Nanaimo, The Google Capital of the World 227
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.'"
And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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'.
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Only if we also get rid of self-righteous, pontificating politicians that go on morality crusades against their perceived enemies in order to further their own career.
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Then again, Spitzer's crusades, however self-serving or hypocritical, were aimed at corrupt businesses that were ripping off their investors and customers. That's not moralism, that's just expecting people to play by the rules. That stuff still needs doing, even if one of its leaders turns out to have Clinton Pants Disorder.
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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
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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
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The problem is that he was married, which means that he put himself into a contract stating that he would restrict his sexual activities. Now he's in violation of that contract, and in the process has put the other party at risk of developing incurable diseases.
Don't blame the laws; he chose to marry his wife, and he chose to violate that contract even though are vali
Cheating on your wife isn't illegal in most states (Score:2)
Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh sure (Score:2)
"What's that you say? On a playground, during recess? Well, the law's the law!"
[Rolls eyes]
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No need for RFID (Score:3, Funny)
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Anything to avoid rush hour in downtown Nanaimo (Score:2)
Next thing you know, they can use this tracking information to let me know when the next train arrives on the Nanaimo Metro so I can get to Nanaimo International Airport in time for my flight to Prince George.
Re:And I suppose next (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: And I suppose next (cometh the Matrix) (Score:4, Informative)
Obscure? Have you never heard of Nanaimo Bars? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanaimo_bar [wikipedia.org]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanaimo_bar [wikipedia.org]
I knew that coal prices were rising... (Score:3, Insightful)
How long before they start building man-made islands in cute shapes?
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Not coal though, oil will buy you that. Coal is on it's way out (or at least that's what we hope for)
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Soon, I hope. I've always wanted my own Tux-shaped island.
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I'll try and contact a magrathean to build me a designers planet. Something with one tux-shaped continent, one with a solaris-logo shaped continent, and well..... Slartibartfast will probably come up with a few ideas....
Re:I knew that coal prices were rising... (Score:5, Informative)
I live about an hour north of Nanaimo, and I just told a bunch of my co-workers about the characterization of Nanaimo as a "coal mining town", which caused a pretty good round of laughter. Vancouver Island coal mining [nrcan.gc.ca] has been nearly dead for about a half a century.
The economy here is doing fairly well, considering that coastal BC seems to be one of the few places in North America where real estate is not plummetting, but I don't think they'll be making any man-made islands soon, especially since we have no shortage of natural ones.
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City corruption (Score:3, Interesting)
Boon for the Ambulance Chasers (Score:2)
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
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I guarantee that this will never happen in the US, though, over concerns that knowing where fire trucks are could potentially allow terr'ists to strike areas where the firefighters are all busy elsewhere or something silly like that.
Probably, but there is already a nifty little device to do this. It's called a police scanner. People have been using them for years to find out where public service vehicles are. Google earth doesn't help terrorists as much as a handy portable police radio would.
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Although the idea of tracking and finding a pattern to police vehicle movement is both scary and interesting.
Absolutely. Obviously that information could be used for criminal activity, but I would love to see if there is a correlation between police presence and an actual reduction in crimes. The city I live in, Greeley Colorado, recently built a new police station, only a few blocks from my home. The old one, which had been there for many years, was in one of the more high crime areas of town. It would be interesting to know what impact moving the police station has on patrol areas, and what impact that h
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You mean the part where they take existing maps and, here's the exciting part, display them in Google Earth?
The only really interesting part is updating the position of public service vehicles in real time. The other stuff is just presenting existing data via Google Earth. Things like being able to look up the trash collection schedule by Google Earth is "kinda neat" but really no more useful than a simple table. I can get that information for my town online - just not via Google Earth.
I haven't looked
Police tracking... (Score:2)
GPS on lawnmowers? (Score:3, Interesting)
You Take The Good, You Take the Bad (Score:2)
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)
Not that the SLAs buy you anything (Score:2)
Given the huge disparity between my risk and the tiny insurance that the common SLAs provide, I just don't care about those SLAs at all.
I wish I could find a provider who was willing to put some real skin in the game, but alas I am sure I couldn't get my PHB's to accept the necessarily hi
This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I don't play WoW, don't own a Wii, nor Xbox, Nintendo DS. My kids have a Game Cube I got dumpster diving. Hey it works. I don't drive
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Except that's generally not how it works. If there's a $100K mortgage taken out in Archangel Michael's name, then Archangel Michael has to prove it wasn't taken out, not the other way around. The law is skewed to the creditors, not the borrower.
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Dude, once I'm dead they can track my location and call me all they want... unless of course they start tracking me into my next life.
Re:This is cool (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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.
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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
"Cool" isn't a good enough justification though... (Score:2)
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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.
To storing and indexing you!
Blhack (click here to learn more)
*click*
Real name: Arthur Smith
Age: 31
Sex: born intersexed, gender-assigned male (parents never told him)
Sexual Orientation: straight, but there was that one time at band camp... (click here for video)
Interests: Posting on slashdot, furry porn
Marital Status: Married
Wife: Maylin Smith, born Martin Hazleton (sex change operation in 1998, Arthur unaware)
Children: Bobby Smith
Sue Sm
So much easier to visit your dead relatives (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
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A drag and drop interface for this would be great!
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Coal Mining??? (Score:5, Informative)
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. "
maybe (Score:2)
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Next time you go to the store with your list, note where they are so that you next visit can be more efficient
Urban Planning 2.0 (Score:2)
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
why they chose nanaimo (Score:2)
furthermore, "google maps nanaimo" is exactly the kind of nonsensical phrase from the future no one would have predicted in 1978
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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
This save me a trip (Score:2)
" ... 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!!
In A Word (Score:2)
Tag the babies!1! (Score:2)
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
My 2 cents (Score:2)
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What about the bars? (Score:2, Informative)
JJ
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What's not to love? It's the Holy Trinity of yummy goodness, all in one delicious snack.
And, of course, my Mom's are the best.
So there.
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I'm Shocked No One Already Mentioned This... (Score:2)
"I Knew a girl and her name was Joe...." (Score:2)
Those lines have been in my head for many many years now.... = )
Nanaimo used to be quite the dump--and rough, but they've been doing a lot to fix it up since the 90s. Wonder if that hot pink Mexican restaurant on the hill is still open....
Nice to see that they are continuing their efforts.
Forcing geeks to become Luddite-Lites (Score:2)
I used to want a cell phone that did everything. I used to want to wear a computer on my sleeve. I thought it would be great for my refrigerator to tell me I'm low on mustard... but it's things like this complete Googling of a cit
This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
"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.
Driving in Nanaimo (Score:2)
I wish they had spent the money on actually figuring out how to get around the mess that is downtown Nanaimo. The street grid dates back to the 19th century, and it shows. Ugh.
Who needs streets when there are more malls to build! From the B.C. Ferries terminal to the north edge of town you pass at least 4 enclosed malls, plus numerous strip malls.
...laura
Real time rail map for Switzerland (Score:2, Interesting)
ultimate google earth (Score:2)
I wonder what it would take to keep the entire Earth covered in that level of detail. Why do I want something like this? So I can show it to Dick Cheney. He'll spooge so hard in his pants his heart will explode.
Wee, my home town made it onto Slashdot! (Score:2)
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Are they insane? (Score:2)
I love this idea of complete transparency (Score:4, Interesting)
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You know, when I was at school I once worked for the municipal utility's public gardening service during summer. Whenever we had some downtime, regardless of whether it was to have a smoke or because we were waiting for the tractor to come back (so that we had something to throw the cut grass onto) we had to hide behind some bushes, because some jerk of other from the surrounding apartments would always immediately call the company to complain. Jackasses li
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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.
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No kidding. I'd be much more interested in knowing where Eliot Spitzer's been.
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Re:This makes me happy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This makes me happy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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In Vancouver you can send a text with a stop code to get texted back the schedule. I don't know if that's when the busses are actually running or just the pre-planned schedule though.
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e.g. NextBus for Chapel Hill, NC [nextbus.com]
BC Ferries realtime (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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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...with a stinky pulp mill nearby. Of course that's the smell of MONEY :)
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It creates an interesting effect in those towns. Before the seniors get there, it's a very seasonal population with lumber and tourism providing most of the employ