Re: now ~CT-infested -- Re: Q: For Sy Liebergot (Yeah, it's new safe CT-free topic fodder!)

On 2005-05-08, Stuf4 <tdadamemd-spamblock-@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> But what we are talking about here is not some dynamic document that
> was created yesterday. We are talking about an official report that
> was published in 1970. A report that was to investigate the wasting of
> millions of US taxpayer dollars (assuming that those tax dollars were
> spent on actually landing). We're talking about a report on an event
> that was made into a megabuck Hollywood movie.
>
> ...yet no one, as far as I'm aware, has made the contents of this
> report available through simple popular search.

Yeah. Is NASA's job to get Google, or Yahoo, or Inktomi, or whoever, to
crawl it's material? Nope. NASA's job is to get that material published.
Last I checked, it was published.

This is a bit like complaining a book is suppressed by the government
because your city library hasn't bought a copy.

[Incidentally, there was an election here the other day - I don't know
if you noticed. That election, as with every general election I've lived
through, was goverened by the Representation of the People Act 1983,
which is on the face of it thereby a much more critical document. There
isn't a copy of that "available through simple popular search" anywhere,
although I can't say this ever poses anyone any problems...]

>> That post I wrote yesterday? I skimmed 3-500 pages of pdf'ed text,
>> and read about a hundred in detail. It's not difficult.
>
> Perhaps you'd like to demonstrate how a person can do a search on
> certain keywords and get a hit from the contents of the Apollo 13
> report.

I never suggested someone "do a search". There are other ways to extract
information.

See, there is this concept called "reading". To the best of my
knowledge, you're doing it just now.

First, you open the pdf document, then you set it to an appropriate
size, then you start reading the individual words in the appropriate
order. This takes quite a while, so you might want to look at the index
and try looking for keywords (if there is one, gov't reports often don't
include one), or at the table of contents and going to the relevant
section, or just going through glancing at each page for relevant
sections. (Reading the first line of each paragraph often works)

You may find this familiar; it's what you do with "books". You're
familiar with books, right? You know, what people used to read things in
before they read stuff off computer screens - like, to pick an entirely
random example, back in 1971.

> I've found a few pages of front matter that have been made crawlable.
> But that's far from the majority of the report. And that's far from
> the meat of the report.
>
> The goal I was suggesting was to have the entire report crawled for
> anyone doing a simple search. As it stands today, those people have to
> do extra work to get to it. (And that's assuming that they know that
> it's there in the first place.)

Because, Lord knows, anyone who wants to do moderately detailed research
into Apollo 13 wouldn't ever have thought to go looking for a copy of
the accident report.

You're doing yourself no favours here; it's published. If you can't be
bothered reading it, fine, it's no skin off my nose. But to keep
redefining what you want, and to keep demanding more and more with vague
insinuations of malfeasance, just reminds me why so many people have
given up.

(And on the matter of being bothered to read things, some indication
that you'd noticed the 300-line answer to your complaints about bad
documentation of abort decisions might not go amiss. Even if you just
searched through it...)

--
-Andrew Gray
andrew.gray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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