What planet are you on? Street view is nothing like you describe, and believe it or not there is ample case law and precedent to separate candid photography taken for purposes of journalism, hobbies, and reference from deliberate harassment. That legal distinction is not hard to make.
Many nudist beaches have explicitly posted restrictions on photography. If they don't, and they do not prohibit others from taking photos, why should Google be prohibited? How are they different from any other private entity?
Tell me why - when the shoe is on the other foot - the geek will settle for nothing less than "opt-in."
Because geeks understand some of the basic subtleties of privacy? If someone wants to do something that requires the use of private resources I own or control -- like my personal phone or e-mail -- then it's reasonable for them to ask before they expend those resources.
If someone wants to take a photograph in a public place, which by definition is not private, and requires nothing from me, then I'm not a stakeholder in that transaction. Taking a picture of something I own deprives me of nothing.
It's an extension of the basic right to have control over your own body.
Don't confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. You have control over your body and a legal right to assert that control. You do not have control over pictures that include your body, or a legal right to assert that control, although control has been granted in certain commercial circumstances.
Your body and a picture are actually different things, they are not the same thing.
you have to ask people for permission... This is also, why such material is not allowed in court when there was no permission.
Really? Tell me of this court that bans photographic evidence without the permission of the person in the photograph.
I think it's reasonable that a person has a right to vet images of them that reach the public.
Right, and we're not talking about professional modeling or commercial photography here. Sure, it's a best practice to get a model release when you plan to sell a photograph for publication, since the people in the photograph may be professional models themselves and wish to negotiate the use of their image. When Virgin used photographs downloaded from Flickr for an advertising campaign in Australia without seeking releases from the persons depicted, that was not cool, and we all understood why.
But that is very different from candid photography done for news, reference, or geographic purposes. Recognizable photos are published all the time -- sporting events, public attractions, tourism or just news on the street -- without seeking permission from every person that is visible in the background. Aerial and satellite photographs of private property are taken all the time and put in public and private databases, some of them Internet-accessible. Street view is different in magnitude, not principle, from these services.
You might be OK with the concept and execution of Google Street View. However,
a lot of people most certainly are not happy. We don't want our houses plastered
up on an easily indexed, location linked, photography database.
And it's going to happen anyway, with or without Google. I've posted hundreds of geolocated photos in Earthscape and Picasa. More will come. In 5 or 10 years, perhaps every photographable thing on earth will have at least one geolocated, maps-searchable photo pointing at it.
If not, can you claim with a straight face that this issue is important enough to warrant government involvement in private photography? It is unclear to me that there should be an a priori restraint on publication simply because "a lot of people are not happy". If that's a problem, toddle on down your Congressman's office and see if you can get enough people interested to pass a law. If you don't care enough to bother, fine, but don't tell me it's important to you.
I'm a veteran of these wars. I fought Lotus Marketplace, I wrote letters to my legislators and to Lotus and to Mitch Kapor. That success was utterly irrelevant. What I have learned is that you need to pick your battles, and pick them only when there is real harm being done. Otherwise you risk creating an unwieldly, overbearing enforcement environment that hurts everybody.
Because if the actions of individuals are constrained by fear of lawsuits, then nobody will take pictures, and applications of photographic and mapping technology will likewise be constrained. Sure, now he complains about Google. Next time it will be local realty system, then the city's map of water and sewer lines ("you can see the right rear tire of my car in this picture!"), then some poor guy's photostream on Flickr, etc.
I've used Street View to look at pictures of a destination -- including other people's residences -- PLENTY of times. It's absolutely invaluable to get the lay of the area, identify parking, etc before going out there, and reduces the likelihood of an accident or a traffic ticket. Realizing that the main parking entrance to a facility is on Beta Street when its mailing address is on Alpha Drive is fantastically useful information that saves me time and makes me safer.
And *it does not collect any information that is not easy visible from the street*. As a matter of principle, publishing photos taken on a public street should have no a priori restrictions.
(1) Why is it a problem when Google takes photos of your house? (2) What is your expectation of privacy regarding the portions of your property visible from a public street? (3) You say it's creepy when individuals put up pictures of your house. Has that happened? Have you tried to find out? If not, can you truly say that it is important to you?
This back-and-forth regarding publicly visible portions of private property is a huge mess. Either something is viewable from the street and therefore fodder for general photography, or its not. This singling out of Google is only going to create an unbearable enforcement mess when the next prima-donna Barbra Streisand type decides that they want to sue every tourist, amateur photographer and real estate company who might have *DARED* publish photos including some corner of their property.
wait while itunes chugs and makes a COPY of each file before syncing.
It's a checkbox in the Advanced preferences. And you can see why they start with it turned on -- people who don't understand the filesystem would get *seriously* confused when they deleted some Blankety-Blank folder that they didn't remember creating in their My Documents folder and suddenly music disappeared from iTunes.
Plus, it's easier to keep metadata (covers, for example) in the same location as the music, since otherwise you couldn't rely on having write access.
> Who is going to write your open-source textbooks? And who is going to pay the authors?
I'm not sure they need or want payment. Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook. It seems to me that most professors go to the textbook because they want a structure imposed on the class, not because it is the best (or in some cases, even a competent) source of information.
I found plenty of mistakes in my business school textbooks, and dozens of examples of freely available Internet resources that explained the same material in clearer and more correct ways. The 30 pages on isoquants and isocost curves in my microeconomics textbook were easily surpassed by an 8-page article posted by a professor at Seattle University, for example.
> Wikipedia doesn't really claim to be a textbook replacement.
True, but it is a textbook replacement in many cases. Coverage of many specific topics in Wikipedia is excellent, and it's often able to get to the point without a lot of rambling and page-filling.
I recently completed a business degree, and I found that very often I came away with a much better understanding of some topics if I went straight to the Internet -- there is a rich world of short-subject articles out there from people who care passionately about teach particular topics. Wikipedia is a great source, but not the only source.
"Most, but not all, instructors are teaching because they can't hack it in the real world of their chosen field."
You make a good point. One of the things I liked about my business school (I'll plug it a little: Webster University, based in St. Louis) was that all the instructors were current or retired managers and corporate officers, with years of experience in marketing, accounting, finance, leadership, etc. My Operations professor was an industrial process engineer for Hallmark. They were flying him cross-country California to Connecticut and back every two weeks because he was that important to Hallmark (which led to some confusing class scheduling, but it was worth it).
The books were just books; the people and the ideas made the degree worthwhile.
Haven't relatively mature technologies like GPS devices been providing augmented reality for some time now? I mean, my GPS can show me the location of Dunkin Donuts shops long before I can see them on the street.
Integrating the GPS-located items in the camera view seems to be the only innovation here.
That being the case the government should make damn sure that any such device deactivates the moment your car starts moving and punish anyone tampering with it.
Yes, this would be the magic government that has the ability to remotely disable ubiquitousportablevideoscreens, using their Amulet of Regulation.
This is a problem that government cannot solve -- appealing to them is not going to make it happen.
I would suggest that no safety concern justifies the implementation of *ineffectual* safety requirements. The ubiquity of portable television devices and personal media players (heck, my *phone* is a personal media player) insure that anybody who wants to watch TV while driving will have the ability to do so. Arbitrarily closing out one of the many LCD screens available to them is not going to prevent someone from watching a video screen if they so choose.
The only real deterrent would be enforcement -- police see a motion video screen operating in the front seat while the car is moving, and they fine your ass into the next decade. I'm not comfortable with that either, but it would at least have an effect. Arbitrary limits on a single LCD panel will do nothing, and we'll be greeted by an army of Chinese import devices that ignore the restriction anyway.
"So you shouldn't have to know how to solve a given problem yourself, in a vacuum, because in the "real world" we have reference books and other people to collaborate with."
This may come a surprise, but in the real world, problems are not handed down by some giant professor in the sky. Quantifying and defining the problem, taking data, developing solutions and testing, engineering the solution into something that can be manufactured, managing costs, these are all part of the process. A 45-minute test does nothing to develop these skills.
Sure, there is value in learning what others have done. The classsroom test format might encourage students to do that. But don't kid yourself into thinking that taking tests is comparable to original thought, and that somehow working alone will qualify you to find the answers to real-world questions. The days when scientists and engineers could succeed in isolation passed in the early 20th century. In this century, great scientists and engineers also have to be great leaders.
I would go even further and suggest that universities should be teaching students to solve difficult problems, that are not simple or trivially time-limited, with access to a universe of references and a team of skilled engineers. Problems that are so difficult that many will fail, and yet learn from that failure.
Solving a difficult problem as a team is the only skill that matters, and the only skill that will matter.
Teach students how to do *that*, and you'll be building leaders, not loners.
Sure, but that real reward is intangible to the student. It might be nice to think that students will learn "for the ultimate rewards", but the ultimate rewards are a consequence of the immediate rewards: high GPA means a shot at NSF Grant, Battelle scholarships to grad school, a great looking resume, good recommendations from professors, etc.
If you don't get those, then the good opportunities don't come.
"And how much did they retain a month later, would you think, compared with those who didn't? That's the real point of getting an education, you know, not just grades."
I would assert that, as long as the reward consists of grades, then the learned behavior will be "getting better grades".
Teachers and professors complain about this problem all the time: students are "grade grubbing", they "fight for every point", etc, etc. But who created this form of reward? Certainly not students. If you're going to distill months of work -- and ultimately years of work -- into a single numerical measure, you can be damn sure that I'm going to seek every possible advantage to increase that number. Drugs are just one angle.
The browser on the iPhone is a revelation. It's the first small-format browser that has generated the same sense of "flow" that I get from a full-size browser. I sit down to use it after lunch then look up surprised when 40 minutes have gone by and I'm late for my next meeting.
You're right. We should feed him to the newly cloned Ibex.
To address the original poster's point more clearly, I don't think anybody is doing this with the goal of repopulating the species, although they may claim it for funding purposes. They're really just trying to push the cloning envelope, and a recently-extinct goat is a perfectly good excuse to experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
What planet are you on? Street view is nothing like you describe, and believe it or not there is ample case law and precedent to separate candid photography taken for purposes of journalism, hobbies, and reference from deliberate harassment. That legal distinction is not hard to make.
Many nudist beaches have explicitly posted restrictions on photography. If they don't, and they do not prohibit others from taking photos, why should Google be prohibited? How are they different from any other private entity?
Because geeks understand some of the basic subtleties of privacy? If someone wants to do something that requires the use of private resources I own or control -- like my personal phone or e-mail -- then it's reasonable for them to ask before they expend those resources.
If someone wants to take a photograph in a public place, which by definition is not private, and requires nothing from me, then I'm not a stakeholder in that transaction. Taking a picture of something I own deprives me of nothing.
Don't confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized. You have control over your body and a legal right to assert that control. You do not have control over pictures that include your body, or a legal right to assert that control, although control has been granted in certain commercial circumstances.
Your body and a picture are actually different things, they are not the same thing.
Really? Tell me of this court that bans photographic evidence without the permission of the person in the photograph.
Right, and we're not talking about professional modeling or commercial photography here. Sure, it's a best practice to get a model release when you plan to sell a photograph for publication, since the people in the photograph may be professional models themselves and wish to negotiate the use of their image. When Virgin used photographs downloaded from Flickr for an advertising campaign in Australia without seeking releases from the persons depicted, that was not cool, and we all understood why.
But that is very different from candid photography done for news, reference, or geographic purposes. Recognizable photos are published all the time -- sporting events, public attractions, tourism or just news on the street -- without seeking permission from every person that is visible in the background. Aerial and satellite photographs of private property are taken all the time and put in public and private databases, some of them Internet-accessible. Street view is different in magnitude, not principle, from these services.
And it's going to happen anyway, with or without Google. I've posted hundreds of geolocated photos in Earthscape and Picasa. More will come. In 5 or 10 years, perhaps every photographable thing on earth will have at least one geolocated, maps-searchable photo pointing at it.
You're worried about photos of your house. Have you bothered to check Picasa, Flickr, Imageshack, Photobucket, Bayimg? TerraServer? Real estate comparison sites? What of the hundreds of other image and geographic services I have not named?
If not, can you claim with a straight face that this issue is important enough to warrant government involvement in private photography? It is unclear to me that there should be an a priori restraint on publication simply because "a lot of people are not happy". If that's a problem, toddle on down your Congressman's office and see if you can get enough people interested to pass a law. If you don't care enough to bother, fine, but don't tell me it's important to you.
I'm a veteran of these wars. I fought Lotus Marketplace, I wrote letters to my legislators and to Lotus and to Mitch Kapor. That success was utterly irrelevant. What I have learned is that you need to pick your battles, and pick them only when there is real harm being done. Otherwise you risk creating an unwieldly, overbearing enforcement environment that hurts everybody.
Because if the actions of individuals are constrained by fear of lawsuits, then nobody will take pictures, and applications of photographic and mapping technology will likewise be constrained. Sure, now he complains about Google. Next time it will be local realty system, then the city's map of water and sewer lines ("you can see the right rear tire of my car in this picture!"), then some poor guy's photostream on Flickr, etc.
I've used Street View to look at pictures of a destination -- including other people's residences -- PLENTY of times. It's absolutely invaluable to get the lay of the area, identify parking, etc before going out there, and reduces the likelihood of an accident or a traffic ticket. Realizing that the main parking entrance to a facility is on Beta Street when its mailing address is on Alpha Drive is fantastically useful information that saves me time and makes me safer.
And *it does not collect any information that is not easy visible from the street*. As a matter of principle, publishing photos taken on a public street should have no a priori restrictions.
(1) Why is it a problem when Google takes photos of your house? (2) What is your expectation of privacy regarding the portions of your property visible from a public street? (3) You say it's creepy when individuals put up pictures of your house. Has that happened? Have you tried to find out? If not, can you truly say that it is important to you?
This back-and-forth regarding publicly visible portions of private property is a huge mess. Either something is viewable from the street and therefore fodder for general photography, or its not. This singling out of Google is only going to create an unbearable enforcement mess when the next prima-donna Barbra Streisand type decides that they want to sue every tourist, amateur photographer and real estate company who might have *DARED* publish photos including some corner of their property.
Do you mean people walking down the street with a camera might photograph cars or faces? Or see things through a transparent material? And those same people could publish pictures on the Internet for any reason! They are history's greatest monsters. Well, I'm going to go live in a cave where this sort of thing can't happen. Who will think of the children?
It's a checkbox in the Advanced preferences. And you can see why they start with it turned on -- people who don't understand the filesystem would get *seriously* confused when they deleted some Blankety-Blank folder that they didn't remember creating in their My Documents folder and suddenly music disappeared from iTunes. Plus, it's easier to keep metadata (covers, for example) in the same location as the music, since otherwise you couldn't rely on having write access.
By the many hands of Vishnu I tell you it is a lie!
I'm not sure they need or want payment. Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook. It seems to me that most professors go to the textbook because they want a structure imposed on the class, not because it is the best (or in some cases, even a competent) source of information.
I found plenty of mistakes in my business school textbooks, and dozens of examples of freely available Internet resources that explained the same material in clearer and more correct ways. The 30 pages on isoquants and isocost curves in my microeconomics textbook were easily surpassed by an 8-page article posted by a professor at Seattle University, for example.
True, but it is a textbook replacement in many cases. Coverage of many specific topics in Wikipedia is excellent, and it's often able to get to the point without a lot of rambling and page-filling.
I recently completed a business degree, and I found that very often I came away with a much better understanding of some topics if I went straight to the Internet -- there is a rich world of short-subject articles out there from people who care passionately about teach particular topics. Wikipedia is a great source, but not the only source.
You make a good point. One of the things I liked about my business school (I'll plug it a little: Webster University, based in St. Louis) was that all the instructors were current or retired managers and corporate officers, with years of experience in marketing, accounting, finance, leadership, etc. My Operations professor was an industrial process engineer for Hallmark. They were flying him cross-country California to Connecticut and back every two weeks because he was that important to Hallmark (which led to some confusing class scheduling, but it was worth it).
The books were just books; the people and the ideas made the degree worthwhile.
Haven't relatively mature technologies like GPS devices been providing augmented reality for some time now? I mean, my GPS can show me the location of Dunkin Donuts shops long before I can see them on the street. Integrating the GPS-located items in the camera view seems to be the only innovation here.
That being the case the government should make damn sure that any such device deactivates the moment your car starts moving and punish anyone tampering with it.
Yes, this would be the magic government that has the ability to remotely disable ubiquitous portable video screens, using their Amulet of Regulation.
This is a problem that government cannot solve -- appealing to them is not going to make it happen.
I would suggest that no safety concern justifies the implementation of *ineffectual* safety requirements. The ubiquity of portable television devices and personal media players (heck, my *phone* is a personal media player) insure that anybody who wants to watch TV while driving will have the ability to do so. Arbitrarily closing out one of the many LCD screens available to them is not going to prevent someone from watching a video screen if they so choose.
The only real deterrent would be enforcement -- police see a motion video screen operating in the front seat while the car is moving, and they fine your ass into the next decade. I'm not comfortable with that either, but it would at least have an effect. Arbitrary limits on a single LCD panel will do nothing, and we'll be greeted by an army of Chinese import devices that ignore the restriction anyway.
Eric Raymond's famous essays on relationships and the modern geek: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/
I'm just amazed they found somebody willing to pay almost $5 per minute for long distance.
"So you shouldn't have to know how to solve a given problem yourself, in a vacuum, because in the "real world" we have reference books and other people to collaborate with."
This may come a surprise, but in the real world, problems are not handed down by some giant professor in the sky. Quantifying and defining the problem, taking data, developing solutions and testing, engineering the solution into something that can be manufactured, managing costs, these are all part of the process. A 45-minute test does nothing to develop these skills.
Sure, there is value in learning what others have done. The classsroom test format might encourage students to do that. But don't kid yourself into thinking that taking tests is comparable to original thought, and that somehow working alone will qualify you to find the answers to real-world questions. The days when scientists and engineers could succeed in isolation passed in the early 20th century. In this century, great scientists and engineers also have to be great leaders.
I would go even further and suggest that universities should be teaching students to solve difficult problems, that are not simple or trivially time-limited, with access to a universe of references and a team of skilled engineers. Problems that are so difficult that many will fail, and yet learn from that failure. Solving a difficult problem as a team is the only skill that matters, and the only skill that will matter. Teach students how to do *that*, and you'll be building leaders, not loners.
Sure, but that real reward is intangible to the student. It might be nice to think that students will learn "for the ultimate rewards", but the ultimate rewards are a consequence of the immediate rewards: high GPA means a shot at NSF Grant, Battelle scholarships to grad school, a great looking resume, good recommendations from professors, etc. If you don't get those, then the good opportunities don't come.
"And how much did they retain a month later, would you think, compared with those who didn't? That's the real point of getting an education, you know, not just grades." I would assert that, as long as the reward consists of grades, then the learned behavior will be "getting better grades". Teachers and professors complain about this problem all the time: students are "grade grubbing", they "fight for every point", etc, etc. But who created this form of reward? Certainly not students. If you're going to distill months of work -- and ultimately years of work -- into a single numerical measure, you can be damn sure that I'm going to seek every possible advantage to increase that number. Drugs are just one angle.
The browser on the iPhone is a revelation. It's the first small-format browser that has generated the same sense of "flow" that I get from a full-size browser. I sit down to use it after lunch then look up surprised when 40 minutes have gone by and I'm late for my next meeting.
You're right. We should feed him to the newly cloned Ibex. To address the original poster's point more clearly, I don't think anybody is doing this with the goal of repopulating the species, although they may claim it for funding purposes. They're really just trying to push the cloning envelope, and a recently-extinct goat is a perfectly good excuse to experiment.