On a similar note, does anyone else remember the proposal for the
group "net.weather"? -- it was a place where people could ask for
weather reports in other parts of the country or something. This
was, I might add, a SERIOUS suggestion, not a joke group.
I didn't propose net.weather, but I later tried for a while to get the
National Weather Service TTY-style data stream into a NNTP-distributed
group, with appropriate expirations and geographical parsers. Though
Steve Wolff said (of NSF backbone bandwidth) "crunch all you want,
we'll make more", I was turned down by the people in Colorado who are
in control of the data. Seems they (a) still thought the stream would
need too big a hose and (b) had already sold it to various vendors for
satellite distribution. Hacker pilots across the country were
dismayed, because we have to dial an 800 number rather than having it
delivered to our desktops. Sigh...
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16