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To: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)
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Subject: Re: earthviewer (was Re: whoa}
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From: Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>
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>>>>> "K" == Kragen Sitaker <kragen@pobox.com> writes:

    K> Planning battle tactics; for this reason, the intelligence
    K> press reports, spy satellites have had 1-meter resolution for
    K> many years.

The military already have these spy satellites; they are basically
Hubble pointed the other way, so I doubt they will be a big enough
customer of this service to justify a next-generation wireless
network rollout for the rest of us.

    K> Finding an individual vehicle in a city might occasionally be
    K> possible with 1-m images and might occasionally also be worth
    K> the money.

My car is only just over 1.5 meters across and maybe 3 meters long, so
that means roughly six pixels total surface area.  You might find a
16-wheeler this way, but how often do people misplace a 16-wheeler
such that it is _that_ important to get old images of the terrain?
Since they can't send up aircraft to update images in realtime every
time, how is this different from just releasing the map on DVDs?  Why
wireless?

I thought of the common problem of lost prize cattle, but there again,
will there really be business-case for creating a hi-res map of
wyoming on the fly instead of just doing what they do now and hiring a
helicopter for a few hours?

    K> For small areas you have legitimate access to, it's probably
    K> cheaper to go there with a digital camera and a GPS and take
    K> some snapshots from ground level.  Aerial photos might be
    K> cheaper for large areas, areas where you're not allowed --- or,
    K> perhaps, physically able --- to go, and cases where you don't
    K> have time to send a ground guy around the whole area.

I can see lower-res being useful for Geologists, but considering their
points of interest change only a few times every few million years,
there's not much need to be wireless based on up-to-the-minute data.
I expect most geologists travel with a laptop perfectly capable of DVD
playback, and I also expect the most interesting geology is in regions
where the wireless ain't going to go ;)

I don't mean to nit-pick, it's just that I'm curious as to (a) the
need for this product that justifies the extreme cost and (b) how we'd
justify the ubiquitous next-generation wireless network that this
product postulates when we /still/ can't find the killer app for 3G.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
 Business Advantage through Community Software : http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


