Sneaky Satellite Photos Available Online 188
Delboy writes "Here's an article from BBC News about a company called Space Imaging which will point their satellite at an area of the planet that you request, take a 1 metre resolution picture and then e-mail it to you the next day, check out this link to read more."
Sattelite Images (Score:3)
Most of the eastern US, I believe is available. Last time I checked, at least.
Neat. Many uses. (Score:2)
But, say, some Columbian drug lord wanted to guage build up of DEA forces in area Foo. He could go through a proxy, but how deeply would the company check backgrounds for ppossible nefarious uses?
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Area 51 (Score:2)
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Fun (Score:1)
Pictures of the geek compound (Score:1)
You can learn:
1) What toys the boys bought with their IPO money
2) What the next version of
3) Who will by
DeCSS (Score:1)
Re:Area 51 (Score:1)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
how to get rich spying for small hostile countries (Score:1)
2. find small, militant country looking for someone to start a fight with.
3. offer to help country out, for a price
4. after selling photos, obtain great two-for-one deal on nuclear missiles from a certain former communist country
5. obtain blast proof bunker and large amounts of supplies
6. sit back and enjoy the show
Timed picture? (Score:1)
Okay, I'll spend the money... (Score:4)
Great! I'd like shots of the following locations, as well as their surrounding areas:
115-49'00"W 37-14'00"N
115-44'00"W 37-38'30"N
115-51'30"W 37-7'30"N
115-47'30"W 37-16'30"N
(For the curioius, those Latitude/Longiude numbers are in the vicinity of Nellis Air Force base, the area of Rachel Nevada, Groom Lake, and surrounding parts.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:Sattelite Images (Score:1)
Problem is, they're years old. It seems from the story that they'll take the picture for you on demand.
not to be paranoid, but (Score:1)
First, I wouldnt think it ridiculous for the service to be used for the purpose of plotting terrorist or spy attacks. Considering the military has probably used this technology to map out and survey areas, I could forsee some wannabe terrorists purchasing an aerial map of a large metropolitan city in order to determine where to place a bomb for maximum impact and what to use as an escape route. True, the photos arent detailed enough to be dangerous, but on large scale area, it might be problematic.
Also, I could forsee this used in the corporate realm for espionage. As a prior poster mentioned jokingly, one could spy on movie screenings and car testings. However I wouldn't be surprised if some companies started investing in satelite pics to scout out the developments of competitors (especially in the defense industry, auto industry, construction industry, and the like).
Finally, this may be paranoid of me, but I think eventually the technology would get better to the point that personal spying could occur. It doesn't seem realistic, but it is a potential threat to privacy. Imagine being able to spy on your neighbor's daily activities, especially considering the possibility of blackmail or libel as a result of pictures. Maybe the tech could even be used to plan out hits by mapping out the "target's" house and daily activities.
Yeah I know, this all seems far-fetched, but those are potentially serious issues that could be brought up by the use of what is essentially commericialized spy technology. Just a few thoughts
Uh oh... (Score:1)
Quick, Honey! Cover the skylight before your parents find out about this company! :-)
Actually the resolution of 1m is not too invasive, but you might be able to track vehicle movements, etc. Remember when that Yacht was lost in the race around the south pole? I'll bet this satellite could have helped in the search.
Terraserver: Not satellite images (Score:2)
If you're looking at areas over the United States, you're looking at aerial photography, not satellite images. Specifically, they are DOQs (Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles.) This is aerial photography that is georegistered and then terrain corrected (a digital elevation model is applied to the data to correct for relief.) The spatial resolution is 1 meter, which certainly puts it on par with Ikonos.
Of course, there's a big difference between satellite data and aircraft data: assuming that you've got the listening infrastructure (antennas and ground stations available worldwide) or a big-ass solid state recorder, acquiring satellite data allows you to assemble more or less a complete archive of data for a selected region or regions. With aerial photography, there's obviously a lot more involved, and clearly you can't have coverage of a single place on Earth updated every (say) eight days! (The exact time period would depend on the orientation of the spacecraft's orbit.) Most of the DOQs provided by the USGS are several years old; very few have "newer versions."
Oh, and if you're going to be continuously acquiring satellite data, shitloads of storage capacity helps.
Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scanning? (Score:2)
Satellite images and ecology (Score:2)
In fact, a good friend of mine in the Serengeti is using a different satellite technology (GIS -- sorry, but I forget what the acronym translates to) to study the foraging and dispersal behaviour of lions. The take home message is that this is REALLY useful stuff and that there are a lot of us that can't wait for more of those birds to go up.
When they specify the detection of a 1-metre square area, does this mean that a lawn chair would show up as a big honking off-white 1m2 pixel?
Make them free? (Score:2)
I think that'd be neat. Cause if I could afford to, I'd snapshot the geek compound.. Taco/Hermos, whats your GPS coords?
Update - Just found some prices... mmm, very expensive, will have to explore more to get a better idea. If someone figures the prices out clearly, post them please.
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Area 51 (Score:4)
Actually, about 2 years ago when I was reading the sci.space.* newsgroups regularly there was a reference to a french satellite that was taking pictures (resolution not as good however) and keeping them in a database. They had a web page and you could punch in some coordinates and it would pull up the most recent photo in its database of that area.
Someone did type in the Area 51 coordinates and when the photo came up you could see a runway. Not much else though due to poorer resolution.
I just checked some of my old bookmarks and I couldn't find the link. I'll look some more later.
Re:Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scannin (Score:1)
Re:Neat. Many uses. (Score:1)
- Henrik
- Henrik
Uses & implications (personal and geopolitical) (Score:5)
The sample images are very impressive. It's terrific to see that yet another space age technology is available for everyone.
The commercial availability of these kinds of imaging changes so many things. A few off the top of my head:
This last aspect will give world governments more accountability about geopolitical "hot spots". When Joe Sixpack (or, at least, Joe Wealthy Sixpack or Earth First! or Greenpeace or International Amnesty) can produce images better than the ones that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis, it will become very hard for dishonest governments (such as our own!) to get away with certain kinds of lies. Of course, the illuminati aren't particularly stupid and will undoubtedly try to regulate or outlaw this stuff.
In that light, the ``snapper'' of the BBC article is intriguing -- apparently the U.S. government has already outlawed certain kinds of spaceborne photography of Israel? Sheesh, you'd think people would eventually figure out that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. (You turn your back on congress for one session...)
Lame webmasters (Score:2)
Earth Viewing (Score:1)
Traditionally a unix domain, the business of aquisition, geo-referencing, rectification, enhancement, projection, storage and display of geo(data/imagery) has been migrating towards NT.
The file sizes are worth pondering, single full colour scanned aerial photos are approx 400Mb, composite colour aerial's of a reasonable sized city are about 32Gb in size, compressable to under 10 Gb ( & preferably in a manner that allows rapid server access to any sized region at any zoom level ).
The colour imagery and DEM( digital elevation model ) for a large state can easily top a terrabyte.
Add to this a database of locations, labels, vectors, populations, demographics, land-use, etc ...
( An "OpenContentDistributed"(tm) database perhap's )
some stuff that's about:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/gltiles.shtml
http://www.earthetc.com
Re:Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scannin (Score:2)
No, he couldn't. Maybe you've been watching too much Enemy of the State? It would be awfully difficult for a spacecraft moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour to monitor you sunbathing naked in the backyard in real-time. The spacecraft images what it is passing over. Once it's past, it's gone until the next go-round.
I don't know anything about the orbital design of Ikonos, but a good analogy is this: take a basketball and a roll of masking tape, and then start unrolling the tape across the surface of the ball, starting at the "south pole" and heading north. The width of the tape represents the swath, or the total width of the imaged area. Once you get to the north pole and back down to the south, keep on unrolling
Again, a lot of this depends on the design of the spacecraft's orbit (which I know nothing about), but that's the general idea.
Re:Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scannin (Score:1)
Legal ramifications? (Score:2)
Sure there are plenty of satellites out there in the hands of the government, but most of those are unavailable for mundane applications potentially inconsistent with national security. But one of the rationales in Ciraolo was that the policeman taking the photos from the plane was in publicly accessible space, and that can hardly be said of most spy satellites. But if this particular satellite is available for public use, then does that change the picture? I hope not -- privacy is a scarce enough quality as it is.
GIS (Score:2)
Re:I have it! (Score:2)
I think the major danger would be that hostile countries could use the images for targetting missiles on Israeli defense installations.
The US has a huge geographic database that is used for programming terrain following cruise missiles.
Well, ... (Score:2)
interesting, but... (Score:1)
texas... (Score:2)
Hmmm... 1 meter shot of Aurora. Sweet.
Images can be used for good or evil. (Score:1)
Re:GIS (Score:1)
GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems.
For more info see the comp.infosystems.gis FAQ at:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/faq-index.html
Cheers,
Adam.
Possible uses... (Score:1)
How about Pamela Anderson's backyard?
Environmental research my ass
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Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
Well, if you're suggesting that they might be able to slow the spacecraft down over an area of interest, it doesn't work that way. The forces of orbital mechanics overrule the curiosity of any national security agency. The velocity of the spacecraft is directly related to the radius (altitude) of its orbit. The lower the altitude, the higher the velocity. And at the altitude Ikonos is at, it's chugging along at a good clip.
Re:not to be paranoid, but (Score:2)
Ater dun said:
Unless aforementioned terrorists intend to drop a bomb out of a plane (or crash a plane into a downtown area), most of those maps aren't going to be terribly useful. I'd suspect most terrorists would find maps of the internals of a building, or plain old MAPSCO street maps, far more useful. (This is especially true in the case of most domestic terrorists, which are actually the larger source of potential terrorism in the US; a Planned Parenthood office isn't going to be easily identifiable as such by a mere aerial shot (well, unless you look for the building with a lot of people marching about with piccies of dismembered stillborn fetuses), while on MOST maps of downtown areas they tend to mark federal buildings clearly as landmarks.)
I'd actually think, oh, a building directory or blueprint, or even a AAA map would be more useful. The majority of terrorists are going to go for either car-bombs (a la World Trade Center or Oklahoma City) or for small devices which can be hidden easily (a la the Eric Rudolph bombings, or butyric acid attacks on family-planning centers that perform abortions). This is probably true even if they go for non-conventional arms.
The aims of military are different, in that with spy cameras they are usually looking for military installments; then, "smart weapons" or bombers are targeted towards those areas using the info from the maps. Not too many terrorists have ready access to ICBM's or bombers yet. :) (If and when they do, I suspect we'd have rather worse problems than, say, merely keeping high-resolution photographs of downtown areas away from them. :)
Invisible Death Rays: (Score:1)
Dr. Kevorkian could have a new euthanasia device consisting of a GPS unit and a wireless webpad, simply key in your co-ordinates to commit suicide!
Ohhh thats bad taste!!!
Re:not to be paranoid, but (Score:1)
Once the resolution for commercial birds goes to <30 cm, then let's start worrying.
If it can't be used for porn, it has no future (Score:1)
Francis Hwang
Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
Re:not to be paranoid, but (Score:1)
Erhm, you could just as easily use the USGS for this purpose. And they don't change. Or search terraserver.
I could forsee this used in the corporate realm for espionage. As a prior poster mentioned jokingly, one could spy on movie screenings and car testings. However I wouldn't be surprised if some companies started investing in satelite pics to scout out the developments of competitors
Once again, you don't get to choose the exact time of day or night that the photograph gets taken. Just that it will happen sometime in the next three days. And it's not at all clear to me how you would be able to distinguish an SUV from a limo, let alone features of some new car model. Perhaps for aerospace, but not the auto industry.
I think eventually the technology would get better to the point that personal spying could occur. It doesn't seem realistic, but it is a potential threat to privacy. Imagine being able to spy on your neighbor's daily activities
Again, you don't get to choose the exact time. And considering the sattelite is moving through space at thousands of miles per hour, I don't think it would be feasible to track someone in real-time. Plus the one-meter resolution makes it difficult to identify an object the size of a person, let alone who it actually is.
Essentially, all the things you are afraid of can be accomplished by aeroplane already.
Re:Terraserver: Not satellite images (Score:1)
nude beach coordinates (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Ikonos orbits at an altitude of 675 kilometers. The altitude required for a geostationary orbit is approximately 36,000 kilometers. It's safe to say that the instrument array is not going to yield a 1 meter spatial resolution from that height.
On the other hand, a geostationary orbit like this is obviously great for communications satellites.
Try terraserver (Score:1)
I know its from ms and all but I've spent hours looking at terraserver. [microsoft.com] For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, ms has a massive collection of sattelite imagry in a database that you can browse like a map. Very cool, now see if area 51 is blocked out...
Re:Well, ... (Score:4)
The Ikonos satellite data (see here [spaceimaging.com]) shows that it orbits at an altitude of 681 kilometers / 423 miles. Why so close? Because the closer to the earth, the higher the resolution of the picture, all things being equal.
If you look here [pipex.com], you'll find a quick rundown of orbital types -- of interest is Geostationary Orbit (GEO), which is what would be necessary to accomplish what you want. However, its altitude is 35786 km / 22228 mi. So, if they were to push the satellite to a higher orbit (which is also much more expensive to do, and required a much bigger launch vehicle and other things I'm probably overlooking), the resolution would be 53^2 (2809) times poorer, again all things being equal. This would make a 1m resolution picture into a 53m resolution picture. Not likely to catch you sunbathing in the back yard.
They would have to increase their optical system by over 3 orders of magnitude to do as you suggest.
I'm no expert, and I have probably overlooked many things. However, this is a quick summary of why it's not as easy to do as it sounds.
-Lunatic
North Korea? (Score:1)
Re:Neat. Many uses. (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Is that for a stationary object? What about flying the satellite at the speed of the earth's rotation? Please explain this to me like I'm 4. I'm starting to get a headache from not seeing why this won't work.
Old news (Score:1)
"No such thing as privacy" (Score:2)
Sure there is - just do all your outdoor activities under a big umbrella.
Click on "Media Only" (Score:2)
Beijing
Cairo
Manhattan
Rome
Sanaa
San Francisco
Santorini
Sapporo
Taipei
Tokyo
Yeah, I agree to the terms. Uh-huh, I work for the Times.
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Hate to quote myself, but that is what I needed to hear. Thanks for the explanation.
Re:Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scannin (Score:2)
Re:Forget Pictures - How Much for Realtime Scannin (Score:1)
BTW: (Score:1)
Especially those $10 ones. Think of it, you could have a huge archive of pics from all around the world. I think it'd be sweet. So who's gonna do it?
Also, what's the legality involved here? If you pay for the image, do you have the right to distribute it to others?
Re:Legal ramifications? (Score:2)
The cops were flying at the legal minimum, 1000' above terrain. I don't know the altitude of the satellite, but it can't be below 100 miles up and I wouldn't be surprised if it's 200 miles up. For convenience, let's call it a shade under 200 miles up - 1,000,000 feet up. That's a nice round factor of 1000x. Also, if I did my math right that works out to an angular resolution of around 1/2 arc second.
The average human eye has an angular resolution of something like 1 arc second, so the camera is a bit better than the human eye. But the cops in the aircraft were only 1000 feet up, so even with their poorer eyes they had resolution of around 1.5 mm (again, if I did my math right). I don't recall the size of the average marijuana leaf off the top of my head, but at a guess let's call it 150 mm - large enough that the plant would be easily recognized by eye.
I don't like the idea of cops buzzing property to peek over fences, but if I did my math right they could have still identified the plants from far higher than that.
But orbit? If you assume classic optics it seems unlikely that any satellite could ever recognize objects as well as a cop in a helicopter. Even if we assume a ten-fold improvement in the resolution (to 0.1 m), the leaves will still be an indistinct blur. This might be fine enough resolution to recognize the plant via remote sensing techniques, but this violates the "naked eye" test.
In the future? (Score:1)
Just like our CPU's keep getting better, our ability to perform satellite recon will also get better. I don't know but I don't think that there is an available technology to screw up this capability. At least for computers there is encryption. I don't have anything to hide but I'm concerned about privacy issues.
I guess for now, all one can do is make it public knowledge about when this type of satellite is overhead. For me, I'm going to put my statue of NP naked and petrified in my back yard. If infrared sensors/imaging is available, then I'll pour hot grits down my pants. There! Something useful advice gained by the trolls of /.
sigh (Score:1)
Re:Legal ramifications? (Score:1)
Hey... don't I have any rights to the shots your satellite took that you're selling to Playboy of my backyard? I mean, I should get some royalties here.
Maybe you could set up a Jennicam-in-the-Sky service...
Seriously, though, this court case says:
The same argument would apply here, since space is still (last time I checked, at least) a public vantage point. After all, what other alternatives are there? You can't stop people from looking out of satellites or airplanes by accident, and to expect people to cover their backyards for some privacy; it's a lose-lose situation.
Privacy seems to inevitably go down the drain, no matter what we try to do to protect it...
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
But what do you mean by a stationary object? The velocity and the orbit radius (altitude) are codependent. If you are travelling at a certain altitude and you increase your velocity, you also increase your altitude. If you decrease your velocity, you also decrease your altitude. The two are inseperably tied together. You can't be travelling at a certain altitude, cut your velocity in half, and remain at the same altitude. It doesn't work that way. There is a constant velocity for objects in a geostationary orbit, just as there is a constant velocity for objects orbiting at an altitude of 675km.
This is nothing new; tech background (Score:2)
Well, the resolution of IKONOS is new, but space photographs of many places --- yes, including Area 51 --- have been available from many years.
Space Imaging --- previously EOSAT --- has handled Landsat imagery since the mid-1980s, when Landsat was "privatized" (read: "paid for with taxpayer money and then given away to wealthy aerospace firms.") They raised the Landsat prices to the point where Congress enacted a law (in 1992, I think) to pay for flying a new Landsat not under Space Imaging's control, and distribute the results in the public domain.
The Space Imaging Landsat CDs on my desk are marked "Trade Secret", with a notation that their use is governed by a license agreement.
Landsat has borne four sensors: the RBV or Return Beam Vidicon, with 80m resolution and which never got much use; the MSS or Multispectral Scanner, with four bands of 80m resolution; the TM or Thematic Mapper sensor, with 7 bands with 30m resolution; and the latest satellite, Landsat 7, whose data is available from the USGS's EROS Data Center for cost (presumably a few hundred dollars for a roughly 7000x7000 "scene", although I haven't been able to find it on their Web site yet) bears the ETM+ or Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus sensor, which is roughly equivalent to the TM sensor, but with an extra "panchromatic" band with 18.9 meter resolution.
About the Landsat-7 data: it's public-domain once you get it, so you can do whatever you like. If someone sets up a web site with all L7 data available free to the public, the cost to the USGS per image provided will probably go up --- they'll be providing only one copy of each image. They might be unhappy about this.
About geosynchronous orbits: the Landsat 7 satellite flies at 705 km altitude. Geosynchronous, or geostationary, satellites are flown at 35,000 km, 50 times higher. (That's the way the math works out --- if you want to go around the Earth once every 24 hours, you need to fly that high.) If the Landsat 7 ETM+ sensor were flown in a geostationary orbit, its multispectral bands would provide 1500-meter resolution instead of 30-meter resolution. The GOES satellites that provide weather maps fly in geosynchronous orbits; they have 4-km resolution on most bands and 1-km resolution on one of them.
An additional difficulty is that half of the work --- one direction of scanning --- is taken care of by the Landsat's motion over the earth, giving us a simpler and more reliable satellite. (Landsat 5, still flying, is 15 years old.) So a geostationary surveillance satellite would need either a much bigger sensor array, or more mechanical parts to do a second direction of scanning.
In response to some of the more paranoid posts: given the difficulty of surveillance from a geostationary orbit and the coverage times from the unclassified satellites (Landsat-7 covers the whole earth every 16 days --- so it covers any given spot almost twice a month), it is highly unlikely that the NRO or any other agency is able to track you minute by minute, or probably even day by day, by satellite.
(I do not have access to any classified information on this topic.)
Space Imaging also handles one of the Indian Remote Sensing satellites, if I recall correctly.
Landsat data is good enough that you can distinguish different kinds of crops --- so those guys you know who grow their weed under fluorescents in their basements aren't just being paranoid.
Other satellites that provide similar information are the French SPOT satellites and the EOS satellites.
The hot new tech in this department is something called "imaging spectroscopy", or "hyperspectral imaging", which potentially provides much more detailed information by collecting hundreds of bands of information. (What brand of paint are you using on your car? What is this soil made of? Where in this minefield is the earth disturbed? etc.) I believe there is now one experimental hyperspectral sensor in orbit.
"Remote sensing" is the name for this whole field of study. I believe rst.gsfc.nasa.gov has a superb tutorial on the subject.
whoops (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Neat. Many uses. (Score:2)
Since when is using information to AVOID conflict a "nefarious" use? Is it that you've bought the US government's line that "drugs are bad"?
If that's the case, and you're willing to accept that in a supposedly free society the government can dictate to its adult citizens what chemicals they are legally able to ingest, perhaps you should consider that the abridgement of other freedoms are soon to follow.
And why should the company be required to do a background check AT ALL? The free flow of information is ESSENTIAL in a democracy. To suggest that the government has any place in censoring who has access to that data is INSANE!
Too many people have bought the line that "it's in the National Interest(TM)" too many times. The sooner the USA is put on even footing with other nations in the world, the sooner we will be FORCED to deal with other nations as equals and treat them with respect, rather than acting as the global bully, expecting all other peoples of the world to comply with our wishes because we can wave the biggest guns around.
Re:nude beach coordinates (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Lame webmasters (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Short answers: Laws of Physics, and no. The closer a spacecraft is to the Earth (i.e., the lower the altitude) the more the Earth attracts the spacecraft and therefore the faster it travels. (This is, of course, Newton's law of universal gravitation
For further reference, consult a book on astrodynamics
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:nude beach coordinates (Score:1)
Here is a High-Res Image... (Score:3)
...to show you what this thing is really capable of!
http://ww w.spaceimaging.com/gallery/ioweek/archive/iow1122Enjoy!
-AP
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Legal ramifications? (Score:1)
Not really, if you don't want people looking in your backyard, just build your house to the size of your backyard. :) Enclose it, put a roof over it and there you go. Of course there might be some building restrictions of some sort. You could also buy a bigger plot of land, make an indoor pool, make it so no one can look in from any vantage point and there you go. Your privacy is alset. :)
Re:Legal ramifications? (Score:1)
Putting a roof in between the uh .. exotic .. plants and the sun, kind of defeats the whole purpose.
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What you can see on the base (Score:2)
Now for posting this, will I get a knock on my door? I sure hope not, I didn't sign a non disclosure agreement or anything.....
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Yeah, if you had enough fuel (keeping in mind that you need more fuel to compensate for the mass of the fuel), you could keep an object in a geostationary position at an arbitrary altitude. I hesitate to use words like "orbit" or "satellite" to describe such a scenario, however. Keep in mind that this would be more like a high-altitude plane/rocket than a satellite. The whole point of satellites is that they are in stable orbits, so they don't need to be firing thrusters all the time.
Really, though, I was just quibbling. Because a satellite can't be kept up that way for any appreciable length of time, barring a major advancement in energy storage, one would be better off just sending a plane.
Their "Terms of Use" Clause for downloads (Score:2)
What they NEGLECTED to do, however, is either:
(a) JavaScript it so you can't actually get focus inside the textarea to change things, or
(b) verify that the license agreement "matches" what it should when you click to "Agree"
You could theoretically change the agreement to say "Space Imaging agrees to grant the downloader exclusive rights to this image in perpetuity. Any future sales of this image by Space Imaging will incur a royalty payment due the downloader in the amount of 25% of the collected monies". If they, in turn, agree to that license (by sending you the poster/image/etc.), then it should be considered legally binding.
Moral of the story: Let's paste the GPL in there, and have a field day. :)
Space Images for FREE! (Score:1)
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
Re:Try terraserver (Score:1)
Re:Area 51, I found the URL (Score:3)
After searching far and wide (I even checked on floppies) I found the URL. I don't know if it will work for you, because friends have told me that they occasionally get locked out being asked for a password, but here it is:
It's called DALI [spotimage.fr].
Use it, but don't abuse it. :-)
If it gets slashdotted they'll probably cut us off.
Re:Neat. Many uses. (Score:1)
Really, this puts an interesting spin on the concept of being a mercenary. I wonder if the outfit doing this will refuse to take pictures of war zones lest they get their satellite disabled by the big boys.
Re:Sattelite Images (Score:1)
The military isn't concerned over TerraServer due to this out-of-datedness.
One step closer to zero freedom (Score:1)
It's interesting what freedoms we surrender in the name of technology. Again, not complaining, I just find it interesting.
With other satellite companies sending similar projects up into orbit, the prices for the service ought to come down. A neat use for this would be to take aerial photos of a long enough event (one that lasted all day or longer), like some large sports tournament or something like that.
Ramifications? (Score:1)
Granted, this is nothing close to the technology that modern spy satellites have (probably greater than 10 centimeter resolution [space.com]). Who knows, maybe much greater.
Still, it's only a matter of time before this is used in some way that endangers the national security of some country. I mean, is this company going to be informed by every country that creates a 'classified' area? Will there be formal no-spy-zones announced by every country on Earth? What happens the first time that it accidentally photographs something that gets a team of DEA agents slaughtered or worse, tips the hand of something far more serious and causes the deaths of thousands of ethnic minorities or something?
As for real-time satellite observation, the 25-year old Keyhole satellite program was able to monitor evens on the ground in near real time, I hate to think of what they are capable of doing now. I recently saw an interview with a former CIA employee who was commenting on SR-71 photographs and said something to the effect of 'The images we used to view from the Blackbird were so detailed that no only could you look down on a golf course and see who was putting, but you could tell what brand of gold ball they were using. And that was 30 years ago.'
Should this interfere with or threaten a US military (or intelligence) op, I don't doubt for one moment that this baby would somehow, uhm, vanish...we've had ASAT [af.mil] missiles since '85. :)
What about property tracking (Score:1)
Re:not to be paranoid, but (Score:2)
I think your hat needs more tinfoil.
dave
Re:Well, ... (Score:1)
Re:Old news (Score:2)
Just yesterday I was thinking of buying some 'smart drugs' to improve my memory. I'm sending them straight to /. instead - you covered this when Space Imaging launched their website several months ago! Maybe the Slash code should automatically search and suggest stories that could be the same whenever you make a submission? Or was it your aim to cover someone else's coverage of a story you had already run, to show how far behind the competition is?
Or is it OK to rerun stories over and over because there are so many new readers that haven't seen what was posted anything more than four months ago?
Re:Try terraserver (Score:1)
Anyone know the coordinates?
And please email me photos if you beat me to them
- Steelie
More actual uses. (Score:3)
By overlaying the national wetlands inventory or corresponding state GIS information on top of a aerial or sattelite photo, you can easily tell who has been building in a wetland.
We're working with an agency in CA to map rice fields for purposes of mosquito control. Normally vegetation and crop identification requires infrared, however with rice you can use black and white photography when the rice field is flooded. A few thousand dollars of sat imagery will save them many times the labor costs in surveying.
For most users the advantage of this kind of imagery is lower cost vs conventional survey or aerial photography. For some applications that you mention (photos of war zones) you simply can't get the information any other way.
Hey!! (Score:2)
According to these satellite images from Terraserver, Area 51 really does not exist... There's just a big black hole there.
I'm sorry Agent Smith, was I not supposed to see that?
Re:I have it! (Score:2)
What bugs me most about this is that Congress thinks they can legislate such "dangerous behavior" out of existience. I have news for Congress: Tennessee's #1 cash crop is illegal. Translation: Congress' power to legislate behavior is exactly squat.
Which is as it should be.
Mere posession of information (DeCSS) should not be illegal. If I want to go have a spysat take pictures if the Israeli version of Area 51, MY GOVERNMENT has no business holding a gun to my head and telling me I can't.
Now, if I go use that pic to lob a SCUD missile in on the runway, the Israelis have the right to make me face a firing squad. But the UNITED STATES fscking GOVERNMENT has no business poking its nose in my hard drive, period, end of sentence.
Assuming, of course, they can make heads or tails of it, or want to bother devoting a supercomputer to a small-time maverick like me... :)
Re:Legal ramifications? (Score:2)
This saves on using hydroponics and sunlamps, which chew through so much power (for a decent sized crop) that your power bill skyrockets, and they often catch growers by watching power bill fluctuations.
Growing with sunlight gets around that problem, and reduces the ammount of work you have to do.
But, if you want to grow it, why not trek up into government land, find a clearing, and plant there? Find a place with adequate (lots) rainfall, and stop by every few weeks to fertilize.
That would strike me as the best way to grow, and to avoid being caught.
Longitude and Latitude (Score:2)
http://www.mit.edu:8001/geo
It will find longitude and latitude of cities, specific addresses, and various other things.
Kintanon
Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
Problem ultimately boils down to reaction mass use efficiency: chemical rockets really don't use fuel very efficiently, so you have to carry a lot of mass (as fuel) relative to the amount of thrust you get when you burn it. This makes the problem of hovering over an arbitrary spot at an arbitrary (orbital) altitude strictly within the realm of science fiction. Now, of course, there are other kinds of propulsion which are more efficient, like the ion drive on Deep Space 1, but even though it is more efficient it doesn't have enough oomph to do it. Naturally, we don't have fusion engines yet, but they might be able to do it (but this is by no means certain). I'm going to leave the calculation of what kind of fuel efficiency you need to stay poised over Manhattan at 637 km as an exercise for the students in my remote sensing course -- what a great idea for a final exam question, thanks Colonel!!!
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
Re:Neat. Many uses. (Score:2)
There is a clear difference between you choosing not to tell me your SSN, and the state requiring that I pass a background check before you are permitted to tell me your SSN.
Re:Well, ... (Score:2)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."