I know satellite photo-imagery has greatly improved, as seen recently by the flex satellite companies showed on the Ever Given incident, but I'm a bit tickled by the conflation of satellite and aerial imagery. The later is the one we think of the most when thinking of Google Maps high-res "Satellite" view:
Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
481–490 of 693 posts
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason that this conflict always gets the same optics in international media — jewish lives are worth less. At first, as you don't want to believe it, you argue, you investigate, you really try to find any sane reason that while these things are happening on ground with you and your family, everybody else still sees a different picture, and then you just come to realisation that there's no other explanation for…
Israeli lives are worth at least $400 / year each to the United States, given the $3.3B annual aid and a population of 9M. Since 2007, when the US stopped economic aid, it's been entirely military aid. ( https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ISR ) In total, Afghanistan gets more, $4.9B, but that only comes to $129 per Afghan. (That's the "you break it, you bought it" plan, I guess.) The next highest is Jordan, $1.7B or $170…
This narrative about "aid" misses so much context that I it's almost the same as outright lying.
Most of this "aid" is military equipment that sits unused in warehouses, and it's point is job programs for US defense industry. The rest is investment in military R&D that US will have access to, and given how good Israel is at R&D in general, and military R&D in particular, ROI on it is quite high.
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also enabled the modern mobile navigation industry. I was working on automotive navigation systems in the early 90s and SA was a killer for the product, options were various dead-reckoning and inertial sensors or differential GPS, both of which ended up being cost-prohibitive. But you can't do usable route guidance with a 100m CEP in an urban area.
With modern high powered CPU's, more detailed maps, and particle filters (which require all that cpu), dead reckoning has become much more viable. I suspect you could go hours driving round a city with the GPS and WiFi location turned off before losing your position - simple wheel speed, gyro and compass is sufficient for most stuff.
Hmmm. What about the sensors on my phone? For a while now I've wanted to know my realtime speed in the underground sections of the local rail/metro network.
I suspect the most accurate measurements would be done using wideband SDR, iff I were able to acquire absolute position references for the signals I was seeing. Not likely, especially for something I might like to let others play with and/or generalize.
Everywhere I read about the subject the general consensus is that using accelerometer and gyro data from the average phone is a fool's errand. I have zero experience with the field so I wouldn't know if failure was incorrect signal processing or just had sensors.
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ll be overjoyed the day that the compass in the vehicle can tell my phone what direction the vehicle is pointed to avoid making a left instead of a right out of a driveway. Yes, there are solutions to these problems in theory, but in real-world application today they’re still pretty lame / inaccurate, and the solutions still seem far away (try getting a few auto mfgs to agree to a standard way of communicating a co…
I've used a phone that didn't have a built in compass and one that does. The one that has an actual compass knows which direction I'm facing even without moving. The one that didn't would usually have no idea until I started moving. They make external GPS units that plug into your car and connect to your phone wirelessly for example Garmin GLO that are supposed to improve accuracy although I haven't used one myself a…
The built in compass in a phone is pretty inaccurate for driving because it can't compensate for the unknown shape of the body shell of the car it's in.
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#485Wikipedia (of course!) has a list of locations intentionally blurred on public satellite map services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
That's interesting - the one in Antarctica, for example, really tickles the fantasy, doesn't it.
That's where they activate the portal duh. Don't tell anyone, lives depend on it, human and non-humanoid.
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting - the one in Antarctica, for example, really tickles the fantasy, doesn't it.
If they were truly hiding some secret villain's lair, why wouldn't they cover their tracks by making it look like any other expanse of white snow?
Why not do both
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the phrasing you'd prefer? "Children were once again murdered in cold blood in Gaza, a metropolis that could be just like Singapore, Tokyo, or Hong Kong given its dense population and prime geographic location, were it not under constant military oppression from a country whose illegal nuclear weapons program is more successful than that of North Korea"? I think a lot of people would find that uncomfortably pa…
Whatever criticism Israel may or may not deserve over its current bombing campaign, you aren't going to convince anyone if you misuse phrases like "murdered in cold blood". That's just not what those words mean.
Can you explain why I am misusing the phrase? I believe it to be objectively accurate.
Again, that phrasing might make people uncomfortable. as I wrote above. I understand that, and I understand why people desire to censor it. But I don't believe it's incorrect, which is another thing entitely.
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#488Not really related to the article at hand, but I've been on a bit of a Google Maps binge the past couple weeks. I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them. Another strange thing I found that might not be super well known (I didn't know about it) is that all GPS data in China is offset by a nonlinear psuedo-random amount. If you turn on the satellite view in Google Maps and look at various citi…
>I learned a few interesting facts, blurry Israel being one of them.
Yes, Israel specifically has favor from the US government that satellite imagery of that country is allowed to be blurred:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#489This link title is extremely misleading to the point of being disingenuous and provocative. The title of the linked article is “Israel-Gaza: Why is the region blurry on Google Maps?”... because the entire Israel / Gaza / West Bank region is blurred in the exact same way. There is no preferential blurring of Palestinian areas. The clear answer is to prevent actors on both sides from using Google’s satellite imagery to…
Your opinion is a bit of wishful thinking when compared against policy reality and whose side has favor written in law.
As mentioned in the article, Israel specifically is protected -- "U.S. law mandates U.S. government censorship of American commercial satellite images of no country in the world besides that of Israel.":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyl%E2%80%93Bingaman_Amendment....
Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can OpenStreetMap or someone make non-authoritative maps, or is this impossible without the cooperation of people on the ground who cannot operate safely within the borders of China?
It's "impossible". Private, independent geographical surveying is illegal in China. [0] So technically you can't do it even in the local coordinate system. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
OSM has an extensive article about mapping in China. Generally it's not allowed. Still, in the bigger OSM is quite accurate. :>