Twixt the Devil and the Deep Blue
First, I get all twitchy with paranoia, imagining Google has managed to hide surveillance bots in my sock drawer. Fie! Fie! Run for your lives.
Then, later on the same morning, I'm lured back into the Googleverse by the free download of Google Earth--the ten-year dream of my internet-using fantacy life: a free world map program that will transport me to every town, neighborhood and backpacking or canoeing location I have ever in this life spent time.
Approach. Avoidance. Seduction and revulsion. What's a paranoid, net-dependent, infojunky mapfreak to do?
Comments
easy answer: go to www.esri.com & check out all the free map downloads there. much better & safer, too. 'course, they will be happy to sell you all kinds of upgrades, but you get what you pay for. (same with google, only it's not real GIS). so check out esri if you haven't already. this is where GIS was invented, it's still the biggest GIS software company in the world, and it's still completely owned by a husband-and-wife team who drive their 1970s era VW microbus to work everyday and pay cash for everything. and could care less what you have on your computer.
Posted by: susannah eanes | June 28, 2005 12:42 PM
this weekend I got some forty-year-old maps at a garage sale. really nice geological survey maps, lots of them with out-of-date place names and big empty places where entire towns exist now. all from virginia and west virginia. those are the kinds of maps I can get excited about. realtime close up satellite maps I cannot get very happy about unless I know with absolute certainty that they are not putting humans in a fishbowl against their will.
Posted by: suzy | June 28, 2005 1:22 PM
Hmm. I have a desire to comment intelligently on that first article but it's really hard to evaluate because it's so breathless.
Posted by: Ana | June 28, 2005 2:01 PM
Geographer. Must have maps. Many maps. All the maps....
Posted by: fredR | June 29, 2005 3:39 AM
Fred:
As regards your fear of spybots on your PC .... get the free Microsoft Anti-Spyware tool (Beta Version) that is on the Net .... also, get the Free Ad-aware program ...... run the first all the time and run the second once a week or so ...... combine those with a good firewall and you should be OK.
S.
Posted by: Steve | June 29, 2005 9:22 PM
China has the answer, at the link.
Posted by: chris hall | July 1, 2005 1:21 PM
Google Earth is cute, but the free version is all fuzzy (doi) at least in viewing most of Floyd Co. Wasted my time downloading I think.
Posted by: Mike | July 25, 2005 1:00 PM