Come on, admit it, you've spent hours gazing at Google Maps and Google Earth, finding your house, school, and seeing what various building and features look like from space. ...

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Utterly cool. However, it'll take several months until the first images reach Google Earth/Maps.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

What has the U.S. government got to do with the equipment installed on a commercial satellite?

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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. -- Benjamin Franklin

Without getting into any heavy conspiracy stuff, this is hardly a precedent. What has the U.S. government got to do with the export sales of encryption software, what words you use in an email, or what you talk about on the phone? Why is it that Google Earth allows anyone to see the roof of Buckingham Palace but not the White House? It's just part of the whole security obsession nonsense.

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

US governmental buildings are visible all right (except for the Vice President's office, which has older imagery). Elsewhere, Google's imagery is often based on national image services, which may have censored their buildings (the results are often funny, there is a forest in Sweden which is full of roads, as the road data has not been tampered). DigitalGlobe imagery has not been censored, which has caused rows between Google and various countries, especially India. Which is dumb, since non-censored data is readily available commercially. If your sensitive military equipment is visible in satellite images you can blame only yourself.

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Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

...That's because Cheney sunbaths naked on the roof, and that is not a security issue, that is just gross.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?