GIS

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has decided on another stupid patent of the month [1], and in this case it relates to geographic information visualized on the internet (aka web maps). Sometimes entertaining, sometimes frustrating read. In any case, I think it's good to know about such practices, if only to be prepared when such a patent troll knocks at our doors. Fortunately, it seems that he days of this particular practice are numbered.

We all know that distance computations are a common thing in many GIS projects, and that all serious spatial data systems allow you to perform such computations through a built-in function, often simply called distance. And everyone of us knows the square root definition for the case of point-to-point distances.