Slashdot Mirror

You really don't see anything odd in these results?

1. Google Maps
https://www.google.com/maps/

2. Maps - Navigation & Transit - Android Apps on Google Play
https://play.google.com/store/......

3. Official MapQuest - Maps, Driving Directions, Live Traffic
https://www.mapquest.com/

4. iOS - Maps - Apple
https://www.apple.com/ios/maps...

5. Google Maps - Navigation & Transit on the App Store - iTunes - Apple
https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...?...

6. Yahoo Maps
https://maps.yahoo.com/

7. World and USA Maps for Sale - Buy Maps - Maps.com
https://www.maps.com/

8. New Night Lights Maps Open Up Possible Real-Time Applications ...
https://www.nasa.gov/.../new-n...

9. 'Duck Dynasty' vs. 'Modern Family': 50 Maps of the U.S. Cultural Divide ...
https://www.nytimes.com/.../12...

10. From Ptolemy to GPS, the Brief History of Maps | Innovation ...
www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/brief-history-maps-180963685/

11. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: MAPS
www.maps.org/

12. Bing Maps - Directions, trip planning, traffic cameras & more
https://www.bing.com/maps

Show me the pipeline/canal that can deliver water from northern California to southern.

Uh, the California Aqueduct was created in the 60's to do exactly that. (Map for the visually inclined.)

Historically the world has gone about creating it's political boundaries completely backwards, using waterways as division lines. Understandable or even intuitive as this may be (it's a dead-simple visual reference that can't be disputed), it has not served the people well. Take for example the polluting factory or livestock yard that simply builds on the opposite side of the same river where it has fewer pollution regulations, however continuing to affect the same river and the population on the other side who have no say in the regulation of said factory, because it's in a different state/county/whathaveyou.

The USA (every country, for that matter) should be redistricted from the state level, down to county level, down to political districts should be strictly based on watersheds. Think about that - It would have the potential to solve many current problems, including putting an end to gerrymandering once and for all, improving local autonomy, ending irrigation squabbles, improving environmental & health protection, etc.

This is not a new idea, and now more than ever needs more popular discussion. A couple of maps:
Wikipedia: Drainage basin
US Watershed map (just from a quick web search, I'm sure a more useful map exists but this gives a good idea)

I don't want to get drawn to the eternal argument about US vs European political systems, but...

Finland has a lower population density, but its populated areas are all very close together. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finnish_municipalities_by_population and look at where the top ones are on the map, all of them are very close together. Compare that to a US state of a similar size such as California where people are scattered all across the state ( http://media.maps.com/magellan/Images/capop.gif ) Nearly all the major areas of Finland are close to their southern coast with no major cities in the northern half of the country.

... yes, and despite this, the internet service is available even at the most remote corners of the country. For instance, Enontekiö is a town of less than 2000 people in the very northwest of the country, 300 km from the nearest town bigger than 10000, and almost 500km from the nearest town bigger than 100000.

Despite this, parts of the town still get ADSL: 2mbps @ 46e/month, 8mbps @ 51e/month and 24mbps @ 48e/month.

Even if you don't get ADSL, and wherever you live, you can still get at least 1mbps, by law. Admittedly this often means mobile broadband that may not always reach those numbers these days, but hopefully a few lawsuits will rectify it.

Not this tired thing again. Areas in Europe such as Finland places which have same or lower population density than USA still have better broadband service and cheaper compared to USA. In actual fact, the system *works better* in Europe. The measurable fact. Your system is a full decade behind first world countries.

Finland has a lower population density, but its populated areas are all very close together. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finnish_municipalities_by_population and look at where the top ones are on the map, all of them are very close together. Compare that to a US state of a similar size such as California where people are scattered all across the state ( http://media.maps.com/magellan/Images/capop.gif ) Nearly all the major areas of Finland are close to their southern coast with no major cities in the northern half of the country. Now look at that all across the US, there is no major coast that has the majority of the population. Major cities aren't located really close to each other as in Finland, while the East and to a lesser extent the West coast of the US is pretty well populated, there are still huge gaps between the major cities in the Midwest. The major centers of the Midwest, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Etc. are all quite spread out from each other. Unlike in Finland where they are all concentrated in a very small area. Finland has a lower population density because they have a huge northern part of their country where almost no one lives, in the US we have huge gaps where no one lives between the major cities making cable a whole lot harder to lay.

That's rich coming from the county that pushes its laws down the throat of people who don't want them, and that started several wars of aggression in just the past 10 years. Please listen to the rest of the world, who considers the USA one of the top few tyrannical countries in the world based on its behaviour.

...And I never said that I supported that. I support a -very- limited government with a small army to defend itself from outside aggression and only two duties, to protect its citizens from force and fraud both domestic and foreign, a government which does not expand beyond those two duties. A government that protects its citizens natural rights including complete and full freedom of expression and religion, a government which does not restrain its citizens rights to protect themselves against force both from their government or from its people, a government which only taxes citizens for what each individual citizen uses, a government which seeks to expand trade with all and entangles itself with none. That is the government I support. No, the US is not that government, but neither are the governments of Europe. However, the government of the US has not stepped so far as to increase taxation to the levels of Europe nor sought to remove from its people their right to defend themselves against the abuses of others or the government, it has, to a small extent, supported the freedom of expression for all without cherry picking which rights to protect and which rights to forsake. No, the US isn't perfect, but I much prefer the abuses of the current US government to the abuses of European government.

"And considering how close most of the world's population lives to the ocean coasts, and how much we rely on a relatively small number of dwindling species for survival, can we really say that we're not going to be on the extinction list this time around?"

Considering all the people who already live inland (look at all the dense red inside Europe, India, and China on this map), and considering the slowness of the ocean rising (so those on the coast can move inland), we're not talking extinction. Unless maybe this triggers huge nuclear wars or something, but those could be triggered by factors other than global warming.

The standard layout these days seem to be with Europe as center. But I think that decision is pretty arbitrary as well, who says the zero longitude couldn't be defined to be in the left corner and then right corner would be 360. Of course longitude is arbitary by defintion, there's been a dozen different prime meridans over time, centered on Rome, Pisa, Paris, hell even Philadelphia tried it one time.

When I was a kid we had this huge wallmap with America as the center, like this that probably skewed my world view for good. When I visited Japan I saw maps like this all over the place. It really suprised me at the time.

If you check a map, his track is ESE, so a spotter plane following behind would indeed see him silhouetted in the morning sun.

Today microsoft released the first service pack for it's Spot line of watches. When the microsoft programmers who designed this watch were informed that New York and London have a five hour time difference rather than one, the blushing engineers claimed "but it looks so close on the map".

Open source enthusiasts responded: "this is yet another case of microsoft taking an open standard and mostly complying with it, but then perverting it enough to become incompatible with the rest of the world. They are clearly abusing their monopoly position in operating systems to force changes in world timekeeping."

Service pack 2 (to be released on Febsoft 29th, 2004) will hopefully also correct the direction of the earth's spin. Normally, London time is New York time + 5 hours, not - 1 hour.

I am about to spend way too much time on this, but this is an argument I've had before and I want to end it here and now.

"I suspect the difference is due to the use of "metropolitan area" versus city."

"Metropolitan area" is a very vague definition. The Canadian census folks talked about it being a city and the surrounding area that economically relies on the city blah blah blah... I'm sure the relatively arbitrary definition of these "metropolitan areas" is usefull for bureocratic statisticians, but I don't find it useful here. For example, your areaconnect.com link claims that all of New Jersey is a "metropolitan area," even though I know for a fact that there are farms in New Jersey.

"The largest population centre, Toronto, has a density of 603 p/sqkm. Compare this to the entire state of New Jersey: 437p/sqkm. That is a "high density" city compared to a state. New York state is better at 155p/sqkm. But this is still higher then the density of southern Ontario and Quebec."

But looking at the population density for an area the size of even the relatively small New Jersey is meaningless. The scale is too great; the people of New Jersey aren't spread out uniformly. And of course you'll find higher numbers when you consider there are about ten Americans for every Canadian. I think something a bit more meaningful is needed.

Information on New Jersey can conveniently be found here. According to the numbers on this page, about 14.1% of New Jersey's population live in its ten most populous cities. For the three most populous states, New York has 45.5%, California has 24.8% and Florida has 22.1%.

Unfortunately, Canada doesn't seem to have such an easy-to-follow presentation of information, so I needed to go digging. For Ontario, I went here and went digging through for the ten most populous cities (not "metroplitain areas" not "regional municipalities," honest to God cities). They are:

Toronto 2,481,494
Ottawa 774,072
Mississauga 612,925
Hamilton 490,268
London 336,539
Brampton 325,428
Windsor 208,402
Kitchener 190,399
Vaughan 182,022
Greater Sudbury 155,219

This means 50.5% of the people in Ontario live in Ontario's ten most populous cities. Not only is this ratio more than New York, it's also a numerical majority.

Moving on to Quebec, we have:

Montreal 1,039,534
Laval 343,005
Quebec 169,076
Longueuil 128,016
Gatineau 102,898
Montreal-Nord 83,600
Saint-Laurent 77,391
Sherbrooke 75,916
Saint-Hubert 75,912
LaSalle 73,983

So Quebec has 29.9%. Nowhere near as bad as Ontario, but still more than California and Florida by a comfortable margin.

More numbers to chew on include:

Rhode Island: 48.3%
Connecticut: 27.4%
Massachusetts: 23.8%
PEI: 34.7% live in either Charlottetown or Summerside

And what if we look at just the three most populous cities?

New York: 41.8%
California: 16.9%
Florida: 14.7%

Ontario: 33.9%
Quebec: 21.4%

(rant mode ON)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Canadians are a heck of a lot more concentrated than Americans! You have fewer meters of phone lines to upgrade per capita! You have fewer kilometers of road to burn gas on per capita! You have less area cell towers need to cover! So don't give me all this crap about how good everything is in Canada compared to the US because it's amazing what you can accomplish when y'all freakin' live next door to one another!

Ontario has slightly fewer people than New York, is about 4 to 5 times larger, and yet the average Ontarian can't throw a rock without hitting another one! Come on people! You live in the second largest country in the world! Don't you want a freakin' back yard?!?! New York's numbers are skewed by having one of the most populous cities in the world, what's Ontario's excuse?

No wonder so many of the links I found when looking up this info talked about Canadian city-states...
(rant mode OFF)