Going back in time, remember that in the past I did propose that we could be using this bulletin board to discuss and generate some helpful ideas for this particular type of problem and other similar problems.

Roger and I spent a good part of Friday trying to decide which of us was the more upset with the USGS for their latest format mess. And with some humor intended, this is just another of the things we have had trouble agreeing on. Any reasonable person would agree that I was clearly much more upset with that format mess. But Roger as usual will insist that he was the most upset.

Life has to go on in spite of these serious disagreements (humor intended).

What I am planning to do if and when time permits is go to higher level U.S. Policy Makers and ask them to TELL those agencies to do a better job with their efforts. And improving things should extremely easy to do. All the work is done with computer programs. The data they generate can be as complex and unreadable as they wish for whatever purposes they have in mind. But they can easily also provide the data using a simple format that anyone can easily work with such as straight ASCII or DOS text organized into columns or at least separated by a space.

Other important improvements for data generated by U.S. government agencies involve displays they are providing for things such as solar storm data and Total Electron Content data. Additional format options could be helpful for international researchers.

Before contacting them that I plan to once again post a list of proposed changes to this board and perhaps to one of my Web sites describing options for how those earthquake could be displayed. If some general set of formats can be agreed on then that information would be sent to U.S. Policy Makers who would then tell the USGS people, DO THIS OR ELSE! And I think that I could get U.S. Policy makers to get them to do that.