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.

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?

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.

By the many hands of Vishnu I tell you it is a lie!

> 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.

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.