This is a great list of the rights and rules that photographers have and should follow when taking photos in public. A good read in the times where the rights of photographers are being questioned constantly.

I. Anyone in a public place can take pictures of anything they want. Public places include parks, sidewalks, malls, etc. Malls? Yeah. Even though it’s technically private property, being open to the public makes it public space.

II. If you are on public property, you can take pictures of private property. If a building, for example, is visible from the sidewalk, it’s fair game.

III. If you are on private property and are asked not to take pictures, you are obligated to honor that request. This includes posted signs.

IV. Sensitive government buildings (military bases, nuclear facilities) can prohibit photography if it is deemed a threat to national security.

V. People can be photographed if they are in public (without their consent) unless they have secluded themselves and can expect a reasonable degree of privacy. Kids swimming in a fountain? Okay. Somebody entering their PIN at the ATM? Not okay.

VI. The following can almost always be photographed from public places, despite popular opinion:

• accident & fire scenes, criminal activities
• bridges & other infrastructure, transportation facilities (i.e. airports)
• industrial facilities, Superfund sites
• public utilities, residential & commercial buildings
• children, celebrities, law enforcement officers
• UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, Chuck Norris

VII. Although “security” is often given as the reason somebody doesn’t want you to take photos, it’s rarely valid. Taking a photo of a publicly visible subject does not constitute terrorism, nor does it infringe on a company’s trade secrets.

VIII. If you are challenged, you do not have to explain why you are taking pictures, nor to you have to disclose your identity (except in some cases when questioned by a law enforcement officer.)

IX. Private parties have very limited rights to detain you against your will, and can be subject to legal action if they harass you.

X. If someone tries to confiscate your camera and/or film, you don’t have to give it to them. If they take it by force or threaten you, they can be liable for things like theft and coercion. Even law enforcement officers need a court order.

Read the rest of the article at Photojojo

Here is an interesting idea:

The idea is that after your death, you will donate all of your intellectual property into the public domain, overriding the current 70 year copyright waiting period following your death.

I'm not running out to carry around a card like this, I am already releasing much of my work under Creative Commons, so I don't see the need to have things change when I die.

Public Domain Donor via Hugh McGuire

I will be attending the London Geek Dinner next Wednesday, if you are in London and or nearby, come join us. Here is the original post from Bill's Blog

If you want to learn about Blogging, Podcasting, or anything else Media or just want to hang out and chat with people involved with the community come on out. We can help set up a blog or podcast or show you tips on how to improve. Any level of know how or experience is welcome. Bring a laptop if you have one, Molly’s has FREE Wi-Fi!
.
Molly Blooms
700 Richmond St
Wed. March 5th @ 7:30PM-whenever

Facebook - Upcoming - Eventful

Tomorrow I will be headed to  Toronto to take part in Podcamp Toronto 2008. I am really excited for this event as I will be able to see lots of the people that I met last year at Podcasters Across Borders and also meet lots of people that I've been interacting with online over the last year.

I'll be leaving along with my wife, Laura-Lee at noon to spend the afternoon at the Canadian International Autoshow and then will be heading to the Tweet Up  at the Bier Market in the evening. To many of my readers, I'll see you there.

I should be posting lots of photos to Flickr over the weekend, and might even blog a couple of times over the weekend.

So I've spent 24 hours playing with the new beta for Flock. This is impressive by itself as every other time I've tried to use Flock it has been so horribly slow that I couldn't stand to keep using it.

I'm glad to say that for the first time, Flock is actually better to use than vanilla Firefox.

Flock is what they call "The Social Web Browser". It essentially adds a number of interesting features to Firefox. Many people say that Flock is basically Firefox with extensions, but it is more than that, it is an integrated set of tools for the browser.

The main additions that Flock brings are: integration with online bookmarks, integration with various social networks, built in webmail checker and built in blogging client.

The online bookmark integration has always been my favorite feature. You can bookmark any page by just pressing a big Star button. And if you double click it, you can specify tags for del.icio.us (Or Magnolia, if that's your site). Once you have bookmarked a site, whenever you do a search, it does a live search of Yahoo, your History and your Bookmarks. I am constantly amazed at how often I search for something, and find that I have already seen what I am looking for.

The social network integration gives you a new sidebar called the "People sidebar", it lists the latest updates from your contacts at your various sites. It is a lot like a built in twitter client, but it also works for Facebook, Flickr and Youtube.

The problem with this sidebar is that it doesn't update nearly as often as a dedicated Twitter client, so I always feel like I am missing updates. Also, its layout doesn't have room for an entire Tweet, so you have to hover over an update to see the whole post in the tooltip. I'm told that they are working on fixing this, perhaps when the final 1.1 update comes out, this will be fixed.

The webmail notifier is nice, but it also doesn't seem to update often enough. It takes a long time to notice that I have a new e-mail and that I have read the new e-mails.

The blogging client is also handy to have, but I am much happier in Windows Live Writer, as it feels like a much more fully featured client. I had too many weird HTML problems when working with Flock's editor.

To sum up: Flock adds a lot of nice features to Firefox. I wouldn't recommend it to the general public. But if you are a heavy social networking and blogging person, I definitely think you should give it a try.

 Here is a cool Yahoo Pipe that I just finished building. It loops trough all of your Twitter friends, loads up their blogs and then returns the latest items from their blog's RSS feed.

Essentially this allows you to subscribe to all of your Twitter friend's blogs without actually adding all of their feeds to your reader. Just add the feed for this pipe: http://pipes.yahoo.com/spaetzel/twitterfriends

It does take a long time to run the first time, but the results are very useful.

I have been spending a lot of time playing with Yahoo Pipes, you can see some more pipes that I have created here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/spaetzel/. I'll blog about more of them soon.

Here is my take on tonight's Total Lunar eclipse

I just downloaded the new Flock 1.1 Beta and thus far it looks pretty good. In the past, every time that I install Flock, I find that the browser is horribly slow, making it unrealistic to use as my everyday browser. But this time, it looks like they got it right. It doesn't seem to be any slower than Firefox. Now, I think the only complaint I have is that the People bar listing for Twitter is pretty much useless because it doesn't update often enough, and people's tweets are cut off, so I have to go to Twitter.com to see the whole post. I'll post more detailed impressions shortly.

The news has been all over the net that Toshiba is finally throwing in the towel for HD-DVD. This isn't a terrible surprise given the number of studios that have jumped ship in 2008, and the cancellation of their CES press conference.

Personally, I was backing HD-DVD, yes I am an Xbox and Microsoft guy, so I am biased; but, the HD-DVD spec was always much more laid out. The features that HD-DVD had that Blu-ray didn't were the requirement for a hard drive or flash drive to store updates on, and an Ethernet connection allowing firmware updates and access to online content.

Both of those features really excited the Nerd within me. The idea of a DVD that isn't static and can be updated as new content becomes available was really amazing to me. Blu-ray has struggled with comparability since its inception. There were several movies that didn't work on all players, and the PS3, with its hard drive and net connection was always the only player that could always play all discs. There are rumours that the Blu-ray spec is changing, making the Hard drive and net connection a requirement. But, since it wasn't always required from the start, these features won't be widely used be the discs.

However, I certainly am very glad that the world is moving towards a single format. This certainly will hasten the price drop of the technology, and help ensure that your Hi Def disc collection won't be suddenly a pile of useless plastic. The issue now is if people will bother upgrading at all, DVDs look quite good on most HD screens. HD content does look better, but I doubt that the general public really cares about having the best quality possible. DVD had lots of benefits over VHS, over and above the picture quality, so it was an easy change to argue for. HD movies, are not as easy to argue.

Personally, I think that downloadable content will be the winner. There are no stores that make the argument easy that are around these days, too few people have Set top boxes that can download content. And the boxes that people do have, only allow you to rent HD movies, not buy. Once purchasing becomes available, and people have set top boxes, like the Xbox 360 or Apple TV, I really think that the convenience of getting movies instantly, and having all of your purchases readily available to you will be an argument that is hard to pass up.

Only time will tell to see what truly comes out on top. But one thing is abundantly clear. HD-DVD is definitely not the winner here.

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, end format war: source | Technology | Reuters

Back in January, I switched this blog to run off of DasBlog, switching away from the old Drupal based site. And of course, my old theme style didn't work any more. Since that time, I've been using one of the default DasBlog themes, which, to put it frankly, was ugly. I just finally uploaded the new theme that I had been working on for the last couple of weeks.

The two goals of the theme were to make the site easy to use, and to show new visitors who I am and what I do. There are several new features that you'll find with this version.

The first, and most visible additions are my phone number and e-mail address front and centre. I want to remove any barriers to people contacting me, so I put those two pieces of information where they would be found right away. They are both in an image, so spammers shouldn't be able to contact me. And the number is my Grand Central number, which lets me filter callers if necessary, right now it will ring my phones directly.

Next, is the new about me section up at the top. There is both a "Twitter Style" quick blurb, and for those who want to know more, a new About Me page that should satisfy all but the most curious of visitors.

I've added the obligatory list of social networks - all coded directly in HTML, I want to avoid any JavaScript includes as they slow down your browser and don't always look so nice.

The other big addition is my Tumblelog, which I have set up to pull in almost everything that I do on the web including my Twitter posts, Flickr photos, Google Reader Shared Items, and my del.icio.us bookmarks. I don't expect many people to do this, but you can subscribe to the feed if you want to see everything I do on the web.

I hope that you like the update. Please post what you think of it in the comments. Now, to get to actually posting something to read around here.