FYI, this came up many years ago in the US. Defendants challenged the admissibility of evidence from aerial observations. The courts pretty much held that since the police are allowed to fly helicopters and airplanes over your house, anything that they observe while doing so is admissible under the 4th Amendment.

The basic rule for criminal evidence is that the cops can make observations from anyplace they're allowed to be. If they're standing on a sidewalk and see a marijuana plant in your front window, that's probable cause. Same if they walk up to your front door. They can look around any non-fenced areas on your property too. They can't stand in the bushes and peek through your windows, unless they have some other business being there (hint: do not have a burglar alarm if you're growing weed anywhere someone can see it through a window).

So if the cops can see your mj plants (or pool) from the air or some unfenced part of your yard, you're toast.

The rules for adminsitrative searches (e.g. code enforcement or tax enforcement) are much more lenient than criminal searches. Administrative searches often don't require a warrant, or if they do the warrants are much easier to obtain.

Only they were using aerial, then later satellite photos. We scanned the aerials, orthorectified them then registered them in a coordinate system for the city's GIS. They'd overlay a lot map and go plot by plot looking for pools, decks, and additions that weren't in the property tax database. These were mostly wealthy towns in Connecticut where this stuff added up to real money.

Now of course you can do that with Google Maps, if you don't mind waiting 1-3 years to catch people.

Just because you do *exactly the same thing* with a slightly different tool doesn't make it new. Back from those days one of the senior managers used to come into my office and say, "I just read about this patent where --" and I'd cut him off right there.

"This isn't going to be another one of those things where they take something people have been doing for ages with LORAN and substitute GPS, is it?" I ask.

"Well..."

"I don't want to hear about it. Whatever it is the patent is sure not to stand up to scrutiny, but I still don't want them holding treble damages over our head."

Which is why we need to move more to nuclear.

You're one up on me. I can't find the Start Menu...

[emphasis mine]

You have this backwards. Samzenpus thinks this is a great idea. He if far more MSNBC than FOXNews material.

The problem with Geothermal in Hawaii is that all of the good sources are on the big island "Hawaii" while the island of Oahu has roughly 5 times the population.

Those making $24,000/yr will finally understand that government money is not free.

Finally! Because you know your income level obviously proves that you're horribly ignorant! You tell 'em, bub!

Then you won't have the problem of people who don't pay taxes voting to raise the tax rate on those that do.

Because that's what's happening, right. The greedy, selfish... how have I heard it put... "parasite" poor bastards! You gotta make 'em SUFFER what it means to be poor!

A sales tax is still going to a progressive tax since things like food, school supplies, and other absolute necessities won't be taxed at all.

It's still regressive. It just means someone making millions will continue to pay a relatively trivial amount, while the poor take it in the shorts.

Sure, a billionaire might spend $5 million on a house, but his grocery budget is not going to be 50x more than the guy who spent $100K on a house.

Indeed, so in the end the billionaire will make out like a bandit (no longer having to pay out on his income) and the guy making 100k will happily save a few k$ per year, and the poor likely won't benefit at all.

So low income people will spend a larger percentage of their income on non-taxed products, meaning they will pay a lower tax rate than the guy who eats out twice a day.

Or they'll probably continue paying that tax, because they don't have the time or energy to visit the store and prepare the untaxed food because they're still struggling to keep their head above water.

Everyone pays, including corporations

Except when they engineer their taxes so that all the profits are outside the country, and their taxes report only losses. GE did that to the tune of a billion dollars back from the government, even though it was a complete fraud.

Well, I started with Linux by downloading Debian 0.93 by modem onto floppies (because the copyright situation for 386BSD was unclear at the time). I think this was the first official Debian release with dpkg and it was awesome!

So I remember when Linux started to get media attention very well. What people associated Linux with was Communism. My reaction at the time was that people who did that were hysterical idiots, and history has proved me right.

As for Islam, it's not going away. It can't be "defeated", any more than Christianity or atheism can be "defeated". These things will live on no matter what kind or unkind things people say about them. Those who insist on making Islam into the boogeyman are hysterics condemning themselves to permanent worry about what's hiding under their bed.

Well, before we candebate a question like "Is ISIL Muslim?" you have to specify what you mean by the question.

The important thing is not to ask a question like that in one context and then use the answer in a different context. For example if you ask someone in a white supremacist "Aryan Nations" church "who is a true Christian?" you can't automatically attribute those same ideas to Quakers. Likewise you can't attribute the answer of a Salafist group like ISIL to the question "Who is a true Muslim?" to your sober, industrious, and peaceful Hanafi Muslim neighbors. Both groups see the other as apostates.

A historian or anthropologist would certainly consider ISIL an "Islamic movement", just as they'd consider the KKK a "Christian movement". And while your local ultra-liberal Sufi imam or Episcopalian minister would disagree strongly, nobody is actually wrong here. They're just using the words in different senses.

Just like PCs what matters has shifted.
On the desktop speed is becoming less important while video is becoming slightly more important thanks to GPU compute being used for transcoding video and of course games.
Laptops cpu speed is less important than display quality, graphics performance, battery life, and weight.
Oh phones it is really all about the screen and battery life for most people.
CPUs right now are fast enough for majority of people. Of course there are users that need the fastest CPU, GPU and so on and others that need the lowest possible power draw.

I expect better from the tech community. If the tech world can rally around the destruction anyone that says anything homophobic why do they tolerate someone that called Neil Armstrong a liar less than a week after his death?

But only to build his army of gay-married socialist drones.

In certain circles there's no such thing as good news.

Let's all be honest Armstrong should be the ultimate tech poster boy. After walking on the Moon he became a college professor.