Please MOD UP. The problem is that the police are above the law, the typical US police model is that they are a "paramilitary" force, and we are purposefully filling the police departments with dumbshits. Gone are the days that the police are community stewards.
I think that it does. I guess Google could try to argue that a sign that says "Private Drive" implies that the land is public. Perhaps they could argue that the property owners have been allowing others (Yahoo, Microsoft Live View, Cuil) to take pictures of their land from their land and that means that Google somehow has explicit permission to do the same without actually getting it directly from the owners. But the law is very clear. You cannot take pictures of private property except from public property or except with explicit permission to do so. Google does not meet either condition in this case. I think Google's only angle is that the property was not clearly marked as private. The sign says otherwise. If they came in on foot from public land (national forest or some such thing) and there was no fence or signage to indicate the private land then they would be in the clear. The law is written so that beyond taking steps to indicate the line, which the owners did, you don't have to do anything else to "enforce" your privacy rights. It is not an "Opt-in" system the way the law is currently written.
The issue is that with the sign Google, and everyone else, is informed that they are on private property. The list of "things that you can do" gets shorter when you are on private property. The law is already there, and there is no "opt-in" to be covered by the law other than somehow defining the line between the public property and the private property. It so happens that you are not allowed to photograph private property from that private property without explicit permission. By posting the sign they are alerting Google that now they are on private property. Google could simply turn around, get on public land and resume shooting, or they could get explicit permission to take pictures from the private property. They did neither, and what they did instead is illegal.
The rule (law) is that you can't photograph private property unless you are doing so from public property. The sign informs Google that they are not on public property. They may have been given implicit permission to access the land, perhaps to go as far as the front door and ask permission to take the pictures. But without explicit permission to take the pictures they cannot legally do so. Especially for posting on a publicly available repository. This is not a trespassing issue, and no trespassing charges are being pursued against Google.
I am not a lawyer, but I play one on the internets.
I agree with you. What I can't figure out is the airspace thing . . . what about aerial photography of mike's porch with a really good telephoto lense , oh and an IR camera as well to spot the grow room or count people inside or make sure your stove is off? I think this should not be legal either with the exception of 3m resolution for Google Earth like applications . . . the image database for which is public domain (is here means that I think it should be) and in the visible spectrum only.
So the sign at the head of the private drive that said "Private Drive" doesn't erode Googles firm ground? If a solicitor came up your drive, took pictures of the inside of your house through windows and posted them to the net you think they are on "firm ground"? There are easments to property that allow the government surveyors, utility line workers, postal carriers, etc certain rights to your property. But even they have limits, for instance the "posting pics of you taken through a window on the net" would still be illegal.
I worry about those who are arguing that it is indeed legal, and that there is nothing we can do about that.
IIRC they will export "electricity" in the form of hydrogen. If there is one place on earth right now, or ever, where hydrogen makes sense it is Iceland. Perhaps they will push the technology to a point where it is viable in other places and perhaps not. But they will most likely get to a point where that.1% fossil fuels trends greatly downwards.
Huh? It is folly to think that any one thing should produce all of our energy. Think of it as a diversified energy portfolio. Where I live wind and solar could power the region and still leave enough to export. This probably is not true in Alaska, but then again high mountainous regions tend to be regularly windy, and I think the sun shines there at least part of the time. I find that people who argue that the sun can't possibly meet our energy needs are severely lacking in imagination and vision. We are infants in these technologies, but even as such have the capability if not the will to generate large amounts of power with the sun. We are also infants in efficient appliances, and are quickly moving up the curve there too. These two trends likely will continue . . ..
Please note that solar is not only PV, and that PV is a small subset of the potential to derive electricity from the sun.
I'm pretty sure that most aluminum stuff is from mostly recycled aluminum . . . similar to steel. But I have nothing to back that up, except that it would be easier and cheaper to use recycled aluminum as it is a "local resource" almost everywhere. You are right about the environment in the back of everyone's mind, behind profit, convenience, and almost everything else.
True about the smelting. But the thing you are glossing over is that there are vast amounts of aluminum scraps ready to be recycled. Recycling aluminum is very easy, that is, it uses far less energy than it does to make it in the first place or than it does to recycle steel. Aluminum has a pretty low melting point, I could google for it I suppose, but IIRC its 1700 F or so.
That's a good question, and I wondered too. Lately though (past decade or so), I've heard Aluminum touted as eco friendly because it is very cheap and easy to recycle (compared with steel recycling it is cheaper and it is way cheaper than making new aluminum). So the current situation is that we have a lot of aluminum that is unused after its first life (say as a soda can, or siding, or an airplane fuselage). In that way it may be better than plastic (that is a debatable point), and better than those steel and titanium laptops that are so chic right now.
Well at least the "threw up on the monitor" part was right. I actually really loved MFC when I first was using it, but as time went on I really wished that I had the time to re-do it in some way that read better.
No doubt. I seem to recall hearing that genetically modified corn was found in non genetically modified crops (perhaps in mexico), so the gm crops were cross pollinating, over many many miles with non gm crops. Thanks Monsanto.
Hear hear on the biology patents. IIRC pharmaceutical companies are able to patent the genomes of plants . . . perhaps also of animals. Hopefully this is the next bad idea to epic fail.
I think it was Jesse Helms who said something like "These people who talk about freedom of religion really mean freedom from religion." That might be the only thing he ever said that I agree with, in the deepest part of my soul . . . freedom from religion is what this country is all about. And that is the only way anyone will ever have freedom of religion.
It annoys me that Democrat == anti gun, etc. exists because it detracts from any kind of real debate. I think purposefully, and this is why things like abortion, family values, etc. are talked about as "the issues", when without the media playing them up they would not be "the issues".
So the thing that happens with the libertarians is they come off as crackpots in the media. People who think every town should be run by a militia and such. There was a rundown of candidates in the free paper here (alibi) a while ago and the libertarians all came across this way . . . I think of libertarians as a more pragmatic version of the old school republicans, before religion became the rallying cry. Small government, be stewards to the environment, dont regulate the market and don't let the market regulate government (the latter part seems to be largely ignored, but a free market needs both). I guess my offtopic rant is done . . .
Sorry, but I'm not. I read the first part as a joke and the second as the truth (ie, this is not about productivity, it is about control . ..). One persons funny is another persons flaimbait I guess.
I'm not sure about your assertion regarding solar panel available space, I've seen numbers that suggest the equivalent size of texas could power the world, but I'm not advocating PV. I am advocating solar thermal which Germany is starting to build, based on technology developed in the 70s in the US energy labs (and then abandoned when Reagan got elected). Use heat from the sun to melt a big tank of salt and use it to drive a steam turbine. Yes you need mirrors, but this is a simpler, lower maintenance solution than a coal fired furnace to to the same thing (drive a steam turbine).
My point about the post I originally replied to was that you were misrepresenting the facts about Romania and Solar panels by a large margin, which undercut any other potentially valid points you were trying to make. Which you are again doing here (not enough space anywhere on earth to install enough solar panels to make a difference). That point is surely wrong and I would bet that existing rooftops are enough space to make a difference. That is not the reason that PV is not the right technology for TED to discuss (and I agree that PV is not the right topic for TED).
Oh, I see. Your point is that there is not enough room for the solar panels that Germany already has installed. Or that they need to be maintained? Or something. Good point.
There is a lot of wrongness in your post, but I'll stick to this one: At this price the whole military budget of US for 2008 will buy about 40GW of power, which is less than what, for example, Rumania uses during one year.
With 40GW of solar panels Romania will generate a years worth of power in 1462 hours, or about 180 days given 8 hours of daylight per day. (thems big numbers but I get 58,490,000,000,000 Wh/year / 40,000,000,000W). But here's the thing, if that much money poured into buying solar panels, the price would come down, the manufacturing would further innovate, and likely efficiencies would go up. Solar thermal generation technologies are not new, but they are innovations relative to coal and ng power plants and these things are low tech enough to be viable now. As we (the rich countries like Germany) deploy them they also get cheaper and can be viable cheap alternatives to emerging countries.
No one has directly observed gravity waves. But their existence is tied to a set of observations which formulated a model which then predicts their existence. Scientists then work hard to prove or disprove these models and so they device experiments, make measurements, refine the models, etc. This is a far cry from the religious belief in something that remains unobserved, unmodeled, or what have you. Scientist don't believe they exist on faith alone, they believe they exist through study and experimentation. Sometimes they are proven wrong and so must amend their beliefs and through this process make important discoveries about the nature of the physical laws of the universe. The only faith scientists operate on is the faith that through adherance to the scientific principles they will make progress towards the answers, about which they know very little. This kind of faith is very important to the human spirit . . . faith that the hard work, experimentation, and failure after failure will yield positive results. This is in contrast with the religious faith that means you do not question the nature of god, that you accept and when you die you will get to live in the happy place.
Slashdot Mirror
Please MOD UP. The problem is that the police are above the law, the typical US police model is that they are a "paramilitary" force, and we are purposefully filling the police departments with dumbshits. Gone are the days that the police are community stewards.
I want to see the film . . .
I think that it does. I guess Google could try to argue that a sign that says "Private Drive" implies that the land is public. Perhaps they could argue that the property owners have been allowing others (Yahoo, Microsoft Live View, Cuil) to take pictures of their land from their land and that means that Google somehow has explicit permission to do the same without actually getting it directly from the owners. But the law is very clear. You cannot take pictures of private property except from public property or except with explicit permission to do so. Google does not meet either condition in this case. I think Google's only angle is that the property was not clearly marked as private. The sign says otherwise. If they came in on foot from public land (national forest or some such thing) and there was no fence or signage to indicate the private land then they would be in the clear. The law is written so that beyond taking steps to indicate the line, which the owners did, you don't have to do anything else to "enforce" your privacy rights. It is not an "Opt-in" system the way the law is currently written.
The issue is that with the sign Google, and everyone else, is informed that they are on private property. The list of "things that you can do" gets shorter when you are on private property. The law is already there, and there is no "opt-in" to be covered by the law other than somehow defining the line between the public property and the private property. It so happens that you are not allowed to photograph private property from that private property without explicit permission. By posting the sign they are alerting Google that now they are on private property. Google could simply turn around, get on public land and resume shooting, or they could get explicit permission to take pictures from the private property. They did neither, and what they did instead is illegal.
The rule (law) is that you can't photograph private property unless you are doing so from public property. The sign informs Google that they are not on public property. They may have been given implicit permission to access the land, perhaps to go as far as the front door and ask permission to take the pictures. But without explicit permission to take the pictures they cannot legally do so. Especially for posting on a publicly available repository. This is not a trespassing issue, and no trespassing charges are being pursued against Google.
I am not a lawyer, but I play one on the internets.
I agree with you. What I can't figure out is the airspace thing . . . what about aerial photography of mike's porch with a really good telephoto lense , oh and an IR camera as well to spot the grow room or count people inside or make sure your stove is off? I think this should not be legal either with the exception of 3m resolution for Google Earth like applications . . . the image database for which is public domain (is here means that I think it should be) and in the visible spectrum only.
So the sign at the head of the private drive that said "Private Drive" doesn't erode Googles firm ground? If a solicitor came up your drive, took pictures of the inside of your house through windows and posted them to the net you think they are on "firm ground"? There are easments to property that allow the government surveyors, utility line workers, postal carriers, etc certain rights to your property. But even they have limits, for instance the "posting pics of you taken through a window on the net" would still be illegal.
I worry about those who are arguing that it is indeed legal, and that there is nothing we can do about that.
IIRC they will export "electricity" in the form of hydrogen. If there is one place on earth right now, or ever, where hydrogen makes sense it is Iceland. Perhaps they will push the technology to a point where it is viable in other places and perhaps not. But they will most likely get to a point where that .1% fossil fuels trends greatly downwards.
Wind and solar probably can't deliver the wattage
.
Huh? It is folly to think that any one thing should produce all of our energy. Think of it as a diversified energy portfolio. Where I live wind and solar could power the region and still leave enough to export. This probably is not true in Alaska, but then again high mountainous regions tend to be regularly windy, and I think the sun shines there at least part of the time. I find that people who argue that the sun can't possibly meet our energy needs are severely lacking in imagination and vision. We are infants in these technologies, but even as such have the capability if not the will to generate large amounts of power with the sun. We are also infants in efficient appliances, and are quickly moving up the curve there too. These two trends likely will continue . . .
Please note that solar is not only PV, and that PV is a small subset of the potential to derive electricity from the sun.
I'm pretty sure that most aluminum stuff is from mostly recycled aluminum . . . similar to steel. But I have nothing to back that up, except that it would be easier and cheaper to use recycled aluminum as it is a "local resource" almost everywhere. You are right about the environment in the back of everyone's mind, behind profit, convenience, and almost everything else.
True about the smelting. But the thing you are glossing over is that there are vast amounts of aluminum scraps ready to be recycled. Recycling aluminum is very easy, that is, it uses far less energy than it does to make it in the first place or than it does to recycle steel. Aluminum has a pretty low melting point, I could google for it I suppose, but IIRC its 1700 F or so.
That's a good question, and I wondered too. Lately though (past decade or so), I've heard Aluminum touted as eco friendly because it is very cheap and easy to recycle (compared with steel recycling it is cheaper and it is way cheaper than making new aluminum). So the current situation is that we have a lot of aluminum that is unused after its first life (say as a soda can, or siding, or an airplane fuselage). In that way it may be better than plastic (that is a debatable point), and better than those steel and titanium laptops that are so chic right now.
Well at least the "threw up on the monitor" part was right. I actually really loved MFC when I first was using it, but as time went on I really wished that I had the time to re-do it in some way that read better.
mover your cell phone away from your crotch
Thus making the vibrate mode virtually useless.
No doubt. I seem to recall hearing that genetically modified corn was found in non genetically modified crops (perhaps in mexico), so the gm crops were cross pollinating, over many many miles with non gm crops. Thanks Monsanto.
Hear hear on the biology patents. IIRC pharmaceutical companies are able to patent the genomes of plants . . . perhaps also of animals. Hopefully this is the next bad idea to epic fail.
"Eat that sh*t".
this is a joke, not a troll or a flame
I think it was Jesse Helms who said something like "These people who talk about freedom of religion really mean freedom from religion." That might be the only thing he ever said that I agree with, in the deepest part of my soul . . . freedom from religion is what this country is all about. And that is the only way anyone will ever have freedom of religion.
It annoys me that Democrat == anti gun, etc. exists because it detracts from any kind of real debate. I think purposefully, and this is why things like abortion, family values, etc. are talked about as "the issues", when without the media playing them up they would not be "the issues".
So the thing that happens with the libertarians is they come off as crackpots in the media. People who think every town should be run by a militia and such. There was a rundown of candidates in the free paper here (alibi) a while ago and the libertarians all came across this way . . . I think of libertarians as a more pragmatic version of the old school republicans, before religion became the rallying cry. Small government, be stewards to the environment, dont regulate the market and don't let the market regulate government (the latter part seems to be largely ignored, but a free market needs both). I guess my offtopic rant is done . . .
Sorry, but I'm not. I read the first part as a joke and the second as the truth (ie, this is not about productivity, it is about control . . .). One persons funny is another persons flaimbait I guess.
Mod UP. Since when is pointing out a simple truth considered Flaimbait?
I'm not sure about your assertion regarding solar panel available space, I've seen numbers that suggest the equivalent size of texas could power the world, but I'm not advocating PV. I am advocating solar thermal which Germany is starting to build, based on technology developed in the 70s in the US energy labs (and then abandoned when Reagan got elected). Use heat from the sun to melt a big tank of salt and use it to drive a steam turbine. Yes you need mirrors, but this is a simpler, lower maintenance solution than a coal fired furnace to to the same thing (drive a steam turbine).
My point about the post I originally replied to was that you were misrepresenting the facts about Romania and Solar panels by a large margin, which undercut any other potentially valid points you were trying to make. Which you are again doing here (not enough space anywhere on earth to install enough solar panels to make a difference). That point is surely wrong and I would bet that existing rooftops are enough space to make a difference. That is not the reason that PV is not the right technology for TED to discuss (and I agree that PV is not the right topic for TED).
Oh, I see. Your point is that there is not enough room for the solar panels that Germany already has installed. Or that they need to be maintained? Or something. Good point.
Yes, because I was actually suggesting that it is a good idea for Romania to put in 40GW of solar cells. It turns out you are a troll.
There is a lot of wrongness in your post, but I'll stick to this one:
At this price the whole military budget of US for 2008 will buy about 40GW of power, which is less than what, for example, Rumania uses during one year.
With 40GW of solar panels Romania will generate a years worth of power in 1462 hours, or about 180 days given 8 hours of daylight per day. (thems big numbers but I get 58,490,000,000,000 Wh/year / 40,000,000,000W). But here's the thing, if that much money poured into buying solar panels, the price would come down, the manufacturing would further innovate, and likely efficiencies would go up. Solar thermal generation technologies are not new, but they are innovations relative to coal and ng power plants and these things are low tech enough to be viable now. As we (the rich countries like Germany) deploy them they also get cheaper and can be viable cheap alternatives to emerging countries.
No one has directly observed gravity waves. But their existence is tied to a set of observations which formulated a model which then predicts their existence. Scientists then work hard to prove or disprove these models and so they device experiments, make measurements, refine the models, etc. This is a far cry from the religious belief in something that remains unobserved, unmodeled, or what have you. Scientist don't believe they exist on faith alone, they believe they exist through study and experimentation. Sometimes they are proven wrong and so must amend their beliefs and through this process make important discoveries about the nature of the physical laws of the universe. The only faith scientists operate on is the faith that through adherance to the scientific principles they will make progress towards the answers, about which they know very little. This kind of faith is very important to the human spirit . . . faith that the hard work, experimentation, and failure after failure will yield positive results. This is in contrast with the religious faith that means you do not question the nature of god, that you accept and when you die you will get to live in the happy place.