(e:ajay,339) Senator Sanatorum wants the government will stop offering the weather in XML format?!? For those of you that don't understand this, XML is some crazy superhightech this it is basically a standard way of documenting information.
The NSA currenly offers weather data in a format like this.
<weather>
<temp>59</temp>
<wind>5mph</wind>
</weather>
The little stamps (tags) before and after each section of data just make it easy for us to know when the data starts and begins and what it means.
The reason Senator Sanatorum wants to stop this is because other companies sell the exact same information and they have clearly paid him off. We already paid for the government to produce the information, it is avaiable to us in so many other public formats, why should we not be able to use it for without having to pay again.
Senator Sanatorum is clearly working on behalf of the copmpaies that want to resell us out information. It makes me sick that he is trying to hide behind the context that we re modernizing by removing this service. It is also so carefully constructed so that the average non-tech person would think that the current services were outdated, which theya re not. They are the forefront of modern information technology.
I seriously cannot belive Senator Sanatorum is so evil. He keeps topping himself, no pun intended. I knew about Senator Sanatorum's repressive social policies but somehow that is expectable to me. But this is insane. I can't believe that any American citizen, even
(e:jasonsback) , would agree to this accept the people that re-sell the weather we paid for in the first place.
The most outrageous part is that if Senator Sanatorum is sucessful in removing the weather information that we paid for from the public sphere, it is not going to stop most web designers and information scientists. The people that understand the web and make the web don't need the freakin' XML tags to get the data, it just makes everything nice and easy. Not to mention that if Senator Sanatorum si sucessful in stealing our weather feeds from us, every hacker will be even more interested in scraping the data.
I am so sick of services like that being privatized. We pay for them!!
If it Senator Sanatorum sucessfully steals our the weather feeds that we paid for from us, I am going to make a free buffalo weather feed in protest. It would be so easy. Maybe we can start a movement of web programmers that do that in lots of cities. Maybe I will do it anyways, seeing as it sounds fun.
Here is part of the press release from Senator Sanatorum's ssite.
Santorum Proposes to Modernize National Weather Service to Better Serve Public
April 14, 2005 -
For Immediate Release Contact: Christine Shott (202) 224-0610
Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, today introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 to clarify the duties and responsibilities of the National Weather Service (NWS) within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
"With the support of my colleagues, we can pass this legislation to modernize the description of the National Weather Service's roles within the national weather enterprise, so that it reflects today's reality in which the National Weather Service and the commercial weather industry both play important parts in providing weather products and services to the nation," said Senator Santorum.
Quoted from: United States Senator Rick Santorum :: Press Office 
