For those who think that Dick Cheney might not really be gone -- suspecting that somehow the Darth Vader of American politics might be hiding in some closet in an undisclosed location ready to infect the bureaucracy with poisonous legal memos -- now comes proof that we really have moved on.

It seems Google Maps now has a clear satellite view [5] of the vice president's residence on Massachusetts Ave., which has not been the case for about eight years.

The funny thing is that when tech detectives first discovered the blurred image of the Naval Observatory, which includes the vice president's home, Google insisted that it was all very normal. "Our imagery generally comes from third-party suppliers, some of which may blur images before they provide them to Google," a Google spokesman told Wired. 

According to the AFP, Google reportedly got the updated image from Digital Globe, a company that provides photographs from commercial satellites. The former picture with obscured pixels was from U.S. Geological Survey, according to Google.

Hm. Wonder who ordered that.