What Are You Doing With Your Shutdown Freedom?

[Steve Contra]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology website has been taken down :'( :'(

It was my main source for source for fluid thermodynamic properties I need for work.

Don't understand why it's down so soon. Website hosting doesn't seem like a cost outlay that would be interrupted in less than a day of gov't shutdown.

My wife uses a lot of data from the Census Department at work. Pretty frustrating.

I can't get very important customs paperwork for stuff on the water already.  What's crazy is only the part of the website that people use is taken offline, all the portals to get their, the faqs etc. are still online

[demi]

Where is the option to see who voted for what so I know which jerks to avoid?

I haven't added that option in yet. I know who voted what, though. You naughty girl...

[benjipwns]

What's crazy is only the part of the website that people use is taken offline, all the portals to get their, the faqs etc. are still online

Crazy like a fox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

[benjipwns]

In the "you're never the first to say something" files*: http://www.cato.org/blog/online-washington-monument-syndrome

With a few more examples of the weirdness about what sites are up and functioning and which have been taken down.

That doesn’t seem to account for some of the weird patterns we see, however. The main page at NASA.gov redirects to a page saying the site is unavailable, but lots of subdomains that, however cool, seem “inessential” remain up and running: the “Solar System Exploration” page at solarsystem.nasa.gov; the Climate Kids website at climatekids.nasa.gov; and the large photo archive at images.jsc.nasa.gov, to name a few. There are any number of good reasons some of those subdomains might be hosted separately, and therefore unaffected by the shutdown—but it seems odd they can keep all of these running without additional expenditures, yet aren’t able to redirect to a co-located mirror of the landing page.

Still weirder is the status of the Federal Trade Commission’s site. Browse to any of their pages and you’ll see, for a split second, the full content of the page you want—only to be redirected to a shutdown notice page also hosted at FTC.gov. But that means… their servers are still up and running and actually serving all the same content. In fact they’re serving more content: first the real page, then the shutdown notice page. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome and don’t mind browsing in HTML-cluttered text, you can even use this link to navigate to the FTC site map and navigate from page to page in source-code view without triggering the redirect. Again, it’s entirely possible I’m missing something, but if the full site is actually still running, it’s hard to see how a redirect after the real page is served could be avoiding any expenditures.

And this gem from the official policy:

The determination of which services continue during an appropriations lapse is not affected by whether the costs of shutdown exceed the costs of maintaining services.

*via TechDirt and Reason.

[PigSpeakers]

http://www.fcc.gov/shutdown-page.html

The FCC is down. I'm gonna go wiggle my dick on live tv and drop a million swears.

[Joe Molotov]

Gas was $2.99 today Based Free Market Government