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No way anyone in West Texas would bother driving all the way to Sabine... see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22149320

OpenStreetMap's definition of Beaverton is quite complicated: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/423111 It includes several cut-outs for neighborhoods (including Cedar Hills) and other features. I'd guess that the OSM mappers were trying to represent a particular legal definition of the Beaverton city limits. How accurate it is, I wouldn't know.

Perhaps in situations like this, "City Roads" might consider ignoring the cut-out enclaves and just using the mulipolygon's outer boundaries.

The power line showing up as a road is a mystery. If you can locate the corresponding feature on OSM you might want to investigate it. (There may in fact be a road or trail of some sort, though -- it's common for powerlines to have a track for maintenance vehicles.)

Wordpad is great for reading and authoring documents with text attributes but without page formatting. It's comparable to TextEdit on MacOS. And compared to Word or LibreOffice it produces extremely clean RTF code. (Or it used to, haven't used it in Windows 10.)

And yes, it's handy for opening .doc and .docx files if no office suite is installed. ("Because reasons" often being that it's not a machine under your control.)

It's more like a usenet/twitter hybrid than reddit.

Car burglary != car theft. The 70/day number refers to break-ins, generally a broken car window and stolen belongings -- loose change, usb charger, fuzzy dice, laptop, whatever.

Are "pants" good or bad? I can never remember...

N.b., it's the stated policy of OpenStreetMap to not take information from Google... not primarily out of zealotry, but because Google's terms of service conflict with the ODBL license, and they don't want the organisation in legal trouble.

Normally this means no copying from Google Maps or Google's satellite or street-level imagery. (It also means no using Google's geocoding API if you have addresses that you want to add, but don't know where they should be added -- low-budget SEO companies tend to do this a lot.)

Using Google Translate -- and not even to translate, but just as a way to get copy-pastable handwriting recognition -- is a greyer area, but I probably would still recommend avoiding it. But nor do I know of any free alternatives offhand.

It's an early implementation of the same idea as the mouse scroll wheel. Engage scroll lock, and the arrow keys are used for scrolling the current text view instead of moving the cursor.

The idea of also using it to pause scrolling console text, I think, originated in Linux.

> When all three switches are off, power is also killed to sensors a la "Lockdown Mode"

Personally, with all these switches off, I'd still want GPS for offline navigation.

If your browsing history is of value, than giving it (or even just the portions of it that are manually typed into the url bar) away is a cost to you. You can't point to a dollar amount on an invoice, so in that sense it's not "non-theoretical." But if you believe that personal information can be valuable -- and it's pretty clear that it can, especially in the aggregate -- then calling this a "cost" is not a joke.

Seashore (a severely gimped GIMP) is a decent simple editor for OSX.

https://github.com/robaho/seashore

I could imagine having a file with correctly-synced subs in the wrong language. Maybe that would be a good reference file.

(I think you're correct subbing "subtitles file" for "video file".)

While we're dreaming, how about ports in the front! Miss my aluminum tower.

In my experience, most people simply use "alum" for the singular, "alums" for the plural. Dropping the n, even!

(a.k.a. former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, for the title-too-long-can't-parse crowd.)

The article's a fun read, and indicates that the originals were a product of Chinese tailors using Japanese kimono fabric in a hybrid Filipino/European style at the request of middle-class Hawaiian school boys.

You can try Kurviger -- it uses OpenStreetMap data and chooses "fun" curving routes using the Graphhopper routing engine.

https://kurviger.de/en

The New York City Office of Emergency Management has a "pre-fab brownstone" demo assembled in downtown Brooklyn. They're hoping to be able to relocate entire neighborhoods when another event like Sandy hits.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6996729,-73.9898138,3a,65.6y...

And it's similar in form to verbs like detect and protect. Maybe the noun should be architector.

On both Aloha 243 and United 811, it was the first-class cabin that broke apart. In both cases seatbelts kept passengers from being sucked out of their seats. Aloha 243 lost a flight attendant who wasn't buckled in... but United 811 lost two whole rows of first class seats, passengers and all. And at least one passenger was sucked into the engine. So maybe being behind the engine isn't so bad.

It's a common trope that the rear of the aircraft is safer, since it usually crashes nose-first. Back when the rear rows were the designated smoking section, one would always hear a few rounds of "smoking saved my life!" after a fatal plane crash.

> “we found the suspect’s fingerprints at the scene, is it possible the suspect wasn’t there?”

This is a perfect example of "begging the question"! Hopefully we can ammend the question with "we found a fingerprint at the scene that matches the suspect" and get that number down to 11/12.

The default search functionality on OSM ("reverse geocoding" in mapspeak) does, indeed, need a lot of improvement. It's actually a separate project called Nominatim[1]. It's on Github and you can browse the issues and see a lot of similar complaints.

It's a daunting problem, parsing a free text query that may be in any language and trying to best match it with addresses that are standardized a hundred different ways all over the globe. In its current state it isn't good enough for everyday use. It's annoying how often a Google Maps search sends me to the wrong state or even the wrong country. But with Nominatim it's almost a given.

This underscores one of the fundamental features/bugs of the OSM project: It's pretty good at attracting mappers, developers, and 3rd-party projects that use its data and APIs, but it's never really been designed to meet the needs of end users. UX, according to the classic OSM schema, is to be implemented by the various 3rd parties in whatever way suits them best. If someone wants to develop and host a Google Maps replacement using OSM data they're welcome to do it (and they can provide their own reverse geocoding solution if necessary) but that's not an immediate goal of OSM itself, according to the current leadership.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

> Creating an account is a pain point for some people.

Fair enough. And even fairer, if you're not an experienced mapper you may easily be able to spot a problem but not be sure how exactly to fix it. OSM has you covered -- right-click the map and select "Add a note here". Add a quick note with all relevant info. It won't appear on the map, but mappers who are working in the area will (hopefully) see it and fix it.

Not sure if Gnome Maps implements this functionality, but most phone-based OSM clients do.

After spending some time adding info to OSM, you'll start to see plenty of cases where Google and Yelp have info for an establishment that's nowhere to be found on their website. And even for some businesses that don't have a website at all. Some of it's extracted from their street view imagery, but some of it clearly isn't. I can walk by my local bakery and their phone number and hours aren't posted anywhere visible. Maybe they're on the takeout menu. Maybe a business card. Maybe they're printed on the receipt. Maybe you actually have to ask someone.

You can't assume that everything on Google Maps is from scanning public web sites. Sometimes, apparently, they do some actual investigation.

Plus, Google's not always right anyway! Nothing's more embarrassing than being caught copying incorrect information. So do your own research. Obviously copying info from a public website is fine, but info on the ground is going to be more complete and reliable. (Plenty of businesses are sloppy about updating their websites.)

Go Map!! (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Go_Map!!) is pretty good for iOS.

Updating OpenStreetMap is incredibly easy. Create an account, click edit (iD, the javascript-based map editor, is intuitive and highly functional), make changes, click "save."

The hard part is learning how to map well. The documentation is fragmented: There's a multi-language wiki with a lot of inconsistencies in the translations. There are dozens of mailing lists for various regions and sub-topics. There are IRC channels. There's a web forum. There's a subreddit. There's a Stack-Overflow-style Q&A help site. There are Youtube videos. And you can often find a different answer to a simple question in each of these resources! A little chaotic. But I wouldn't quite call it painful.

Yes, compañero, this is pretty much what I was getting at. I said it was a little more understandable, but I didn't mean to imply it was correct.

I guess "Fifteen years ago, American armed forces and American mercenaries destroyed my country at the bidding of the democratically elected leaders, but with only partial consent of the citizens" was too wordy.

To be serious, blaming an "entire country" is a little more understandable if that country is a functioning democracy. Of course, if it's actually an oligarchy where the government is above the law and many voters are disenfranchised and easily manipulated by unchecked propaganda, then... well, that's frustrating.

It's a little odd to hold a civilian citizen of a despotic regime accountable for his government's actions.

The obvious solution is to remove the on-street car parking on at least one side of any street that hosts a bike lane, and use the space for a separated bike route with a protective barrier. Unfortunately I doubt it's politically feasible at this time. There's plenty of resistance to bike lanes already; reducing the street parking would be seen as an undue hardship on the middle class.

I do feel things will change over time though -- I know several New Yorkers who used to have cars but now, in the age of car/bike sharing and app-enabled car services, no longer own one.