They have this neat idea of a digital embassy. They have got a copy of digital Estonia running in Luxembourg. When the russians do come the estonians who manage to get out of the country open their laptops somewhere else, and there are still part of digital Estonia.
It sounds really simple: all information in one place, you own your own information (including your health information). And techniscally it *is* simple. But the governance can be made so complicated that no other country has pulled this off yet. Getting all your national institutes to work together on one digital government is no small feat.
Many comments refer to Openstreetmap as an alternative to Google Maps. I guess that this is the motivation behind the cooperation of commercial companies. Facebook, Apple have no interest in Openstreetmap itself. Openstreetmap has humanitarian goals as well. For Facebook and Google it is no more than a tool to limit their dependance on Google.
It is fine that companies contribute to Openstreetmap. But it is important to keep in mind that this support will stop as soon as it is deemed to be unnecessary.
Which is why the Estonians founded a "digital embassy" with a full backup of the (digital) country. Even if the russians do invade or bring the system down it is a matter of switching to the digital embassy in Luxemburg.
Where in the New Orker article did they even suggest that you could become a citizen through e-residency?
Good point. Dutch government is clearly trying to paint a positive picture of the Dutch secret service. The referendum is about new legislation which will allow "trawling" for information by the secret service. Basically they do not have to target surveillance any more under the new (future) law but instead are free to monitor web traffic, also of citizens not under suspicion. The law is called the "sleepnet" in dutch, dutch for "trawlfishing net". More info (in dutch) at Bits of Freedom: https://www.bof.nl/dossiers/sleepnet/
We were in Grand Teton national park, at Jackson Lake Lodge. THis is well north of the center line, so we got about 1 minute 50 seconds of totality. The location was great, on a small hill with full view of the horizon and the Grand Teton mountains. Weather was clear from about 10:00 onwards so we had a great view. There were park rangers with telescopes as well. One of which was a Lunt H2 solar telescope which gives a really impressive view of the surface of the Sun with sunspots, solar flames etc.
I always thought the GIS community was still too unfamiliar with remote sensing. Apparently it also is the case the other way round. They have made a spatial analysis of a classified remote sensing image. This has been done in a lot of fields. Geologists, hydrologists and other experts have been making maps using remote sensing images for some time. In this case they mapped the parameter "poverty".
... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"
