The Earth Is Square

We have just about seen country after country having issues and demands with Google’s street view.  Now the next country to step up is Switzerland.

Switzerland’s data protection watchdog on Friday demanded that Google immediately withdraw the “Street View” facility it has started offering on its map of Switzerland.

Slashdot has the initial news story coverage.  But the related articles offer up more tidbits of information.  The main reason for their demands it be taken down is that the Internet giant was not respecting conditions set to respect personal privacy in Switzerland.  Browsing through the images finds vehicle plates and faces that should have been blurred, are not blurred.

National Geographic TV has a really good special running that is entitled “Drain The Ocean” where they are using the latest mapping technology and CGI to drain away the ocean and show features that are hidden under miles of Ocean water.

This is a world you have never seen before – a world normally hidden under miles of water, the ocean floor. We’ll remove the water using CGI animation, revealing a landscape of unimaginable scale with features more dramatic than anything on dry land.

These are two screen shots from the show, and the video is even more amazing.

If you have looked at the Ocean’s features with World Wind or Google Earth, then this is really a special worth watching.

Well, apparently.. they know a less than 1th of a mile savings when using “Shortest Distance”.

This summer I have seen a huge increase in out of state traffic going up my 20mph residential road to get to a main road when they could have gone less than .1 mile and gotten on the same road.  I know they were following GPS unit directions because 1) all out of state 2) doing the speed limit or slower 3) they all have GPS units stuck to their windows and turned on.

I have tried it with two GPS units I have, using shortest distance it will take you up the residential road, using shortest time you go the main intersection and go up that way.

They are gonna hate it when we finally get the road closed off…

Another heads up that this weekend (Friday till Sunday) will have another outage at NASA for World Wind related sites.  Save for the remotely hosted data.

Affected systems will be the main website, .NET servers, and supporting systems will be down including the Virtual Earth layer.

Notice something new when I went to the WorldWide Telescope website tonight, they have a preview of a web client written in Silverlight.

The web client looks and behaves just as the desktop application does.  Though image downloading and display do seem to be a little slower.  The client works on Windows and OSX computers with Silverlight 2.0 installed so while the desktop is still Windows only.. with the web client they can reach a larger audience.

One of the most commonly asked features for WWJava is KML support for it.  And what most developers have done is to write their own support for KML.

But now there is a Java API for KML (JAK) support.  So now developers that want to have KML support in WWJava can add it in via this API.

The objective of the Java API for KML is to provide Java interfaces for easy access to KML (Keyhole Markup Language) data.

 

The main goal of the Java API for KML (JAK) is to provide automatically generated full reference implementation of the KML object model defined by OGC’s KML standard and Google’s GX extensions. It is an object orientated API that enables the convenient and easy use of KML in existing Java environments.