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Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

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Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#691
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't forget Hamas is the legitimate elected government What do you think is the background for that? I had a look at Wikipedia about Hamas, look how they grew more popular and became more violent: > ... Jewish settler in military fatigues, massacred 29 Muslims at prayer in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron [year 1994] in the West Bank during the month of Ramadan. An additional 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fo…

I'm not saying they're aren't two sides to this. But acting like Hamas and Israel are equally bad here is a stretch of the imagination. One side cares about preventing civilian casualties, the other does not. It's like comparing Isis and the US military. Very different approach and rules of engagement. > Does it sound as if the voters voted for rocket attacks? In 2007 not rockets, but they knew Hamas had a history of…

> acting like Hamas and Israel are equally bad

I didn't say that (and I don't think that).

Also, there's a difference between the people in Israel and the state. Most people don't do bad things; the government in Israel sometimes does. So just saying "Israel" is confusing, makes it seem as if you don't see a difference between the gov and the people. A government often does things that are bad for the voters.

Anyway I'm not sure it's helpful to compare "who is worst". It's not as if beating someone a bit, gets less bad, just because a different person beats another one even more.

> One side cares about preventing civilian casualties, the other does not. It's like comparing Isis and the US military. Very different approach and rules of engagement.

Agreed that Hamas doesn't care, instead, directly attacks civilians.

I think most, almost all, people in IDF do care -- that they don't want to hurt civilians.

At the same time, if you look back a few years, 2018, you'll notice that individuals in IDF shot a thousand people in Gaza, most of them unarmed. Killing about a hundered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...

> an independent United Nations commission set the number of known militants killed at 29 out of the 183.[4] Other sources claim a higher figure, of at least 40

To me this shows that there are some people in IDF, who do enjoy killing Palestinians.

Maybe almost all of those in IDF don't want to hurt civilians, but those few who do want, get to do that quite a lot, sometimes, no consequences for them it seems.

> as guilty as the Germans were for Hitler and the Nazis

In the Israel-Palestine, there was an ongoing conflict when Hamas got the power -- and massacres had been done already by individuals from both sides. So it seems like a poor comparison, to me.

It's odd that you write about one side that it "cares about preventing civilian casualties" -- when individuals from that side, did what to me looks like a massacre a few years ago (2018), and now continues bombing although they know how many civilians get killed. And then you go on compare the other side with nazi voters.

It seems to me your world view is more black and white, than what you're aware about? And probably I'm not going to reply any further here.

I'd just like to say, to anyone in IDF reading this, that I think it's wrong by Hamas (or anyone else) to attack people in IDF. I don't think people are "legitimate targets" just because they're in the army -- they're still people, and most of them (although not exactly all) never did anything bad. I'd like to give a hug to you in IDF who didn't do anything bad personally (that's almost all of you), and to the civilians in Israel and Gaza.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#692

Not 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…

Nitpicky, but useful for anyone interested in spatial data: WGS-84 is not a "GPS standard" but rather a geographic coordinate system and is usually paired for consumption with a projection like wgs 84 web mercator to view those 3d coordinates on a 2d plane. Super interesting stuff and reconciling these standards across the globe is a really fun problem, and one you'll likely run into if you ever find yourself dabblin…

An interesting tidbit is that our world is not a sphere, but a spheroid. This makes 3d -> 2d transformations very local.

Re: Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?

#693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

planet.com can get you a ~12 images per day [1] for a reasonable price. If cost really isn't an issue, I'm confident you could strike a deal with planet.com to place their next few new satellites into the specific orbit you want to up the frequency even more. [1]: https://www.planet.com/pulse/12x-rapid-revisit-announcement/ , as of June 2020.

Could you divulge what you use the images for? Or, anyone who buys satellite images? I know about real estate, navigation, and I've heard that some business use them to forecast retail sales. I curious about other uses.

Tracking deforestation, melting of glaciers, basically anything geographic. If you're looking for things people profit from, you're right that some trading firms use satellite images to count cars in parking lots of e.g. Walmart to predict earnings reports. Similar things can be done on oil refineries for example (some satellites can even look /through/ oil tanks to look at oil levels by looking at specific wavelengths).
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