The copyright notices also mention Sanborn. Once you take a look at what Sanborn does as a business you'll see what I'm talking about.

That's because, in most likeliness, these images are "leftovers" from aerial surveying and were never really meant to be used in the fashion they are today. Their original purpose probably has nothing to do with Google Maps.

It seems that this is a joint effort with Sanborn given the copyright notice on the bottom of the image. Sanborn uses LiDAR as one of it's tools.

I'd also like to note that Bing has had areas covered with a similar angular mapping for a while. Their images are tagged with the name Pictometry.

So, yes, it seems it is a "guy taking pictures out of a Cessna". Or something close to it.

Why are you upgrading if there is no reason to upgrade? This one still baffles me to no end.

It's kind of like in Civ... Obama sent out some explorers and a friendly tribe of Inupiats gave them a data center.

Also check out Manhigh as an early high altitude jump.

Social networking is a great example because most of the people reading the article had seen the evolution of the technology first hand.

Most people have a hard time relating to history because they never got to see it from the ground level. Just like in football, people scream for the QB to throw to a guy 30 yards down the field not realizing what it must be like to have a group of 8 300+ pound guys in between you and the open receiver. History is the same, in hindsight we think of it as obvious but for those who lived through it? It was anything but.

I'm a user of a monitor that can rotate and use the feature fairly often. Given the kind of work I do on it and the amount of wasted real estate on most webpages because of formatting, benchmarks are very low on my priorities. My limited senses never notice the difference anyway.

Can you cite something for this? The highest spin rate I could find for a neutron star (XTE J1739-285) is 1122 times a second and it seems that it may not even be the correct rate.

I kind of makes me think of Bordered in Black by Niven.

Why? We have life in both conditions on Earth.

While I find any claims that the tidal locking of the planet makes it any better or worse for life dubious the surface temperatures in and of themselves don't fall outside of the only known working model.

Yeah, I think there is some confusion here. The MSNBC article states "If the planet has a rocky composition like Earth's, it would be 1.2 to 1.4 times as wide as our own planet, qualifying it as a "super-Earth.""

That's the problem with science articles on the general web, many skip facts that others contain. Even PhysOrg didn't seem to bother with this estimation but god only knows who's predicting this kind of thing too.

In any case, we are much too early on to think about sending anything it's way. We have so much we can do with observation today before we go launching anything. And in just a few years we'll gain even more insight from James Webb once it's in place. Let's no go off half cocked on this.

hawking was wrong. Any alien that is technologically able to do anything to us doesn't need for us to contact them. They already know we're here and if they want to pull some crap on humanity it will be done without our consent.

Do you have a better solution?

Let's be honest about this... There is no absolute deterrent to anything but at the same time we can't just sit on our thumbs and hope for the best. Education in the matters is already in place. Technology doesn't seem to provide a good solution yet. What else would you have people do to address the problem?

I'd really like to see you do a half-century in a pair of Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs and come back and tell us that those of us who wear spandex are just doing it because Lance Armstrong does.

I do understand where you're coming from and I wear BDU shorts over my riding shorts. I'm not trying to make a fashion statement but riding shorts do serve a real purpose.