Slashdot Mirror
Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls
Sylvestre writes "Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast. The goal? Busting people putting up illegal sea walls. The catch so far? One golf course covered the beach with boulders. Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Best use of technology I've seen all month!"
Question... why would making a "sea wall" be illegal?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I'm assuming any golf course that has "field of boulders" as a hazard is pretty damn hardcore.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
But what the heck are they doing using Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 as the HTML editor ???
If you talk the talk, please walk the walk
"Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free."
Err. Why does that sound like one of the Cosby kids trying to conince their dad that he should buy them a computer? I mean, who cares if it has 44 gigs of photos? None of us are going to download that many. Who cares if it runs on solar power? We're not paying for it. And who cares if it's MS free? We wouldn't know the difference if they were using MS for anything.
I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but the way they presented those last bits of detail suggests to me they were trying really really hard to make sure Slashdot posts this story.
I dunno, maybe I missed the point and each of those details was uber-important to understanding what this guy is doing. Sure.
"Derp de derp."
TGV was really goddamned cool. They were purchased by Cisco a few years ago and it all went to hell. They used to have catered lunches every Friday (I attended several of them) and every time I went it was from somewhere else that was good.
Anyway I didn't know the place myself well enough to actually know who was responsible for any of the cool shit, but TGV used to make network software for VAXen. I logged into a pub ftp that used their ftpd once, it was a joy because it made it look like Unix.
In any case TGV made the fastest TCP stack for Windows 3.1. It didn't make much of a difference when it came to doing PPP or SLIP over a modem because modems were max 28.8k in those days and they were real modems with buffered FIFOs and whatnot. But if you were using 10mbps ethernet or better then the TGV stack was dramatically faster than trumpet's. They also made a fast TCP stack for Windows 95 etc, but Cisco didn't do anything with it and by the time they were ready to do anything with TGV they had crushed the place's spirit, failed to open reqs for needed personnel, etc. Some of the engineers went to Cisco, and some of them went elsewhere. I'm not sure if the Santa Cruz office is still there or not. The person who was the director of the site at the time I quit from that office (As a Cisco employee) was a plant from Cisco, and not technical at all at that point. (She supposedly wrote some code at some point, IIRC.)
TGV is the birthplace of the Mainframe Mouse. It was made of ~0.75" acrylic, and contained a normal-scale mouse attached to a bowling ball. You sat on it and gripped the handlebars... well you get the idea.
TGV used to be the groovy kind of place that needed a soldering iron even though they were a software developer. Hold your hat over your heart when you remember the last time you saw a shop like that last.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Although it is only a week old, the site already has received more than 5,000 hits.
Was the article accepted to be put on slashdot just to up those number of hits a bit more??
which would take up about 99 CD-ROMS' worth of computer memory
Hmm, I hope they don't send the archives using 99 CD's worth... we all know what an environmentally friendly company AOL is with their set of coasters. ;)
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
If I have photos proving you did something illegal, then the burden of proof is still on me as the accuser. Its just I already have proof.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
holy crap, you can see my house!
Meanwhile, in an attempt to one-up Ken's website californiacoastline.org, photographer J. Smiley has published a new web site: jennascoastline.org in which he promises to photograph every 500mm of Jenna Jameson's body. Environmentalists hope they can use this new data to finally settle the "are those real" debate.
The step for advocacy againsg illegal acts is:
1: Identify act
2: Confirm act is illegal
3: Publicice act as illegal.
One does not skip step 2, unless one wants to get slapped with a nasty slander / libel suit. (IANAL,BIWIWO)
44 gigs of images has nothing on some socially impared guys I know.
After thinking about my post above... Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.
I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.
(Like getting free publicity on Slashdot for using exclusively non-MS technology for a cool task, perhaps.....? Naaaaahhhh....)
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
This isn't vigilanteism. Is he breaking the law? Is he walking in with a jackhjammer and breaking the seawalls? He's simply taking pictures. It's the equivalent of a citizen's watch group.
Doh! I get it! It's okay to be a vigilante for lefty causes! For instance, Eco-terrorism is okay!
This terrorizes you? You feel terror while visiting this website? Timid little guy, aren't you.
It's the coastline after all. The guy isn't breaking into buildings or anything. What he is doing is similar to a very successful group called the Riverkeepers. This group patrols the Hudson river and watches for people dumping illegally. They are the major reason that the Hudson is no longer the utter cesspool it used to be. The government has neither the resources nor the inclination to enforce its environmental laws and so it is up to citizens to do so.
He is leaning out the side of a helicopter taking these photos? How about mounting this on the bottom of the copter in a rattle-free housing and having the photos taken automatically at specfic time intervals.
This is like a Barney Rubble story of aerial photography.
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
I like the idea of converting to solar power especially in Ontario.
The size of solar array that I would need is only about four times larger than my property in downtown Toronto.
However, if I stack the panels four high I believe I can fit them all in.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I don't know but when i read
No Microsoft products were used in creating this web site.
My first thought when I read this was the disclaimer
No animals were harmed in the making of this film that always appears at the bottom of movie credits.
I stole this Sig
Um
Perhaps you ought to look into fuel consumption for a R44 before you go spouting off.
If you were to look at the R44 Spec Sheet you'll see that the standard fuel capacity is 30.6 US gal. with a max range of 400 miles.
A little simple math shows us that 400/30.6 is equal to what kids? That's right, 13.07 mpg. Now, let's take a look at the gas economy on your SUV..... hmm... Comparible, is it?
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
and I quote:
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0"> <meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Lots of other folks have posted the explanation - beaches in CA are PUBLIC property. Nobody owns them except CA citizens. Someone builds a rock wall in a public park, it's vandalism. They do something that accelerates erosion or otherwise degrades the environment, IN A PUBLIC PARK, they should get their heads handed to them.
add to that:
"...and is SLASHDOTTED to hell and back."
The beaches-- or to be precise, land that is submerged at high tide, belongs to the people. Not to any private entity. This legal tradition dates from the time of Justinian. If people want to congregate on beaches, ajoining private property, that's their business.
Now here's a golf course acting in a manner that happens to deny public usage of that beach.
As for "protecting the golf course from erosion", I'd say that building a golf course in that location, in such a manner that "erosion control" necessitated the ruination of a beach, was a pretty dumb business decision.
Go visit some place where industrial development has existed without enviromental concerns. Like China, the ex-U.S.S.R, or East Germany. Is that what you want to live in? I don't think so.
If you want to piss in your bathtub, go ahead, but if I catch you pissing in _our_ bathtub.....
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
This is wrong twice over:
What gets me about this is how old (and obvious) this advice really is.
Whatever one's religious beliefs, it's generally agreed that Jesus know how to make a point. In Matthew 7:24-27, he tells a story about a foolish builder who builds his house on sand. His audience would have laughed about that.
Two thousand years later, people with degrees in architecture and engineering build houses (and even gigantic hotels) out on the beach, and then try to get the government to spend tax money on beach replenishment when the ocean comes to take away their buildings.
People who put up seawalls should have to pay to remove them, and people who build on sand shouldn't get one penny of my tax money for beach replenishment. Building on sand is so obviously stupid that anyone who does it doesn't deserve any help from anybody.
Good on this guy. If the government won't pull their finger out it is the obligation of the citizens.
Seen a lot of comments here about why seawalls are bad and the only explanations given are legals ones. Not suprising given most people here are americans.
The reason is one of basic physics, the legal arguments have to take second place.Unless you think you can legislate against nature. Please ignore this if you think you have a right to destroy other people property and public property and the general environment to protect your own interests.
If there is a rock, a wall, a washed up spare tyre, anything that is a hard object on the beach, then when the water hits it during normal wave action, the wave will retreat back to sea at a higher speed because it's energy hasn't been absorbed. Normal beaches (with sand) absorb the wave impact. If the water is going faster, it removes sand as it returns to the ocean and thus erodes the beach, much faster than natural movements. Even a small hard object on a beach can show this, one season I saw the tire I mentioned above, a tractor tyre, chop a gully about 0.5m deep and about 6-7m wide, just from wave action on this one small object. A wall will destroy the beach.
Remember beaches ARE NOT FIXED in the earth, they rise, fall and move around on a seasonal basis. Beach nourishment is not to replace sand that is lost, but to re-build the natural shoke absorbing action of an already eroded one.
Sydney residents please visit http://www.realsurf.com/nowall/ and please think about supporting this cause, we know what private interests have f**ked up in the states through ignorance and greed, lets not let it happen at home.
phil
When asked why they go through the trouble of reclaiming the sea, the Dutch are said to answer: "We had two choices for expansion: invade Germany or reclaim land from the sea. We took one look at the Germans and decided taking on the sea was much easier" or words to that effect.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Solar powered web site? No wonder I can't get any response ... it's night time.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars