CompuServe Messages

I'm not so pessimistic. I don't vote Republican, either. 🙂 But I can't help but think that privatization will force a company to be *profitable*, as opposed to a government agency, which has very few motivations to serve the public's desires. After all, the USGS still has plenty of data you can only get on *mag tape*. I don't know anyone who owns a reel tape drive on their PC. Any private company with half-and-ounce of smarts would've moved all that data to CDROM simply for internal archives, if not for mass distribution. As for the old-fashioned paper map business, I'd think they'd streamline operations as profits would dictate, which might mean spinning it off to other companies with better ideas or better funding. De Lorme makes paper maps, too, they have a great line of gazette-sized 1:150,000 state maps. And what's wrong with making the more obscure maps more expensive, such as those of interest only to commercial mining companies or timber companies? How do you make your wishes known to the USGS now? Write your Congress-critter?