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Terra Bella

terrabella.google.com

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: Terra Bella

#32
Interesting. I'm assuming there will be areas that we are prohibited from imaging. Will these be limited to areas defined by the US Government or every government that Google works with?

Re: Terra Bella

#33
post #25
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a very ambitious project, but the scrolling is utterly broken for me (firefox 43.0 on Debian), and seeing from other comments, I'm not the only one. Wonder how someone can possibly ship a website where the scrolling is so broken.

Looks wonderful in chrome.

Looks wonderful, perhaps, but plays wonderful it does not. There must have been 12 history items added to my back button before I was able to "scroll" down even a fraction of the page...

Re: Terra Bella

#34
post #7
post #2

This project is amazing. The site's scrolling should be memorialized in a museum of awful user experiences for posterity's sake.

Does anyone really like this kind of scrolljacking pages? Not responding properly on an MBP 2015. The project looks so interesting that I tortured myself by scrolling till the end. To me it feels similar to invasion of space.

Doesn't Google hire the best of the best?

Re: Terra Bella

#35
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still do not know how is this actionable. So, they have satellites that take cool pictures, ok. Are they selling the stuff? Sharing an API?

Whether it's a consumer sale (sign up via web and get an API key) I do not know, but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans. In terms of what you can use it for, I know people have built applications on top of Planet Labs to run queries from counting the number of cars in Walmart parking lots every day for hedge funds to tracking deforestation.

> but if you have a compelling use I'm sure you can get access by talking to humans.

So they make money by potential customers guessing at what they can provide them and reaching out to them? Seems like a terrible way to do business.

Unless I missed it (which would be easy; damn is it hard to get to the content on that site) I see no information about anything other than what they do internally. Which is cool but that's about where it ends.

Re: Terra Bella

#36

Interesting. I'm assuming there will be areas that we are prohibited from imaging. Will these be limited to areas defined by the US Government or every government that Google works with?

They likely can take images of everywhere in the world. They will very likely be limited as to who they can sell certain areas to, at various resolutions. The US government restricts sale of imagery under 31cm resolution currently, but previously it was 50cm. Neither of those restrictions would apply to these satellites which are 90cm resolution, but similar things will probably apply elsewhere. I believe Israel is one of those places with a coarser limit in place.

Re: Terra Bella

#37
post #14
post #3

Unbearable scrolling behavior in Chrome on a late 2013 MBP.

I (and likely many others on this site) am tired of people complaining about weird-scrolling sites, but this one is exceptional: I can't get it to actually display the content! At some point scrolling gets somehow stuck and I can't scroll down anymore.

> At some point scrolling gets somehow stuck and I can't scroll down anymore.

You just have to scroll harder. Seriously. Every time it got stuck for me I just tried scrolling faster and after a few swipes it would move on.

Re: Terra Bella

#40

This post makes me wonder about space pollution/saturation. Are there any resources that talk about what is a safe number of satellites for different altitudes and the effects of space pollution? I have heard of the Kessler Syndrome, any suggestions that discuss this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

The largest class of debris object, by mass, is unspent boosters from launches in the 50s-70s. Lots of old Soviet stuff up there.

Kessler Syndrome can be brought under control with as few as five upper stage boosters brought out of orbit per year. Whether the political will exists to spend money to clean up our space mess is another issue entirely.

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