So uh, would this qualify for the Darwin awards if he doesn't make it?
RH> Today a French officer called Michel Fournier is supposed to get in a
RH> 350-metre tall helium balloon, ride it up to the edge of space (40 km
RH> altitude) and jump out.  His fall should last 6.5 minutes and reach
RH> speeds of Mach 1.5.  He hopes to open his parachute manually at the
RH> end, although with an automatic backup if he is 7 seconds from the
RH>   "Vederò, si averò si grossi li coglioni, come ha il re di Franza."
RH>   ("Let's see if I've got as much balls as the King of France!")

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On 9/8/02 7:38 AM, "Gary Lawrence Murphy" <garym@canada.com> wrote:
>   J> ...  If you want a region of the globe mapped out to a very
>   J> high resolution (e.g. 1-meter), they can scan the area with
>   J> aircraft LIDAR and add it to the database, thereby making that
>   J> region zoomable to the resolution of the database for that
>   J> area.
>
> Can you give us an example of an application where 1-m resolution
> would be worth the considerable expense?
An example:  Being able to model RF propagation in three dimensions for a
metro area when deploying wireless networks.  By having every single tree
and building detail and similar, you can "see" even tiny dead spots due to
physical blockage and signal attenuation.  Overlay this with fiber map data
for yourself and your competitors (when you can glean such data), which is
also useful at this resolution, and you have a very slick way of modeling
existing network deployments in excruciating detail and optimizing further
deployments to maximize coverage and bandwidth.  Take that and tie it into a
slick geo-physically aware real-time network monitoring and management
system and you've really got something...
For many applications though, 5-meter data is probably adequate.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com