The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘drop-the-route’

Sometimes there are many ways to get from point A to point B, whether you are walking or driving. Until now, Google Maps’ directions feature has given you the route they consider the best and allows you to drag and drop the route to change your path. Today, Google Maps is adding functionality that suggests additional routes so that you can see all of them on the map for comparison.

Under a “Suggested Routes” heading, you will now be able to access other routes to the same destination. This is a feature that GPS systems in car, like a Garmin device, have been offering for quite some time so it makes sense that Google would want to catch up. Google says that they choose alternative routes bases on many factors, including distance, travel time, and number of turns. Google Maps boils this data down to what is the lowest “cost” and ranks the routes based upon the “cost.”

MapQuest doesn’t suggest alternate routes but the site does let you choose alternate routes by filtering directions by no toll roads, highways, and distance, which is a function Google Maps has as well.

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Celebrities get impersonated on the web. They’re famous — everyone is anonymous — it happens. Most celebrities just ignore it; but some get pissed off. Kanye West got mad as hell about Twitter users pretending to be him last week. This week it’s Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler who is up in arms — to the point of actually taking anonymous bloggers to court.

Tyler attempted to sue a group of bloggers that he says were impersonating him, sharing private facts, making false statements even using his likeness on the web, NBC Los Angeles reports. The only problem? The whole “anonymous” thing. Seeing as no one really knows who these bloggers are, they naturally didn’t bother showing up to court. Hell, I’m quite certain they didn’t even know they were supposed to be in court. So the judge dismissed the case.

Tyler is apparently most upset about these anonymous bloggers posting some comments about his mother who passed away last year. I wasn’t able to find those, but I did find a robust web community around “Fake Steven Tyler.” There’s a popular one in the Rock Band Forums, a group on Facebook (also based around his Rock Band avatar), there’s even a Wikipedia page and an odd YouTube video (embedded below).

Twitter took down the fake Kanye West accounts at his request, but it’s hard to see what Tyler or a court could do in this case. A good first step would be to figure out who you’re actually suing though.

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