Slashdot Mirror
Iran Plans To Launch an 'Islamic Google Earth'
Shipwack sends this quote from the Guardian:
"The Iranian authorities have long accused Google Earth of being a tool for western spy agencies, but now they have taken their attacks on the 3D mapping service one step further — by planning the launch of an 'Islamic' competitor. ... The minister, however, gave little information on what he meant by an Islamic 3D map. 'We are developing this service with the Islamic views we have in Iran and we will put a kind of information on our website that would take people of the world towards reality Our values in Iran are the values of God and this would be the difference between Basir and the Google Earth, which belongs to the ominous triangle of the U.S., England and the Zionists [a reference to Israel].' Experts, however, have serious doubts about the project. An IT consultant who has worked on Iran's national internet project in the past said the announcement was merely an excuse to obtain funds and secure working contracts for the future. 'They have claimed to run their service in four months and said their data centre capacity will reach Google's size in three years,' he said. 'Three-year project, no business model and only relying on government funding, a piece of cake indeed. To have a data centre with such capacity and security level they need power stations, cooler systems, bandwidth, etc, which will require billions of dollars of investment that doesn't fit with Iran's sanctions-hit economy.'"
They have long wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map and this is how they will do it. Just make their own maps and pretend they don't exist. Now if only they would do support virtual terrorism instead of real terrorism.
Someone up for a corn field portrait of a certain prophet?
Is this just a huckster trying to make a few bucks off nationalist suckers by offering to draw a map with a few contentious names and borders modified(the sort of thing that a script kiddie could do by hacking together a KML layer for google earth in about 10 minutes; but I digress...) or is there some sort of 'Islamic geography' that has serious issues with basic tenents of what we know about our dear home geoid?
I'm honestly curious... It certainly isn't uncommon to have mere nationalist spats over mapping; but that's just standard political bluster.
Religious convictions that are seriously opposed to empirically demonstrable facts about the world, though, tend to be fairly amusing and sometimes quirky. You've got your flat earthers, your YECs, your geocentericists(does the Tychonic system get any love anymore?), your 'baraminologists', faith healers of a zillion different flavors, people who are pretty sure that Jesus and/or the 'lost tribes of Israel' ended up in North America, you name it, we've got it...
Is this just the tedious nationalism, or does folk islam have some weird bug up its ass about the-world-as-observed-from-orbit?
I wonder if it will show a crudely drawn America with the caption - "Here be dragons".
Without BLACKJACK!
Or HOOKERS!
or Israel.
or gays.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
They could replace street view with Terrorist View, showing all the best places for terrorist bombings.
Yes, I know not all people from that part of the world are terrorists. But that is a lot less funny.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
the fact that in the Qur'an, the earth is said to be flat. ... therefore, once it states something, nothing - not even scientific proofs - can negate it.
OK: what impact (pun intended) does that have when an islamic rocket scientist tries to calculate an ballistic missile trajectory?
"These two groups probably comprise the majority of Christians in the USA."
no,. they don't. There just the loudest sects of that particular cult.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd be willing to bet that most of the server admins at Google have no idea how many servers they have.
(Googler here) You'd be wrong, actually. Google is a very numbers-oriented place; I can see the totals, including CPU, disk, RAM, etc. The numbers are... large.
I wish Iran all the best with their endeavor, but I'm skeptical.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Simple: ...
1. Create 3D map image.
2.
3. Prophet!