Not true, not "just websites" were impacted. I work for a non-US national meteorological center. Those recent hacks meant for us that important satellite data that was usually provided by the NOAA suddenly stopped being accessible, having real impacts on weather forecasting quality. It took a few days to find alternatives. We learned and are in the process of making certain that such a situation does not happen once again. In other words, for some major 'foreign' weather forecasting operations, the impacts were real and important, not overblown as you state.

Unrelated, Slashdot's commenting system sucks in mobile devices... We can't quote or even see the original comments while replying... And the comment box doesn't resize while replying, we can't even review our own replies! Lots of room for improvement...

Most important: NewsBlur is open source. I'm glad I paid the 24$, but if anything goes wrong with their business model, I don't lose anything, I can run it myself: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

+1 .. NewsBlur works greatly for me too. And it's open source so at least I'm not worried about perenity.

What Dries say in this article:

I would have liked to know that before... I moved from Slashcode to Drupal years ago on the advice of a few. While I can appreciate how Drupal is flexible and powerful, now I understand that what I really needed, as a non-expert and for my small website, was just WordPress. But too late, won't do another painful migration anytime soon...

What annoys me most with Drupal: no straightforward way to update major versions (e.g. from 6.x to 7.x), especially since a lot of user-contributed modules doesn't exist in the new version or require a lot of work to do so. The admin interface is pretty bad. The user community is much much smaller than WordPress (thinking of mature/maintained user-contributed modules here). Etc.

Hey! That's my book! :-) I still run Slashgeo... but its engine is Drupal now, since Slashcode died long ago...

I'm not available on the 24th.... maybe I'll find a way to make it to l'Amère à boire, but in any case, enjoy the party! :-)

Alex

Actually, such imagery should go to OpenAerialMap.org, not OpenStreetMap (which is for vector data).

Also, this story has not mentioned yet (afaict) the official announcement: http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2012/04/balloon-and-kite-imagery-in-google.html

Anyone found out how to battle monsters? Is this just part of the joke or is there a way to actually do it? :-)

The official Google Lat Long blog: "Get detailed directions to avoid dangerous paths, and battle your way through a world of powerful monsters and mystic treasures."

Thanks! I've been looking for this for a while! See http://slashgeo.org/2011/06/07/Whats-best-iOS-App-contributing-OpenStreetMap

From the article: "To enable all that, Google introduced a new standard in 2011 called GTFS-realtime. It builds on GTFS, but is a different animal, since it includes new feed types for trip updates, service alerts, and vehicle positions, as well as provisions for constantly refreshing this data throughout the day."

So the article does state that it's also for vehicle positions. I haven't checked if the article is right or not though.

The only thing I'd add to your entry, is asking our fellow canadians to tell their friends, family, everyone in fact, to send such an email by spreading the word on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or any other means you have. Hey, we're in a connected world now, let's show them that we're able to use those connections for a meaning!

Siri doesn't do translations, it's more of an advanced voice recognition tool. Am I wrong? This would mean that at the moment, Apple's Siri and Google Translation would have two different strengths; Siri: usable natural language voice recognition (at least that's how they sell it) and Google Tranlation, well, multi-language translations.

Two truly open initiatives offering back the crowdsourced data to everyone (it doesn't seem to be the case with OpenSignalMaps): OpenCellID.org and openBmap.org.