i've been playing with it myself. it's wicked. i love how the view "flies" you to your next destination. check out the oblique view over some mountain ranges. really cool!

Yea, as cool as this is it's scarey to think others with "dangerous intentions" have access to this...

these are not 'current' views, but pictures taken 'sometime' before...

the street where I live is nowhere to be seen so is a whole new neighborhood in my area.

so it can't be used to spy on someone...besides, there is Echelon for this already ;-)

This coupled with Mapquest (yes, I know you can overlay the streets in Google Earth), makes a GREAT route planning tool for rides. Wish I'd had this years ago...

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Some are born to move the world to live their fantasies...

https://triomultisport.com/
http://www.mjolnircycles.com/

I just found this a few days ago. I run a lot of fireroads and trails in the state/national parks around here. I can use google earth to track elevation gains on the fire roads, and to pick new routes, which is pretty incredible. Been having a lot of fun with it. Cool to be able to see a whole route from above as well.

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"He broke into the long easy lope, and went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that put man and his magnetic needle to shame."

-Call of the Wild

I guess this is what they did with Keyhole.com? They bought keyhole sometime ago - those are the pics cnn uses. This stuff is so cool... now where is my alwayson-wireless-gpsenabled-h.u.d. Briko helmet that I ordered

Google-Earth is a very handy tool for measuring the distances of your runs. Using the Tools-Measure-Path option it seems to me to be very accurate. Some very clever math needs to go on in order to achieve that, given the elevation changes, and umpteen other factors. This beats the hell out of wearing a GPS watch.

Anyway, here's something even better, they've mapped the moon, you should zoom in onto the moon landing sites:
http://moon.google.com/
Absolutely fascinating

The view is over two years old... my street had a new water main installed two years ago. It was then freshly paved... In photo you can clearly see the "patching" job where the new pipe was laid.

maps.google.com is nice, no need to download and you can toggle the satellite view.

clever math??? you mean, doing stuff like
if you go uphill and the angle is alpha, would do d is it was flat and therefore do d/cos (alpha)...
and add each little segment...
pretty ok software sure...but very clever math, certainly not.

Very funny.. the moon turns into "cheese" if you zoom in enough.

No, I don't mean that, that's all a piece of cake even to we mortals. I was referring to things like the terrain layer, which adds perspective for elevation of all of the visible terrain from the current viewpoint, or the fact that the software uses photographs that obviously are not all taken from directly above, so need to be stretched etc to match the map (you'll see the sides of some vertical buildings, but the map measurements are still correct). It's all just Pythag, but lots of it. Actually, to the average bloke in the street, basic Pythag' is clever math! What's clever to some may not be to you, but your reply is as condescending as if somebody got excited about managing to run a 7 minute mile, and then you were to tell them that it's not fast 'cos you can run 26 of them at the end of an Ironman (if you ever finish one).

I wasn't condescending...just pointing out that it was trivial...
and I have finished an IM.

by the way BB, that little attempt at an insult was all you could do?