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Nanaimo, The Google Capital of the World

Posted by Zonk on Tue Mar 11, 2008 10:01 AM
from the when-will-you-be-googlefied dept.
Businesses Google Privacy The Internet
eldavojohn writes "Time.com has up a story on Nanaimo, a British Columbia coal mining town of about 78,000 that has had everything conceivable mapped into a Google database. Citizens can track fire trucks real time. The results also include Google Earth data for Nanaimo. 'The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city's RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city's gardening staff. And the city's cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow Internet users to find out who is buried in each plot, says Kristensen. A new multi-million-dollar conference center, opening in June, will have 72 wireless access points to allow out-of-towners to use their laptops to navigate the Google Earth version of the city.'"
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Submission: Nanaimo, The Google Capital of the World by eldavojohn (898314)
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  • And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)

    by FlyingSquidStudios (1031284) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:05AM (#22716584) Homepage
    they'll plant RFID tags in every citizen so you can track THEM on Google Earth...

    • Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)

      by lucabrasi999 (585141) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:18AM (#22716850) Journal
      they'll plant RFID tags in every citizen so you can track THEM on Google Earth...

      Let's start with the elected officials. How about using Eliot Spitzer as our first test case? I know. He isn't Canadian, but I bet the results would be interesting.

      • Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @11:28AM (#22718160)

        How about using Eliot Spitzer as our first test case?
        I have a better idea.

        Let's get rid of laws that proscribe when, where and under what conditions consenting adults in a free society can have sex.

        I'm just sayin'.

        • Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)

          by c6gunner (950153) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @12:21PM (#22718980)

          Let's get rid of laws that proscribe when, where and under what conditions consenting adults in a free society can have sex.
          Damn straight! I've always wanted to have sex in the Prime Ministers office while he's in conference with the Pope. Thank you for trying to make my dreams come true!
        • Hell no. Legalizing prostitution would remove my best excuse to say no when my girlfriend asks for money!
          • You can't possibly be *that* stupid that there's other laws to take care of that, or have not understood what I meant, can you? (rolls eyes)

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by lucabrasi999 (585141)

              When Spitzer prosecuted Grasso (the former NYSE head) for basically conspiring to increase his own salary to an astronomical sum, Spitzer didn't limit his prosecution to the issue about salary. He went after Grasso for sleeping with his own secretary. What does that have to do with Grasso's other alleged sin? Spitzer wasn't just interested in prosecuting corrupt businesses for fraud. He was interested in crushing those businessmen and women in every way possible.

              Spitzer also prosecuted prostitution ring

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by fm6 (162816)
                Yes, it's hypocritical of Spitzer to enforce prostitution laws he was himself violating. The secretary thing is a whole different matter.

                I don't know what the story was there (can't seem to find this detail online) but I very much doubt that Grasso was prosecuted for "sleeping with his own secretary." Having sex isn't illegal in itself (at least not in New York!). Having sex with one of your own employees might open you up to sexual harassment or discrimination charges, but not without the question of the s
      • Relocating Spitzer to Nanaimo is going to be a punishment enough.

    • Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)

      by snowraver1 (1052510) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @11:50AM (#22718518)
      TRUE STORY:

      I was on vacation in Toronto (I know, weak place for vacation) with the old man and my grandpa. We had rented a car and got a GPS reciever to navagate the Toronto area. Our first stop was my Uncle George's house, so I programmed the address into the GPS and we were on our way.

      As we were getting closer to our destination, I was showing the GPS to grandpa and explaining how it worked. We make the final turn and were rolling down the street, when gramps says "Can you see George on that thing"

      Naturally, I replied "Of course I can, he's taking a shit!"
      We got out of the car, knocked on the door, 2-3 mins later the door opens. Turns out I was right, he was on the can. The rest of the vacation though, my grandpa thought that GPS could track people.

  • I knew that coal prices were rising... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop (214511) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:05AM (#22716598) Journal
    but I didn't realize how much.

    How long before they start building man-made islands in cute shapes?

  • City corruption (Score:3, Interesting)

    by darjen (879890) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:12AM (#22716710)
    I just have to wonder how much resistance city officials will put into something like this. Would any of the corrupt city councils here in the states ever allow Google to do that? If they catch cities that are bad about updating their infrastructure, there could be a backlash against the local government. It could be a whole new way of holding them accountable...

  • Citizens can track fire trucks real time.

    Ambulance chasers [wikipedia.org] rejoice!

    Seriously, there's something about this idea that seems kind of silly. I don't know - tracking public services does make some sort of sense, I guess. I wouldn't want to pay for the cost, but if Google's willing to foot the bill, I guess I'd have no problem with it were it done locally. It's not something I'd like the local government to spend money on though - too little benefit for the cost.

    I guarantee that this will never happen in the US, though, over concerns that knowin

  • Just imagine how useful it would be to have the real time location of the city's police force as well. ;) The $64,000 dollar question is, of course, whether public funds should be invested in building Google's infrastructure. Yes, cloud computing is more cost effective that rolling your own systems, it's convenient, outsourced, on a common platform, etc. On the other hand, will this result in the city losing control of their data? Will the city share in any revenue that Google earns from their investment in

  • GPS on lawnmowers? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stoofa (524247) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:13AM (#22716748)
    So where as you used to just cheekily shout "You've missed a bit!" - now you get to email them with co-ordinates and a satellite photo as proof... and then blog it all.
  • Here's the upside: Exploitation of existing technology. Shows real potential for the future of the internet. Further, these are services that would not have been possible for free (or cheap) even 3-4 years ago. This is building on what I call The Google Platform. Great PR for Google, right? ;-)

    Here's the downside: Since most of this is built on Google, these folks are building on an infrastructure that is mostly free. When you don't pay, you have no control. Further, there's no SLA's (service level agreemen

    • Re:You Take The Good, You Take the Bad (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuantumRiff (120817) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:35AM (#22717208)
      Actually, most of the cool features are built on the KML file format and RSS. If MS would support it, it would work on Virtual Earth. You could create a tool to do it. They are not loading up google with data, they are publishing the data in a very easy to read XML format, and suggest you use google earth to view it, since it is currently the best tool out there.

  • This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blhack (921171) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:15AM (#22716780)
    This is one of my favorite things I've seen google do so far.
    It really is neat to see how google has gone from a company that indexes web pages, to a company that stores and indexes your email, to a company that stores and indexes maps of the world, to a company that will literally tell you ANY available information about an area on the map.
    As much as the privacy advocates are going to hate this (and please, somebody tell me WHY without using a slippery slope argument), this is really where I would like to see mapping go. Maps hadn't really improved in the past couple of hundred years, but now we're starting to see just what mapping can do.

    Should be an exciting next few years.
    • Because you can figure out someone's maiden name using cemetery data potentially? Guess what, losing privacy IS a slipper slope. Maiden names. Your home address. Your phone number. Where you work. Start putting this together and it becomes intrusive as heck. And then one day "oops, we just lost some cd/tapes/laptops/whatever that contain sensitive data on some/most/all of our citizens/consumers/whatever".

    • Re:This is cool (Score:5, Funny)

      by garett_spencley (193892) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:28AM (#22717054) Journal
      "As much as the privacy advocates are going to hate this (and please, somebody tell me WHY without using a slippery slope argument),"

      Agreed. That slippery slope argument really pisses me off. A few months back I was hiking in the woods and, thanks to my GPS device, I was alerted moments before stepping onto a slippery slope and sliding to my doom.

      The more people we can save from slippery slopes the better. Surely any privacy advocates who say that such technology is a slippery slope simply have never had a near-death-from-slippery-slope experience themselves. They really need to STFU.

    • Ah yes, but have you tried out some of them slippery slopes recently? Some of them are really, really slippery.

      Perhaps we need to be told WHY this is so cool without being told it's new and shiny.

      Scientist: We can now graft a human ear onto a mouse.
      Concerned public: Pardon?
      Scientist: Well, at least the mouse heard me.

    • Because Governments and Corporations have demonstrated themselves to incompetent in the management of private and / or sensitive data. Moreover they have shown a callous disregard towards the negative consequences borne by consumers & citizens in events of identity fraud that the security breaches enable..

      Additionally surprising methods have been demonstrated which tease identities out of what was thought to be anonymous data.

      Also just because be some ass hasn't figured out something annoying or illega

  • So much easier to visit your dead relatives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ozamosi (615254) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:15AM (#22716800) Homepage
    Adding all graves will make it so much easier to visit the graves of your relatives. It's already possible to visit the cemetery through Google Earth/Maps, but it can be hard to locate your passed loved ones.

    However, I feel there's a need for an additional service to be developed: put flowers and candles on the grave. As soon as that's implemented, you'll never have to go to the cemetery again!

  • Coal Mining??? (Score:5, Informative)

    by rueger (210566) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:29AM (#22717078) Homepage
    Surely with all of that intense technology eldavojohn or Time could have figured out that coal mining stopped back in 1938 in Nanaimo. Since then it is primarily known for being one of the finest examples of really bad urban planning, for at one time having more square feet of shopping mall per capita than any place else on earth, and of course for theNanaimo International Bathtub Race. [island.net]

    To quote Ember Swift: "This is the city that Engineers enter to demonstrate just how not to build a city centre This is the city used as a symbol of haste. "
  • i was standing in the supermarket about a week ago, looking over my shopping list on my palm phone, and as i read the next item i had to get, i wondered why everything in the supermarket couldn't be available to my phone, such as where it is, if it is on sale, if it has been moved from it's regular spot in the isle to the end of the isle to attempt to make it more visible when on sale. It would make shopping more easy, but that is just one tiny way the world could be organized, i am not going to say that a

  • There was a time when cities just grew out of towns, streets went anywhere, etcetera; complexity grew organically, with the odd extreme here and there. In newer developments, streets started getting laid out in grids years ahead of need ... cue cookie-cutter houses, the 1950s, etcetera again. Now I'm no urban planner, so I shouldn't comment on it (-grin-), but this urban-information-integration prototype sure seems like a Good Thing, to me (in the sense that it's a prototype/trial of a planned information

  • because the city already sounds like a futuristic sci fi japanese anime city, or a place in a videogame, so why not have everything mapped that way too?

    furthermore, "google maps nanaimo" is exactly the kind of nonsensical phrase from the future no one would have predicted in 1978

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dubbreak (623656)

      he city already sounds like a futuristic sci fi japanese anime city

      The name is aboriginal (the politically correct term in Canada being "first nations".. ). The name Nanaimo comes from the Coast Salish name meaning "Great Mighty People", the whole", "great strong tribe" etc.

      Funny thing is no one has mentioned the dessert of the same name: Nanaimo bar [wikipedia.org].

      Whether the dessert actually originated there is debatable, whether it is delicious is not ;).

  • " ... will have 72 wireless access points to allow out-of-towners to use their laptops to navigate the Google Earth version of the city."

    Now, I don't have to go there at all. WHEW!!

  • All I can say is: neat!
  • My new tag the babies song..

    Words/Lyrics: dusty
    Music: TheDataminersJugBand

    Tag the babies, tag the pets.
    Tag the children, tag the rest.

    We want to watch the little dots.. That are people!
    We want to watch the little dots.. That are people!
    On our screens!

    Tag the old ones, tag the cold ones.
    The cold ones don't move too much.
    Naw lord, the cold ones don't move too much.

    We want to watch the little dots.. That are people!
    We want to watch the lttle dots.. That are people!
    On our screens!

    So tag th

  • This just in... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation (858215) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @11:24AM (#22718082)
    The town of Nanaimo has completely vanished, leaving behind only a flat and barren landscape where there was once a thriving, interconnected community. One relative of a Nanaimo resident reported receiving a phone call from the town shortly before it vanished.

    "I got a call from my brother Earl in Nanaimo," said Harry Wacker of Fresno, California. "He was babbling on about how they may have gone too far in connecting the town up to the intertoobs, and some sort of hogs pizzle about a 'singularity' or something. Utter nonsense, but that's Earl- loonier than a sack of weasels. You'd have to be to move to gol-damned Canada. Broke his mother's heart, he did."

    Other relatives and friends have reported hearing the voices of former Nanaimo residents coming from their game consoles, computers and other Internet connected devices, but these reports are unconfirmed.
  • What's not to love about this? As governments want more and more information about us, we should demand more information about them. This is our tax dollars at work. We should know where our money goes and how it's being used. If governments were to provide all this information, we'd have an army of fact finders going through every detail of every budget, every purchase, every opportunity to defraud the public or waste time, money, or manpower. The people would become the watchdogs over government instead of journalists. This is probably a good thing, as it's pretty clear that the journalists haven't been doing their job properly for some time.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Knuckles (8964)
      Yeah, finally anal people can bitch about the length of the grass with the help of Google. Jeeez, get a life.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cromar (1103585)
      I am a bit of a privacy nut, but I am all for more transparency in government. This story is somewhat interesting; it's neat this sort of thing is getting off the ground (finally). At some point, though, too much transparency isn't really worthwhile (like knowing when the ruddy green was mown last).
    • I think we're finally seeing the realization of the Internet's potential.

      Are you actually telling me that this is the end result? After years of listening to tech evangelists preach about the future, we find out that the future means we can instantly find out where our local fire truck is? Forgive me if I don't jump for joy.

    • It would be nice if they could get rid of road signs. All of the information would be available to your PDA amd vehicle nav. system, and the scenery would be better for it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by geoffspear (692508)
        Yeah, and screw the people who can't afford a vehicle with a nav system; who cares if they get hopelessly lost?
    • Let's see how much you love it when your potential employer brings up a list of the local strip clubs you've visited in the last year, or informs you of the number of times you've exceeded the speed limit in the city (besides the number of times you've actually been stopped by the police), and then asks you to "explain again why we should hire you."

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by partenon (749418) *
        "Because I'm competent at my work. What I do outside the company isn't an indicator of my competence or lack of professionalism"

    • Re:This makes me happy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by CastrTroy (595695) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:41AM (#22717340) Homepage
      I've always wanted to be able to see where the city buses are in real time. In Ottawa, they all (well, most anyway) have GPS units on board, so it probably wouldn't take much to have them transmit their location every 5 minutes. It really sucks when you end up waiting in the cold for 20 minutes because the bus is late. If I could see ahead of that it was going to be late, I would just stay inside until I knew the bus was close.

      • Re:This makes me happy (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Quattro Vezina (714892) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:45AM (#22717434) Journal
        Yeah, that sounds awesome.

        As someone who takes the bus to and from work every day, I'd love this.

        You know what's the only thing worse than the bus being late? The bus being early. Nothing like standing out in the cold for 20 minutes past the time the bus is supposed to arrive only to realize it must have passed your stop 15 minutes early.

      • If you live on Vancouver Island or nearby, and rely on BC Ferries like many of us do, they post real-time GPS images of ferry location and direction. [bcferries.com] They're highly addictive, since either the ferries are late, or I am. I'm a mac user mostly, so I have a web clip of my spouse's daily commute ferry one touch away.

        I think all major transport systems would benefit from this.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GlitchCog (1016986)
      I don't think any privacy activists will mind greater transparency in government. Privacy for the government isn't a privacy that should be promoted or protected in any free society.

      You have two groups:
      1) The government - has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force
      2) The people - controlled by that government, but, hopefully, with enough of a democracy to keep the government from beating the liberty out of them with the police, military, judicial system, etc.

      One of the most important tools in ke

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