exit doors. They use a 120v relay coupled electromagnet to pull on a metal plate on the door frame. This design works well for entry/exit doors, because when depowered, it leaves the door open, for people fleeing from a fire, going home, etc.
Most other "magnetic locks" are mixed electromechanical. They use a permanent magnet to hold the door plate, and a 12v solenoid to move the magnet out of the range of the plate. These can either open or close on power-off, by design.
I rented a car at the airport in Chicago at 19. They didn't like it, and I paid out the ass, but they rented me one. I rented one in Canada, with a US drivers license, a little over a year later. I flirted with renting one from Detroit Metro about the same time, got down to picking out a car before I decided, "Eh, prolly less of a hassle to just call [buddy#2] to come pick my ass up, and less trouble when I have to return it in a few days.
My little brother used a company similar to Rent-A-Wreck for a while when he was still 18. They rent older cars, more or less on a weekly/monthly basis.
They will rent to anyone if pressed. Just press 'em.
cellphone signals, computer radiation, high/low voltage cabling radiation goes byebye...
Why not a nice tinfoil-lined coverall to go with your tinfoil hat? Then not only will all the bad RF radiation go away, the CIA won't be able to use their mind control beam on you.
1. You have to lie these perfectly straight 200-foot rails down at either ends of the lot, perfectly parallel and at a perfect distance. And make sure they don't move.
Not the end of the world. One surveyor, one worker, one afternoon.
2. You have to lug this huge behemoth crane on huge supports to the site and *onto the rails*.
Not any harder than bringing out that same huge crane to install the engineered trusses. Actually, easier. You only have to drop one robot, versus many engineered trusses.
3. You have to place all the building materials in perfectly lined up position.
Three large spools of the three pipe sizes it needs (some small gauge CPVC, some small gauge copper, and some decent size DWV), two spools of Romex, and a spool of cat5 comm cable. These would only be need to be replaced once per job, probably before the robot arrived on site.
The other ingredients are concrete mix and water, easily supplied once every few days in a truck to the machine's hopper.
Let's not mention the inconvenient fact that the underprivileged and otherwise construction-disenfranchised that these cheap natural building techniques will supposedly help don't actually *own any land* to BUILD anything on!
Land is cheap. Houses are not. I can buy fifty or even eighty acres for the cost of one nice house on two acres.
Naw.. Far easier in terms of battery life, platform reliability and cost/ease of implementation to use commercially available routes to do image improvement/stabilization at the control end. TV card, openly available image filters, some thin code to string it together.
As for adding a variable speed option to the vehicle, it's probably more cost effective (and less work intensive) to start over on another platform, like a $9 Rat Shack remote control car.
At that distance, regular old 802.11 will be fine. Two $50 directionals, use a of the shelf AP at one end and an off the shelf network card at the other. Keep the cable runs short. Long cable runs mean you need rather expensive cable. If you're unable to place the PC with the wireless card close to the antenna, use a Pentium class throwaway stuffed in the attic to bridge it to Ethernet, or a second AP. (Make sure the two AP will interoperate without too much firmware headache.)
You should be able to deal with minor tree obstruction.
I'll have to remember this.. I drive an old truck, with a leaded size fill neck. It's near on impossible to fill with one of the tree-hugger endorsed pump nozzles. First slacker that shoves the nozzle in and pumps is going to get covered in gasoline. And then I can argue the asshole spilled the gas on the ground and not pay for most of it.
I'll even let em fill the second tank if they're apologetic enough. The fill nozzle is in one of the wheel wells, under the fender. It's always coated with a good half inch of mud.
That would almost be as fun as the time I pulled into a full serve in a 68 Mercedes. I handed him the keys and went inside for a coffee. Waited in line, argued about the Tigers losing with the clerk, emerged ten minutes later to the guy still looking under my hood and in my trunk for where to put the nozzle. (Hint: It's behind the license plate, and you need the ignition key to unlock the gas cap)
Go read that first link you supplied us. They are *targetted* by the bastards at Gator, who add their own ads to apple.com pages. It is the reverse which is scorn-worthy.
Now go read your second link, which gives no real information at all. Go to ThinkSecret, read the full blurbs elsewhere on powerpage.org.
Now what do you think Apple is trying to accomplish?
Jobs is sick and tired of leaking assholes in R&D stealing all his fire every year by providing specifications to "journalists". He's finally gotten pissed off enough about it that Apple is now going to make damn sure they find who did it, and then fire their asses. If the press and your competitors were getting advance warning of your unreleased products, complete with specs and price, you'd be pissed too.
No. That's not extortion. There was no demand of money. Intent matters.
Consider these statements;
A. "May want to your fence, I'm getting a mastiff next month." B. "If you don't fix your fence, I'm going to sic a mastiff on your cat." C. "$500, or I'm going to kill your cat".
"A" is an informative statement, reminding a neighbor of his responsibility to maintain his fence. "B" is a threat of violence. It effectivly promises a dead cat for a failure to do as told. "C" is extortion.
Replace "fence" with "product", "cat" sith "customers", and "mastiff" with "large dog that enjoys biting crotches" at will.
Yes ma'am! That's how some folks get their funding. Release a report to the media saying "Fear X!", and wait for the ensuing "We need to study this" to ask for your funding.
And that pad is larger than any travel adapter for a mobile phone - so you won't be taking one with you anytime, which means you'd have to rely on one being present wherever you decide to go ? I don't think so.
No.. You won't be lugging it around. But you'll have one on your desk at work, another at home. The hotel you stay in will have one next to the phone.
The idea is that all your devices will be charged by it. Throw your cell, music player, and Palm on the rubber matt, walk away. No plugging three devices in to charge. No more needing three different wall-warts. Since nearly everyone has an electronic device that needs a recharging, nearly everyone will have one. Since everyone has one, why carry your own around?
You weren't there when the world of IT was ruled by the fear of Big Blue and the Death Star obviously.
You bought IBM hardware and used AT&T for infrastructure. If you were one of those sneering techie types with an Amdahl mug on your desk, or even mentioned United Telecomm in a meeting, it was tape monkey for you until you learned better.
evolution as fact, and that everything else is crackpotted brain-poison that he/she shouldn't even consider
Let's teach them the sky is yellow, the Canadians are Red Communists, and that Walter Cronkite is, in fact, the reincarnation of John Wilkes Booth, who assasinated Harry Truman at the Battle of Antietam.
Why ruin their minds with any other facts? It might make them into a zealot!
Now now.. There will be no negotiation of my carefully researched figures! They are 99.42% accurate, and no other figures, studies, or estimations are correct!
This isn't PCMCIA-like at all. This is not a new bus. This is just a new standardization for how to connect to the existing PCI-E/USB busses, and a standard on card size! Think of it like hot-swap PCI for laptops.
Say you make a ExpressCard 56K modem. It will appear to the system as a USB device. All the card is doing is using the four pins of the slot that connect to the USB controller. The manufacturer will probably reuse 99% of the code from the USB version.
Say you make a ExpressCard video adaptor. Well, here it uses the couple dozen pins in the slot that connect more or less directly to the PCI-E bus. The manufacturer will probably reuse 95% of the code from the PCI-E version of the adaptor.
Beyond support for hot swap, the Linux kernel folks will have to make few changes.
SSIDs listing the geographic location of the AP are a good idea in my opinion. If you know there's an AP at 185th and Birchwood from a cursory glance, you either use a non-interfering frequency or make sure the directional antenna is not throwing garbage that way. Company information is much more useful though. "WmDavis Rsrch AP01" lets me look in the phone book and find "William Davis Research" to yell at them. Troubleshooting an intermittant PTP link in Seattle, I discovered someone claiming to be on a particular street several miles away throwing waay to much signal and cutting off the customer. Driving down there with a directional only got me down to a particular block of leased warehouses, with two dozen companies. If I could have said "Yeah, that's Airborne Express", I could have had a word with their guy and gotten it moved. Instead, I had to swap cable to lose some loss, realign the antenna on each end, insert an amplifier to further drop the losses, and change channel. But at least I knew where the interference was coming from; At many other places in the city, I could have moved them to a different POP with a twist of the antenna.
Some of the odd ones I saw while looking to find free spectrum:
"MYWRHSEAP" (And on the same frequency, farther down, "MYOFFAP") "USN_Secure" and "NSA Fort Mead" "iVEgOTbIGbALS" (Spelled like that) "Bad firmware dont use" "Cyberdyne Systems" "CPE1704TKS" "plz dont hack" "Jerrys porno" "NOT STARBUCKS ASSHOLE" "Change your password, moron" "Unconnected"
Also saw a bunch pushing some agenda or another.. "GoreIn04", "BushSucks", "Lower My Taxes", etc
The Giant spyware application nukes stuff the other vendors decided was benign. For example, there are a bunch of tool-bar and assistants that are on their own safe, but can and will install other applications if not instructed otherwise by the user. AdAware won't nuke those; It nukes the spyware they can install, however.
This is where the majority of the "Wow, I found spyware!" factor comes from.
It also makes a bigger deal out of wiping files after the spyware has been nuked. AdAware and SpyBot leave the odd DLL, the odd this, the odd that lying about from time to time. The spyware is gone (It neither runs nor is capable of running) but Giant will claim this as an infection and bitch at the user that they have SPYWARE, when in fact they have an unusable dll stub in their windows directory.
If the city decided they needed the data to deal with an existing problem, and could budget it at the time, then it was paid for by tax dollars and should be free. The city needed it anyway, right?
If the city decided that it would be nice to have GIS data, but they could neither see any dire need for it at the time or could not budget enough at the time, they should never have done it.
If they can't justify doing it without whoring themselves out to either cover the cost of it or to make money, they shouldn't be doing it. They're not out there to compete with the commercial GIS companies. They're also not out there to sell data the taxpayer paid for to pay their salaries.
because of partner deals with GIS agencies of those governments
I would guess it would be more akin to the security agencies in Europe would rather not risk release of data they can't screen, and consider it a security risk.
The GIS folks just milk it harder..
Besides, why worry about the Americans? You can buy the Russian's data on Europe on the cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
If all you know of great authors and thinkers is the quotable soundbites, you're missing most of the information they were attempting to convey.
Take Nietzsche. Everyone here has heard the enduring sound bite "God is dead.".
Now read the full text:
Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why? is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub.
The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrify! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!
How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife - who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event - and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!" Here the madman was silent and looked again at his hearers; they also were silent and looked at him in surprise.
Quite a different mental landscape is painted, isn't it?
Next time you stand there at the grocery store wondering if Maruchan Ramen is better than Top Ramen or vice versa
Nissin manages to stomp all other lesser instant ramen. There is no wondering to do.
some fanboys won't be happy until we're eating Google brand noodles
With the general education level of the folks that work at Google, I'm guessing they have like 8000 man years experience in Ramen. Google Brand Instant Ramen(R) would own the market once they get it to that $0.10/package price point most college students base their food budget on.
Super Milk Chan is a dub-job of a Japanese series, it's not a product of the Adult Swim folks.
Most of the humour just goes "whiz" over the average viewer because it's a gibe at japanese pop culture and television. If you don't know who Mister President is doing a half-assed impersonation of, it's just not funny.
Depends on the type of door and they type of lock. Most doors with true magnetic locks (Electromagnet on metal plate) are entry/exit doors. They use a 120v relay coupled electromagnet to pull on a metal plate on the door frame. This design works well for entry/exit doors, because when depowered, it leaves the door open, for people fleeing from a fire, going home, etc.
Most other "magnetic locks" are mixed electromechanical. They use a permanent magnet to hold the door plate, and a 12v solenoid to move the magnet out of the range of the plate. These can either open or close on power-off, by design.
I rented a car at the airport in Chicago at 19. They didn't like it, and I paid out the ass, but they rented me one. I rented one in Canada, with a US drivers license, a little over a year later. I flirted with renting one from Detroit Metro about the same time, got down to picking out a car before I decided, "Eh, prolly less of a hassle to just call [buddy#2] to come pick my ass up, and less trouble when I have to return it in a few days.
My little brother used a company similar to Rent-A-Wreck for a while when he was still 18. They rent older cars, more or less on a weekly/monthly basis.
They will rent to anyone if pressed. Just press 'em.
cellphone signals, computer radiation, high/low voltage cabling radiation goes byebye...
Why not a nice tinfoil-lined coverall to go with your tinfoil hat? Then not only will all the bad RF radiation go away, the CIA won't be able to use their mind control beam on you.
Easier to plan in a few strategically placed battery backed emergency lights and a generator that can be switched to in event of a grid failure.
1. You have to lie these perfectly straight 200-foot rails down at either ends of the lot, perfectly parallel and at a perfect distance. And make sure they don't move.
Not the end of the world. One surveyor, one worker, one afternoon.
2. You have to lug this huge behemoth crane on huge supports to the site and *onto the rails*.
Not any harder than bringing out that same huge crane to install the engineered trusses. Actually, easier. You only have to drop one robot, versus many engineered trusses.
3. You have to place all the building materials in perfectly lined up position.
Three large spools of the three pipe sizes it needs (some small gauge CPVC, some small gauge copper, and some decent size DWV), two spools of Romex, and a spool of cat5 comm cable. These would only be need to be replaced once per job, probably before the robot arrived on site.
The other ingredients are concrete mix and water, easily supplied once every few days in a truck to the machine's hopper.
Let's not mention the inconvenient fact that the underprivileged and otherwise construction-disenfranchised that these cheap natural building techniques will supposedly help don't actually *own any land* to BUILD anything on!
Land is cheap. Houses are not. I can buy fifty or even eighty acres for the cost of one nice house on two acres.
Naw.. Far easier in terms of battery life, platform reliability and cost/ease of implementation to use commercially available routes to do image improvement/stabilization at the control end. TV card, openly available image filters, some thin code to string it together.
As for adding a variable speed option to the vehicle, it's probably more cost effective (and less work intensive) to start over on another platform, like a $9 Rat Shack remote control car.
At that distance, regular old 802.11 will be fine. Two $50 directionals, use a of the shelf AP at one end and an off the shelf network card at the other. Keep the cable runs short. Long cable runs mean you need rather expensive cable. If you're unable to place the PC with the wireless card close to the antenna, use a Pentium class throwaway stuffed in the attic to bridge it to Ethernet, or a second AP. (Make sure the two AP will interoperate without too much firmware headache.)
You should be able to deal with minor tree obstruction.
I'll have to remember this.. I drive an old truck, with a leaded size fill neck. It's near on impossible to fill with one of the tree-hugger endorsed pump nozzles. First slacker that shoves the nozzle in and pumps is going to get covered in gasoline. And then I can argue the asshole spilled the gas on the ground and not pay for most of it.
I'll even let em fill the second tank if they're apologetic enough. The fill nozzle is in one of the wheel wells, under the fender. It's always coated with a good half inch of mud.
That would almost be as fun as the time I pulled into a full serve in a 68 Mercedes. I handed him the keys and went inside for a coffee. Waited in line, argued about the Tigers losing with the clerk, emerged ten minutes later to the guy still looking under my hood and in my trunk for where to put the nozzle. (Hint: It's behind the license plate, and you need the ignition key to unlock the gas cap)
Do you not read well, or are you a troll?
Go read that first link you supplied us. They are *targetted* by the bastards at Gator, who add their own ads to apple.com pages. It is the reverse which is scorn-worthy.
Now go read your second link, which gives no real information at all. Go to ThinkSecret, read the full blurbs elsewhere on powerpage.org.
Now what do you think Apple is trying to accomplish?
Jobs is sick and tired of leaking assholes in R&D stealing all his fire every year by providing specifications to "journalists". He's finally gotten pissed off enough about it that Apple is now going to make damn sure they find who did it, and then fire their asses. If the press and your competitors were getting advance warning of your unreleased products, complete with specs and price, you'd be pissed too.
No. That's not extortion. There was no demand of money. Intent matters.
Consider these statements;
A. "May want to your fence, I'm getting a mastiff next month."
B. "If you don't fix your fence, I'm going to sic a mastiff on your cat."
C. "$500, or I'm going to kill your cat".
"A" is an informative statement, reminding a neighbor of his responsibility to maintain his fence.
"B" is a threat of violence. It effectivly promises a dead cat for a failure to do as told.
"C" is extortion.
Replace "fence" with "product", "cat" sith "customers", and "mastiff" with "large dog that enjoys biting crotches" at will.
Yes ma'am! That's how some folks get their funding. Release a report to the media saying "Fear X!", and wait for the ensuing "We need to study this" to ask for your funding.
And that pad is larger than any travel adapter for a mobile phone - so you won't be taking one with you anytime, which means you'd have to rely on one being present wherever you decide to go ? I don't think so.
No.. You won't be lugging it around. But you'll have one on your desk at work, another at home. The hotel you stay in will have one next to the phone.
The idea is that all your devices will be charged by it. Throw your cell, music player, and Palm on the rubber matt, walk away. No plugging three devices in to charge. No more needing three different wall-warts. Since nearly everyone has an electronic device that needs a recharging, nearly everyone will have one. Since everyone has one, why carry your own around?
Dip em in lacquor.
Plain old clear, high gloss exterior door lacquor.
The chips don't fall off.
You should also take some 00 steel wool, buff the insulating resin off the circuit traces. The copper on green looks a lot nicer.
You weren't there when the world of IT was ruled by the fear of Big Blue and the Death Star obviously.
You bought IBM hardware and used AT&T for infrastructure. If you were one of those sneering techie types with an Amdahl mug on your desk, or even mentioned United Telecomm in a meeting, it was tape monkey for you until you learned better.
evolution as fact, and that everything else is crackpotted brain-poison that he/she shouldn't even consider
Let's teach them the sky is yellow, the Canadians are Red Communists, and that Walter Cronkite is, in fact, the reincarnation of John Wilkes Booth, who assasinated Harry Truman at the Battle of Antietam.
Why ruin their minds with any other facts? It might make them into a zealot!
Now now.. There will be no negotiation of my carefully researched figures! They are 99.42% accurate, and no other figures, studies, or estimations are correct!
None!
Do you hear me?!
Sorry, didn't mean to channel Gartner there.
This isn't PCMCIA-like at all. This is not a new bus. This is just a new standardization for how to connect to the existing PCI-E/USB busses, and a standard on card size! Think of it like hot-swap PCI for laptops.
Say you make a ExpressCard 56K modem. It will appear to the system as a USB device. All the card is doing is using the four pins of the slot that connect to the USB controller. The manufacturer will probably reuse 99% of the code from the USB version.
Say you make a ExpressCard video adaptor. Well, here it uses the couple dozen pins in the slot that connect more or less directly to the PCI-E bus. The manufacturer will probably reuse 95% of the code from the PCI-E version of the adaptor.
Beyond support for hot swap, the Linux kernel folks will have to make few changes.
SSIDs listing the geographic location of the AP are a good idea in my opinion. If you know there's an AP at 185th and Birchwood from a cursory glance, you either use a non-interfering frequency or make sure the directional antenna is not throwing garbage that way. Company information is much more useful though. "WmDavis Rsrch AP01" lets me look in the phone book and find "William Davis Research" to yell at them. Troubleshooting an intermittant PTP link in Seattle, I discovered someone claiming to be on a particular street several miles away throwing waay to much signal and cutting off the customer. Driving down there with a directional only got me down to a particular block of leased warehouses, with two dozen companies. If I could have said "Yeah, that's Airborne Express", I could have had a word with their guy and gotten it moved. Instead, I had to swap cable to lose some loss, realign the antenna on each end, insert an amplifier to further drop the losses, and change channel. But at least I knew where the interference was coming from; At many other places in the city, I could have moved them to a different POP with a twist of the antenna.
Some of the odd ones I saw while looking to find free spectrum:
"MYWRHSEAP" (And on the same frequency, farther down, "MYOFFAP")
"USN_Secure" and "NSA Fort Mead"
"iVEgOTbIGbALS" (Spelled like that)
"Bad firmware dont use"
"Cyberdyne Systems"
"CPE1704TKS"
"plz dont hack"
"Jerrys porno"
"NOT STARBUCKS ASSHOLE"
"Change your password, moron"
"Unconnected"
Also saw a bunch pushing some agenda or another.. "GoreIn04", "BushSucks", "Lower My Taxes", etc
The Giant spyware application nukes stuff the other vendors decided was benign. For example, there are a bunch of tool-bar and assistants that are on their own safe, but can and will install other applications if not instructed otherwise by the user. AdAware won't nuke those; It nukes the spyware they can install, however.
This is where the majority of the "Wow, I found spyware!" factor comes from.
It also makes a bigger deal out of wiping files after the spyware has been nuked. AdAware and SpyBot leave the odd DLL, the odd this, the odd that lying about from time to time. The spyware is gone (It neither runs nor is capable of running) but Giant will claim this as an infection and bitch at the user that they have SPYWARE, when in fact they have an unusable dll stub in their windows directory.
Intent matters. Not effect.
If the city decided they needed the data to deal with an existing problem, and could budget it at the time, then it was paid for by tax dollars and should be free. The city needed it anyway, right?
If the city decided that it would be nice to have GIS data, but they could neither see any dire need for it at the time or could not budget enough at the time, they should never have done it.
If they can't justify doing it without whoring themselves out to either cover the cost of it or to make money, they shouldn't be doing it. They're not out there to compete with the commercial GIS companies. They're also not out there to sell data the taxpayer paid for to pay their salaries.
because of partner deals with GIS agencies of those governments
I would guess it would be more akin to the security agencies in Europe would rather not risk release of data they can't screen, and consider it a security risk.
The GIS folks just milk it harder..
Besides, why worry about the Americans? You can buy the Russian's data on Europe on the cheap.