You could just stop buying cigarettes, sticking them in your face and setting fire to them. I quite smoking (when I had reached the point of craving a cigarette while actually smoking one) by asking myself a few questions: do you really want to give your consent and your money to an industry that slaughters its own customers in their millions? do you want to do something so evidently disgusting and stupid as paying a predatory corporation to poison you? do you want to look like an idiot? would you smoke if cigarettes had arsenic in them (nicotine is about 4x as poisonous)? who's in charge here? A tip for those who want to quit: choose a moment of maximum stress – first day back at work, middle of divorce, moving house.... The -– mild – distress from nicotine withdrawal gets lost in the noise.
Thank you. Climate change is of course real, but it is an epiphenomenon: the underlying fact is over-population, which seems to have become a taboo subject.
ASAR, MERIS, AATSR, MWR, GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY, DORIS, LRR (https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-operational-eo-missions/envisat/instruments) - although only the first two gave anything that could be called an image. Maybe "integrated atmospheric water vapour column" sounds promising...
Maybe you're just trying to be funny. Envisat did much to establish the facts and mechanisms of climate change. There's no conspiracy: it grew old and died.
The shuttle couldn't reach its orbit, and if it could, the satellite was not designed to be worked on in orbit (unlike Hubble), and even if neither of those things were true, nobody would think it a good idea to spend around a billion dollars to try and fix a satellite 5 years past its design life span, with no idea what's wrong with it. Satellites die. Move on.
New Scientist magazine has tried twice, to my knowledge, to restrict web access to the subscribers to their - very expensive - magazine. They did not even offer a web-only subscription. I wrote each time pointing out that this was foolish, and I would have been prepared to pay a reasonable (i.e. small) sum for access, but was fobbed off with a bit of corporate boilerplate. Each time the paywall lasted a few weeks before coming down.
The responses here on/. point up what is wrong - not with Tennessee, or the USA, or libertarianism, but with human beings as a species. When you let a principle, right or wrong, trump your humanity you have lost the plot. It seems for most of the people on this site you can stand by and let your neighbour's house burn down because it makes sense politically, or economically, or administratively. And if his children had been in the house? The principle doesn't change. Never mind that libertarianism is just an infantile fantasy anyway. What kind of fireman will stand there and let this happen? A cowardly one. I don't care who pays, or how it's organized, or what the policy is: if your ideas are more important than your humanity, your ideas aren't worth shit.
...if the EU were also ready to take responsibility for the additional costs, monetary and environmental, of their meddling. I use CFs where I can, but my house is full of dimmers which don't work with anything but incandescents. I'm also pretty sure that many of my CFs will be made obsolete by progress in LED lighting, which is even more efficient and environmentally benign.
I'm no free-market fundamentalist, but in this case the EU, rather than throwing its weight around passing ill thought-out legislation, could have waited for market forces and common sense to produce the desired result.
(Yes, I know: there's nothing rarer than common sense...)
If only it were that simple! But mere badness is no guarantee of success. For every Dan Brown there are thousands of talentless hacks slaving away in well-deserved obscurity. Gore Vidal put it neatly: "Shit has its own integrity."
I have written something better -- much better. Still waiting for my money.... I confess: I don't know how to connect with the semi-literate millions.
Thank you. Nowhere in all this fuss have I seen mentioned that the Larsson books are very, very bad: ill-written, tedious, preposterous, paper-thin characters and highly misogynist despite their feminist pretensions. Books are like money: the bad drives out the good.
It's in my head. I simply don't see most ads, unless they're for something that interests me. Most ads are irrelevant to me: I have very little disposable income, so I'm not much good as a consumer, but show me a web - or magazine - page and then ask me afterwards what ads were on it and most of the time I couldn't tell you. It's like that psychology experiment in which a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the scene and nobody sees him. Aren't we all like that? Really intrusive ads - particularly anything using sound, or covering the page, have a negative effect: I will never buy their stuff even if I want it. I like Reader. I don't like web sites where the background is hundreds of little pictures of the self-important geek who made it.
I'm waiting to see what happens at New Scientist. They are only letting non-subscribers see 7 articles a month -- essentially nil, since it's a weekly magazine. It's really expensive, especially if you don't live in the UK. There's no web-only subscription (I wrote and asked: they recommended the digital version of the magazine but that doesn't seem to come with a subscription to the site...). Now, this is the second time they've tried this. I don't know how long the first one lasted: I went away and came back one day to find they'd given up on it. This time I'll be able to see when they quit because the protection is reeeeally easy to defeat and I'm using the site as much as I ever did....
I don't know what the answer is. The day pass that Salon used to use was fine with me: I didn't have to watch the ads, that were never for anything I'd want, in fact I never pay any attention at all to advertising, because I have very little disposable income.... But whatever the solution to paying for content is, it's not going to be an accountant or 'manager' who figures it out.
My own employers have an ethics code which is 33 pages of closely-spaced Maoist gibberish, most of which has nothing at all to do with the ethics of company, or managerial, behaviour and much of which is actually exhortations to blind obedience for employees. All corporations tend to authoritarianism, and these are the people who actually own the world, while blathering about freedom and democracy. The truth is that anyone employed by a large corporation spends most of their waking hours living in a totalitarian dictatorship - could this be what is wrong with Western Civilisation?
IANASCJ, or even a lawyer, but this is pathetic. The second amendment is bad
law. The supremes themselves cannot agree on what it means and even if it does
mean that every American citizen has a right to his own nuclear submarine (which
is what they seem to think...) then it's dumb (all right: it's an anachronism)
and should be changed. While to those who answer "look at Iraq" to the question of how they are going to overthrow a tyrannous government with their trusty revolvers, I can only say: "Oh, I get it: The 2nd amendment is a blueprint for terrorism. Why didn't I think of that."
Excellent comment from Slate:
Guns of Convenience
THE SUPREME COURT THINKS CONVENIENCE IS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GUN CONTROL. ACTUALLY,
IT'S AN ARGUMENT FOR IT.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 12:49 PM ET
The Supreme Court has discovered a constitutional right to convenience. In
District of Columbia v. Heller, which strikes down D.C.'s handgun ban, Justice
Anthony Scalia writes,
It is no answer to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the
possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long
guns) is allowed. It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American
people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon.
There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense:
It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency;
it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier
to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun;
it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the
police; it can be twirled around the index finger like Lee Marvin did inSeven
Men From Now. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen
by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their
use is invalid.
OK, I added the clause about twirling it on your finger (and anyway, John
Wayne had no difficulty twirling an 18.5-inch Winchester rifle in Stagecoach).
My point is that a handgun's convenience when put to good uses is heavily outweighed
by its convenience when put to bad ones. A handgun can be concealed easily,
and it can be tossed down a sewer drain without attracting much notice. The
barrel can be used to break a snitch's jaw. (There's no such thing as "rifle
whipping.")
If it's easier for a woman to handle (I presume that's the meaning of Scalia's
gallant reference to upper-body strength), imagine how much easier it is for
a 4-year-old child. It can be twirled on a table when you want to play Russian
roulette. It can be used to caress a woman, as various witnesses attested in
Phil Spector'smurder trial (which, despite this testimony, ended in a hung
jury; a retrial commences Sept. 29). Because of its light weight, it can be
accessed immediately after your wife tells you she's been sleeping with your
best friend, but well before she heads out the door with a suitcase. Because
of its small size, it can be used to shoot a cop dead before the chump even
realizes you've got it in your hand.
It's this second set of conveniences that led the District of Columbia to
ban handguns. Granted, in jurisdictions where gun ownership is permitted, criminals
seldom obtain their guns legally. But illegal guns begin life as legal ones.
Glock, Beretta, and other handgun manufacturers are not illegal enterprises;
rather, they manufacture a legal product that is subsequentlystolen and fenced
by criminals. More legal guns therefore mean more illegal guns. More illegal
guns mean more people get killed. The inconvenience this poses to the dead
and their families, and to society at large, does not concern Scalia.
There are some very significant unsupported assumptions there:
You seem to think that interstellar travel is not only possible but practical, but if the speed of light limit holds that's a very big assumption. Even bigger is the assumption that other intelligent species will be like us - boneheaded predators intent on expanding forever, something that even humans can't go on being much longer if we are to survive.
What if interstellar travel is just not worth it -- too slow, expensive, dangerous, and you have to wait generations -- even millennia -- for a result?
What if there's a means of communication that doesn't involve radio waves?
Then we would see exactly what we see now: nothing, and all the while a thriving galactic civilisation based on the free exchange of information is waiting for us to catch up.
Current very-high-resolution satellites can see a metre or two into clear
water - see these
examples. But the Panchromatic band on these sensors extends down into the
near-infrared so pan-sharpening,
which combines the multispectral image (2.4 metres/pixel for QuickBird) with
the much sharper Pan data (60cm/pixel) tends to make water go black.
The next generation WorldView-2 satellite from DigitalGlobe will
have a 'Coastal' band (450 - 500 nm) in addition to the Blue, Green, Red and
Near-IR bands, specifically to improve this capability (it will have additional
Near-IR bands as well).
Radar, as other correspondents point out is not much use in water, but it
has been used to study desert sites, such as Ubar in Southern Oman. (This may
be in TFA but I still can't get to it...)
QuickBird, launched 2001, has a 60cm pixel and a swath of 16.5 km. WorldView-1,
launched last Thursday, and WorldView-2 (late 2008) have similar swaths and 50cm
pixels. The main limit on resolution has been legislative (i.e. U.S. Govt.) and
political, not technical. You can't get video from a satellite, of course, because
it's in orbit (450km for QuickBird, 770 for WorldView-2 -- orbital period around 90 mins) and only sees the target for a few minutes
and anyway each scene is around 2Gb. This Sony camera seems to have nothing to do with
satellites. Satellite sensors are more like scanners than cameras. There's a
guide to VHR satellite imaging here.
Commercial missions use sun-synchronous orbits for consistency -- the satellite passes overhead at the same local time, usually around 10-11 a.m. Military (Keyhole) sats can produce a smaller pixel but they use highly elliptical orbits and... wait... what are those black helicopters outside my window... listen, I was just....
Yay! Indeed. Mod parent up. Humans on Mars is a fraudulent boondoggle, or it would be if it ever happened in our or our children's lifetime. We're not ready; there's no decent rationale anyway, and the costs and risks are simply out of sight. Can you imagine the consequences of a failure of this particular stunt? Space exploration would be set back decades, generations even. There's nothing humans can do there that robots can't do -- more slowly, yes, but far more cheaply and safely. The Incumbent said, "we're going to Mars" in the same way he said, "mission accomplished". He was simply... what's the word I want?... Oh, yes: lying.
This is nonsense: I work in the earth observation satellite industry and there are no ultraviolet or x-ray sensors on earth observation satellites (for obvious reasons - the earth does not emit x-rays, and UV is absorbed by the atmosphere.) Optical sensors can see at most a few metres into clear water. At infrared wavelengths water is black and opaque. "Light passes through matter"? No, it doesn't. Didn't The Times use to have a science correspondent?
... on-line, in various places. The University of Maryland has a fairly complete set of Landsat 5 and 7 data, all bands, available via ftp (not my place to give out the url, though).
Landsat 7 has been ailing for the last four years and Landsat 5 is older than most slashdotters, though still soldiering on (Landsat 6 was lost on launch.) The delay in launching a continuity mission is a scientific crime, as 35 year's worth of continuous acquisition is going to be interrupted -- unless the ailing birds can keep going to 2011 (+).
Look at the copyright notices: DigitalGlobe generally means satellite imagery from QuickBird (.5m resolution), TerraMetrics = Landsat 15m medium resolution. The aerial imagery is from various suppliers. Aerial imagery is more likely to be censored by national agencies (e.g. The Netherlands shows a lot of censorship, even right in the middle of Amsterdam (http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=3 0.5494,47.669935&spn=0.040728,0.065918&z=14). Aerial imagery may also be older, though most of the QuickBird imagery on Google is not very new,
There are no commercial European satellites with.5 metre pixel capability. The only commercial European Remote Sensing mission currently is SpotImage -- Spot 5 has a 2.5 m capability.
For all those who ask 'how hard can it be?' (shades of Top Gear...) entry level into the commercial Very High Resolution satellite business starts at around half a billion -- don't forget the ground segment. Even future missions are not planning to go much below.4 metre: the problems of handling huge data volumes, programming the satellite acquisitions, and the trade-off in covereage are not worth the gains in sharpness for most commercial users. The US military can get down to about 10 cm (allegedly), but are believed to use highly elliptical orbits (and huge, Hubble-sized telescopes) which would be inmpractical for commercial operators. 10 cm is not as good as Hollywood has got: the last episode of '24' showed what was supposed to be a Landsat image - only it was thermal infrared at about 1 cm updated once a second (as opposed to 15 m every two weeks or more...)
The Man may well have bought 'all the coverage of Afghanistan' -- from a single operator. The Ikonos mission (1m pixel) was the only one operating at the time. The US Govt. does retain 'shutter control' rights of all the VHR missionslicensed by them - which is all the current VHR missions. That will change - especially with COSMO-SkyMed, a constellation of all-weather radar satellites with a max. resolution of >1m, coming soon.
Nothing to it - all you need is a 12m tracking dish capable of keeping up with a Low Earth Orbit Satellite on a circa. 90 minute orbit, hardware capable of handling the huge bandwidth required (a single QuickBird scene of about 272 km^2 runs to gigabytes, then you can hack into the satellite to persuade it to unload the raw data from the on-board solid-state memory to your PC which knows how to process it into system-corrected data and then...
look, forget it. Weather satellites are geostationary, and the pictures they send are small. There's a intro to VHR satellite imagery here.
Slashdot Mirror
You could just stop buying cigarettes, sticking them in your face and setting fire to them. I quite smoking (when I had reached the point of craving a cigarette while actually smoking one) by asking myself a few questions: do you really want to give your consent and your money to an industry that slaughters its own customers in their millions? do you want to do something so evidently disgusting and stupid as paying a predatory corporation to poison you? do you want to look like an idiot? would you smoke if cigarettes had arsenic in them (nicotine is about 4x as poisonous)? who's in charge here? A tip for those who want to quit: choose a moment of maximum stress – first day back at work, middle of divorce, moving house.... The -– mild – distress from nicotine withdrawal gets lost in the noise.
Thank you. Climate change is of course real, but it is an epiphenomenon: the underlying fact is over-population, which seems to have become a taboo subject.
ASAR, MERIS, AATSR, MWR, GOMOS, MIPAS, SCIAMACHY, DORIS, LRR (https://earth.esa.int/web/guest/missions/esa-operational-eo-missions/envisat/instruments) - although only the first two gave anything that could be called an image. Maybe "integrated atmospheric water vapour column" sounds promising...
Synthetic Aperture radar porn with a 30 metre pixel size - kind of a specialised taste.
Maybe you're just trying to be funny. Envisat did much to establish the facts and mechanisms of climate change. There's no conspiracy: it grew old and died.
The shuttle couldn't reach its orbit, and if it could, the satellite was not designed to be worked on in orbit (unlike Hubble), and even if neither of those things were true, nobody would think it a good idea to spend around a billion dollars to try and fix a satellite 5 years past its design life span, with no idea what's wrong with it. Satellites die. Move on.
New Scientist magazine has tried twice, to my knowledge, to restrict web access to the subscribers to their - very expensive - magazine. They did not even offer a web-only subscription. I wrote each time pointing out that this was foolish, and I would have been prepared to pay a reasonable (i.e. small) sum for access, but was fobbed off with a bit of corporate boilerplate. Each time the paywall lasted a few weeks before coming down.
The responses here on /. point up what is wrong - not with Tennessee, or the USA, or libertarianism, but with human beings as a species. When you let a principle, right or wrong, trump your humanity you have lost the plot. It seems for most of the people on this site you can stand by and let your neighbour's house burn down because it makes sense politically, or economically, or administratively. And if his children had been in the house? The principle doesn't change. Never mind that libertarianism is just an infantile fantasy anyway. What kind of fireman will stand there and let this happen? A cowardly one. I don't care who pays, or how it's organized, or what the policy is: if your ideas are more important than your humanity, your ideas aren't worth shit.
...if the EU were also ready to take responsibility for the additional costs, monetary and environmental, of their meddling. I use CFs where I can, but my house is full of dimmers which don't work with anything but incandescents. I'm also pretty sure that many of my CFs will be made obsolete by progress in LED lighting, which is even more efficient and environmentally benign.
I'm no free-market fundamentalist, but in this case the EU, rather than throwing its weight around passing ill thought-out legislation, could have waited for market forces and common sense to produce the desired result.
(Yes, I know: there's nothing rarer than common sense...)
If only it were that simple! But mere badness is no guarantee of success. For every Dan Brown there are thousands of talentless hacks slaving away in well-deserved obscurity. Gore Vidal put it neatly: "Shit has its own integrity."
I have written something better -- much better. Still waiting for my money.... I confess: I don't know how to connect with the semi-literate millions.
Wipe your chin.
Thank you. Nowhere in all this fuss have I seen mentioned that the Larsson books are very, very bad: ill-written, tedious, preposterous, paper-thin characters and highly misogynist despite their feminist pretensions. Books are like money: the bad drives out the good.
It's in my head. I simply don't see most ads, unless they're for something that interests me. Most ads are irrelevant to me: I have very little disposable income, so I'm not much good as a consumer, but show me a web - or magazine - page and then ask me afterwards what ads were on it and most of the time I couldn't tell you. It's like that psychology experiment in which a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the scene and nobody sees him. Aren't we all like that? Really intrusive ads - particularly anything using sound, or covering the page, have a negative effect: I will never buy their stuff even if I want it. I like Reader. I don't like web sites where the background is hundreds of little pictures of the self-important geek who made it.
I'm waiting to see what happens at New Scientist. They are only letting non-subscribers see 7 articles a month -- essentially nil, since it's a weekly magazine. It's really expensive, especially if you don't live in the UK. There's no web-only subscription (I wrote and asked: they recommended the digital version of the magazine but that doesn't seem to come with a subscription to the site...). Now, this is the second time they've tried this. I don't know how long the first one lasted: I went away and came back one day to find they'd given up on it. This time I'll be able to see when they quit because the protection is reeeeally easy to defeat and I'm using the site as much as I ever did.... I don't know what the answer is. The day pass that Salon used to use was fine with me: I didn't have to watch the ads, that were never for anything I'd want, in fact I never pay any attention at all to advertising, because I have very little disposable income.... But whatever the solution to paying for content is, it's not going to be an accountant or 'manager' who figures it out.
My own employers have an ethics code which is 33 pages of closely-spaced Maoist gibberish, most of which has nothing at all to do with the ethics of company, or managerial, behaviour and much of which is actually exhortations to blind obedience for employees. All corporations tend to authoritarianism, and these are the people who actually own the world, while blathering about freedom and democracy. The truth is that anyone employed by a large corporation spends most of their waking hours living in a totalitarian dictatorship - could this be what is wrong with Western Civilisation?
Guns of Convenience
THE SUPREME COURT THINKS CONVENIENCE IS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST GUN CONTROL. ACTUALLY, IT'S AN ARGUMENT FOR IT.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 12:49 PM ET
The Supreme Court has discovered a constitutional right to convenience. In District of Columbia v. Heller, which strikes down D.C.'s handgun ban, Justice Anthony Scalia writes,
It is no answer to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed. It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon. There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police; it can be twirled around the index finger like Lee Marvin did inSeven Men From Now. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.
OK, I added the clause about twirling it on your finger (and anyway, John Wayne had no difficulty twirling an 18.5-inch Winchester rifle in Stagecoach). My point is that a handgun's convenience when put to good uses is heavily outweighed by its convenience when put to bad ones. A handgun can be concealed easily, and it can be tossed down a sewer drain without attracting much notice. The barrel can be used to break a snitch's jaw. (There's no such thing as "rifle whipping.") If it's easier for a woman to handle (I presume that's the meaning of Scalia's gallant reference to upper-body strength), imagine how much easier it is for a 4-year-old child. It can be twirled on a table when you want to play Russian roulette. It can be used to caress a woman, as various witnesses attested in Phil Spector'smurder trial (which, despite this testimony, ended in a hung jury; a retrial commences Sept. 29). Because of its light weight, it can be accessed immediately after your wife tells you she's been sleeping with your best friend, but well before she heads out the door with a suitcase. Because of its small size, it can be used to shoot a cop dead before the chump even realizes you've got it in your hand.
It's this second set of conveniences that led the District of Columbia to ban handguns. Granted, in jurisdictions where gun ownership is permitted, criminals seldom obtain their guns legally. But illegal guns begin life as legal ones. Glock, Beretta, and other handgun manufacturers are not illegal enterprises; rather, they manufacture a legal product that is subsequentlystolen and fenced by criminals. More legal guns therefore mean more illegal guns. More illegal guns mean more people get killed. The inconvenience this poses to the dead and their families, and to society at large, does not concern Scalia.
There are some very significant unsupported assumptions there: You seem to think that interstellar travel is not only possible but practical, but if the speed of light limit holds that's a very big assumption. Even bigger is the assumption that other intelligent species will be like us - boneheaded predators intent on expanding forever, something that even humans can't go on being much longer if we are to survive. What if interstellar travel is just not worth it -- too slow, expensive, dangerous, and you have to wait generations -- even millennia -- for a result? What if there's a means of communication that doesn't involve radio waves? Then we would see exactly what we see now: nothing, and all the while a thriving galactic civilisation based on the free exchange of information is waiting for us to catch up.
The next generation WorldView-2 satellite from DigitalGlobe will have a 'Coastal' band (450 - 500 nm) in addition to the Blue, Green, Red and Near-IR bands, specifically to improve this capability (it will have additional Near-IR bands as well).
Radar, as other correspondents point out is not much use in water, but it has been used to study desert sites, such as Ubar in Southern Oman. (This may be in TFA but I still can't get to it...)
QuickBird, launched 2001, has a 60cm pixel and a swath of 16.5 km. WorldView-1, launched last Thursday, and WorldView-2 (late 2008) have similar swaths and 50cm pixels. The main limit on resolution has been legislative (i.e. U.S. Govt.) and political, not technical. You can't get video from a satellite, of course, because it's in orbit (450km for QuickBird, 770 for WorldView-2 -- orbital period around 90 mins) and only sees the target for a few minutes and anyway each scene is around 2Gb. This Sony camera seems to have nothing to do with satellites. Satellite sensors are more like scanners than cameras. There's a guide to VHR satellite imaging here. Commercial missions use sun-synchronous orbits for consistency -- the satellite passes overhead at the same local time, usually around 10-11 a.m. Military (Keyhole) sats can produce a smaller pixel but they use highly elliptical orbits and... wait... what are those black helicopters outside my window... listen, I was just....
Yay! Indeed. Mod parent up. Humans on Mars is a fraudulent boondoggle, or it would be if it ever happened in our or our children's lifetime. We're not ready; there's no decent rationale anyway, and the costs and risks are simply out of sight. Can you imagine the consequences of a failure of this particular stunt? Space exploration would be set back decades, generations even. There's nothing humans can do there that robots can't do -- more slowly, yes, but far more cheaply and safely. The Incumbent said, "we're going to Mars" in the same way he said, "mission accomplished". He was simply ... what's the word I want? ... Oh, yes: lying.
This is nonsense: I work in the earth observation satellite industry and there are no ultraviolet or x-ray sensors on earth observation satellites (for obvious reasons - the earth does not emit x-rays, and UV is absorbed by the atmosphere.)
Optical sensors can see at most a few metres into clear water. At infrared wavelengths water is black and opaque. "Light passes through matter"? No, it doesn't. Didn't The Times use to have a science correspondent?
... on-line, in various places. The University of Maryland has a fairly complete set of Landsat 5 and 7 data, all bands, available via ftp (not my place to give out the url, though).
Landsat 7 has been ailing for the last four years and Landsat 5 is older than most slashdotters, though still soldiering on (Landsat 6 was lost on launch.) The delay in launching a continuity mission is a scientific crime, as 35 year's worth of continuous acquisition is going to be interrupted -- unless the ailing birds can keep going to 2011 (+).
There is a gallery of Landsat imagery here.
Look at the copyright notices: DigitalGlobe generally means satellite imagery from QuickBird (.5m resolution), TerraMetrics = Landsat 15m medium resolution. The aerial imagery is from various suppliers. Aerial imagery is more likely to be censored by national agencies (e.g. The Netherlands shows a lot of censorship, even right in the middle of Amsterdam3 0.5494,47.669935&spn=0.040728,0.065918&z=14).
(http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&t=h&om=1&ll=
Aerial imagery may also be older, though most of the QuickBird imagery on Google is not very new,
There are no commercial European satellites with .5 metre pixel capability. The only commercial European Remote Sensing mission currently is SpotImage -- Spot 5 has a 2.5 m capability.
.4 metre: the problems of handling huge data volumes, programming the satellite acquisitions, and the trade-off in covereage are not worth the gains in sharpness for most commercial users. The US military can get down to about 10 cm (allegedly), but are believed to use highly elliptical orbits (and huge, Hubble-sized telescopes) which would be inmpractical for commercial operators. 10 cm is not as good as Hollywood has got: the last episode of '24' showed what was supposed to be a Landsat image - only it was thermal infrared at about 1 cm updated once a second (as opposed to 15 m every two weeks or more...)
For all those who ask 'how hard can it be?' (shades of Top Gear...) entry level into the commercial Very High Resolution satellite business starts at around half a billion -- don't forget the ground segment. Even future missions are not planning to go much below
The Man may well have bought 'all the coverage of Afghanistan' -- from a single operator. The Ikonos mission (1m pixel) was the only one operating at the time. The US Govt. does retain 'shutter control' rights of all the VHR missionslicensed by them - which is all the current VHR missions. That will change - especially with COSMO-SkyMed, a constellation of all-weather radar satellites with a max. resolution of >1m, coming soon.
There's a intro to VHR satellite imagery here.
Nothing to it - all you need is a 12m tracking dish capable of keeping up with a Low Earth Orbit Satellite on a circa. 90 minute orbit, hardware capable of handling the huge bandwidth required (a single QuickBird scene of about 272 km^2 runs to gigabytes, then you can hack into the satellite to persuade it to unload the raw data from the on-board solid-state memory to your PC which knows how to process it into system-corrected data and then...
look, forget it. Weather satellites are geostationary, and the pictures they send are small. There's a intro to VHR satellite imagery here.