NOAA Adopts New Net Policy

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has adopted a new policy which applies to provision of all National Weather Service environmental information, including forecasts, warnings, and observations. In June, /. reported that NOAA was taking comments on the proposed policy. Hundreds of Slashdotters responded. And it made a difference: NOAA will make its data and products available in internet-accessible, vendor-neutral form and will use other dissemination technologies, e.g. satellite broadcast, NOAA Weather Radio, and wireless, as appropriate. Congrats to the Slash community for making a difference and helping to set US Govt policy.

NOAA's electronic survival

[TWX]

So, since "Hundreds of Slashdotters responded..." and NOAA both kept functioning and was able listen to the comments, would it be safe to say that they weathered the storm?

Re:free weatherbug?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I'll write one but it'll use Clippy. "You seem to be getting hit by a PYA hurricane."

Ok, now what about

[pair-a-noyd]

all the hot air in DC?
Can we get some action on that?

See?

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Not every *AA is evil!

Voobah, voobah, voobah, ping!

[kfg]

NOAA!

You talkin' to me?

It's Slashdot, NOAA.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight! Who is this. . .really?

KFG

Re:Good stuff!

[AKnightCowboy]

This is scary stuff. If the terrorists got their hands on weather reports in the USA there is no telling what trouble they could stir up. I imagine this kind of thing should remain secret and proprietary.

Re:Voobah, voobah, voobah, ping!

[plover]

NOAA! I want you to make a first post that includes Natalie Portman!

Riiiight . . . What's a first post?

Never mind, NOAA. I want you to go out into the world and collect a cluster of beowulfs, and load them up two by two.

Riiiight . . . am I on JenniCam? How come you want me to do all these weird things?

I'm going to destroy the world.

Riiiight . . . how you gonna do it?

I'm going to post the URL on the front page of Slashdot, and crap-flood 'em all right out.

Riiiight . . .

Re:If only...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only we could get the Feds to make their porn available in internet-accessible, vendor-neutral form, and use other dissemination technologies such as satellite, radio, and wireless.

You can find some naked chicks right here [usda.gov].

*AA

[tangent3]

First thing that came to my mind seeing the NOAA acronym....

Say "NO!" to *AA!

33% of response were from Slashdot

[Ingolfke]

There were a total of 1473 comments, of those 490 were submitted by Slashdoters, according to the linked-from URL. This is 33.26%, which on the surface seems like a significant impact, but when you look a little closer you'll see that the #s are not quite as impressive as they seem. Here's the breakdown

63 - In Soviet Russia the weather updates you.
19 - Notices that this service is already provided by Goatse.cx
3 - Requests to add a feature that notifies you anytime Natalie Portman comes within 50 meters of hot grits.
16 - Pondering what a beowulf cluster of these might be like.
48 - Blasting the NOAA because Microsoft is secretly behind bad weather.
27 - Claimed the request was a dupe and cited existing services provided by the NOAA.
16 - Only old Koreans use the weather.
19 - Claims that "1 0wnz d4 w34th3r cuz 1m s0 133t"
193 - Users suggesting the NOAA needs to rely on perl, python, BSD, Linux, MySQL, PHP, emacs, vi, haskell, or ruby for all future development efforts.
1 - Comment suggesting the weather should be properly called GNU/Weather (thanks RMS!)
11 - Requested a change for notices about clear sunny days. The new notice will read, "Nothing to see here. Move along."
13 - Requesting that the raw weather data and weather forcasting software be sent as part of an ebuild that they could emerge and compile the report anytime they wanted, because they've got their Gentoo system totally tweaked out for this type of application.
27 - Asked for help getting WeatherBug to work correctly on Linux w/ Wine.
9 - Posts about how Netcraft had confirmed it, weather is dead.
1 - Comment with made up statistics about how important changing was.
1 - Comment with made up statistics about how important not changing was.
32 - EA employees asked for pictures, b/c they've never seen the light of day, a blue sky or snow lit by daylight.
1 - Comment that read...

To Whom It May Concern:

Thanks, this is a great idea. Go for it. You guys rock. I've only been here a few days now, but I'm glad I could give my 2 cents, check out my blog (excluded). Also, I was thinking about going into programming because I took a class on C++, and I wrote a program that would randomly guess the weather, but since you're going to do this maybe I need to consider not studying IT in college... any suggestions?

Josh Milsken
Sophmore, Wuleska High School
Topeka, KS

P.S. - My birthday is next week... gonna be 15... gonna get my learners permit. Woohoo!

Quite an impact.