On Thu, May 14, 1998 at 12:27:45PM +0000, Karl Coplan wrote: > If NOAA charts are public domain . . . why doesnt someone do us all a > big favor and scan them and post them on the net? Might put a few > NOAA dealers out of business, I suppose, but why should we all pay > for what we have already bought (as taxpayers) anyway? > > In fact, why doesnt NOAA just post its charts digitally? Could it > be that the people who make money reproducing them and selling them > would howl too loudly? Ding ding ding ding. It's also probably because most (US) government agencies are incredibly backward technologically. It's been a major battle just to get FOIA requests fulfilled electronically. And even some government agencies which *do* put things on-line often do it badly. For example, the Pennsylvania DER has a large number of documents on their web site in Word format. Not ASCII text. Not HTML. Not even PDF -- but Word, a proprietary format licensed by a single company. Repeated applications of the clue-by-four to their webmeisters don't seem to have gotten the point through their skulls that the web *was invented because of the proprietary formats* and exists primarily to render them superfluous. So you're quite right: every public document that governments generate should be online: it's easy, it's cheap, it's fast. But the entrenched methods of decades (or centuries) are hard to shake. ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk_at_gsp.org *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu May 14 1998 - 10:14:45 PDT
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