If there was an award for offline editing you would win it by a mile. Working without your own computer, limited internet connection and still contributes massive amounts of data to this project. You are an inspiration to us all.

A lot of the heavy users seem to be wanting the same goal; gratis maps without internett. The only program I know of that does this without mass downloading is OsmAnd which comes with its own tile renderer and a sqlite vector map. This is the same model as Google maps have for their online application. Provided a light tile server that can fit on an embeded device and use a compact (filtered) database that can be updated with ease, how much will the trafic on the tile servers drop?

A SPAM about SPAM.

It seems someone is confusing mph and km/h. OSM uses metric units so the data states that the speed limit is 90 km/h.

It is most common in the states to use mph so it shoud say "55 mph".

Do not upload Yahoo data or Bing data!!!

You are only allowed to trace from the satelite images from those providers. Only the satelite images and not any highway data.

If Harry is right and they only spam to get a high Page rank could it not be possible to disable links when a web crawler visits the diary. This would give lower Page rank to real web sites as well unless we do some fancy shit.
In help.osm.org we could set a limit of say 100 points to be allowed to post links. However this does not work if the spam bot is helpfull.

A report spam button would be nice, possibly with the ability to temporary take down a comment after x reports.

I would prefer spamers spaming the diary, message system, help, forum, wiki, etc. and not require them to spam the map data itself.

I am glad someone have joy over the Bing photos. In my area it seems GeoEye skipped the ortification and we are left with wild inaccuracies that render the photos unusable :(

I envy you who have aerial photo over your area. Only hope now is that Microsoft gets ortophoto over our area. Why don't they release the Bird's eye pictures?

Looking at http://munin.openstreetmap.org/openstreetmap/smaug.openstreetmap/index.html the database has a lower load between 00:00 and 06:00 GMT. It would seem that that is the best time to run bots.

If the rails are removed to accommodate the road then you should not tag the abandoned railway at all as it is no longer there. If however you have a case of a railway on a road (like a tram) then you can tag the way as both a highway and a railway at the same time.

OSM is about mapping what is on the ground. According to the wikipedia article the area is administered by China. Wether or not other countries are claiming that area it is de facto Chinese. The boarder should then be placed on the line of actual control. Google have to be more political, but OSM can be factual.

But disputed areas are a problem in OSM. It is no technical problem with one area being in several multipolygons at once, but the problem is that someone might resort to vandalism. The best we can do is to remain as objective as possible.

It is allowed to put a name= tag on postboxes if you know the name. It is not allowed to copyright public knowledge, so if you know something without having to look it up there is no copyright on it. However you can not just memorize a work and then call it public knowledge.

In most cases you can assume that all post boxes in a country have the same operator (RM) so the operator tag can be omitted. You don't tag every road with an operator for the same reason.

That is why JOSM came with the option to filter data to edit. That way you can filter out all the messy shapes that would otherwise ruin your editing.

CloudMade have an extract that you can download OSM data for Jamaica at http://downloads.cloudmade.com/north_america/jamaica
They have similar extracts all over the world.

As I do not know what data type you want this in I can not help you converting it into a format that FSX understands. You could try the shapefiles as this is a widely supported file type that is a common standard for map data outside of OSM.

If you append /status to the tile url you get when it was last rendered. All tile urls are on the form http://c.tile.openstreetmap.org/[z]/[x]/[y].png

There is a T@H project that renderes the osmarender layer. Seehttp://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/T@h for more info.

If you wonder about an import send the user a message. Often there are local mailing lists where imports gets discussed.

You could try any of the methods in osm.wiki/Shapefiles

But all these tools makes assumptions as osm does not use polegons but instead ways with special tags or relations.

I think that the mapnik name rendering rule does not filter any tags. If it has a highway=* and a name=* it gets rendered.

As for the addresses see osm.wiki/Addr

This looks great. I am stunned of the NED9 quality. You can even map buildings and roads from this.
Witch made me think; I am not an expert on US informational justice but isn't this data public domain? That means that we might use it for mapping.
After reading about NED I found out that it is actualy an ortogram. It is derrived from areal photographs for the use of rectification. Then where is the original ortphoto? And isn't that something we might trace?

I call fake. No way anybody have put this together for OSM. It looks like it is cut from another add.

@drlizau He is the one in the centre with the realy pale skin.