On Apr 27, 2005, at 3:13 PM, Steve Brown wrote: > I'm paying now. The only question is: how much? I don't expect a tax > refund > because of this, but maybe it will go toward the deficit. As we all > know > from our personal budgets, it's usually the many small items that add > up to > big numbers. You will still pay. You just won't be able to use what you pay for. What this bill means is AccuWeather and the Weather Channel can have the information for free, but you can't. AccuWeather would then be able to charge you to find what is now available for free online. You can go to http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/marine_map.htm to find a marine forecast. This data will still be freely available to AccuWeather, but you will be blocked from accessing it. > Anyway, whatever it costs AccuWeather to provide the service, you can > bet it > cost the Feds several times that. This will not shut down the National Weather Service, just block your access to their data. AccuWeather gets data from NOAA to help generate their forecast. They then develop their own forecast based on this data and what they collect themselves. Now AccuWeather wants to compete with the NWS they must go beyond the what the government provides for free. If this bill passes, there will be no such incentive. The quality of forecasts will likely suffer. > > Also, no one has defined what services are going to be lost that > relate to > kayaking - if any. The bill only proposes not duplicating services > which are > provided in the private sector. No it proposes to shut down any service that might hurt the ability of the private sector to make money with NOAA data. If your local AM station broadcasts the AccuWeather forecast once an hour, the NOAA continuous weather radio broadcast competes with it and may be shut down. You will have 10 useless channels on your VHF. > > Americans have a bad habit of complaining about their taxes, > complaining > about the deficit, and complaining about any reduction of government > supplied services - sometimes all in the same paragraph. This is not being sold as a money saving measure. It will not affect our taxes. It just says that if during the course of predicting the next hurricane, the National Weather Service happens to notice that tomorrow is going to be a nice day, they can't tell us. They are still required to do the predicting, but they can only tell us what they learn if there is threatening weather approaching. Nick Schade Guillemot Kayaks 824 Thompson St Glastonbury, CT 06033 USA Ph/Fx: (860) 659-8847 http://www.guillemot-kayaks.com/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Apr 27 2005 - 14:19:45 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:31:20 PDT