This is not new, and has been known for many years.

Interestingly enough, this policy is awkward - borderline useless - for two reasons. First, any satellite imagery, at any resolution, can be purchased on the private market, for the right price. Maybe not from the US, but it's not like the US is the only country that collects satellite imagery.

But there is a more interesting aspect to this story. Israel does allow publishing high-resolution imagery of its territories, given that they have been censored. Thus, you get ridiculous images such as a huge park in the middle of Tel Aviv, where clearly the Kirya [1] usually stands.

The fun starts once you diff a censored map with a publicly available one, even if it's low-res. Even an untrained eye can easily spot places that someone does not want you to look at. (I have been toying with the idea of mining satellite imagery and running image diffs between censored and uncensored versions of the same area.)

Ridiculous, considering that most secret places blend in perfectly with their surroundings.

Had they not been censored, no one would notice these facilities.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaKirya

This is one of the best and most damning analyses of Groupon I've seen yet, which is kinda surprising coming from TC but I guess it is a guest post.

The biggest parts of this are the account risk, the needing to grow revenue to pay existing liabilities (which is and should be a huge warning flag for any enterprise) and just how much room there is for someone to do this better.

My only fear is that a collapse of Groupon--which I actually see as a non unrealistic possibility--will taint other Internet/tech IPOs and, even worse, prompt the Federal government into more kneejerk regulation even stupider and more onerous than Sarbanes-Oxley.

Since I don't see this specifically addressed in the text: I suspect this is a classic case of survivorship bias. The same way the stock market looks better and better the further back you go, because you aren't tracking the stocks of companies that are no longer in business, developers probably look better and better the further they are into their careers, since all the ones who've fallen by the wayside probably were the weaker developers who found something better to do with their time.

As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of witnessing them second- or third-hand.

I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better over that decade. It can be done.