Posted on 02/13/2009 7:30:16 AM PST by Crazieman
Democratic staffers released the final version of the stimulus bill at about 11 pm last night after delaying the release for hours to put it into a format which people cannot “search” on their home computers.
Instead of publishing the bill as a regular internet document -- which people can search by “key words” and otherwise, the Dems took hours to convert the final bill from the regular searchable format into “pdf” files, which can be read but not searched.
Three of the four .pdf files had no text embedded, just images of the text, which did not permit text searches of the bill. That move to conceal the bill’s provisions had not been remedied this morning at the time of publication of this article. (You can find the entire bill on the House Appropriations [http://appropriations.house.gov] website.)
(Excerpt) Read more at humanevents.com ...
That would not prevent someone from reversing the operation but reversing it would probably take longer since OCR is very computation intensive. Depending on the paper quality, etc., the reverse OCR operation might not yield perfect accuracy either. Perhaps most critically, the delay in reverse OCR would tend to delay the ability to analyze the bill thoroughly in real time. I can't think of why someone would do this other than to ram it through a congressional vote quickly and put congresspeople on the spot to vote in favor of something their staff had not yet had time to analyze.
Good ‘toon. Financial analyst Bob Brinker calls it the Trojan Horse Bill....
The version on thomas.loc.gov is a searchable PDF file.
It is searchable in the OSX preview program, although I haven’t tried it on Adobe or Foxit reader on Windows.
In the version I'm downloading the "text" looks to be scanned documents. They're images of words. So you can't search for specific text. If I wanted to search for the word "toilet", I can't do it.
Looks like what happened is that they used images on the pages that have hand written notes on them. On some of the other pages of part one, search worked fine. I got half way through downloading it and crashed, so we’ll see...
On the section I was able to get, there’s a charming little “hire my buds” section on page 60 that says the Secretary of Energy can ignore the career service and hire anyone he wants upon his own certification that they’re needed. Should just thrill the heck out of career employees.
Oh, this is interesting... the Appropriations website now won’t load. Anybody else reach it?
OH, JUST IN TIME FOR THE WEEKEND TOO.
HOW ABOUT THAT?
How can this be seen as anything but tyranny? This is a coup.
My DL stalled at about 4.7MB of Part “A”. Paused and restarted and it’s continuing, at around 6K/s
Checking.....
Yep, it’s up again.
files, which can be read but not searched. Yes it’s the way democrats operate some things never change obama.
...and it’s downloading...at less than 3k a second.
And these are the guys who.... oh, never mind.
Accuracy check, ailse 2!
You can search pdf files...unless they scanned the pages manually as pictures...still you can OCR the document...
I run linux, and Adobe makes a reader, but I don’t have it installed yet. So I’m using Okular, a universal document viewer, that is part of KDE 4.2. I can search just fine, and yes, it is the marked up photocopy version.
17 For assistance to owners of properties reCeiVIng
18 project-based assistance pursuant to section 202 of the
19 Housing Act of 1959 (12 U.S.C. 17012), section 811 of
20 the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act
21 (42 U.S.C. 8013), or section 8 of the United States Hous-
22 ing Act of 1937 as amended (42 U.S.C. 1437f),
23 $2,250,000,000, of which $2,000,000,000 shall be for an
24 additional amount for paragraph (1) under the heading
25 "Project-Based IWntal Assistance" in Public Law 110-
Yes, the new era of openness, transparency and accountability of the almighty Obama is here...
I think this will make it searchable.
Change it to word then back again.
hellopdf.com
PDF can sometimes be searched if a text recognition conversion is done on it. But if they secure it so you can’t convert it, then yes, it makes it harder to read.
“This is inaccurate.”
Unfortunately, the vast majority of computer users are not computer-literate enough to know this. I have used Adobe Acrobat reader on occasion, but even I didn’t know about this function & having used computers & various programs at work extensively, I’m pretty well versed in such stuff.
Acrobat reader cannot search images of text. When you scan, if you do not use OCR (Optical Charater recognition), then a scanned image of the page appears - and the picture is NOT searchable.
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