81–90 of 124 posts
If I understand this correctly, it means that any address in a disputed territory has multiple mapcodes, one for each claimant, and therefore whichever one you use you are implicitly backing one political claim over the others.
If so, this is a potential can of worms that many people won't want to open.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their own website is displaying/using MapCode's incorrectly. For example, they have 0C.T4 and they say it's in Ireland and appears to be some bench in the picture. However, if you use that MapCode, you will see it's the middle of some river in Amsterdam. 0C.T4 == 52.369764, 4.868898 Another: 81.J4W They seem to claim it's in Alaska, appears to be some road. However, it's another river in Amsterdam. 81.J4W == 52.50895…
Actually it's that those MapCodes are incomplete. They're missing the country/state designation. If you look up "Ireland 0C.T4" or "US-AK 0C.T4" you should get the correct results. I'll cite a .doc file here, it's also available on the Developers page: > 1. Codes only need to be accurate enough for public, every-day use. At the human scale, when you are within a few meters of a destination, you are “there”. > 4. Peop…
Imagine if a URL resolved to different addresses in each country you were in. Would that be a better system than what we have now, or a worse one? I think it would self-evidently be worse.
I'm surprised they didn't make mapcodes a globally-unique identifier.
The associated patent application: http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013057221A1?cl=en
> The mapcode system is a free, open standard.
Which is it, open or patent-encumbered? It can't be both.
Slightly off topic, but I'm stupefied at how much faster TomTom's maps (and Bing, apparently!) are than GoogleMaps.
Honestly, I don't like it. At first I thought it was a short, sort of binary (at least machine-readable) representation of coordinates. A,A might be (0,0) in our coordinate system. Turns out it's not. It's not even global but country (or in the US, state) specific. This means that the locations are controlled by a single entity together with country codes. Sure, postal codes are controlled by a single entity too, but…
One of the available regions is "Earth", which offers global coordinates(they're a bit longer, four or five characters on each side of the dot).
The upside of this is that it is possible to implement it completely offline, you don't need to query the regions from a database, because they're already defined. You just run the algorithm to project the local coordinates onto global coordinates, and your GPS system will handle that.
Speaking of current events, do Isreal and Palestine have separate MapCodes and what happens when borders shift?
>Mapcodes are free. They can be used by anyone, and may be supported, provided or generated by anyone, as long as this is done free of charge, conditions or restrictions
Why can't someone charge money for a service that generates mapcodes?
>The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be altered in any way that would result in the production of different (and thus incompatible) mapcodes. The mapcode algorithms and data tables may not be used in any way to generate a different system that produces codes to represent locations.
I think this means that the source code they are distributing is proprietary, because we cannot use it for any purpose.
No, they didn't. They "killed" parts of addresses. Also, these are still hard to remember. Personally, I'm a fan of http://what3words.com/ I'm currently here: http://w3w.co/lives.fend.spent
I like what3words also. What I'd really like is a hierarchy so that given >lives.fend.spent when you saw the words >lives.fend.rabbi you knew it was nearby, within the "fend" place or that >lives.gopher.spoon was within the "lives" places