Slashdot Mirror
Angry Villagers Run Google Out of Town
Barence writes "A Google Street View car has been chased out of a British village by angry residents. The car was taking photographs of Broughton in Buckinghamshire for Google's when it was spotted by a local resident who warned the car not to enter the village then roused his neighbors, who surrounded the vehicle until the driver performed a U-turn and left. 'This is an affluent area,' protester Paul Jacobs said. 'We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike. I was determined to make a stand, so I called the police.'"
That the novelty of having your private shit paraded on Google is wearing out. About friggin time.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
If burglars only picked houses they found on the internets...
Given the shape of popular british paranoia these days, I would have expected the google car to be identified as an agent of the paedophiles and run out of town for that reason...
I was driving close to the Googleplex the other day and spotted what I thought was one of those infernal google camera cars, so I drove up next to it and stared, holding a bizarre contorted face for as long as possible. Turns out it was just Google security. Sorry security man, I thought I could be famous....
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
It is a terribly invasive service. Let's hope Google gets the message before one of these mobs takes out their anger out on the driver.
Please post the google maps pictures of the crowd...I cant wait to see it!
So instead they got media coverage about how they are affluent and easy targets for burglars?
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
Not sure where British law stands on this topic? I know it is legal for me (in the USA) to set up my tripod on the street outside someones home in an affluent neighborhood and snap away, then post those pictures on the internet. I would think the CCTV-soaked Brits would be even more forgiving.
You'd think the English would be used to having their pictures taken. I happens like 300 times a day in London.
I'd fire that driver for turning tail. Lock the windows and keep driving. They can blur the faces of the mob later.
As for calling the police, go right ahead, I'm sure Google is breaking no laws.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I don't want my house and car on the internet for the same reasons this town has said. Want to case out a street and see the best way to rob, car jack, or even see my neighbors and family members for all to see so easily. What happened to privacy? If I want to be famous i'll be on a reality tv show.
I've been looking for a neighborhood full of snobbish, whiny Brits to rob. Now I know where to go: the part of Broughton that's not on Google "street view"...
This isn't the Streisand Effect, you troglodytes. Learn what that is before you go shrieking your confessions to being magnificently retarded.
This is a local street for local people!
the burglars already know where you live.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Rule #1 is:
Security through obscurity isn't.
Rule #2 is: Making a huge stink about your private neighborhood against a well-liked company like Google will probably mean you're going to get a lot more attention than if you just let well enough alone.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Get Orf Moy Laaaand!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Palmer
Clearly these people are hiding something. After all, why else would they be afraid? If they're not hiding something, there's no reason to be worried about being watched, is there? I suspect they're harboring a pedo... If you don't support the investigation, you support children being raped.
Sarcasm, I'm constantly shocked by how utterly cavalier young people are with their information online.
So a car drives through once and takes still photos, gets chased out of town. But the Gov. puts up video cameras that shoot continuously, its ok? Granted there are loads of protests against the surveillance-state, but part of me feels that this story might be a bit of propaganda to divert attention from the real problem. Now let me put on my tin-foil hat...
Your country connects every camera in every room of every store of your capitol to a big brother machine and you form an angry mob when google takes a picture of your yard?
Folks across the pond seem to trust only the state with cameras these days.
3 burglaries in 6 weeks. Awesome. Gun control stops crime.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
British socialist idiots made self defense illegal. These village idiots already have a burglary & robbery problem, so they imagine safety by not having pictures. Same flavor of idiot as the California politician that wants CA schools blurred in Google to prevent terrorist attacks. Makes me wonder if he has a speech about how terrorism started after AlGore invented the Internet.
In other news, Chrysler calls Google and offers them a great deal on some less recognizable cars.
Rule #3: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
How that fits in with the theme of this story and the discussion soon to follow, I'll leave to the dear reader.
So the bizarre flashmob of angry residents barricades a public road and illegally blocks Google from taking photos from the public streets? This is in the UK... those people are already putting up with a billion cameras, what's one more?
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Lucky they didn't pull the poor bloke out of the car and burn him as a witch. Ignorant peasants.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
It is not at all clear that Google is breaking no laws.
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
The latest King Kong flick had a note in the credits that the had licensed the image of the Empire State Building.
Architects sometimes try (and succeed) in protecting their creations.
And Google is in it for the money - they use these photos to gain more click data and to sell more ads. Google is not some innocent taking a few snapshots.
So don't jump too quickly to the conclusion that Google isn't violating some of the property owners rights.
If they intended their little affluent, apparently easy to burglarize, neighborhood to remain secret then that's one big FAIL for them.
Google did nothing wrong. However I am smiling for some reason. Something about even a miss directed desire for privacy tells me perhaps we as a race will still be okay in the future.
George Orwell RIP.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
The same technology can be used to go inside of buildings, such as shopping malls, government offices such as the Driver's License Bureau, courtrooms, or even in public bathrooms, subways, or one's private homes (such as for selling real estate), or on boats, inside museums, and so on. Possibly with similar micro camera, one could go inside a drainage pipe.
The people attacking the Google car probably could be charged with assault under the Common Law.
hicks
They took a stand and 'Called the police.'
That's hardly a 'stand.'
'Taking a stand' would be tarring and feathering their local district attorney equivalent and their MP's until their right to
shoot burglars dead is once again respected by English law.
Burglaries will be sorted out after a few burglars end up dead for their efforts.
Take a stand and kill a crook. Take a stand and slap around your local DA to de facto respect the notion that a man's home is his castle. Take a stand and slap around your politicians until they recognize what nature teaches: That every living thing has a right to defend themselves, their friends, their family, and their home.
Being a crook isn't a legitimate career choice. It should carry a great deal more risk than it currently does in jolly ol' Britain.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I really hope there were pitchforks and torches involved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They say they don't want to be targeted by burglars. But I've seen plenty of movies about small English villiages. I've seen the alarming homicide statistics.
Clearly these people have something hide. If they didn't they wouldn't have been so concerned about the Google camera.
I demand that the home office immeadiately send the Army in to round up the lot of these devil worshiping, pedophile, terrorists.
So, rich people who live on public roads, have more privacy rights than others? And apparently, the homes aren't yet on Google maps, however they were robbed anyway, indicating that thieves ALREADY know about that neighborhood. Doesn't make sense to me.
It has been extremely well established that if your copyrighted (sign, building, whatever) is viewable from a public place, then an image taken from that public place does not infringe. Period.
If the hollywood sign people really are doing that then they would get their asses handed to them if it went to court.
The King Kong movie is probably more questionable, since I'm guessing at some point a computer model was made of the building.
Sorry, it uses Flash and JavaScript. I refuse to use those because they are insecure, closed source, and were never part of the W3C standard.
The web was never meant for this kind of thing and if Google wants me to use it, they should release the source code so I can inspect it first. Then if I determine it is secure, I can compile it an run it on my desktop. The browser is for delivering text containing useful information and text for locating porn. This "web application" delivers neither text nor porn.
I can take pictures of the street with my camera, what is your point? Why do I need their DRM infested flash player to do something anybody can do already?
(voice behind closed door) "Who is it"?
(friendly well-dressed man) "Burglar, ma'am."
(homeowner) "Are you sure you're not a map scout for Google?"
(man) "No ma'am, I'm definitely a burglar."
(homeowner) "You're not planning to take pictures of our streets and houses and yards, are you?"
(man) "No ma'am. I just want to ransack your house and make off with some cash, fine china and jewelry."
(homeowner) "But you don't work for Google?"
(homeowner) "Well... all right. I'll unlock the gate."
(man sets up tripod in yard) "You know ma'am, I appreciate this project might be a temporary nuisance, but Google really is doing this as a free public service that will bring your neighborhood into the 21st century...."
Am I the only one that read this article and thought "Gee it'd be fun to walk down the street with a flashmob all snapping photos of the houses and posting them all over flicker!"
Possibly, since flickr isn't spelled with an E. I was thinking the same thing though and found your post when I searched for "flick".
I tried using street view a couple times when there was one available for somewhere I needed to go, but the fish eye distortion made it almost useless. Maybe it was just those two spots.
Would that be this Broughton, off the M1, NW of London?
I can't figure out where to take my camera, can you give me a link to this location on Google Maps?
Oh here it is.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Buckinghamshire&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=51.754532,114.257812&ie=UTF8&ll=51.880332,-0.873456&spn=0.019895,0.05579&t=h&z=15
Don't blink as you drive through.
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
Maybe not so much. Try opening Google Earth and typing "hollywood sign" you will not only see the sign (without trademark attribution) but several amateur photos of it (also without attribution).
They will be coming for you next for put stuff like the following online:
http://www.homes24.co.uk/property/search/?ps_type=1&loc=Aylesbury&prop_type=&min_price=0&max_price=0&min_bedrooms=0&keywords=&maxdist=0&age=-
I wonder how posting full price info, detailed descriptions of the home, exterior *and* interior photos is less revealing than driving down the street with a camera mounted on the car. I suppose the xenophobia response doesn't get triggered when it's members of the local community that engage in privacy-violating activities.
Even if there are copyrights on the structures, that doesn't prevent taking photos, only publishing them.
> Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
Oh, really?
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?&search=hollywood+sign
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=hollywood%20sign
Man, they must be making millions, nay, billions off those lawsuits!
This is why the Daily Mail should have the corporate death penalty.
to go over and rip open a bucket of whupass and pour it all over them.
What?
Actually, they go after people on the Hollywood sign for a slightly different reason. You won't find many pictures taken from the south-west that show anything above the "D" without airbrushing out the background.
Among other things, there is a cold-war era relic for the governor's fallout bunker, but this isn't the issue.
Google is doing the work of Islamic Jihadists, gathering data for the next terrorist strike.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3565918/Mumbai-attacks-Terrorist-suspect-arrested-in-February-had-Bombay-attack-plans.html
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Personally,
I'd rather be slowly burned to death than listen to Barbara Streisand singing me to death.
Personally...
You see, unlike us savage Americans, the British know that it's not a violation of privacy if the government are the ones watching you.
Google should just cut a deal with parliament to use the 88,000,023 cameras already installed across the UK.
Causation can cause correlation
I don't know how privacy laws work in England, but in the US the concept of "Reasonable Expectation of Privacy" exists. What I can see of your house from the street is NOT private. It's public. If you don't want people to see your house, you better build a big fence, or some other method of exhibiting a particularly strong interest in visual privacy. Otherwise your front lawn should be free game. This concept provides a distinction between Street View and peeping toms. It's not reasonable to expect that nobody will see your house when it is in plain view, but if you close your blinds, you can reasonably expect that people aren't going to go to extra measures to see inside. If they do, you have a legitimate privacy complaint, because you put up a barrier that prevents casual observation of the inside of your house that had to be circumvented to some degree.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Yes - they take your picture and steal your soul - or in Britain, they take your property!
..........FULL STOP.
Not that I think Google is doing anything illegal or "wrong", but I am curious why people are so quick to scream bloody murder when governments spy on people yet willingly give mountains of data to a publically traded company. Seeing hordes of people rush to Google's defense here and mock those "stupid" people makes me wonder how many of them cry foul when the government tries to do it. Not to mention the fact that this company wants floating datacenters.
Massive databases full of information. Potential to move datacenter to international waters. Serving the shareholders.... Yeah...TOTALLY an organization to trust with hordes of information to be mined, public or not. Anyone with a shred of credibility in the security realm can tell you about how you can put together lots of public information to put together secret information. Hell, the internet has made a damned sport out of doing this with the latest techno gadgets with people digging through every little piece of public information to come out of a company to try and determine what super secret dodad they are about to release.
Now...to invoke Godwin's Law. I suggest everyone goes and looks up that little company called IBM and their role in the Holocaust. Money is king. Is it really so hard to believe that someone might pay very large sums of money for access to those databases to do "bad stuff"? It isn't like it hasn't happened before.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
No one cares about your the view of the outside of your house. Obviously, if they were so "affluent" than they would have a gate. Frankly the street map of your village is already on google maps so its not like a bunch of pictures of your fancy gates and yards is going make it any easier for criminals.
Besides isn't your Utopian society supposed to be free of crime?
...plus, English law is very different from American law. "Your freedom ends where someone else's nose begins" is an old English concept.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So now towns and neiborhoods need put up robots.txt signs?
The problem with that is that you're basically assuming that the law is something final, set for all time, instead of an ongoing, gradual, negotiated codification of rules that should apply to everybody, developed as the rules are needed, in response to new circumstances.
There's a fair amount of argument and research going on right now trying to refine the notion of privacy to new circumstances posed by information technology. Some points here are Privacy as Contextual Integrity and A Taxonomy of Privacy.
I would distill the fundamentals of these arguments down to the following: the privacy laws that we have today are tailored to the privacy issues of 50 years ago, when we didn't have the big, emerging privacy problem we have today: the dramatically increased ability to put together disparate pieces of "public" data to discover "private" facts.
Are you adequate?
> "Your freedom ends where someone else's nose begins" is an old English concept.
Whereas the new English concept would appear to be "Your freedom ends where your nose ends." Or maybe a bit before.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
What is it that a burglar will see on street view that they cannot see for themselves driving down the road? I love Google street view. I am in the USA at the moment and taking a virtual drive around my home town in Australia the other day made me feel homesick.
the government always has everyone's best interest at heart! More surveillance is good, as long as the government does it, right?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Bloody Google-assisted pervs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
ya damned kids and your google. We never had google when I was a kid. If you wanted porn you had to peek into the crack in the side of the outhouse.
http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs. Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks.
1) People aren't things. It is at least polite to remove photos OF PEOPLE if they object. Things perpetually visible to the public have no such considerations. This is a matter of dignity.
2) Inside vs outside. If you EXPECT to be visible from a public street, that is different than if you are in a house with blinds drawn and do not expect this. If I am taking photos of the inside of your house, that ought to be actionable on other bases.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That was just the decoy. The real car says "Dominos" on it.
Village of the faceless screaming hicks? Maybe not the same ring as night of the living dead but still.
The thing about British hicks, you know... the type that wears tweed clothes, wellies, flat caps and drives around in moss-green landrovers is their infuriatingly stoic nature. In the USA all you need to do to convince a bunch of hillbillies to break out ye-olde lynching rope is to take the lord's name in vain (or mention Darwin). In Britain, however, even when the hicks carry double barrelled shotguns the worst that can happen to you is being invited to tea and cucumber sandwiches and bored to death by stories about the intricacies pheasant hunting. The un-armed variety usually defaults to talking about bovine disease or complaining about the price of manure. Getting them angry is almost impossible, although if you try hard enough you may succeed in getting an emotional outburst. A stiffening upper lip followed by a slightly high voiced "I say!!!" is a good indicator you are getting somewhere. I'm not sure what Google did to enrage them this time. Just driving around taking photos is not a convincing reason. Perhaps some mean-spirited person tacked a sign to the back of the Google van reading something like "God shave the queen" ???
...over stuff like Google Earth and Google Street View. Hell, I'd think people would have a better complaint about Google Earth, as that actually lets people see areas that might not be on a public street.
As it is, I can't understand what the hysteria is about over Google Street View. So, a picture of my house is on the internet. There's a pretty good chance there's an unrelated picture of my house on the internet. Were I to decide to burgle a house that's not on Google Street View, I'd probably just, gasp, drive to it myself and take a look.
Although I do, personally love the "we have money you can't do this to US!" attitude these "affluent" people have.
Unjustified paranoia over this is silly, especially after hearing about all the Government cameras and stuff in the UK.
and when your mom walks in on you slapping it sideways you get upset. I understand and empathize with that
You Been there Done that huh?
... until I put it personally on internet.
http://www.countyviews.com/bucks/
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
It would certainly scare ME away....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Stop reading the Daily Mail. Seriously.
You do have a right of self defence. You don't have the right to kill someone. That's not defence that's murder, and you'd rightly be put away for a long time for it.
You also have the power of arrest, provided you have reasonable suspicion of an indictable offence (Trespassing isn't, btw. that's a civil offence).
and instead of taking the photos, encourages (perhaps paying for the privilege) people to submit photos they took. These could be any legally taken photo by a property owner, a freelance photographer, a tourist, etc.
How would this change your response? Can people buy photos of this sort or solicit them for free?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
"why would you have them risk their lives?"
That's easy.
Put a EULA on the front of the car that says:
"By standing in front of this car, you agree that whatever happens is your own damned fault!"
Hey, if it's good enough for Microsoft, it's good enough for the little people!
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Yup. My next door neighbor's house appears with its front door open on the Google StreetView. You can bet that burgulars are going to take interest.
Google StreetView is a cool, but bad, idea. Just go there yourself if you're interested in what it looks like, and more importantly, so WE can see what YOU look like, and report any suspicious activity to the police.
I consider any Google StreetView car to be engaging in a "suspicious activity." If I came to your neighborhood and started taking lots of pictures, wouldn't you?
--
Toro
The King Kong movie is probably more questionable, since I'm guessing at some point a computer model was made of the building.
This.
It has been extremely well established that if your copyrighted (sign, building, whatever) is viewable from a public place, then an image taken from that public place does not infringe. Period.
Maybe so, maybe not. Especially see the part about trademark.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Google's equivalent of that picture is rather blurry, so I think they are safe.
Google Streetview of the Hollywood sign
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It has been extremely well established that if your copyrighted (sign, building, whatever) is viewable from a public place, then an image taken from that public place does not infringe. Period.
True; but you can be limited in how you use the photograph. For example, you then use it to advertise a product you need permission to use the copyrighted sign. Just because you have an image that is non-infringing doesn't mean you have the right to use copyrighted material in the photo in any way you see fit.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You're right -- the rate of burglary in the UK is about 3 times the rate in the US. Of course, the murder rate in the US is about 3 times the rate in the UK, so gun laws aren't all bad.
This is what happens when you live in a society where you are a subject of the state rather than a citizen of a free republic.
You are ignorant. British people are citizens, not subjects, and have been for a very long time.
The reason there are so many burglaries in that area (and the UK as a whole) is because the citizens of that once great nation have been deprived of their right to self defence and the right to defend their property.
Japan, which also has strict gun control laws, has a fraction of the number of burglaries per capita compared with the USA. Clearly your explanation that the burglaries are down to the lack of guns is simply not the case.
to resist an intruder is a "crime"
Not true. The case that got all the publicity in the tabloids about this issue? He shot a kid in the back as he was running away. That's not "resisting", that's revenge and murder.
ownership of solid means of self defense, namely a firearm
Why do you think that a firearm is the only means of self defence?
You also have the power of arrest, provided you have reasonable suspicion of an indictable offence (Trespassing isn't, btw. that's a civil offence).
Good luck on that if you're not armed. I mean, if you actually need to arrest someone. Someone who broke into your house isn't going to behave. A stranger in your house in many circumstances is reasonable suspicion, at least in reasonable countries. You'll ban kitchen knives next.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Broughton: A Mob of Effluence.
Does he have any idea what an affluent area is?
That's probably more burglaries than my town has had since last year.
Anyway, is that really a good measure of affluency? What's to stop the burglars coming from a neighboring town?
Follow me
...the Google APC.
Have gnu, will travel.
Good for you. But (like most things) this is not as clear cut as you'd like to suggest. I'll present two alternatives:
1) You're a homosexual man kissing your partner in public and a person who is offended by this asks you to stop. You're breaking no law (in any sane place), it's a free country.
2) You're whistling the theme tune to Dallas loudly in a church and a person who is offended asks you to stop. You're breaking no law (in any sane place), it's a free country.
In the first situation you're right, in the second you're an ass. Whether you break a law or not is irrelevant, our social interactions are not governed by law, they're governed by manners.
Get some.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
Now that everybody knows they're rich and snobby they'll probably get a lot more burglaries.
This isn't actually true and the statistics are being distorted by pro-gun groups (look at the long term picture for this town [Kennesaw]and you will see it's not related to the guns), gun ownership is not a statistically significant deterrent to burglary and the number of accidental shootings of family members and higher incidences of murder during home invasions more than counteracts any supposed benefits from this proposition.
A large proportion of burglaries are performed by drug addicts who do not take into account the future consequences of their actions, such as being arrested or being shot, thus the only truly effective means of reducing these crimes is to treat the addicts and attempt to get them to become an active member of their community.
(From the wiki article you quoted:
"Others have challenged this conclusion, however, citing data showing that the number of burglaries in the 10 years spanning the passing of the ordinance remains roughly the same")
But the parent (who I assume is also my sibling) is more than correct. Many of us post to slashdot anonymously because we refuse to use cookies. Since slashdot uses something non-standard (invented by netscape) intead of the standard way to log in, it is all but impossible for the principled to post on this website with an account.
A lot of people on Slashdot talk the talk about web standards and the importance of adhering to them, but few walk the walk. And by walking the walk, not just talking, we get punished and ridiculed!
The parent is right. Streetviewer is nothing but marketing hype just like Vortals, Portals and e-tailors. The web is for serving hyperlinked text--he is only wrong in one aspect, the images (hopefully PNG) he downloads should be done using SFTP (hopefully using GNUTLS, not the non-free OpenSSL based variants).
If the grandparent really was a true, real nerd, he would be outraged at how badly Google has abused the standards!
We may have a new front runner in the "Incoherent Rant" category.
Speaking as an Australian (and therefore a convict who was run out of Britain years ago), I feel there's a staggering lack of respect for such an ancient and popular profession.
Frankly, if people don't stop discriminating against thieves, robbers, pilferers, bandits, crooks, larcenists, prowlers, plunderers and pirates in general, we're going to see a general strike from the whole industry - and think what that will do during the Economic Downturn!
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Wrong. In Europe, they may have the right to do so in most places, but it is absolutely NOT a right in the US. There is no "freedom of panarama" here. I had several images deleted off of Wikipedia for this same reasons. They were pictures from an art festival in a hick town, but they were of "copyrighted art" (fiberglass sculptures of farm animals) and thus, it is illegal to distribute pictures of them without the artists permission, in writing, as they are automatically copyrighted by the artist, not the photographer. This is supposed to cover any building built since the 1970s (when copyright law changed) and any art still covered under copyright.
I forget the exact details, but a tourist taking a picture of a scupture in Chicago started the whole affair, and yes, he lost in court. And yes, the law isn't enforced very often either.
Just one more fucked up legal situation in the US.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
It's more that the British haven't yet developed ghettos in every major city, where people utterly dependent on the government's teat never learn to think for themselves and end up shooting each other.
Once you break into my home, I have no idea what your intentions are. I reserve the right to utilize lethal force. Of course, in the US, we have some common sense about this. In the UK, you try to protect yourself, and *you* end up in jail. Fark the Brits.
Does anyone have pictures?
/obvious
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
whatever you say, bitch. is that the best you could do? kinda hard to think with a dick in your ass?
Using violence to achieve political aims? That sounds like terrorism. It certainly doesn't demonstrate any genuine respect for English law.
A plausible hypothesis disproved by reality : after the notorious incident in Norfolk in 1999 when farmer Tony Martin shot dead a burglar, the crime rate did not go down.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
I would break out my old copy of C&C generals, but I run linux now.
"I fail to see how living in an "affluent area" allows you some extra privacy rights others do not have."
I don't but then I know what money can buy.
Anyone have a large black tarp? Physically censor your own house from streetview. Someone try this for me...
Only in England would someone assume they have special privileges because they are "affluent".
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Really? When did that happen? Was it recently? Because I don't recall anything like that happening. Was there some time when a substantial proportion of the British public owned firearms for self-defence against burglars, and at which time the rate of burglary was lower? I fear my knowledge of history fails me at this point, for I can think of no such epoch.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
dude, please don't feed the gun-toting trolls from the US. Good guess on what he reads for information but seriously ... don't feed the trolls!
You do have a right of self defence. You don't have the right to kill someone. As a matter of fact you do. You're allowed to use reasonable force in self-defence, and if that's what it takes, then that can include lethal force. That doesn't mean that you're allowed to rig your house and grounds with booby-traps, or pursue a retreating intruder outside and shoot him in the back as he flees, of course; that's barbaric and you'd rightly be locked away for a long time.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Man I wish they didn't cancel the Google Plane over Sydney ...
Just put a robots.txt sign in your yard.
So I take it you have burglaries all sorted in the US?
Comparatively speaking, Yes.
FBI Crime Statistics
Home Office Crime Report for 2005/2006
Take a look at page 115 of the home office report. Chapter 7.4.
Let's use the Rural numbers, just for fun. They're lower.
Percentage victims once or more
All burglary: 2%
All Vehicle Theft: 4%
All Violence: 2%
Now compare it to the United States FBI report:
2005, violent crime rate: 469.2 per 100,000 people (equivalent to less than or equal to 0.462%, per UK standards)
Burglary: 726.7 per 100,000 (equivalent or = 0.7267 %)
Motor Vehicle Theft: 416.7 per 100,000 ( = 0.4167%)
Notice also that the FBI counts discrete events of crimes, where as the Home Office will only count you once if you get robbed, beat up, or stolen from multiple times per year. In essence, the Home Office method is a clear attempt to reduce crime statistics by any defendable method.
You are at least 4 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in the UK.
You are at about ten times more likely to have your car stolen in the UK.
You are about three times more likely to have your home robbed in the UK.
I invite you to poke around the official numbers for both the US and the UK and make a counter argument.
My argument is this: Offering violence to criminals reduces their numbers.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Wait a sec, London has CCTV cameras everywhere for Big Brother, ahem Citizen Security, including the affluent areas. And they're working oh so well... Google comes along in a little village to take pictures from the road, which afaik, anyone can do. Now Brits claim privacy evasion. Sheesh, I'd be far more afraid of your govt than of Google. Besides, it appears that you have a developing reputation of being a good target for theives regardless. I'm not certain a thief googles, "easy burglary target rural england".
If citizens had guns, maybe they'd be better defended. After all, criminals will get guns/weapons regardless of whatever stupid law you have to try and control them.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
You are a MORON. Photography isn't a crime!
Please see my other Slashdot comment .
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Google, and people like them, driving around in cars photographing private citizens and collecting information on their personal lives for publication are obviously not well liked.
I share their outrage.
And they will refrain from ever using Street View themselves, right.
In the US, you have a right to take pictures of anything you can see from a public street. I suspect it is similar in the UK or else Google wouldn't be doing Street View there.
On the other hand, surrounding other people's cars and interfering with their passage through public streets may constitute a crime.
But that is precisely what is happening.
Private roads.
Fenced and gated communities.
Guard dogs in the home and armed patrols on the streets.
The geek can be damn slow to sense when he's crossed a line that was dangerous even to approach.
I think we are going to see much more of this sort of thing - and sooner or later someone is going get hurt.
Y'know, if I had a house, and it ended up on Google, I'd tell everyone I knew "Hey! My house is on Google! Check it out!"
Seriously, who cares? If you didn't want people to be able to see your house, maybe you should have put it underground or something.
He shot a kid in the back as he was running away. That's not "resisting", that's revenge and murder.
What about if you live away from the police station and I threaten that as soon as I get my friends, I'll be back to kill you and burn your house down, you dirty arab/mic/whop/nigger/jew/whitey/jap/ethnic-slur-of-your-choice. Will you sit and wait for me to get my liquored up friends and the courage to come back and do it, putting your family and home at risk in hopes the police can be bothered to handle a complaint about some drunk who may or may not come back, or will you shoot me in my knife wielding back?
ownership of solid means of self defense, namely a firearm
Why do you think that a firearm is the only means of self defence?
They're not, just the only effective means of self defense against a criminal adversary who may be wielding a knife or firearm of their own. That's why soldiers are issued guns and not Hello Kitty Pillows.
So what's above the "D"?
The point is that the thieves are now using *computers* to help performing theft! Destroy all computers in this village and ban further possession or use of them! Now! Think of the affluents!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The trouble is as a society we let this twisted idea that if you create something you get to decide how it is used, how derivatives of the work are used etc. fester. That kind of restriction is not beneficial either to society or to the vast majority of individuals.
Put more simply people being banned from taking their pic in front of the Hollywood sign for fun and profit may be the way the law works but it's bone headed and as these "rights" are extended to everything in our public environment it's going to get harder and harder to have fun or make money, with disastrous consequences for society including an increase "real" crime.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
LEAVE THEM ALONE :'''''''(
Rights? I think you mean silly laws protecting imaginary property, not rights.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
simply blurred their houses. Then the burglars wouldn't have known what to do!
If tagging weren't broken I'd tag this story "pitchforks" :D
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They go after people for taking non-informative pictures of miscellaneous microwave antennas and a big repeater array? Un-fucking-likely.
There's no access to those areas, but only because that's where the city of LA has a number of fire, police, and agency radio repeaters. There's an emergency communications bunker up there, but it's not the governor's, it's the city's--- and it's hardly secret.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yeah, that antenna farm up there is unsightly as hell.
A bunker, on top of a hill, right smack in the center of a target area - hundreds of miles from the governor's residence? Cite please.
Yes, we do have an understanding enshrined in the law - but it's not what most people think it is. Just because someone is in your house without unknown intentions does not give you the right to use deadly force indiscriminately.
In the US, if you exceed the legal boundaries in what force you are allowed to use to defend yourself (as above, much tighter than many people think), *you* end up in jail.
Yes, we do have an understanding enshrined in the law - but it's not what most people think it is. Just because someone is in your house without unknown intentions does not give you the right to use deadly force indiscriminately.
Your opinion. I am more than happy to argue that I was well within my right to a jury of 12 of my peers.
In the US, if you exceed the legal boundaries in what force you are allowed to use to defend yourself (as above, much tighter than many people think), *you* end up in jail.
I'm OK with this outcome if it means my family is safe. I'm not going to try to debate legal boundaries when someone has broken into my house in the middle of the night. Don't want to be dead? Don't break into someone's home. It's that fucking simple.
Many people posting here are taking a black and white view of this issue. The basic argument seems to be that anything visible from a public street can't be considered private, and is therefore open game.
However, there are differing levels of privacy. Your front yard is private, you expect people to see it, and you put forth extra effort to keep it nice, yet it is still private property, and you can chase kids off of it if you wish. Your back yard is more private than your front, and many people would rather not have anybody seeing it. The inside of your home is the most private area of all.
The feel of privacy also extends to the immediate area, such as your neighborhood. I imagine this more pronounced in dense areas, like Japan or Great Britain. For example, while the alley your apartment is located on is not strictly private, it is still somewhat private, and you are likely to notice anyone who is not a neighbor. On the other hand, a department store is totally public, and you will not even notice that same person if you saw him there.
I said it earlier in the week and I'll say it again...
Can't we all just agree to pretend Britain doesn't exist.
I mean geez its not like Google touched the queen or something!
If shit is in public, its in public whether or not someone photographs it or not. This is all about the media deliberately stirring up fear in the most ignorant people (no doubt these villagers read the Daily Mail or the Express)
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Most CCTV cameras in the UK are owned by private businesses actually.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That article is about as serious as a the yearly articles we get about daylight savings causing hell for schools and how we need to not use DST because people can die.
This is Britain, we have petty articles and long-winded discussions on everything - doesn't mean it becomes law.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
> "Your freedom ends where someone else's nose begins" is an old English concept.
Whereas the new English concept would appear to be "Your freedom ends where your nose ends." Or maybe a bit before.
Or rather (seeing new English' actions throughout the world): "Your freedom ends where we say it does."
I am waiting for Google to cover Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan. It won't be a few upset villagers taking a stand.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
From my experience most Americans can't take our spicy tika masalas let alone the vindaloo. I would make an exception for residents of New Mexico, you really can get a decently hot chilli there but what Texans call hot is really just approaching medium.
I love the way the 'posher' parts of the UK's largest motorway service station like to call themselves by their estate name.... please don't be fooled, this isn't some tiny village nestled in the middle of rolling British countryside, it's an estate in Milton Keynes.
I'm awaiting the irony of the tv press picking this up and seeing a live TV broadcast intervview with one of these people from infront of their house.....
Not exactly. Ownership of a firearm isn't a crime in the UK. Thousands of people own guns. Ownership of an unlicensed firearm is though - and getting a license isn't trivial.
....and AFAIK only a mimority of those murders are criminals killed committing a crime, and many are the victims of crime which in the UK would have been none fatal (spiral of escalating violence-you don't solve crime by making society more dangerous by having more guns, you just skew the crime into being more violent too.)
I invite you to poke around the official numbers for both the US and the UK and make a counter argument.
Those statistics are measuring quite different things, and cannot be meaningfully compared.
The US figures are offences recorded by the police.
The UK figures you give are from the British Crime Survey - a survey of people, who are asked if they have been victims of crime. Such surveys always give much higher figures, for a variety of reasons.
In many ways a crime survey gives more useful numbers, as it measures victims rather than crimes, and isn't subject to recording differences. But the two really cannot be compared.
Funny... my house has been on Google street view for several years now, and the burglaries at my house went up a drastic 0%.
If you want to take my whole city into account, the crime rate actually went down over the past few years. Hey, I know! Maybe that's due to Google Street View! The more houses there are in GSV, the easier it is for the burglars to see the shotguns hanging from people's mantles.
What, you don't have one? But this is America. Everyone's got one. Right? Right?? Okay, maybe it's not the shotgun. Maybe it's just that your house being on GSV and the local crime rate have no correlation whatsoever. I'm just taking a shot in the dark here, though, so I could be wrong.
This is what happens when you live in a society where you are a subject of the state rather than a citizen of a free republic.
The reason there are so many burglaries in that area (and the UK as a whole) is because the citizens of that once great nation have been deprived of their right to self defence and the right to defend their property.
Burglars and other petty criminals have free reign because to resist an intruder is a "crime" and ownership of solid means of self defense, namely a firearm, is also a "crime."
If the citizens of that neighborhood truly want to see fewer crimes committed against them, then chasing Google away won't help. They need to begin working and fighting to make the UK a free country again instead of a leftist nanny state where the rights of honest citizens are denied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennesaw_(GA)#Gun_law
Simple, we don't have as many Bears as you. We'd have to import the arms. There is a credit crunch you know...
"From what I understand, U.S. law allows photography on public property, i.e. streets. If you have a problem with that, you shouldn't be complaining to Google, you need to take it up with city/state legislators."
RTFA? - the article is about Broughton, Buckinghamshire, in the *UK*. Much as our glorious leaders fawn and worship the grand USA, they've not managed to get us to be the 51st State yet... believe it or not we have this quaint olde thing called our own laws, US laws don't apply here*. English law is generally what is supposed to be in effect in Buckinghamshire (cue comedy responses ;-) ) - though probably you're allowed to take photos on public land most of the time, unless aforementioned householders are rich in which case you get chased orf their land (peasant).
*Unless its "the war on terror" in which case US law applies, you guys get to torture people here, boil them down for their fat (or whatever "rendition" means, I was never sure about that one), etc, on the grounds that your laws trump ours because you're American.
Also, Britain has roughly 8 times the "hot burglary" rate of the US, .
Interesting thread you link to. But if you look at the immediate reply to the source you quote, you find a scientific study which concludes:
"Rather, our analysis concludes that residential burglary rates tend to increase with community gun prevalence."
PHILIP J. COOK
Duke University - Sanford Institute of Public Policy; National Bureau of Economic
Research (NBER)
JENS LUDWIG
The Brookings Institution - Economic Studies Program
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=310473
Good luck on that if you're not armed. I mean, if you actually need to arrest someone
UK police generally do a good job. Of arresting people while not being armed, i mean.
In Soviet Russia, other news is a joke.
Might be more real to the mind :D
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I have no idea what your intentions are... I reserve the right to utilize lethal force. Of course, in the US, we have some common sense about this.
Remind me never to go to the US, where they shoot you whenever they don't know what you're going to do next.
Would someone check each photo by eyeball-scan, or could I just send them the goatse pic as a photo of my neighbour's property?
And if there's someone doing that job, how much do you have to pay him for all the goatse and tubgirl pics he'll get? Will google add free psychotherapy to their job perks?
And on a more serious note, would they have to drive here anyway to check if my house really looks like the Windsor castle, like in that picture I'd send them? Maybe I just want a bit of extra "creative puffering" to sell that house. (Hey, it's not worse than most tech companies' marketing;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'd rather be dealing with burglars who didn't have guns themselves personally. Even if it meant I didn't have one myself. It's simply a lot harder to kill someone without guns.
Great you've a gun. So does everyone else. This is why you're three times more likely to be murdered in the US and twice as likely for a woman to be raped ("I'd better not scream or fight back, he could have a gun!").
If this had happened on some council estate in London, the police would have turned up and kicked the sh1t out of the locals. Because it was an 'affluent area', the vigilante scum got away with their mob rule antics.
Broughton seems to be a suburb of Milton Keynes ... thats like the pimple on an arse ... affluent?!
I just did a search for property sales in the Broughton area. I'd hardly call it affluent. It seems very middle-middle class to me. My neighbourhood is more expensive than all but the highest priced Broughton properties, and my neighbourhood is very, very middle class. My next door neighbour runs a local (1 shop only) carpet and tile shop, the neightbor in the other side is a senior manager (not a director) in a fruit distribution business. Down the road three or four houses, a neighbour is a builder. a few more houses down, the guy owns the local taxi business. No investment bankers, high court judges, consultant surgeons or cabinet level politicians == not affluent.
These folks are Hyacinth Bucket's friends !
Burgulary is defined as theft from a property, rather than theft from one's person (which is robbery), and so the usage usually implies that the property was unattended. Burgulars case a property to make sure no one is present to observe them in their thefts. So in what way would gun ownership serve as a deterrent to burgulary? It's more likely that higher burgulary numbers in England are due to things like leaving doors unlocked and not having alarms (the Euros and Canadians all think we're paranoid), and not having effective police patrols or sentencing. Now, if muggings are more common in England and no-concealed-carry states than they are in concealed-carry states, that would be evidence of a deterrent effect from weapons.
Please tell me you're not a lawyer. Please.
You can kill someone in self defence, provided you feel that it was the necessary force to defend yourself. If someone comes at you with a knife, and you kill them, tough tits.
You have the civil power of arrest, but be warned; it's not the power to remove your liberty that a police officer has. You can be found guilty of removing someone's liberty if you "arrest" them incorrectly.
Obviously, Americans are coming to the UK and stealing all their guns.
So what about tourists taking photos on vacation? Do they have the right to take photos of interesting buildings?
Would it be acceptable to record live footage of your front door 24/7? And then publish it as a browsable online database of anyone entering and exiting?
Further into the future: Combine with facial recognition. Combine with holiday swimwear pictures. Combine with mobile phones snapping pictures of everything, everywhere. All public information, sorted on address.
"Public" information becomes very private when it is cross-linked with other public information and easily accessible for anyone.
There is a conflict brewing, not sure what the resolution will be. Technology tends to trump any attempt to suppress it.
I lost my sig.
Yes, you do have the right to photograph from a public place, BUT what Google is doing with the photographs it takes demonstrates a problem with that right. The concept of being able to take pictures from a public place was not conceived with the knowledge that someone, let alone a company, would drive up and down every street with the intention of photographing every house an posting the images on the internet for the world to see.
The residents were absolutely correct in making Google leave. 'Street View' basically provides a virtual shopping mall for criminals looking to scout out new targets.
Crooks can gather *ALOT* of valuable information from such photographs:
1: Location.
2: Neighboring buildings.
3: Surrounding environment.
4: A rough building floorplan.
5: Points of entry.
6: Points of exit.
7: Possible escape routes away from the scene.
8: Economic status of the resident.
9: Vantage points where neighbors might detect them.
10: Pets (Number, type, and locations).
11: Observation points where the criminal can observe residents activity.
12: Hiding spots.
13: Obstacles to entry.
14: Obstacles to escape.
15: What kind of valuables might be present.
16: Likelihood of passers-by who might see them.
Any criminal can use this information to *GREATLY* increase their chances of a successful robbery.
Unfortunately, civil rights nutjobs will defend their right to photograph in public, but will crucify law abiding people if they shoot a criminal while he is trying to rob a house.
Laws like this make life easier for criminals, and harder for the rest of use who choose to defend ourselves from crime.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
who does google think they are anyway. i find this streetview thing highly annoying. i too have not been able to get my house removed.
i am against my city being plasterd with cctv just as much as i am against streetview.
if a tourist takes a picture of my house thats fine by me but some global mega corp storing this info for every one to access i do not like.
good on those people for chasing the googlemobile off. shame it was dragged into the news.
to prevent the village from further being discovered, i for one insist their ISP and the surrounding ISP's be removed from all routing tables. this will prevent malicious cookies from the google beta email from tracking them.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The trick to getting the images removed is to be standing nude outside your home when they photograph it.
Fatter, the better.
I see that solid connection you made between guns and murder there....
Britain does not have the American ideal where individualism is given free reign to run over public and private sensibility. If the neighborhood does not wish itself to be publicly displayed, (and unlike the United States they DO have more commonly neighborhoods instead of just streets) than the wishes of the community should be honored and the Googlecar should not return.
quote:
Rowling is battling a federal copyright lawsuit in New York claiming her four Harry Potter books infringed on the work of Nancy Stouffer, a Pennsylvania woman who wrote about a boy named "Larry Potter" in the 1980s. Stouffer says Rowling lifted character names, including the "muggles", from her.
is that Britain(at least London) has become a total surveillance society with every bloody move of their citizens recorded on camera for use by Big Brother.
Perhaps they should consider gathering the neighbours and kicking the government out of town?
That this happenned a mere 15 minutes drive from Bletchey Park? Most probably yes!
When has anyone in the UK EVER kept a gun at home?
Sigh, since I live 20mins away from Milton Keynes, which this is a suburb of, and not
the other nice village of Broughton ( See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broughton,_Milton_Keynes ),
their major problem with crime is probably due to the high Chav density of that area.
It is a very dull area and there are lots of bored teenagers.. what do you expect
when the most exciting attractions are a McDonalds and a Hungry Horse...
They don't have neighbors in the UK. They have neighbours. Fuck Google. I mean really fuck them. Rape them anally like a good vatican prelate would do.
Oh BTW: this site sucks. I like the idea but the people running the site are incompetent morons.
Just out of curiosity, did you wear a little black burgler mask when you robbed a house? I was wondering if it was a union thing, or just a popular fad among the sticky fingered.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Try taking a photograph of the Hollywood Sign - it's protected by trademark or copyright law and the folks in Hollywood do go after people.
And yet, you still have every right to take a picture of it. I have several, from my last trip to Griffith Park, and no minigun-armed trademark gestapo ordered me to delete them (or pay royalties). You can't, however, use it without permission in a purely for-profit work - But before you take even that as an absolute, some uses, even profitable ones, may get a pass on the grounds of their documentary nature. I would personally (IANAL) say if anyone would qualify for such a fair use exemption, Google would due to the nature of their collection.
And apparently, Google's lawyers agree with me, since they have quite a few pictures (I see at least 40 without even working at it) of exactly that sign.
Personally, I fail to see the big deal here... A lot of people have freaked out about Google driving through, all just pissing in the wind. Street-view just fills the gap for another 10 years until we have sub-centimeter resolution satellite images available to the public. What then? Erect a giant tent over your whole town, similar to what the Soviets did during the cold war to hide their missile movements?
I have a problem with the privacy implications of having my every move in public (potentially) tracked by security cameras. Google driving by my house? Not so much.
Get on your Segways/recumbent bikes/cars and do multiple drive by photo shootings of the neighborhood and upload them to Google maps. In fact use a smart phone that way it can be uploaded on the fly Bwmahahahahah!
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Great you've a gun. So does everyone else. This is why you're three times more likely to be murdered in the US and twice as likely for a woman to be raped ("I'd better not scream or fight back, he could have a gun!").
Oh, is THAT why? Fuck, you are a genius! People have been debating that one for years, but you know the answer? How come you've been keeping it a secret?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Anyone that has watched the British program Road Wars, which is just another cop show, has probably heard the cops' daily excuse; "he's filming in a public place". Then again, I'm not so sure they can legally say that, since some of the "criminals" shown do have their faces blurred.
The problem is that you're allowed to use "reasonable force". But if you're half asleep at 4 a.m. and worried about your children you're going to have a different definition of reasonable to a juror sitting safely in a courtroom with the benefit of hindsight.
Also, you don't know at the time if the burglar is only after property or likes a bit of rape as a bonus. Do you susggest waiting until afterwards before choosing the appropraite response level?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Hot Fuzz (Contains Spoilers)
And when these people are left alone by the law we know that we can do the same thing for people of the wrong race, or religion, or sexual-orintation, or political affiliation, or income-level try to drive into our neighborhood... just harrass them and block their legal right-of-way until they leave.
'This is an affluent area,' protester Paul Jacobs said. 'We've already had three burglaries locally in the past six weeks. If our houses are plastered all over Google it's an invitation for more criminals to strike.'
No, income disparity (whether just or not I won't debate) is an invitation for criminals to strike. The criminals are already there, before Google arrived. Making Google the boogeyman won't solve anything.
And are criminals really using GoogleMaps to case houses? I suppose anything's possible.
sic
Vigilantism sucks. Way to act less civilized than many 3rd World countries.
This is Britain, we have petty articles and long-winded discussions on everything - doesn't mean it becomes law.
You already have a law requiring people transporting such knives to prove that they're a chef. What if you're trying to become one, and you just bought a knife and you're taking it someplace to do some cooking? Wank wank. Mark my fucking words, banning guns was a huge mistake. However, what's more telling than the attempt to ban guns is that it succeeded. Brits are ahead of Americans in the "doing as they are told" category. America was founded by people too much of a revolutionary pain in the ass to keep in England, and it shows; too bad we're slipping into complete complacency over here, too.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I feel that the best way to resolve this issue, is for all the slash dotters in Britain that can, go to that neighborhood, and photograph every house. If stopped and questioned (which it sounds like will undoubtedly happen) tell the homeowners that they are tourists, and wanted to photograph these "beautiful houses." If enough people do this, it may feed their paranoia... or maybe they won't stop the googlemobile next time. I'm probably going to go with the former, though. They'll probably think everyone is trying to case their homes.
How could this be modded as interesting instead of funny?
Why is it that we are all concerned with privacy until it's Google stealing it? Sure you can take pictures from public areas but shouldn't Google have to seek permission BEFORE it takes pictures of MY house -- not the other way around. This is the same as spam, junk mail, any of that crap. Why do I have to go out of my way to keep my privacy? It might be "legal" but that doesn't make it right. I don't think Google StreetView is a good idea and considering the number of privacy nuts it seems pretty hypocritical to bash them. Though maybe their course of action wasn't the best. If Microsoft had gone on photographing peoples homes and making a huge archive online we'd have gotten our pitchforks and torches a long time ago. (Going for +5 troll...)
FYI, the government in the US doesn't permanently give people enough money to live on. What you're thinking of is illegal drug sales.
There is no proven correlation between enacting gun legislation and decreasing the murder rate.
Don't want to have people seeing your private shit? Don't keep it out in the open, in public view....
I agree with you, but don't stop with the public vs. private line. I should be afforded a reasonable level of privacy even while in public view in a rural area like my own subdivision, and I shouldn't have to go out and invest thousands into my community to quarantine it off from the rest of civilization to get it either.
Google street view is helpful, yes, where it makes sense. Running down a main street in Downtown Business-District makes sense. Running down to the end of a dead-end road in a rural subdivision does NOT make sense. And if you NEED street view to that degree just to find your way around in this world, you have NO reason behind the wheel.
This.
I read that "self" but I don't get it.
Would serve them right. Wanna see my shit, well look at this!
We also have a law on banning "extreme sex", not that it's ever been used. It's just publicity stunts used by politicians.
This comment amuses me. Unlike most people, I have lived abroad, been to plenty of countries too, not with standing: Poland, Germany, Sweden, France, Denmark, USA etc.
In all my travels, the most controlled (police state) society I ever saw with check point spots and insane security practices was when I was in the USA - some of the post 9/11 security crap I saw in the states was plain ludicrous. I agree that the UK may have a lot of petty regulations, but the concept that they "doing as they are told" maybe right in the sense that there is very few deaths in relation to firearms (42 deaths last year), and far less murders as a whole on a statistical percentage when compared against the States (possibly due to knives not having such a dire effect.
Unlike the USA however, we don't have as much of a issue with corrupt politicians and scandals, the government isn't exactly omnipotent and many of us in the UK realize that which is why the government is heavily regulated too, in order to prevent abuse along most of the chain - which is partly what leads to some of these inane regulations we get over some ludicrous things.
That said, abuse of the system does occur, covering it up is a crime. If you've ever been caught dealing in such practices, underhanded tactics, your political career is over, period. There is no second chances, there is no remaining in the government like so many US politicians some how manage to pull off. It's obvious why many Americans fear their government and why they assume other governments cannot be trusted in the slightest.
I think compliance to law is not a bad thing, but in my opinion, you have misunderstood the problems in the UK by relating it to American issues.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I'm reminded of people kvetching that they'll never get the money they paid into Social Security back. The point is, of course, that they'll only get it back if they're horribly unfortunate. Social Security isn't a pension program, it's more like insurance against being disabled, widowed, or left poor and old. (Those Lucky Duckies!)
Similarly, members of the upper classes here must believe that taxes are, as you say, "fees for services rendered", that the only reason you're not barely scraping by is because you're a better person, and you deserve what you have. It's a comforting myth, even though it's based on ideas which range from flawed to laughably false.
Didn't we learn in the 1920s that the wealthy aren't superhuman masters of the universe? Aren't we learning that again now? To read a paean to the ridiculous idea that if I'm worth x on some measure of human quality, then Bill Gates must be worth 1000000x, to read yet another bit of gilded-age sophistry... well, it's kind of breathtaking.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A note to all budding burglers: there is a village full of people who have so much good stuff worth having that they were willing to chase Google out of town to stop it being seen, and it is presumably so brazenly displayed that it can be seen and assessed from the street. Some good easy pickings there...
Rowling, like any other wealthy person, benefited from society. Clearly, there's the infrastructure to produce and distribute the books, and a literate population capable of reading them... but I can't believe that you're forgetting that the wealth of the Harry Potter empire is founded entirely on the government-supported and -enforced convenient fiction of intellectual property.
In any case, the argument isn't that wealthy people shouldn't be wealthy; the argument is that they shouldn't be insanely, ludicrously, "nobody even bothers to understand numbers that big" wealthy. People haven't gotten three orders of magnitude smarter, more productive, or better in the last twenty years, but they've certainly managed to accrete wealth that seems to say that they have.
If wealth continues to rise upwards, your society ends up looking like a small group of "gated communities", containing the prisoners of addiction, surrounded by teeming shanty-town hordes of the prisoners of envy. I wouldn't want to live in such a society, as a member of either group.
So, that is why it's bad that a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth goes to a tiny slice of the very privileged. It sucks for most people, and in the end, it sucks for everyone.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland.[94] Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London,[95] on a street with 24-hour security.[96]"
"In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain.[5]"
"In March 2008, Rowling revealed in interview that she had returned to writing in Edinburgh cafés"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jk_rowling#Personal_life
Censor the Streisand effect for even more Fail.
If I knew where you lived, I'd take a picture of your house and post it on the Web just to piss you off. I'd refuse to remove it, too, because (A) it's perfectly legal and (B) I'm not a massive corporation like Google who has to worry about their public image.
How about we restrict Google Street from "Affluent neighborhoods" so burglers don;t know where to go?
Of course in this case they can find areas where Google Street View is not available and that would narrow their searches considerably, right?
Sort of like bluring Google Satellite around "high value" terrorist targets as it makes a search for such targets a great deal simpler!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If you had paid as much for your living arrangements then you would bloody well expect some perks, too.
Well of course they do. That's what money is for, you silly bugger!
You think they acquire all that money just so they can jump up and down on it like Scrooge McDuck? Get a clue.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
All of which is crap. You're correct, but it is wrong.
However, if you haven't registered your house, there isn't much you can do about it. IN the US. Notice people still take pictures of celebrities homes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...security by obscurity doesn't work :-/
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
In the UK, you won't have the right to use lethal force, because that would be murder.
We have the concept of "reasonable force": shooting somebody in the back as he's running away is not reasonable force, and it's not "protecting yourself".
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
I'll have to visit this neighborhood with my crowbar and ski mask. By making a scene they drew the attention of the media, which has plastered this all over for any criminal to see. So I suspect their crime rate will go up more than if they had been quiet.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Well, we can do this to Google. Why can't we do this to the Government?
I decorated my property.
This artistic work is clearly mine and I hold an automatic copyright on it.
If someone were to take a photo and use it for commercial purposed (ie google) wouldn't that be copyright infringement for commercial gain?
I'm sure the google lawyers have found a useful exception to this, likely it isn't valid in all jurisdictions.
I thoroughly agree that people should have the right to take photos in public places.
But Google is NOT a person. They are an advertising company. The photos in question are being taken for commercial purposes (don't kid yourself by saying that maps is free), and commercial photography can and should be regulated to ensure that it is done in a way that is safe, sane, and not exploitative.
Commercial photography typically requires a film permit, which allows local authorities to review your plans and ensure that public safety and convenience are not going to be affected. You must also obtain photo releases from anyone your photograph, whether they are in a public place or not, if you decide to use their likeness in the finished work.
We like to give Google a pass on this stuff because maps and street view are so damn useful, but they really need to obtain permits and releases like any other commercial photographer.
So that super affluent area that wouldn't let google take pictures is where again?
I think a minor part of it is the British mentality to tear down anyone/thing successful but more importantly these are older people and old people are generally miserable moaners. Plus they're wealthy so they're going think they're god's gift to humanity and get better treatment.
Google maps won't make a difference. As they already pointed out they've been hit a few times for theft. It's a wealthy area and local thugs will already know this. You'll only have to walk through the area and see all the nice cars.
Now they've been hit a few times *and* mentioned it on national TV that they're an easy target they're going to keep getting hit by criminals and quite frankly I'm glad.
- Public photography is legal. As long as the Street View car is street legal, has a valid license plate, is driven within traffic laws by a licensed driver, and does not block traffic, it's legal.
- So did the police actually respond to the residents' calls about legal activity? Do police in the UK arrest photographers on made-up photography bans like they do here in the USA?
- "Mobbing" a vehicle to stop it or chase it away IS illegal--though there are probably exceptions to stop fleeing criminals. If anything, the Google driver could have called the police on the folks mobbing the car.
It actually wouldn't surprise me if Google tells its drivers to NOT "stand their ground" on stuff like this, since angry residents could attack/vandalize the car/camera, attack the driver, or even ram the car if they're angry enough. I'd even bet that Google tells its drivers to not go to any areas where they feel uncomfortable.
Where I live, Street View has almost every single street in the county, but there's a glaring blank spot dead center. It's the local historically black state university and the surrounding "no pizza after dark" neighborhoods. Oddly, several other "no pizza after dark" local neighborhoods were street-viewed in their entirety, and I can't imagine any of those folks mobbing a Street View car.
The odd part: while you can't order a pizza after dark due to multiple incidents in the past, they're not exactly high-crime ghettos with 24-hour open-air drug deals. I've walked through them during the day and driven through them at night, and have never felt uncomfortable.
Were they paintings in the scene, or a close up shot? Things like this could matter for issues such as fair use - the latter is basically making a duplication of a copyrighted image, whilst the former example, such as a photo taken from a van, results in a lower resolution poorer quality results. So these aren't necessarily comparable.
Also note that Wikipedia often has tighter rules, such as wanting images to be free.
Well, no easy citation, and obviously when the hydrogen bomb came about it was worthless. Some tv or movie mogul bought it later, and his pool is still up there (covered and used as a resivour for the firefighting helicopters.
If you can find a good sat photo, the air intake is just north of the main antenna, and I think the stairs down are by two north-east most structures.
Nothing really important is in the bunker anymore, but there is always one person down there. Most boring job imagineable!
In other words, you're blowing smoke.
As others said, the real assett is microwave line-of-site to almost all of metro la. A certain group forces cropping or airbrushing of the arrays in commercial photos and movies, with one notable exception.
The bunker is just odd trivia.
How can you look at a report that counts multiple crimes against multiple people in a year only once, and not immediately see that it's a ploy to reduce embarrassingly high crime statistics?
The FBI report consists of discrete criminal events.
The UK report consists of essentially one tick for any number of crimes committed against any number of people in a household.
In the US, if a person's house got robbed 12 times, and they called the police each time, then that is twelve burglary events recorded for the year.
In the UK, if a person's house is robbed 12 times in a year, than that person is noted as a victim of burglary, and that's that.
Not to mention the UK figures are for households, not individuals. Another example of "look what I can prove with badly used statistics".
And still it's modded up, so it must fool some people.
Have you considered why the UK might pick a different method of reporting crime statistics, and what implications that might have for international comparison?
If you are unwilling to consider why methods are picked, what implications those methods have, and what institutional goals are supported by those methods and implications, then you are the essentially the most likely to be bullshitted by statistics.
If you have a report that is more appropriate for direct comparison, please share it.
If you do not, then you must attempt to extrapolate the differences yourself, if you wish to say one country has more crime than the other.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Oh, they have no idea how big a mistake they've made.
Firstly, they're now newsworthy, and the persons in question have their pictures plastered all over the place, and the Google Controversy gets a heading in the Wikipedia page on the village. For people preferring privacy, I'm rather surprised they appear happy to have their pictures, names, and even professions indicated in the papers.
Secondly, there are probably 10x as many people zooming in on Broughton Village using Google Earth in map view now, and they know the area is apparently ripe for burglary.
And, finally, inevitably, a host of people are already planning to drop by, take their own pictures of Broughton Village. From there they'll probably geotag them, and make them generally available to fill in the gaps in Street View.
Broughton Village vs. Google Street View car: Broughton Village wins! Broughton Village vs. the Internet: epic fail.
Each resident should have just quietly sent a message to Google rather than pulling this stunt.
In my case, they were just images demonstrating the art exists, they were scuptures, thus not actually infringing the artists right to display or profit from their work. In the other instance, the artist sold photographs of the sculpture, and was having cops harass tourists (really) who were simply snapping photos while on vacation. It wasn't about anyone else even trying to sell "competing" images.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!