Deadline For Data.gov Arrives, and Delivers 81
inKubus writes "According to a story carried by AP, as part of President Barack Obama's 'Open Government Directive,' the 24 major departments and agencies that make up the executive branch of the federal government had until Friday to release at least three 'high-value' data sets. Over 300 new data sets have been released on data.gov. There's a lot of interesting stuff on there and more to come." One of the departments required to release data is the office of the US Trade Representative. Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA negotiating drafts?
Publishing the ACTA negotiations (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, back in reality...
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Article 54. Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed inviolability of the person. No one may be arrested except by a court decision or on the warrant of a procurator.
Article 55. Citizens of the USSR are guaranteed inviolability of the home. No one may, without lawful grounds, enter a home against the will of those residing in it.
Article 56. The privacy of citizens, and of their correspondence, telephone conversations, and telegraphic communications is prote
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Want to buy a bridge?
The portions that have been leaked (and not denied) do not confirm that as the reason. Citizen outrage appears more likely.
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According to what I've read, that is exactly why it's behind closed doors. Apparently the first thing that happens is each country makes ridiculous claims, and they ask for ridiculous deals, and then they slowly work their way back to reality. If it was all in the public eye, everything would be nice and politically correct, but they would never agree or disagree on anything for fear of exposure and they would never get to the guts of the treaty in the public eye. Really disingenuous that they are only invi
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Another question. What if the premise of this treaty is fundamentally against the rights stated in the constitution? Could a treaty be ruled as invalid by the legislature? The whole bit about requiring ISP's to hand over user information without a warrant or even suspicion of violating IP, and allowing border guards to determine whether something is in violation of copyright even without a complaint being filed.
These all go against the basic premise of presumption of innocence, and requires no burden of pro
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Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution requires 2/3 of the Senate to consent to any treaty. Of course, if you look at the Senate vote on the DMCA...
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I mean after the fact. Lets say that the senate signs off on the treaty, could it later be challenged on legal grounds?
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Apparently the Supreme Court can invalidate [justia.com] all or part of a treaty if it's blatantly unconstitutional, but it seems that's about it.
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I found the end of your link to be the most interesting piece of the whole document:
"In brief, the fact that all the foreign relations power is vested in the National Government and that no formal restriction is imposed on the treaty-making power in the international context352 leaves little room for the notion of a limited treaty-making power with regard to the reserved rights of the States or in regard to the choice of matters concerning which the Federal Government may treat with other nations; protected
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I found the end of your link to be the most interesting piece of the whole document:
"In brief, the fact that all the foreign relations power is vested in the National Government and that no formal restriction is imposed on the treaty-making power in the international context352 leaves little room for the notion of a limited treaty-making power with regard to the reserved rights of the States or in regard to the choice of matters concerning which the Federal Government may treat with other nations; protected individual rights appear to be sheltered by specific constitutional guarantees from the domestic effects of treaties, and the separation of powers at the federal level may require legislative action to give municipal effect to international agreements."
I read that as "the executive can agree to whatever it wants in a treaty, but it can't enforce any part of it that violates the constitution"
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I've never seen a solid challenge to this. The DEA and all the drug control laws are legally based on the fact that we have to do it to honor a treaty... which we wrote and proposed. Otherwise you'd need some sort of constitutional amendment to prohibit citizens from imbibing popular drugs, wouldn't you?
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I was looking recently and realized that the war on drugs could have easily paid for universal health care. Who's the socialists now?
I wonder... (Score:2)
We gave US the Beatles and all we got was data.gov (Score:4, Interesting)
guardian.co.uk: We gave the US the Beatles and all we got back was this lousy data.gov site... [guardian.co.uk]
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Hey. I just want you to know...
How is this NOT valuable? Access to this information will change the world! We will FINALLY have government information on the tread wear of tires! SWEET! You can keep your musical re
Re:We gave US the Beatles and all we got was data. (Score:4, Funny)
that type of data is wheelie useful
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I thought they sold to Michael Jackson? And agin re-sold? I just started hearing new covers of Beatles songs in otherwise unremarkable adverts.
Anyway, just buy them back like you did my beloved TR3's. And please repatriate Benny Hill as well.
Re:We gave US the Beatles and all we got was data. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the Beatles' music was based on American blues, pop, folk, R&B and rock'n'roll, so I'd say we're just getting back what was ours to begin with, albeit with poncy Brit accents and funny hairdos.
Re:We gave US the Beatles and all we got was data. (Score:4, Insightful)
And...now I guess you expect somebody to list all the influences on blues, pop, folk, R&B and rock'n'roll from "outside" of US?
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Hey baby, how's your baby? Fair exchange, in my books.
From Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset [ted.com]
And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thank to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge, on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.
Quite in the opposite of the World Bank [who rock] it's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in a modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor.
Chinese hackers are in deep trouble (Score:3, Funny)
When their bosses find out the information they have spent months hacking for is on data.gov.
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Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA negoti (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be nice if they televised the entire health care bill debates on C-SPAN as they said they were going to?
Transparency my ass.
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Although I can't really say that anyone really feels nostalgic for the "transparency" of the Bush administration either.
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:5, Funny)
The Bush Admin was transparent. Many people could see right through their plans.
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:4, Interesting)
One difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicans tax poor people by eliminating social services and giving tax breaks to the people who don't need them. Democrats tax rich people to pay for social services for poor people.
This was going alright - both parties have interests in the society, and there was a balance of power. Then the conservatives started losing ground, and had a miraculous conversion. Turns out there are 40 million Americans who will vote against their own interests at the drop of a hat, if you'll call yourself an evangelical. You may have to do a lot of embarrassing things - pretend you'll overturn Roe v. Wade, praise hopeless idiots like Pat Robertson, pretend that gay people are "evil", and so on. Corporations will give you the money to promote yourself this way, to defeat working class (or "union") money, in exchange for tax cuts at any cost, even during wars.
All of this is perfectly illustrated by the last decade of John McCain. If his VP running mate hadn't been so shockingly stupid, he would have given Obama a run for his money.
Sorry for the nuanced approach. I know it's terribly unpatriotic.
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So so naive.
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Republicans tax poor people by eliminating social services? Since when is NOT gifting charity to the recipients suddenly a tax? By what right should the government gift them anything while forcing others to pay for it? You really call the decision to discontinue charity as a tax?
Social services are not gifts or charity. They are the shared benefits of civilization and infrastructure, and a recognition that the market does not have just solutions for every situation.
Spoken like a true Marxist. Need as defined by who? What the heck does need have to do with it? Just because someone manages to acquire, without committing a crime, more than another person they should be forced to give it up? By what right should the government take from one person and give to another when no theft or other crime has been committed?
The infrastructure and shared wealth of a society provides opportunity for success. Liberia is not home to any technology firms because it lacks the infrastructure to support one. Infrastructure is funded by public money. Therefore, if you want to continue to have a civilization, you should pay taxes. How much from whom
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My point is I'd rather charity be voluntary and delivered somewhere closer to the person needing it.
Local communities are the best place, followed by the local government when desired, followed by the state when necessary, and the federal government when idiots like the governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans are too inco
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:5, Insightful)
They're only doing what their corporate masters pay them to do.
Why do you think that every single lawmaker who's in office for more than 10 years leaves as a multi-millionaire? Certainly not on their congressional salaries.
Until we take corporate money out of politics, neither party will be any good, and our real incomes will continue to fall as they have for the past 30 years, since Ronald Reagan took office.
Transnational corporations love it when we spend more than we make. Then, we become more desperate to hang onto jobs no matter how bad the pay and working conditions, and thanks to easy credit, we continue to buy their goods and services. Admittedly, the whole system crashes and burns eventually, which we are seeing with the world economic crisis, but when it does, the corporations will have the resources to start over, and workers will be in an even worse position to negotiate fair wages and decent working conditions.
I'm betting that if you asked Slashdotters if the working hours and conditions at their jobs are getting better or worse, you'd see that they are universally getting worse while their credit card balances are getting bigger. And it's not just big-screen plasma screen TVs that are going on those credit cards, but basic necessities like health care, education, food and shelter. This system lets us think our standard of living is getting better, while we only fall deeper and deeper into debt to our bosses.
The citizens of america.com really do owe their souls to the company store. We should just change the name of our country to AmeriCo.
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Wouldn't it be nice if they televised the entire health care bill debates on C-SPAN as they said they were going to?
Yes, it would.
And they would have, if the Republicans had ever shown one bit of being willing to debate. When a major political party's response is "no, just no, I don't care what we said we'd say yes to, we're saying no even if you take our 2004 platform and make it your health care reform", there really isn't any debate to broadcast.
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If that's all it was, they'd have been delighted to televise the debate, since it would have made the Republicans look really bad.
Personally, I believe they didn't televise the debate beca
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, if the Health Care Bills were so wonderful, why would you need to bribe guys in your own Party to vote for them?
Anyone who has lived in a jurisdiction with corrupt officials will tell you that bribery occurs not because whatever you are being bribed to do is a bad idea, but because you have the power to withhold whatever the briber wants. Bribery is about power not goodness or badness of the behaviour you are being bribed to do.
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:4, Interesting)
Which makes the Democrats (the Party of the People) look even worse. You're not doing the work of "the People" when you require a bribe to do your job....
Note that this is not meant to imply that the Republicans don't take bribes. Though I don't recall a case where a Republican majority leader had to bribe his own guys to get them to vote for the Party's bill.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that I've never heard of it.
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Note that this is not meant to imply that the Republicans don't take bribes. Though I don't recall a case where a Republican majority leader had to bribe his own guys to get them to vote for the Party's bill.
Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, just that I've never heard of it.
I'd say your hearing is selective, to say the least.
These so-called bribes are in fact better described as pork. I haven't heard of anyone buying the senator from Nebraska a new BMW. Instead, Nebraska gets exempted form certain Medicaid costs. The senator from Vermont isn't getting breast implants for his mistress, he's getting $10 billion in federal funds to build health clinics. (Cue the Republicans: "They're buying him off with money for abortions!!!!11") Montana, Utah, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wy
Yes, I suppose if one can rely on any maxim... (Score:2)
... it's that any point of failure completely invalidates other successes.
Be sure to tell your boss or clients, your SO, and your friends.
Re:Wouldn't it be nice if they posted the ACTA neg (Score:5, Insightful)
Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
What I do see a problem with is that I contacted my Congressguy McConnell to let him know that my Crohn's disease leaves me deciding to live a relatively normal life with huge debt, or a debilitating painful existence, and his discussions will affect my own personal future far more than it will affect his personal career, and I would appreciate being able to follow it.
I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade (to most Americans anyway - as bad as numbers seem, the financial meltdown, terrorism, and 9/11 combined don't impact a small percentage of those potentially affected by health care).
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Obama made the promise, Congress is failing to uphold it. I don't see a problem here.
The problem is promising something that anyone with a basic understanding of how American government works knows he will be unable to deliver. Had he promised to work as hard as possible WITH the Congress to pass health care reform, that would have been one thing. Promising that it WILL happen is like promising that I'll be giving you my boss's salary. My boss has other plans.
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I got no response, from my rep, on the most important issue of the decade
And yet, I presume those are the people you want to put in charge of managing that issue? How is that better than the evil HMO? You're just a number to either one, if that.
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While that is technically true, it's far too facile. Before one can claim that someone else is responsible for a broken promise, one must make at least SOME effort to fulfill it. Where Congress is concerned, he hasn't even tried.
Publish text of bills pror to the vote? Sorry, it's too "urgent".
Veto bills with earmarks? Sorry, "last year's business".
Televise negotiations? Sorry, too "sensitive".
Obama has let the Congre
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So, if I promise to reverse global warming, accept your donations (or votes or whatever) and rise to power, then mother nature / the environment / the industrialized world fails to uphold, it will be alright with you?
Underwhelming (Score:2)
I checked several data sets. All appear to be already available. For example:
Interactive Access To National Income and Product Accounts Tables
Dataset Summary
Agency: Department of Commerce
Sub-Agency: Bureau of Economic Analysis
Category: Income, Expenditures, Poverty, and Wealth
Date Released: Continuously released since 1934
...
Oh, god, the images (Score:1)
That said, it works perfectly without JavaScript. They did something right.
Mandatory Wingnut Response (Score:1, Offtopic)
But he's not a citizen! This site proves it definitely!
http://bit.ly/2O6ut4 [bit.ly]
I see they've kept up with the latest (Score:2)
I see they've kept up with the latest in web design. When you go to search for geodata [data.gov], the search list is constrained to a tiny rectangle in the middle of the page. You have to scroll within that tiny rectangle. On my monitor, the page is about a foot tall, and I'm tediously scrolling in this inch-high box.
I've learned to recognize state of the art web design when I see it. I bet it's even CSS compliant. They're not quite there yet. To be really great web design, it should be a Flash only site.
(close
How accurate are these data? (Score:5, Informative)
I've consulted with major research firms who use government data. Universally we find that the data haven't been verified and a little work shows massive inconsistencies therein. When recovery.org was showing jobs in zip codes that don't exist, etc., I wasn't surprise - it's par for the course.
I'll reserve judgment, but making data available is one thing; collecting usable data is something entirely different.
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There is also the matter of state and local government data. The feds are completely transparent by comparison. Even the things that are in the public record are difficult to obtain, expensive, poorly documented, and the data is a mess etc. The "cost of reproduction" is closer to what it would cost to be transcribed on parchment by monks than it is to the cost of making a CD/DVD or FTP. At the drop of a hat they will decide that something _isn't_ public record and then it goes from difficult to impossib
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Completely true.
In 2005 the state of Virginia wanted me to fork over AT LEAST $3,000 (!) to get per-precinct turnout figures. Not per-precinct results; those were free at the State Board of Elections website. But if you wanted to know actually how many voters showed up at each precinct they said it would take 4-6 weeks and "reproduction costs" would be between $3,000 - $5,000 for them to send me a CD with the PDFs. They had per-county/city turnout results (also on the website). But apparently getting
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Yeah. The feds should lead a charge to get standards set up for the states. Not demand but facilitate. A good example would be education data. There's no offical schema for that. Yet we're talking about a one trillion a year expense for the governments (Federal, State, Local) (according to this [usgovernmentspending.com], anyway, which may not be correct).
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Because there is obviously a problem with making all these inaccurate data sets public as opposed to keeping them locked up.
I think part of the point is with more transparency in Government it makes it easier for the public to be aware of and fix what is wrong.
Download Formats (Score:2)
I went to download 2005 Toxics Release Inventory data for the state of California [data.gov] and the only link was for a .csv. When I went to download it, up comes an .exe file. Why the binary executable?
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I went to download 2005 Toxics Release Inventory data for the state of California [data.gov] and the only link was for a .csv. When I went to download it, up comes an .exe file. Why the binary executable?
The Government (a.k.a. Big Brother or THE ILLUMINATI) wants to infect your computer with uninvited wiretapping software, of course! And once the NWO buys control of Google, every time you visit a Google web site, your computer will send the collected data to Big Brother and the Vatican, so that they will know everything you do and can enforce their agenda for globalization upon you!!! DON'T BE FOOLED!!! ITS A TRAP!!!
Or maybe they're just idiots? They probably spend more time playing WoW in their cubicle
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Chinese hackers.
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