[Novalug] [OT] Google takes heat for using pre-Katrina imagery

[Michael Stone]

On Sat, Mar 31, 2007 at 08:29:05PM -0400, Alan McConnell wrote:
>	Pete, you are very ready to jump on the Congress for getting
>	after Google.  But I would first ask: why did Google switch
>	from a depiction of the present state of affairs -- which AFAIK
>	continues shamefully bad -- to a pre-Katrina depiction. 

Why should we ask that? More importantly, where is congress' 
constitutional authority to question a private business about what 
content it chooses to display on a free web site?

>	So let's find out first who leaned on Google to airbrush history.

And why on earth, other than rampant paranoia, would you believe that 
somebody did that? Why don't you look into what kinds of imagery google 
uses (hint: there are at least multiple types of airplane photos as well 
as satellite photos), how current those images are (the ones in my 
neighborhood are years old), how they decide which to use (weighting age 
against resolution), whether it is at all plausible that a human makes a 
decision about every square foot of coverage (no, it's not--it must be 
automated), and whether it's reasonble to expect that the people writing 
the automation software special case things based on potential 
congressional stupidity (it's not).

Mike Stone