Planet Explorer Beta
planet.com
planet.com
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Hence my defense of Planet having TOS requiring feedback for their beta).
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.
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.
It is hosted on Google Cloud.
Account may be required, but here's an excellent example of the use: The Oroville Dam.
https://www.planet.com/explorer/#/geometry/POLYGON((-121.518...
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.
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.
The photo of my backyard hasn't been updated for more than 3 years, for example.
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).
EDIT: With access to the daily views via a free account one can indeed see winter days in which it's all covered in white :)
It's the same projection most online maps use, which is a bummer. Equirectangular (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection) is much easier to grok (IMHO) and is supported out of the box by D3.
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.
It's 2017, update your website footer! http://updateyourfooter.com/
The copyright notice only serves (informally) to indicate the start-point for this time.
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.