Interesting looking conference on the "public domain" [slashdot thread]

Dim Sum and Mapquest

Last night, a friend sent out an invitation for dim sum at Jade Villa.  I gladly obliged, though the rain made me pause.  The food and the company were wonderful, a great contrast to the sad news from New York today.

I didn't bring my camera to Jade Villa, but the aerial map of the Rockaway neighborhood (pointed to by Dave Winer today) got me to think about the fun Mapquest service.  Here's the default Mapquest map for 800 Broadway, Oakland (the address of Jade Villa):

A cool feature of Mapquest is that one can then switch over to an aerial map view (if available):

However, it's not very easy to correlate the features of the aerial photo with that of the map.  Wouldn't it be cool if we had the ability to merge the two images?  The following is an overlay of the two images:

Now, I'm able to pick out where Jade Villa actually is on the aerial map. In case I ever need to fly to Jade Villa, I'll be set.

Would Mapquest have any interest in implementing this feature?  It would certainly make the aerial maps much more useful....

BTW, it took a little while to work around the Netscape 4.7 bug of overlapping images. I don't like disliking Netscape but Opera had no problem with the images...