channel[van]

Super high-resolution spy satellites have been imaging sea ice at the poles for the last decade on behalf of earth scientists. But the images has been kept from the public and nearly all scientists, too. Over the last 10 years, a tiny group of scientists with security clearance was able to see some of the images, but couldn’t use them publicly. Now, mere hours after a National Academy of Sciences committee recommended that the intelligence community “should release and disseminate all Arctic sea ice” imagery that can be created from the classified satellite data, the United States Geological Service has published the set of high-res images. The new data provides what NAS committee member Thorsten Markus called “a dramatic improvement” in what we can see. The previously off-limits sea ice data has a resolution of one meter. The previous scientific standard sea ice images from the Landsat program have a resolution of 15 meters. Markus saw some of the sea ice images last December when the

I can't believe I missed this. Even worse, it looks like just about everyone did (OK, not everyone). I just checked a GPS-enabled webpage page, below, on a 3.0B5 iPhone's Mobile Safari and Boom! The webpage checks the GPS coordinates of the iPhone and returns a result. The test webpage was built by Doug Turner for Mozilla's upcoming implementation of the Geolocation API (if you have Firefox 3.5B you can try it out). Google also mentioned in their Latitude for iPhone presentation last week that they were no longer going to build a native app for the iPhone. They said Latitude was now going to be a WebApp that would run in Safari. That should have tipped me off that Safari would have to be able to not only retrieve others' locations, but also broadcast the location of the user's iPhone. GPS in the browser is a relatively new trick. The Geolocation API Specification is part of the W3 Consortium's standards but hasn't been finalized just yet. That means that the