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Offlinephi1618
old hand

Registered: 02/14/04
Posts: 4,102
Last seen: 13 years, 10 months
eff
    #4140981 - 05/06/05 05:34 AM (18 years, 10 months ago)

The Electronic frontier foundation is an organization involved in informing people about and fighting against various laws that threaten to restrict our freedom or privacy. I've received their e-mail news letter for many months, and sent a number of faxes/emails to my representatives through forms they provide. I'm sure my contact alone is relatively insignificant, but it does let my representatives know what issues are important to me, and that I'm paying attention to what they do.

An example of the sorts of issues the eff is concerned with is a law in the Senate to make it illegal for the NWS to publish it's forecasts in a manner readable to the public ( www.weather.gov ). The purpose of this law is to prevent the government from competing with private industry in the business of packaging information generated by the government in a human-readable format. I'm sure a number of you object in principle to the government having anything to do with making weather forecasts at taxpayer expense, but as a practical matter I think it's silly to force taxpayers to pay a private corporation to access information that was generated with tax dollars.

Is anyone else here interested in the eff? Do you read the newsletter, or have you made a donation?
Are there other activist organizations with a strong online presence that you're involved with that you think other Shroomerites might be interested in?

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OfflineSeussA
Error: divide byzero

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 1 month, 19 days
Re: eff [Re: phi1618]
    #4141010 - 05/06/05 05:51 AM (18 years, 10 months ago)

> I'm sure my contact alone is relatively insignificant

I would't be too sure about that. I was talking with a senator once about an issue that he had changed his original stance. He said he had to change because he got so many letters about the issue. I asked him how many letters and he replied "around twenty".

A VP with P&G once told me that they consider every letter they receive to represent the feelings of 2000 people that did not bother writing.

A single letter can have a lot of weight and go a long way.

> I'm sure a number of you object in principle to the government having anything to do with making weather forecasts at taxpayer expense

Only an idiot, or somebody that makes their money by forcasting the weather, would be against the government providing public access to the data. As you said, it was my tax money that created the space program, my tax money that built the satalites, my tax money that launched the satalites, my tax money that maintains the satalites... (not to mention the 800+ weather balloons launched every day, the thousands of ocean weather buoys, etc...), the data and conclusions that are generated by those expenditures belong to me. If the weather channel wants to charge me for that information, fine... but let them spend a few billion dollars developing the infrustructure first.

I wonder what kind of liability the "pay-for" weather places will take upon themselves the first time they mis-forcast a deadly storm.

> Is anyone else here interested in the eff?

I appreciate what the EFF does, but I don't always agree with them. I got into a huge debate with one of their lawyers back in 1996 about web logs. Her position was that web logs were bad because they collected private information about individuals and saved it without the person knowing. I kept pointing to the various cameras on the street as we were walking in downdown DC and asking how what they were recording was any different than what a web log contains. She never was able to see the connection and remained firm that web sites should not be allowed to log anything at all.


--------------------
Just another spore in the wind.

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Invisiblenewuser1492
Registered: 06/12/03
Posts: 3,104
Re: eff [Re: Seuss]
    #4141089 - 05/06/05 06:38 AM (18 years, 10 months ago)

I'm sure a number of you object in principle to the government having anything to do with making weather forecasts at taxpayer expense

Only an idiot

Perhaps he was referring not to distributing the data but the very act of collecting the data, at tax payer expense, in the first place.

I kept pointing to the various cameras on the street as we were walking in downdown DC and asking how what they were recording was any different than what a web log contains. She never was able to see the connection and remained firm that web sites should not be allowed to log anything at all.

A person visits a website by choice. If a person lives in a city and has a job downtown they may be required to walk down certain streets to get to their building. I have the exact opposite view from that lawyer. Web logs should be legal and street cameras should be illegal.

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OfflineSeussA
Error: divide byzero

Folding@home Statistics
Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 1 month, 19 days
Re: eff [Re: newuser1492]
    #4141155 - 05/06/05 07:02 AM (18 years, 10 months ago)

> Perhaps he was referring not to distributing the data but the very act of collecting the data, at tax payer expense, in the first place.

With hundreds of billions of dollars and lives are stake due to damage from weather, the government cannot afford to be ignorant. I am all for smaller government, but not in this area.

> Web logs should be legal and street cameras should be illegal.

That was my position as well. She wouldn't see it that way. This is when I lost a lot of respect for the EFF, but again this was in '96 and the web was young and there was a lot of hype going on about privacy.


--------------------
Just another spore in the wind.

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