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When you trade in, you pay sales tax on whatever the DIFFERENCE is between the trade-in and the new car.

When you sell your car, get the money, then buy a new car, you pay sales tax on the ENTIRE new car.

A minor snag, but if the old car was $10K, and the new (used) one was $15K, the difference in cost (trade-in vs. buy) is $414 vs. $1242…

(also posted to Riya’s CEO blog)

http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2005/12/riya_and_privac.html

Despite his posting, a few comments led me to post the following, which I wanted to mirror here:

“Although I already wrote about this yesterday and voiced my opinions to Munjal here: http://techandother.blogspot.com/2005/12/riya-and-false-hysteria-over-privacy.html, I want to expand on my own posting here, since this seems all a little too out there.

I can’t say I agree with the comments so far. The privacy concerns being expressed about Riya aren’t so much a function of the Riya service, but of being captured on film.

Being captured on film isn’t anything new, and it definitely is used to invade people’s privacy, but I fail to see how Riya makes this situation any worse.

As stated in the post, the training you do in your own Riya account can’t be used by others, and you have the option of making your pictures private. Yes, there is the possibility of some super-hacker breaking in, as in any system, but I’d be more nervous about said hacker using their skills to get into my bank account than a Riya account.

Could a super-powerful private detective build a facial recognition system in the hopes that someone somewhere took a picture of his/her target and put it in an online service? Sure. But I think they would probably just go take the picture themselves.

As far as having a camera in a public place like an airport that is linked to a database that links your photo to your information, it’s already out there, and has been for quite a while. If you’ve ever walked into a casino, you’re probably in their database, which it then shares with every other casino possible. If you think the government doesn’t already do this, you’re kidding yourself.

The only security concern here is the protection of data from theft. In Riya’s case, they need to protect the “trained eye” of each Riya account from being stolen, combined with a million other “trained eyes” and used in some other context. (The most likely candidate would be something like the advertising in ‘Minority Report’) But again, as stated, the Riya technology isn’t sophisticated enough to be that accurate. There are, however, plenty of systems out there that are much more capable. Nothing is stopping any one of us from buying the software, and writing a script that pulls down a hundred pictures at a time from Flickr and processes them.

Basically, I find the argument of Riya being a security threat ridiculous. Who, exactly, are you worried about knowing who you are? The people who would want to invade your privacy already have access to your background check and credit report. From this they know where you live and can take as many pictures as they want of you, your family, your car, when you go to work, etc. There are a lot more ways to get to your information than Riya, and Riya is one of the least efficient ways of doing so.

Riya isn’t making this situation worse, it is the already-legal methods that can be used that are a threat to your privacy. The issue here is that Riya is new, and everyone likes to take the new, unknown technology and try to find things wrong with it.

Riya is absolutely no different than Flickr, except that its tags are automatically generated for the first hundred users in your account, and you have to manually make the tags in Flickr. Unfortunaely, whenever any new technology comes out, everyone wants to blow the doors off some supposed huge security risk and become the next internet superstar. This just isn’t the case with Riya.”

Essentially, you pull the CO2 out of the air and pump it to the botom of the ocean, where, under pressure, it stays. Slowly it dissolves into the water. This could be where a marine farm could be located to change the underwater CO2 into food, then harvested.

As far as the energy required to pump the CO2 down there, we already have offshore wind generators, these could be turned into pumping stations.

We could even use the mythbusters method (episode 21) of getting gases to the bottom of the ocean, if we found a cheap and clean way to encapsulate the gas until it got to the bottom: http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/episode/episode_05.html–>

Camera in car dashboard recognizes who you are, and adjusts seat, radio presets and air conditioning to your liking. Also recognizes that you weigh more, links to calendar and reminds you that the gym is on the way, and you have time… Also recognizes teenage child and logs speed, g-forces and GPS coordinates for upload to home network later via 802.11g antenna.