Alex Muller

From the OpenStreetMap wiki, shared on Google Reader by Frankie. This is definitely worth a read:

I am currently in Port Au Prince with the Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team (USA-1) out of Fairfax, VA, USA. I wish there was a way that I can express to you properly how important your OSM files were to us. Most of our team members own their own Garmin Rino and 60CSx units on top of the units we already have in the cache. Having these detailed maps on our GPS units is a big deal. Shortly after discovering your work I quickly spread the word and transferred the street level maps onto as many Garmin units as we could before sending the American rescue teams on the streets. The team members are thrilled to have this resource you have created. I wish you could see their faces ‘light up’ when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I’m going to give them street level detail maps.

This is just fantastic news.

A while back I posted about how Jack Waterhouse was causing a stir on Facebook. In case your faith in the average person has been somewhat restored since then, I thought I’d draw your attention to the latest group to spring up: “fuck praying 4 Haiti some thing needs to control the population”.

This is troubling on at least three counts (that I can see):

1. Facebook doesn’t seem to have sufficient power to deal with stuff like this cropping up. They’ve plastered links to ‘report’ posts all over the place, but there’s no indication this actually does anything.
2. There’s still no accountability here, even with this being linked to people’s online identities; it’s too easy to play the “ahh, somebody else did this using my account” card.
3. People exist who are actually this stupid.

Charisse Rosati writes:

Id like to thank the 7.0 earthquake for visiting Haiti, Thats a few less aids infected Peices of shits that will Invade our country with their filth and disease

Eloquent.

If you’d like to help people less fortunate than you, Google’s put a link to the crisis response page on their homepage.