The ToS that you're presented with upon signing up is pretty absurd. It requires you to commit to providing feedback "on a regular basis of not less than once each week during the Beta term", and to creating "a written evaluation of the functionality, performance, usability, and stability of the Beta Site and documentation provided."
It also prohibits you from linking to the site or disclosing any information about it, including the existence and contents of the ToS. Boy, I sure hope I don't get sued for posting this comment. /s
S/he brings up a useful point of understanding the ToS. What if the next iOS and Android require my location be constantly shared with third parties? I would lose privacy or have to go without a smartphone which is freakishly hard in today's modern world.
Obviously that's a hypothetical but I appreciate anyone who pushes back on digital rights given how deep we are in the civic/digital rights gray zone.
> have to go without a smartphone which is freakishly hard in today's modern world.
Totally off-topic but sometimes I find it unnerving how hard it is to spend a week without any type of mobile device. People look at you like you're insane.
Just like saying you don't own a tv in the 90'. It's weird at first but a fantastic social filter. Saves you so much time to bond with the proper people, the ones that are ok with people different from them.
> What if the next iOS and Android require my location be constantly shared with third parties? I would lose privacy or have to go without a smartphone which is freakishly hard in today's modern world.
Or run Replicant or similar, which would assuredly continue to offer the option of preserving your privacy. (It's somewhat less convenient, and limits your selection of devices, but it's an option.)
Seriously though, I'm an indie iOS developer with a semi-popular app. I have hundreds of TestFlight users, but I only get feedback on betas from a handful.
This can be frustrating, considering the whole point is to get things right for many edge cases before it leaves beta.
Sounds like you need a better test->feedback->fix feedback loop. Only include people in your beta who will give you actionable material.. most consumers miss the point of a beta and think it just means 'early access to latest features'.
If your only reward for beta-testing is "early access to latest features" (i.e. no rewards afterwards) most people will assume the only point is indeed "early access to latest features".
Many companies do this to test the robustness of their system by letting people in in controlled beta-invites waves instead of going 0 to 60 in a stampede inauguration. The tight loop you're referring to seems to me more typical of QA/QC testing, which is a paying job. Trying to pass this job into customers is tricky, since most of them are not interested in following tight reporting schedules or writing lengthy standardized reports.
Quite off-topic, but that made me think of a project I wish I'll live to see implemented. I'm sure it will be done by someone eventually, though it's probably too difficult right now. I'm talking about a whole-world representation of paleontological knowledge. It'd be a simulation of the world with all known species. There would be a time slider that would span through all eons. On large scales we could see continental drift and on short scales we could see procedurally generated simulations of plants and animals with basic behavior (like hunting, grazing, circadian rythms, reproduction and so on...). It would make it possible to see evolution going on, generations after generations.
I don't think it's totally unfeasible in this century. We already have video games with procedurally generated planets that include flora and fauna (No Man's Sky is a famous example, but I believe Elite Dangerous wants to do something like that eventually). So it will be similar, only it would be based on actual scientific data.
You should have a look at GPlates: https://www.gplates.org/ It comes with a default dataset that will get you part way there as far as the raw data goes.
There are also several paid mobile apps that add more "nice-looking" overlays (e.g. Interactive Earth).
Of course, for the paleogeography, you're referring to something much broader and more difficult, but somewhat similar things are done to create paleotopographical reconstructions. I've only seen those sold by vendors, though, so I don't think any of them are public.
Ron Blakey's paleography is a classic example of something not too dissimilar, as well: https://www2.nau.edu/rcb7/globaltext2.html It was made back in the late 90's/early 2000's and has been expanded on since, but it's something of a manual version.
Sidenote: Planet presented on Google Cloud Next 2017 keynote today: https://youtu.be/h9FSqVbdHis?t=8109 They told that they use Google Cloud Platform to store 7+ PB of data and upload 7 TB daily with a hockey-stick growth trajectory. Personally their mini satellites were my favorite part. Disclaimer: I work for Google.
This!
Sentinel (1 and soon 2, which launched days ago) data is also available from Google Earth Engine using their API or web UI: https://earthengine.google.com/datasets/
Note that Sentinel 2A has been already delivering amazing data, the launch this month was for his twin (Sentinel 2B) which is meant to reduce in half the revisiting time!
When Google Maps/Earth came out I remember distinctly an immediate sense of completion at the ability to explore everything instantly.
This is it, this is all of the things. The whole world right there explored and surveyed and mapped and labeled and catalogued and borders drawn. There's no mysterious potion shop whose location is whispered and forgotten in time, no unknown shipwreck full of treasure on an unreachable beach, no secret dark alley hidden through a hedge that leads to Hogwarts. No Hogwarts at all, we've already looked everywhere for it.
You can just get on your pocket computer from the couch and pull up the picture of it taken on June 5th with the reflection of the Google mapping car in the window and littered with discarded Starbucks cups and some blurred out licence plates.
If I'm not mistaken, the benefit of Planet over Google Maps is that all imagery on Planet is less than 24 hours old. So, you can see daily snapshots of different locations.
The time slider is huge (albeit potentially creepy)... you can see before and afters of a disaster, check if someone's car was parked outside on a certain day, watch progress of construction, etc.
It's OpenStreetMap-based though, as far as I can tell (there is no attribution to either, but data is loaded from MapBox which I think only provides OSM).
If you click the info (i) in the bottom-right, you'll see that the basemaps are from OSM and MapBox but the raster satellite imagery is from Planet's satellite constellation.
Equirectangular is not a projection. For all of web mercator's faults, it at least preserves direction, which is nice when you're looking at streets/etc locally. Regardless, all of the web mapping stuff standardized on web mercator ages ago. Like it or not, for web mapping, you're stuck with web mercator, unless you want to serve your own streets/etc.
Maybe planet.com only sell their imagery datasets to companies?! That's what came to my mind with GP asking "who are you?" probably meaning something like "who do you represent?"..
Not everyone has an eye for graphic design, so if you can't see the that the resemblance is more than just "a circle as part of their logo", that's understandable.
If you need a tool to help, take a look at the google image search for "lonely planet". Their image matching algorithm thinks planet's logo is related to lonely planet's.
You're probably getting down-voted because (aside from the off-topic comment) that isn't how copyright works. In most cases copyright starts from the time the work is created, and lasts for a specific period of time (Disney-style exceptions notwithstanding), whether copyright is explicitly declared or not.
The copyright notice only serves (informally) to indicate the start-point for this time.
I think the idea is addressing these people (like me) that were used to seeing those "Last edited on XX-XX-XXXX" notices at the footer of HTML pages and worry that the project may be dead/outdated if the date is old.
Now that I think about it, is this why people puts "Copyright $initial_year - $current_year"? Because as you rightly say, only $initial_year is legally relevant.
> Now that I think about it, is this why people puts "Copyright $initial_year - $current_year"? Because as you rightly say, only $initial_year is legally relevant.
Both are, actually, and $current_year may be the most relevant. That formulation generally indicates that the current work was created in $current_year, but is a derivative (possibly through a chain of intermediaries) of a work created in $initial_year.
Derivatives are independent works with their own copyrights, and copyrights of works where the author for copyright purposes is a corporation rather than a natural purpose last a fixed time from the creation of the work in the US, currently, IIRC, 95 years.
So something that says (assuming accuracy of the notice) Copyright 2001-2017, with a corporate author, will be out of copyright (barring further extensions) in 2102, but is ultimately based on an earlier version that will be out of copyright in 2096.
Of course, a lot of websites use automatically updating and false dates for copyright notices, and anyhow the usual current advice is not to include a date at all.
Hmmm I see, I didn't assume people meant that the subsequent updates of the website are intended o be considered derivative works, but for instance by similarity to different editions of a book, I guess this is actually the case?
It also prohibits you from linking to the site or disclosing any information about it, including the existence and contents of the ToS. Boy, I sure hope I don't get sued for posting this comment. /s