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Technology

Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls 365

Posted by timothy from the what's-wrong-with-seawalls dept.
Sylvestre writes "Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast. The goal? Busting people putting up illegal sea walls. The catch so far? One golf course covered the beach with boulders. Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Best use of technology I've seen all month!"
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Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls More

Using R44 And A PowerBook To Bust Illegal Seawalls

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  • They shouldn't be developping right along the coast anyways. It would be nice to have a large buffer zone.

    • Easy. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DAldredge ( 2353 )
      Just buy all the property from those that currently own it.
      • except that those who own that property didnt 'pay' for it completely - the community has decided it now has a much greater intrinsic value, as habitat / access for nature.

        the property owners didnt pay for the privilage to destroy nature did they?
    • for folks to live on?

      Better habitat for wildlife, more places for people to live, less erosion of the actual coast, etc.

      Of course, it won't be so good for the surfers and the folks who paid lots of money to live right on the edge, but for the rest of us (animals & plants included) it would be very nice to have lots of places to live on the coastal shelf.

      It's not just my crazy idea: Dutch planners eye a new frontier: the raging North Sea [s-t.com]

      "A square yard of land reclaimed from the North Sea costs about 260 guilders, or about $130. The same size patch of mainland can cost more than triple that."

  • Why illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dsanfte ( 443781 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:44PM (#4570106) Journal
    Question... why would making a "sea wall" be illegal?

    • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Informative)

      by SirKron ( 112214 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:46PM (#4570128)
      Sea walls are illegal if it can obstruct the natural sea life from living its life. Example: frogs cannot get from the water to the land to multiply and be fruitful.

      • Re:Why illegal? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Suppafly ( 179830 )
        Yes, but wouldn't the added benefit of not having your entire property slide into the ocean give you a legitimate claim against the frogs?

        • Re:Why illegal? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by SirKron ( 112214 )
          It is really funny, the Department of Natural Resources usually care more about how the land "used to" look versus what it "could" look like. Erosion is natural and would happen anyways. In fact, erosion helps sealife get on shore. Retaining walls are good for man, period.
          • Yeah and it "could" look like a completely grey planet, covered in buildings and streets. Urban development is cool and all, but sometimes it gets in the way of stuff like....ummm...breathing and the temperature of the planet (ie: global warming). You have to maintain a healthy balance, which is clearly on the wrong side of technology right now. Mostly anything the DoNR does to promote how the land "used to" look is a good thing.

        • Re:Why illegal? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld@ g m a i l . com> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:56PM (#4570193) Homepage
          It's not just your property though. That seawall may prevent erosion on your golf course, but the guy who lives down the coast a little might experience greater erosion because of it.

          • Re:Why illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)

            by 1010011010 ( 53039 )

            I agree, environmental protection is -- or should be -- a property-rights issue. In your example, the damaged party would be able to seek remedy before the law against the person who caused the destruction of his property.

        • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ender81b ( 520454 ) <wdinger@g m a i l . com> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:58PM (#4570213) Homepage Journal
          No you would be the one stupid enough to *buy* property about to slide into the sea you deserve what you get. If you buy beachfront property and need a sea wall you shouldn't be buying it in the the first place or *shock* you should've built your house on a different location. There are other solutions to building a sea wall btw, that is just the cheapest. Also, people

          Seriously, this is crap. The beach is the most dynamic enviroment the earth has to offer, and one of the most vital to organism reproducing. I could care less about your 400,000$ beachfront house that is going to be rubble the next time a hurricane/el nino/mudslide comes around anyways. Repeat after me - never build that close to a beach.

          Bah, sorry for the rant it has been a long day. I took a oceanography class last semester from a really good professor who drilled into us how dumb beachfront building really is.

          • I couldn't make the boulders out well in the newspaper's photograph, so here is the medium size image of the Ritz Carlton Half Moon Bay , the beachfront, and the boulders [californiacoastline.org] taken from the website.

            It is identified as: N37 26.03 W122 26.84 Image 6133 Mon Sep 30 16:05:57 2002

          • Re:Why illegal? (Score:3, Funny)

            by jafac ( 1449 )
            $400,000 beach house? Where? All the beach houses I'm familliar with around here (pretty much anywhere in CA) start in the low $2 millions.

          • Building on the Beach (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:54PM (#4570508)
            I could care less about your 400,000$ beachfront house that is going to be rubble the next time a hurricane/el nino/mudslide comes around anyways. Repeat after me - never build that close to a beach.

            What gets me about this is how old (and obvious) this advice really is.

            Whatever one's religious beliefs, it's generally agreed that Jesus know how to make a point. In Matthew 7:24-27, he tells a story about a foolish builder who builds his house on sand. His audience would have laughed about that.

            Two thousand years later, people with degrees in architecture and engineering build houses (and even gigantic hotels) out on the beach, and then try to get the government to spend tax money on beach replenishment when the ocean comes to take away their buildings.

            People who put up seawalls should have to pay to remove them, and people who build on sand shouldn't get one penny of my tax money for beach replenishment. Building on sand is so obviously stupid that anyone who does it doesn't deserve any help from anybody.

          • Re:Why illegal? (Score:2, Informative)

            by plierhead ( 570797 )
            Rant is right. The issue of seawalls is a little more complex than you make out.

            You say never build that close to a beach. The thing is, cliffs and foreshores move over time. It may happen gradually, or there may be a huge slip that moves the coast inwards by many yards overnight. So when you say "don't build that close to a beach", how not close is not close enough ? Where I live the same discussion is going on. The council discourages building seawalls. Trouble is, theres only one line of houses, then the public road. What happens when the houses are gone and the road comes under threat ? In some parts of the UK the land is disappearing at the rate of up to 5 metres per year.

            Sure, developers who want to create huge unnatural structures that play havoc with the natural wave and current patterns should get a hard time. But its a bit too simplistic to just say "never build near the sea".

        • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by dubl-u ( 51156 ) <<ot.atop> <ta> <2107893252>> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:01PM (#4570234)
          Yes, but wouldn't the added benefit of not having your entire property slide into the ocean give you a legitimate claim against the frogs?

          The no-seawall stuff isn't just for the little froggies, although destroying a public resource (the ecosystem) for private gain is generally a no-no. Other reasons include
          • California requires public access to the coast; some seawalls impede that, often intentionally
          • seawalls on one property can increase erosion on nearby properties
          • stopping erosion means that beaches aren't replenished, destroying them
          So turn it around: Why would being dumb enough to build on an eroding piece of land give you a legitimate claim to build a seawall?

      • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Informative)

        by !splut ( 512711 ) <sput AT alum DOT rpi DOT edu> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:13PM (#4570307) Journal
        Frogs do not live in saltwater. No frog larvae (tadpoles) are able to survive in salt water. A very small minority of frogs are able to tolerate brackish water as adults (Bufo marinus, the infamous caine toad, is one such animal), but no adult frogs live in seawater either.

        I'm sure you're right about why sea walls are illegal, but if the legislation is limited to points along the coast, then your specific example is incorrect. Destruction of the habitat of shorebirds or the nesting sties of seaturtles would be a better example.

        • Re:Why illegal? (Score:4, Funny)

          by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:54PM (#4570509)
          You know, you just made my day a bit better. Make's me happy to know that there are people around how know stuff. Thanks for teaching me something new. It's little moments like this that keep me coming back to Slashdot :)

    • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Informative)

      by El ( 94934 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:54PM (#4570183)
      Because beaches are public property. Erecting a wall in the middle of the freeway might improve your property too (cut down on that damn traffic noise!) but that's also illegal.

    • Re:Why illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tbmaddux ( 145207 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:10PM (#4570293) Homepage Journal
      All seawalls should be illegal, because they destroy beaches. The landowner is tossing rocks or concrete into the ocean to save his property at the expense of the public's property (the beach). Seawalls erode beaches by burying them under rubble (placement loss), reflecting waves and causing the sand to move offshore (active loss) and by simply being there as the shoreline retreats towards them (passive loss). Read works by Orrin Pilkey, or visit The Surfrider Foundation [surfrider.org] for more information.

      Many states have banned seawalls altogether. Washington is one example. In California, seawall construction is limited by the Coastal Act (passed in 1976) but not banned, and there are major loopholes, including language to protect "existing structures" which can be creatively interpreted to include a structure that did not exist yesterday but exists today. More and more of California's coastline is being buried under seawalls, including "temporary" "emergency" piles of rock that are never removed because the Commission doesn't have a police force to patrol the beaches. What little monitoring there is, is done entirely by volunteers, and kudos to them if they've gotten access to a helicopter to keep our beaches from vanishing!

    • Because sand often travels *along* coastlines. If I build a sea-wall, I protect my bit of sand, and the beach down-stream erodes. This forces my downstream neighbor to sea-wall his beach, and so on. Pretty soon everyone has a sea-wall, a strange curved beach, crappy water circulation, and diminished tidal wildlife.

      Sometimes you just got to accept that some shorelines erode, and banning all seawalls will reduce the overall erosion rate and protect the shoreline (in terms of clean sand, healthy ecosystem.) Yes, you must accept the shore will erode at a slow rate, but that is just nature at work... the only way to halt it is to build a seamless concrete fortification down the entire coast, which rather defeats the purpose.

  • it it just me? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by porn*! ( 159683 )
    It's great that the site runs on solar, but when you're flying a helicopter up and down the coast you're hardly looking to improve the environment.

    "at least he's not using a 747!"

    Maybe he should look into an ultralight.

  • Damn.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by unicron ( 20286 ) <unicron@@@thcnet...net> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:46PM (#4570121) Homepage
    I'm assuming any golf course that has "field of boulders" as a hazard is pretty damn hardcore.

  • Terraserver? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Flamesplash ( 469287 )
    Why not use the Terraserver [msn.com]? should be high enough resolution, I can even find my apartment on the thing. It is MS though, if that happens to not be you thing.

  • MicrosoftFree.com's hearts in the right place.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mgpeter ( 132079 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:48PM (#4570134) Homepage
    But what the heck are they doing using Microsoft FrontPage 4.0 as the HTML editor ???

    If you talk the talk, please walk the walk

    • Re:MicrosoftFree.com's hearts in the right place.. (Score:4, Funny)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:12PM (#4570305)
      I don't know but when i read
      No Microsoft products were used in creating this web site.
      My first thought when I read this was the disclaimer
      No animals were harmed in the making of this film that always appears at the bottom of movie credits.
      • They actually have a cadre of people who ensure that animals are not harmed in the making of those motion pictures. I think almost all US pictures carry that disclaimer, but I don't pay enough attention to the indies to know for sure. It began after several horses died in the making of some old westerns. Following that one of the big animal organizations, not PETA, but more like the kennel club, began a movement to greatly reduce animal risks in movies. Hollywood is pretty careful in bee scenes because there are pretty well defined rules about what endangerment can take place before you don't get to use the tag line.

  • Oooookay.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:49PM (#4570138) Homepage Journal
    "Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free."

    Err. Why does that sound like one of the Cosby kids trying to conince their dad that he should buy them a computer? I mean, who cares if it has 44 gigs of photos? None of us are going to download that many. Who cares if it runs on solar power? We're not paying for it. And who cares if it's MS free? We wouldn't know the difference if they were using MS for anything.

    I wouldn't normally make a point of it, but the way they presented those last bits of detail suggests to me they were trying really really hard to make sure Slashdot posts this story.

    I dunno, maybe I missed the point and each of those details was uber-important to understanding what this guy is doing. Sure.
    • I mean, who cares if it has 44 gigs of photos? None of us are going to download that many. Who cares if it runs on solar power? We're not paying for it. And who cares if it's MS free? We wouldn't know the difference if they were using MS for anything.

      Are you new to Slashdot? The submitted used mystical incantations to make sure his story got accepted. "Solar power," "44 gigs of photos," and "Microsoft Free" (note the miscapitalization) do the trick every time.

  • Incidentally, about TGV (Score:3, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:50PM (#4570150) Homepage Journal

    TGV was really goddamned cool. They were purchased by Cisco a few years ago and it all went to hell. They used to have catered lunches every Friday (I attended several of them) and every time I went it was from somewhere else that was good.

    Anyway I didn't know the place myself well enough to actually know who was responsible for any of the cool shit, but TGV used to make network software for VAXen. I logged into a pub ftp that used their ftpd once, it was a joy because it made it look like Unix.

    In any case TGV made the fastest TCP stack for Windows 3.1. It didn't make much of a difference when it came to doing PPP or SLIP over a modem because modems were max 28.8k in those days and they were real modems with buffered FIFOs and whatnot. But if you were using 10mbps ethernet or better then the TGV stack was dramatically faster than trumpet's. They also made a fast TCP stack for Windows 95 etc, but Cisco didn't do anything with it and by the time they were ready to do anything with TGV they had crushed the place's spirit, failed to open reqs for needed personnel, etc. Some of the engineers went to Cisco, and some of them went elsewhere. I'm not sure if the Santa Cruz office is still there or not. The person who was the director of the site at the time I quit from that office (As a Cisco employee) was a plant from Cisco, and not technical at all at that point. (She supposedly wrote some code at some point, IIRC.)

    TGV is the birthplace of the Mainframe Mouse. It was made of ~0.75" acrylic, and contained a normal-scale mouse attached to a bowling ball. You sat on it and gripped the handlebars... well you get the idea.

    TGV used to be the groovy kind of place that needed a soldering iron even though they were a software developer. Hold your hat over your heart when you remember the last time you saw a shop like that last.

  • Only a week old. (Score:3, Funny)

    by T-Kir ( 597145 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:52PM (#4570165) Homepage

    Although it is only a week old, the site already has received more than 5,000 hits.

    Was the article accepted to be put on slashdot just to up those number of hits a bit more??

    which would take up about 99 CD-ROMS' worth of computer memory

    Hmm, I hope they don't send the archives using 99 CD's worth... we all know what an environmentally friendly company AOL is with their set of coasters. ;)

  • I'd love to see the "panoramic" from THOSE shots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Goldenhawk ( 242867 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:56PM (#4570194) Homepage
    It would be way cool to have a panoramic photo of the entire California coastline (or at least a significant chunk of it) from stitching all those photos together. Set it up as a movie, perhaps, offering a sort of virtual fly-by of the coastline.

  • burden of proof (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oh ( 68589 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:56PM (#4570195) Journal
    ``My concern when the Sierra Club is going to become vigilantes with these photographs is that there be some fairness to people,'' he said. ``People should not have to prove they are not criminals.''


    If I have photos proving you did something illegal, then the burden of proof is still on me as the accuser. Its just I already have proof.
    • If I have photos proving you did something illegal, then the burden of proof is still on me as the accuser. Its just I already have proof.

      Inaccurate comparison. It should read:
      "If I have photos indicating that you have done something that could be illegal under certain circumstances, I have no proof of illegal activity."

  • my house! (Score:4, Funny)

    by gol64738 ( 225528 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:56PM (#4570196)
    holy crap, you can see my house! [californiacoastline.org]
    • And how many computers did you say you have? Next time you post that you are going away for the weekend....

    • Re:my house! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bellings ( 137948 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @10:12PM (#4570607)
      OK, so it's illegal to build a private sea wall. But, your house is at the bottom of a cliff, on a very wide beach, facing the ocean. And, between your house and the ocean, the state of California has built a:
      • a road
      • a railroad bed,
      • a divided highway,
      • a natural gas pipeline, and
      • a seawall.
      Sweet. At least there's no hypocrisy there.
    • Why, oh why did they build a FREEWAY on the beach!??!?!? The stupidity here is palpable. Forget seawalls, we should be mad about freeways on the beach!

  • Meanwhile... (Score:4, Funny)

    by CySurflex ( 564206 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @08:57PM (#4570210)
    Meanwhile, in an attempt to one-up Ken's website californiacoastline.org, photographer J. Smiley has published a new web site: jennascoastline.org in which he promises to photograph every 500mm of Jenna Jameson's body. Environmentalists hope they can use this new data to finally settle the "are those real" debate.

  • Don't make me laugh (Score:4, Funny)

    by Maskirovka ( 255712 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:00PM (#4570225)
    44 gigs of images has nothing on some socially impared guys I know.

  • Why not just use a digital camcorder? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Goldenhawk ( 242867 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:01PM (#4570239) Homepage
    After thinking about my post above... Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.

    I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.

    (Like getting free publicity on Slashdot for using exclusively non-MS technology for a cool task, perhaps.....? Naaaaahhhh....)

    • Re:Why not just use a digital camcorder? (Score:4, Informative)

      by FearUncertaintyDoubt ( 578295 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @10:04PM (#4570555)
      Seems like it would be much easier to just take a decent digital camcorder and fly down the coast at a moderate rate of speed. Better continuous coverage, much much faster, and if the real purpose IS to look for breakwaters or illegal rockpiles, certainly a digital camcorder image would work for that.

      I wonder if there isn't some other motive here, requiring high-res images.

      Bingo. An NTSC mini-DV camera gives you 720x480 resolution. Not only that, but you'd be amazed at how hard it is to make out detail in a still image from a video signal. And a 29.97 frames/sec video feed doesn't give you much of a benefit - maybe if you were flying overhead in a SR-71. In a helicopter, 1 frame/sec would be overkill. You'd be much better at 1 frame/sec with 30x the resolution.

  • Sunnyvale (Score:2, Funny)

    by pruneau ( 208454 )
    Their photovoltaic system was done in Sunnyvale, Calif !!!

    Slayer help us, there must be something vampiric going one. Watch it, you'll be the next to be sacrified !!!

  • Pretty low-tech (Score:3, Insightful)

    by betis70 ( 525817 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:07PM (#4570273) Homepage
    He is leaning out the side of a helicopter taking these photos? How about mounting this on the bottom of the copter in a rattle-free housing and having the photos taken automatically at specfic time intervals.

    This is like a Barney Rubble story of aerial photography.
  • I have to agree with the attorney in the article? I think this is going a little to far. What good does this really do? Who are they actually protecting? And whose rights are they violating? Whats next the Sierra Club lowering cameras into my back yard to make sure I am not using too much fertilizer or pesticide on my lawn? Or PETA to make sure I am not doing anything they disagree with (which includes pretty much EVERYTHING, including owning any pet). Where do we draw the line? Can I use sonar or radar to make sure people aren't storing excess paint or motor oil in their garages?

    These people shouldn't be hailed as heros, they haven't really done anything other then invade the privacy of land owners.
    • Lots of other folks have posted the explanation - beaches in CA are PUBLIC property. Nobody owns them except CA citizens. Someone builds a rock wall in a public park, it's vandalism. They do something that accelerates erosion or otherwise degrades the environment, IN A PUBLIC PARK, they should get their heads handed to them.

      • Huh? (Score:2, Flamebait)

        by jsimon12 ( 207119 )
        The article talks about seawalls, more then likely built to protect the property owners land from erosion, not building brick walls in the middle of a sand box. Sure the public owns the beaches, but don't the property owners have some rights too? They have paid millions of dollars for thar land next to the beach, don't they deserve to keep it for a while before the ocean reclaims it? Also these are the same people putting millions if not billions into the local economy. Sure it might suck to not have a little bit of beach access or that spot with the killer waves, but I think it would suck worse if they didn't build and your county didn't have enough money to by books for kids or repair the roads. Envionmentalism has its place, but without large buissnesses tax dollars things would suck.

        Also read the article closely about the land developer ho put bolders on the beach, it says he just needed a permit, he may or may not get one, but more then likely he will and the bolders will stay, just more tax dollars I guess. Go envionmentalist, help the goverment collect more tax dollars.

        If your house was next to a park, and the lake in the park flooded every year wouldn't you want some protection? Or what if you lived on the beach and your land was washing into the sea? Shouldn't you be allowed to put up some sort of seawall?
        • Sure the public owns the beaches, but don't the property owners have some rights too? They have paid millions of dollars for thar land next to the beach, don't they deserve to keep it for a while before the ocean reclaims it?


          In a word, no. If you paid millions of dollars for land you know is eroding, you are dumb. That does not give you the right to vandalize public property.

          If your house was next to a park, and the lake in the park flooded every year wouldn't you want some protection?


          No. If you build your house in a flood plane, you do not have the right to build a wall that diverts water into a nearby park, just because it is public property, and not owned by a billionare. In fact, you usually can't even build such a wall on your own land, much less on the park.

          One thing America needs to learn badly is that just because you paid millions of dollars for something doesn't give you any special rights.
          • Sure, maybe they shouldn't build there, but if they didn't and the land just sat fallow the city/county would not get tax money (property, buissness whatever) and hence would not be able to do as much. Societies where everything if owned by the people (or government) are called socialist/communist states, and so far we have proven that it just doesn't work. So unless you really enjoy living under the rule of big brother maybe you should quite down and realize that capitalism works and most everything else doesn't. If you don't like big buissess move to a country without it (like Chad or Cambodia or how about China, I hear the "people" own everything there).
    • What good does this really do? Who are they actually protecting?

      In Cali, the coast belongs to all of us. Ergo, they're protecting all of us.

      These people shouldn't be hailed as heros, they haven't really done anything other then invade the privacy of land owners.

      Taking pictures of a city from the air is not an invasion of privacy in this country. And suggesting that taking pictures of public land is somehow an invasion of privacy is just bizarre.

    • What you're missing is that a coastal landowner does not own the beach, so if he damages the beach, he is damaging someone else's property.

  • Seawall? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Wiwi Jumbo ( 105640 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:09PM (#4570288) Homepage Journal
    Did anyone else when they read the title go:
    "Seawall? I know what a firewall is, but what the hell is a seawall? Maybe it's sometype of load balancer..."

    Yeah, I'm stupid. :)

  • Golf?! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 )
    I can't think of bigger waste of land and resources than a golf cource. Drive through Palm Springs CA and you'll see what I mean. Imagine how much water is wasted just so people can play a GAME. Not a sport. I'm not much for development but houses would be better than empty land set aside for golfers. Anybody who stops the golfing industry is on the side of Good and Light in my book.

  • hmmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:12PM (#4570303) Homepage

    I like the idea of converting to solar power especially in Ontario.

    The size of solar array that I would need is only about four times larger than my property in downtown Toronto.

    However, if I stack the panels four high I believe I can fit them all in.

  • Also of note (Score:3, Funny)

    by tweakt ( 325224 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:20PM (#4570351) Homepage
    Also of note: the website has 44 gigs of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free.

    add to that:
    "...and is SLASHDOTTED to hell and back."

  • For the past few months, I've been trying to figure out where I was when I took this [ofdoom.com] picture.
    It's been bugging me since I got back from vacation this summer.

    Using this site, I was able to match [californiacoastline.org] it in a few minutes!

    Now I just need to figure out the name of that park...

  • WTF?? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @09:29PM (#4570402)
    To all the people who posted to this story with 'fucking vigilanties','screw the hippies' and the like.

    Go visit some place where industrial development has existed without enviromental concerns. Like China, the ex-U.S.S.R, or East Germany. Is that what you want to live in? I don't think so.

    If you want to piss in your bathtub, go ahead, but if I catch you pissing in _our_ bathtub.....

    • Ah, you mean all those places which were or are ruled by Communists. I would place a guess that most of use who are saying "screw the hippies" are rather against Communism. You lose.

      Tim
  • He is donating the photos -- which would take up about 99 CD-ROMS' worth of computer memory -- to environmental groups.

    Time to use DVD-R blanks.
  • "Although it is only a week old, the site already has received more than 5,000 hits. Photographs featured on it recently became evidence in one dispute in Half Moon Bay." More than 5,000 hits? Boy these news sites are sure out of date. =)
  • ..everyone knows that these guys will just start using tranparent aluminum, after all, Scotty did give us the plans for it.
  • For the first person or group of people to make a sign big enough to appear on the photos. "HI MUM!"

  • Why seawall bad? Basic physics (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @10:16PM (#4570623)
    Good on this guy. If the government won't pull their finger out it is the obligation of the citizens.

    Seen a lot of comments here about why seawalls are bad and the only explanations given are legals ones. Not suprising given most people here are americans.
    The reason is one of basic physics, the legal arguments have to take second place.Unless you think you can legislate against nature. Please ignore this if you think you have a right to destroy other people property and public property and the general environment to protect your own interests.

    If there is a rock, a wall, a washed up spare tyre, anything that is a hard object on the beach, then when the water hits it during normal wave action, the wave will retreat back to sea at a higher speed because it's energy hasn't been absorbed. Normal beaches (with sand) absorb the wave impact. If the water is going faster, it removes sand as it returns to the ocean and thus erodes the beach, much faster than natural movements. Even a small hard object on a beach can show this, one season I saw the tire I mentioned above, a tractor tyre, chop a gully about 0.5m deep and about 6-7m wide, just from wave action on this one small object. A wall will destroy the beach.

    Remember beaches ARE NOT FIXED in the earth, they rise, fall and move around on a seasonal basis. Beach nourishment is not to replace sand that is lost, but to re-build the natural shoke absorbing action of an already eroded one.

    Sydney residents please visit http://www.realsurf.com/nowall/ and please think about supporting this cause, we know what private interests have f**ked up in the states through ignorance and greed, lets not let it happen at home.

    phil

  • Solar powered web site? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2002 @10:29PM (#4570689) Homepage

    Solar powered web site? No wonder I can't get any response ... it's night time.

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