The point is, if he did want that, there are many phones to consider besides the Iphone. Even sticking with Nokia, they have the number one smartphone platform, Symbian.

Stop trying to treat your phone like a desktop ... or even a sub notebook and you'll be a lot happier AND more productive.

If you just want a phone, get a locked down feature phone that does Internet access and apps, and is way cheaper than Apple's. But the point of a smartphone is, or was before Apple redefined the term, to provide something more like a mobile handheld computer.

If you had 15 mod points all in one go, I presume you must have multiple sockpuppet accounts, which you're using to mod down people for liking the N900, and then you come and violate the spirit of the rules by posting in the same thread.

And you accuse them of being fanatical?

(And yes, it is a once in a blue moon thread about Nokia, the number one phone company. If you don't like people praising devices and being unable to cope with any criticism, why not have a go on the many Iphone stories?)

That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it.

What if you were running a hire car business, and kept a big database on every customer and where they drove to in the cars you hired out?

I mean, there's an uproar on places like here about the possibility of Google doing similar things with search queries - I don't hear the "But it's their server" argument then. And rightly so - the issue of privacy rights is separate to who owns what.

And an employee should have every right to monitor everything about the company, after all, they're giving up their time to work for that company? I don't think that logic follows.

Should a company put cameras in in toilet cubicles and changing rooms because they own the premises? Sometimes the issue of privacy still exists (as Germany has decided), even if someone owns the equipment. Yes, an employee is choosing to work there and use said equipment, but equally, the employer chooses to hire people, and let them use that equipment.

The problem is that erecting a big fence (or forest, as you suggest) on your own land to hide it would likely breach regulations such as planning permission (which probably wouldn't be allowed, for something that significantly changes how it looks).

So I think there should be some balance here. If we're saying it's fair game to publish anything you can from a public street, in any way, we should also allow people to take whatever steps they like on their own private land.

But if society is saying that people should be limited in what they can do, even on their private land, because it affects how it looks when viewed from other people's land, then it's also a fair balance to say that you don't necessarily have blanket rights to do absolutely whatever you like with data that's taken of private land.

(With windows, we can close the curtains. If there was a law saying you couldn't close the curtains without permission, I'd also expect laws controlling stalkers who might point a camera through the window all day long.)

FWIW, I think that Google have the right balance (not just legally, but also ethically - Don't Be Evil, remember?), in that they put the images up, but remove them if people object. This photographer may have a legal right to take photos, but others also have a legal right to criticise him for doing so.

Well, once you have taken the photograph, you then own the copyright on it. This entitles you to do pretty much whatever you like with it.

No - copyright means you can stop others from copying it. It's a necessity for being able to publish, but not a sufficiency. If there's another reason why you can't publish it (which could be anything from model rights as we're discussing here, or other things like defamation, or indeed, if the photograph is itself of a copyrighted work of someone else's), then owning the copyright isn't always sufficient for you to publish.

No one cares.

Evidently this photographer cares.

(Anyhow, you're missing the point. The problem isn't that lots of random people will be flocking to view your photo. But that people such as employers, potential employers, family, can easily see it, without you even knowing - and with easy search faciltiies, i.e., the fact that this is being linked to Google Maps rather than simply being put on a random web page, it's not simply lost in the noise. The claim isn't that everyone is watching you, the problem is that at least some people may do so.)

In the UK when anyone questioned immigration policy they were publically branded "racist" by the Labour party and prevented it from being debated. It was a legitimate concern

Citation?

Actually I'd say that immigration is itself another example of what you list - something that the Government scaremongers about, in order to pass new laws, including the Labour Government: e.g., proposing the national biometric ID cards and database "because otherwise immigrants might get in!"

And there are also the tightened restrictions on employment checking (passport scanning, the UK Border Agency), because oh noes, someone might "steal" a "British" job.

As for political correctness, this is often a tool used by those supporting these things - e.g., people saying "I think we should take freedoms away from people who look different to me, because they might be terrorists - but I can't say that, because it's not politically correct!"

It's an interesting point - in the UK, laws against possession of adult (not child) material have been used against pirates ( http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/16/extreme_pr0n_convictions/ ). But wait a moment, if it's true that piracy harms the producer, and production of said material is bad, surely it's doing good to pirate it...

Quite - this story makes about as much sense as saying "Court OKs Covert RTX PANASONIC KX-TG2511ET Digital Cordless Phone Audio Recording" - does the brand or kind of device really make a difference?

I wonder if it's still illegal for Android and Symbian too, since it's only talking about the Iphone...

(Well, I doubt it, of course. I know Slashdot didn't have it's daily Iphone story today, but do we need to put in a product placement for the Iphone(TM) again, when we have a perfectly good generic term, "phone"?)

What does "reasonable expectation" actually mean?

For most of the history of human civilization, the reasonable expectation was that, although people could see you in public, and in recent history, people could take photographs, there was never an expectation that it would suddenly be available for the entire world to see, forever, at a click of a button.

By all means we can debate the rights and wrongs, but let's drop this pretence of "reasonable expectation" - that's just a circular argument, as you're starting out with the assumption that it's reasonable.

Now, I think that this guy has every right to photograph in public. But that doesn't stop him being an ass.

What happened to Don't Be Evil? Just because you have a legal right to do something, doesn't mean it's always a good thing to do it. Equally, we have a right to criticise either Google, or this guy.

Heh, yes, I'm amused at the way people have been talking about "apps" as if the concept of running software applications was something new. Indeed, I wake up an check email on my Windows laptop (which I suspect is something done by far more people than those using an Ipad, but that doesn't stop the obligitary product placement in the media article) with an email client - but as I have done for years.

The source doesn't support the article anyway. The image makes it clear that the web is losing out to p2p and video. Whilst p2p is certainly a non-web app, it's just one particular case, and it's misleading for the article to conflate this with Iphone Facebook apps. Same with video - although that's just confusing, as surely much video watching will still be done through a web page? So I see no evidence that data sent through specialised apps is in genreal going to get bigger than web usage, with the sole exception of p2p ("Other" is way smaller, and it's also shrinking). There's also nothing to tell us whether any change is occurring due to usage of apps on mobile devices, compared with desktop or laptop apps - I doubt many people are doing p2p on mobile devices yet!

Certainly an interesting image though, even if the rest of the article makes no sense :)

Symbian is a waste to develop for.

Er, Symbian uses standard C++ and Qt, which I would say is one of the best application toolkits around. Apparently it used to be bad, but that's old news - I might as well criticise the Iphone for not having copy and paste.

It is in the process of being rapidly murdered

How? Not only is it still number one in current sales, the number of sales is growing twice as fast as the Iphone (Q2 2010 results), with only Android growing faster. Android is no doubt going to become a major player in future, however, in the mid-range there's still no competition for Symbian (you can get a Symbian phone for as little as £70 on PAYG, where as the latest Android release still requires a high end phone). The mid-range sells far more than the high-end.

and it has no real history of heavy app usage.

Circular argument - because they're releasing for the Iphone and not Symbian. (Do you have a source for this claim, anyway?)

I am calm - I could say the same to you; all the people who are outraged that someone might ask for other platforms, need to calm down.

I hope you are right, and we'll see a Symbian version when they roll it out worldwide. I'm not holding my breath though.

Looking down my Facebook newsfeed right now, I see 0 people using a Blackberry to post updates, 5 individuals using an iphone, 2 using Android, and 2 using Palm WebOS.

But not every person posting gets their phone listed! This is an appallingly bad way of judging how many have their own phones of a particular type. Anyone who uses an Iphone for just about everything gets an "Using An Iphone" ad tagged onto it, but this is less common with other phones. I know of loads of people with Nokias, but I rarely see it tagged on their posts.

Also the argument becomes circular - more apps produced only for Iphone, so Iphone users are more likely to use an app instead of the website, so Iphone users are more likely to have "Posted using an Iphone" advert attached, and then you conclude that there's more demand for Iphone apps...