yellowbkpk
Joined 18 years ago
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Oct 2
@iandees on twitter.
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Comment · 1 month ago
Tesla routing uses a mix of its own data and TomTom, which uses OSM. As a point of reference, I fixed a road name in OSM ~3 years ago and flagged it through TomTom's site directly ~2 years ago and the Tesla map hasn't fixed it yet.
Comment · 5 months ago
Check out this video that goes into a very deep technical explanation about how the satellites can be used as a Synthetic Aperature Radar to build a realtime representation of the entire globe at meters of resolution: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jbp3kdJZ1_A
Comment · 1 year ago
It's interesting that this feels awkward to you, because when apps don't function this way it feels broken and odd to me. When I tap a PDF attachment in an email I expect the back button to go back to the email I was just viewing, not the list of PDFs on my phone. If I wanted to view all the PDFs on my device, I would start at the PDF viewer and tap into PDFs from there.
I wonder what experience made this feel more awkward for you (and conversely, why it feels more natural for me). What a weird/complex world we live in!
Comment · 1 year ago
Nope, unfortunately Royal Post claims copyright on all of the address data and won't release it unless you pay.
Comment · 1 year ago
I love seeing all the great comments in here about the different APIs and the features they do and don't offer, but I want to point out that the underlying data for addresses is incredibly hard to find. The reason the commercial geocoding providers won't let you store their data is because they're worried you'll store enough data to build your own geocoder.
To help with this, a group of folks (including me) started OpenAddresses (https://openaddresses.io/ and https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses/) with the goal of finding every open address dataset in the world. We produce a zip file with 100M's of addresses that several of the APIs mentioned in this thread use as a major part of their dataset. We've been going for well over 10 years now, but it would be great to have more eyes looking for more address sources. Check us out!
Comment · 1 year ago
There is no "official US Gov list of ZIP codes". They come from the US Postal Service, and those aren't published for free.
Comment · 2 years ago
It's public and private. It still has to make money to survive because it doesn't get much in the way of tax money.
https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/postal-serv...
Comment · 2 years ago
It boils down to the fact that the United States does not have (public domain) knowledge of every address in the country.
The USPS knows about deliverable addresses but won't give that information to the federal government because then it'd be public domain and they would lose several of their primary data moats (Zipcodes, addresses, delivery routes, for example). The Census has very complete knowledge of every address, but won't give it up because it's illegal (see Title 13 of the US Code). There is an ongoing attempt by the DOT to collect a National Address Database (https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database) by collecting information from the address assigning authorities (usually county governments), but it's incomplete and unlikely to ever be complete because of holdout/underfunded local governments.
There are several address datasets that are private (Google has a fairly complete one, FedEx/UPS probably have the most complete, TomTom, CostQuest, etc.). I started https://openaddresses.io/ to try and collect them (NAD is based off this idea) into an open-licensed dataset.
The broadband companies have records that say "this address is connected to this network, which could theoretically have this service level", but (a) they won't/can't tell you where they think the address is and (b) won't spend the time to match their address string format with the government's address because both are private data.
Finally, without the address -> location data, even if we could get broadband providers to tell us what service is available at each address, we couldn't put that service level on a map because we don't know where the address is.
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The Markup published some work in 2022 where they used OpenAddresses to use ISP's own tools to gather per-address service offerings and put them on a map. This is what the FCC's broadband map should be doing, but can't for the above (and political) reasons: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncov...
Comment · 5 years ago
At least Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft.
Comment · 6 years ago
Interestingly, it wasn't the Obama administration that tried to build the high speed rail. It was the Republican governor of Wisconsin (Tommy Thompson) that pushed for it. Scott Walker used it as a wedge to split the electorate and win the election. Wisconsin Public Radio did a great podcast about it here: https://www.wpr.org/derailed/wisconsins-high-speed-rail-saga...
Comment · 6 years ago
The Toner style from Stamen has several different layers that you can use to accomplish what you're talking about:
- Hybrid does exactly what you're looking for: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-hybrid/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
But they also break that down into labels and lines:
- Labels: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-labels/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
- Lines: http://maps.stamen.com/toner-lines/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
Their Terrain style has a similar separation:
- Lines: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-lines/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
- Labels: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-labels/#12/37.7706/-122.3782
- Background: http://maps.stamen.com/terrain-background/#12/37.7706/-122.3...
Comment · 7 years ago
Thank you for sharing this. One small typo or formatting error: The last line is missing a ~/ and should be: `sudo chown -R nobody:nobody ~/.zoomus`
Comment · 7 years ago
Take a look at the AWS Elevation Tiles: https://registry.opendata.aws/terrain-tiles/
While at Mapzen (RIP), I helped generate these from a wide selection of open elevation data sources.
Comment · 8 years ago
OSM editors are prevented from using Google Maps because OSM prefers that we have explicit permission to use data sources. Since we don't have explicit permission to use Google Maps, we can't use it.
Separately, Google Maps has a terms of use that prevent reuse of Google Maps data. You agree to those terms when visiting Google Maps or using Google Maps API.
You wouldn't be breaking copyright law when copying from Google Maps to OSM, you'd be breaking the terms of use contract with Google and community Norma expectations in OSM.