Google and the Russia-Georgia War

Georgia does not appear on Google Maps, whereas Russia does. How odd.

Update: They do have Georgia, just not at a very good level of detail.

Thursday morning link rapid fire

• Fast Failure's and Google
• HDR in Photoshop CS III - I still haven't gotten that to work right, more at this site.
• Andrew Sullivan largely echoes me in what to do with Iraq.
  

Sunday link round up

• A creepy collection of suicide notes
• Google used this camera to create their new "Street View" feature (which is not in Atlanta, yet).
• Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin explains why the lessening of racial majorities is a bad thing for diversity. Really.
• There's a new, free version of Refactor! specifically for ASP.net. It's pretty cool. When I installed it it deleted all of my toolbox snippets in Visual Studio, so be careful about that.
  

Two things

Whilst listening to left wing radio today I heard two notable things, which struck me as totally wrong.

• The claim that over 50% of all discretionary government spending is spent on the military. While true, the weaselly use of the "discretionary" modifier makes it meaningless. To declare that some percent of the budget "must" be spent on programs, when they have the full power to change any law making them spend it on said programs is downright silly.
• The left wing (usually uttered by baby boomer types) screed that it is wrong not to show caskets of dead soldiers and marines as they arrive back in the states. This is usually followed by something like "if we could only see the human pain of this war, we wouldn't be there at all." Then it occurred to me that we all watched 9-11 happen and then three weeks later we were bombing Afghanistan, and 18 months later we invaded Iraq. The sight of dead Americans seems to make us more aggressive, not less.
  

Quick thoughts on Google

While having dinner with Pastras tongiht, I remarked that Google was brilliant because they never did anything hard. That is not to say that the creation of that company did not involve anything difficult, but rather that they use technology in a proper way and never in a way that just barely works.

What is the word for that?

A new word I just learned from the surprisingly difficult to use Volokh site is "Parade of Horribles" which I've never heard before.

Katrina satellite photos

Google Maps has satellite photos of New Orleans from Aug 31 of this year.

At long last

Google has just released their API for Google Maps! First Google Earth, now this. Google really is an awe-inspiring company. Look for a week in the life of Steve very soon.

And as I'm writing this, Mike just sent me a link to it.

And for those of you following the screw-you homeowner Kelo Supreme court ruling, check out Hotel Lost Liberty.

Google Earth is staggering

Google Earth was released today and I'm blown away. Basically it's a free version of their KeyHole software, but with incredible capabilities. Skylines, tilting and foreign cities, it's all just staggering.