Yes, using whitespace well is good. The problems start when a cognitive radio malfunctions and interferes with licensed and in use spectrum.

The crux of sharing spectrum (as any down to earth shared whitespace proponent will tell you) has to do with the rules the cognitive radios use. Liken these to rules of the road or right of way. Traffic on the roads and freeways works (for the most part) because of a common understanding of the rules that govern right of way. These rules are determined by the government (in some cases better than others, try figuring out when you can do a u-turn in a given city).

The point is that while in theory, sharing unused white space is great, the devil is in how you share it. Without rules and guidelines defining this sharing of whitespace will simply be a property grab.

Think radios positioned to transmit constantly when they don't have actual network traffic. Think about radios that start bombing unused whitespace to claim it for a telco as soon as it goes out of use. Defining the rules of the road is a good thing. The EU may do a bad job of this, but it still needs to be done before that grand idea of free spectrum can even begin to have a hope of being realized.

Granted you did point out a legitimate bias as the lean is that all capture of license plates is bad (something I'm admittedly on the fence about).

For me the real problem is the logging and storing. For each of the legitimate use cases you outlined, there should be no need to store license plates for anyone to whom those use cases do not apply.

For instance, let's just look at the stolen vehicle use case. As soon as the license plate number is processed (i.e. the image processing software has done it's job and associated an actual number to the image), a query is made against stolen vehicles. If the license plate is not for a stolen vehicle, the image and logs are deleted. You may argue that 12-24 hours of activity are needed, so I could see a data log that is that long being legitimate since it might take a day or so to notice that your car is missing.

A similar process could be applied to each use case you outlined. I would be interested in use cases you can identify that make a year's worth of logs sound legit.

One also deliberately fires a gun.

There was no intent with the campfire to start a wildfire. In both cases, a deliberate and irresponsible act (that is safe in normal wetter conditions) starts an unintended wildfire.

This is a fair comparison only if the driver of the vehicle was intentionally driving around without a spark arrestor or other deliberate *and* irresponsible act. As an example, a police officer who starts a wildfire while shooting his weapon in the course of his duties would be the fairer comparison to your accidental car exhaust fire (although if the grass was that susceptible, I would expect public wilderness areas to be closed to vehicular traffic).

What? Something seriously missing from the summary!

Except that this cost to the merchant is already priced into the goods that you purchase, so we pay for the points and such ourselves via marginally increased prices. By paying in cash, you are simply paying for a benefit that you don't get to receive (and yes, you are increasing the merchant's profit slightly as well). So while paying cash is a nice way to help a small business out, if everyone moved away from cards, prices of goods would drop slightly and the profit of the small merchant would be the same as it is today (even though they would not be having to pay those pesky fees anymore).

I think alot of you are forgetting what driving without ABS is like. Well maybe not, but my experience on the highway on wet roads combined with following distance of the cars around me backs that up. I'd take a car with ABS acting funny every so often (that I can throw into neutral, via clutch or other) over pure analogue brakes any time.

Regular consumption of 'significant' amounts of water can lead to water intoxication: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication

You should not try to apply logic or common sense to government regulations. This is the disconnect. As an example, google around for US policy about employees simply viewing wikileaks.

Let me quote the whole sentence:

There are many diskettes. Some of those have defects in areas with compressed archives. There is nothing to suggest that of the many diskettes there are any with defects in areas other than compressed archives.

You failed to parse correctly, the some you quoted is saying that of all the disks some have errors. Not as you suggest which is that of the disks with errors, some have errors in zip archives. The AC was right.

So I have to be honest, I was just as happy with my google voice account (maybe more so, but time will tell) when I could not use it on my iphone. Now you might be asking why, and maybe my use case is not common, but google voice fills a nice roll in my life. 1) Random people at bars get google voice # 2) Companies that require a phone number get google voice # Pretty much my google voice number is like my spam e-mail account. If you got this number, well good luck getting a return call. The ability to make calls from this number is nice if I ever do return a phone call from some random girl at a bar or some company that really wants to talk to me about why I downloaded their white paper. The only other use case that I can see myself taking advantage of is the free SMS, although to be honest, it's more of a pain to let all of my contacts know who is texting them than it is to pay the $5 a month for my SMS plan.

This is true, if you include the system bus, you have 5 nodes which each have to be connected to the other 4 and you get K5. I was simply responding to the statement that: