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Google Creates Tour de France Video Maps
An anonymous reader writes "In honor of the Tour de France's start today, Google has used its awesome Street View technology to compile amazing Tour de France route views. A great description of the technology that went into creating this can be found in this LinuxDevices article. At least, I'm assuming these are the cameras — Google acknowledged using Elphel cameras for book scanning and 'capturing street imagery in Google Maps.' And from the article, the cameras have come a long way from the days when crazy cat ladies and other privacy freaks scuppered Street View in San Francisco a couple of years back."
Privacy freaks. ow.
Weren't these the same assholes complaining about googlecam recently.
the cameras have come along way from the days when crazy cat ladies and other privacy freaks scuppered Street View in San Francisco a couple of years back."
Too right! I mean, everybody should just let Google photograph whoever they want and publish it on the web to drive hits to their website. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a privacy freak!
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I hear some of the street view drivers were known drinkers of coffee during their runs. This alone invalidates all the results of their efforts until some proper piss tests can be arranged.
Let's face it, you know the Tour de France has become dull when the only interesting thing that happens is when Burghardt hits a dog
Summation 2
A live Earth map of locations to buy doping supplies to help racers.
I can click through stage 1 faster than Alexander Valverde can ride it.
I literally finished configuring my MythTV box this morning for it. Now we can find out how many people were on drugs this year.
Why read Slashdot -- go straight to the source of all your Google and MIT press releases:
http://googlepress.blogspot.com/
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/
Scuppered? Seriously?
I guarantee that came from a 'word of the day.'
You are talking about distance (even if it is a metaphorical and not physical distance), not whether or not something is with you.
My twitter
Let me explain: I am an avid cyclist. Furthermore, I like everything bicycle: I built all my bikes, and I fix and adjust mine and my friends bikes.
And I can't stand Le Tour de France or Il Giro d'Italia. I hate the doping (and everything they do to hide it) and how massively it is happening. The commercializaition of these cycling events is disturbing for sure, but I am willing to accept it as a necessary evil. After all, these events have been commercialized long before even the heroic days of Binda, Coppi and Bartali. But what's going on is just bullshitting.
I don't follow these cycling events animore. I may check some of the track cycling GP competitions (less bulshitting, and it lasts a few days instead of weeks and weeks).
Any fellow slashdotter who actually follows the tour/giro?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"it's awesome Street View technology" --> "its awesome Street View technology"
In the UK the same-old, same-old let's-drive-everywhere television producers have moved on to Microsoft Virtual Earth this year. It is a slight improvement on the hand-coloured 'maps' prepared by clueless graphic artists of previous years - cartography does get involved with the M$ Virtual Earth and those 'Mountain High' maps were getting a bit old.
Unless you have mythTV I would not bother to tune in. The adverts are quite tedious, it seems like they are going for five minutes of ads every ten minutes this year, with more minutes lost after the break with a re-cap of what the story is so far.
Multi-channel television was not supposed to be like this. A decade ago the talk was that you would be able to choose your own camera angles at a football match or other event, not watch what the fat-controller chose to cut up. If ever there was a sporting event that needs to buck up it's ideas on how the television rights get flogged on, it is the Tour de France. I am glad the guys at Google are trying to bring some innovation to this event, but nobody is pushing the envelope, are they?
Jaded? Definitely. I detest how fans of this event get force fed car adverts by the same old autoholic broadcasters. I think I will go cycling instead.
I am having a Franz Kafka problem with Google. My wife (the worlds worst technophobe) lost the password to her blog. Today I discovered that the alternate email address for the account is not only an deliverable address it's an invalid domain altogether.
Google does not have a provision to fix this. The reset password either goes to the address for which I need the password, or, it goes to an undeliverable address. And every 'form' they have for every single problem on Blogger goes to the same submission form.
But here's the good part. To protect my privacy - Google's official response is to say in effect "We don't believe you, we think you're lying and so we won't and can't help you."
And there appears to be no recourse. No place to send an email no place to explain even in one sentence what this problem is.
So fuck Google and the Chinese Death Squads that use them. Fuck them all.
Will we see Michael Chambers breakdancing out in front of a shop with a broom?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Or, you know, you can counter all google's assault on privacy, using advanced privacy anti-invasion technology such as
"Curtains" (tm) (c) (r)
Remember : if google can manage to take an *occasional* picture through the windows when they do their run *once in a blue moon*, that means the *neighbours* can spy on you *every damn single day of the whole year*.
If you're so much afraid of being seen nude through your windows, put a fucking curtain before the neighbours setup a for-profit live-cam on the net and stop complaining because your cat ended up being visible on some map service !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You're a German tourist. For the first time in your life you get to visit new york. You find walking around Manhattan impressive, so you happily decide to take several pictures of your girlfriend with the tall skyscraper in the background.
The your holiday finishes and you go back to the airport to go back to your country.
But at the airport customs, the police performs a warantless search of your laptop & camera and suddenly, you see yourself and your girlfriend detained for assaults on privacy.
Why ? Because on some of your pictures, some cats were visible through the un-curtained windows of the buildings.
See my point ? Google is maybe more talked about of the web. But if your window is visible from the street (=public space), it's not only google's car which can see it. There are significant quantity of passer-by each day who could violate your privacy, both intentionally or unknowingly.
If you care so much about your privacy, put a damn curtain on. Not only would you protect your self from the eeeeviiiilll google, but from the other thousands of people who walk in your street each year and who could see you waking around in your home in the nude, or who could happen to accidentally take a picture from your street just at the moment when you happen to shag your S.O.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Funny how in 2008 so many comments I see on message boards are from people now arguing against the liberties that Google are taking. They achieved it over the years by very simply portraying themselves as "Google", rather than "Google Corp/Ltd". Google is a business much like MacDonalds, Coca-cola, Microsoft, and your own local football team. It cannot be except from any privacy restrictions.
Then we can bet on who has the best doctor !
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Will it be won by an american who refuses to submit to doping testing this time as well, I wonder.
And the other part of the point is :
Google take a picture of your cat once every 3 years != You neighboors setup a live web cam on the intertube showing you in the nude
In the first situation, anyone with internet access can, as long as they have the time to loose to search for your location on the map, see your cat.
In the second situation, anyone with internet access and a credit card, can find the live-cam advertised on some shady website and see much more than your cat.
What I mean is that if google can take a picture, there way much more things that could be spied by way much more people. With the difference that google isn't trying to invade your privacy (the cat merely happens by incident), whereas some other people could very much actually try to harm you.
You close your house's door to avoid any random shmuck entering inside without your permission ?
Then you should also put a *simple damn curtain* to avoid people with bad intention trying to peek through !
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
>> My wife (the worlds worst technophobe) lost the password to her blog.
Since you know that, I'm sure you made a paper copy of the password.
>> Today I discovered that the alternate email address for the account is not only an deliverable address it's an invalid domain altogether.
Ouch. Good thing you've got that password written down.
>> So fuck Google and the Chinese Death Squads that use them. Fuck them all.
Uhh... Seems to me you've fucked yourself.
This is unfortunate, but you've not taken the correct precautions, and now want to blame Google. I'd ask for my money back.
Oh yeah... its a free service.
So, a free service that tries to protect their users ends up pissing off someone who doesn't bother to keep a copy of their password, and have an invalid email address on file.
You might Google "displaced anger". On second thought, you might prefer using Microsoft Live Search.
Place nail here >+
My personnal opinion is that Google isn't new in that field.
Personal privacy used to be limited to a small set of people physically close to you.
I think that this era of privacy ended up when publishing mean appeared that enable a random guy to make something available to the whole planet instantly for free : ie. this privacy died with Internet and the Web.
Google Maps only happened to attract more public awareness around the problem.
But just like forcing Google to obscure strategic building on its "maps" and "earth" sevices won't suddenly stop interested persons finding those informations on any of the other thousand of location on the Web where it is still available (ironically : probably by using the google text search to find the locations),
in the same way, gagging the street view that google is creating won't instantly un-do all the cyber bullying that has already happened on internet to unwilling people like the starwars kid, or countless other persons who have become sudden phenomenon, often against their own will.
Google Maps is not the only tool which could provide fast information for someone wanting to invade privacy. Facebook seems to be even more popular to quickly find embarrassing or disturbing facts about someone.
Tools that enable such privacy invasion are probably as old as the web itself. (Well not exactly... you needed first at least some search engine to be able to target a specific victim).
And have nowadays become too numerous to even hope to contain the privacy problem by just limiting one of them.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]