B+L

I'm not sure why you feel that way either. The point I was making was not intended to be made at your expense. I was commenting on a specific point you made and the meaning of the sentence I quoted was not changed by the loss of additional context. Plus, your original post was only five post backs and it had already been quoted at least once in its entirety in the interim. It probably won't help to soften the blow that you feel that you've suffered, but I'm afraid you've missed my point anyway.

It is pretty common in these forums to impugn the motives of the OP. It's a convenient way to sidestep the issues being raised.

How so? It's hardly an authoritative source. right if you don't keep up with developments in your own country, you must at least be able to use google to verify it The article you cited is in a student newspaper. Cherry picking is not verifying and sneering at people when they raise the issue is really uncalled for.

How so? It's hardly an authoritative source.

This is necessary to call a "telephone joker" directly from the app, although this is not implemented yet.By "telephone joker" do you mean a "phone a friend"? Someone who can give you hints over the phone? Sort of. It's a service that can send info to your phone, probably by sms instead of needing a data connection, but my German is a little too weak for me to be certain. http://www.gcjoker.de/

Shaking down the taxpayers is not quite as lucrative these days, so they're moving to a more direct model and they're shaking down anyone passing by. And they'll have the Sheriffs to back them up. The motivation being homeless camps, dumping, etc, is just speculation.

All the negative activity has a price and it is unfortunate that those responsible are generally not the ones to pay it. People have already reported running into "rangers". I'm sure they can get some pretty good coverage since they control all the choke points.

Sounds like a libertarian paradise. When timber companies morph into "Forest Management" groups, which are in turn subsidiaries of "vertically integrated, full-service timberland investment advisory" firms who've hired Project Managers tasked with "an emphasis on developing alternative revenue streams", there is a predictable outcome.

Married couple. How quaint. (Their language, I know). There are conservation easements on some of their land, but there is no language that ensures public access to the areas with easements. If you want to blame someone, all the unauthorized MTB trails and ORVs going around locked gates, etc, are good places to start. But whatever the reason, they've apparently decided to stop treating public access as a nuisance and start managing it as a revenue source. Casual users are not the target market. Heavy users, such as those that ride Tokul frequently, are.

It's pretty obvious that some people can find endless rationalizations for why it is OK to do something they would probably not do if they were not geocaching. We live on an island and so we see people all the time coming from or going to a ferry that "forget" all the normal traffic laws. Laws that they normally would (mostly) respect.

Yes, that's kind of like throwing the ball over your neighbor's fence and telling the all the kids its fine by you if they play over there.

I thought it was addressed by the NDOT punting the caches into someone else's jurisdiction. The often cited tourist dollars don't amount to much and they are not the BLM's concern anyway. Nope, the CO worked directly with NDOT and now have thier blessing. Their blessing to move the caches out of the NDOT right of way is not quite the same as their blessing. Anyway, I'm sure their blessing is actually documented somewhere, rather than just rumor. Right?

I thought it was addressed by the NDOT punting the caches into someone else's jurisdiction. The often cited tourist dollars don't amount to much and they are not the BLM's concern anyway.

My guess is that the BLM could care less about the local economy. They might care more if they ever figure out how to extract some of those tourist dollars for themselves. It doesn't amount to much, but then they get only get $1.34 per head of cattle per month, or something like that, so anything extra would be a nice bonus.

It's called being inconsiderate.

It's kind of amusing how these arguments go around in circles, while almost everyone studiously ignores the actual issues. Maybe the CO had good reasons for asking people not to drive the circuit. The cows have enough sense to walk when they are asked not to use vehicles, what's the geocacher's excuse?

Oh, they are allowed as long as you make an invisible friend during your visit. There are plenty of examples.

It's a virtual. More than one actually, because it's too big to fit in just one.

Autostarting is not a necessary precondition for something to be automated. Another example of automation is if you have a list of caches stored in c:geo and you "Refresh all". By your definition, I could write a script to scrape the entire geocaching.com site, but it would not be automated because I had to run the script from the command line before it would do anything. If you wanted to argue that that there are some questions about the enforceability of the TOU, you would be on somewhat firmer ground.

The blog post from way back in March 11, 2010 describes GS's initial contact in which they asked carnero to stop using their icons. It is true that he "fixed" that problem, but that does not mean that there were not other concerns raised later. There were. GS has clearly decided their thread kill strategy was sub-optimal. That does not mean they now suddenly approve of an app that allows free access to premium features and that is the real issue here, not the alleged load on the servers. Screen scraping is not relevant only if one wants to get all pedantic and say it's not screen scraping, it's web scraping, web data extraction, web harvesting, etc.

Mostly pretty good advice, except the above is hard to square with the actual guidelines.

I read this differently too. B+L wasn't saying, no one cares, on the contrary, I think his tone was that as wrong as it is, poeple are going to place caches in parks no matter what the policy. I think he cares very much, and he is not alone. He was saying that most people don't bother or care enough to ask for permission, thye just place caches anywhere they please, be it in a park or otherwise. I don't know about in Oregon but in Washington State The WSGA has a Parks Liason program. They have been instrumental in getting caches reinstated in Dsicovery Park and working with Land Managers to keep other parks open for caching. does Oregon have a local Geocaching Association? If so I would recomend consulting with them about your concerns... If I was being snarky, it was not directed at you. FobesMan is correct that I actually do care and he has also touched on some of the reasons for my snarkiness. The fact that some people seem to think you have personally insulted them just by wondering aloud about adequate permission is interesting, but not surprising. I already could see that this was true, but I was once told by a reviewer that unless a land manger specifically asks for caches to be removed, they will assume that there is adequate permission. FobesMan has give you some very good advice. It will be much more productive to get involved and help the Parks Departments craft some reasonable guidelines than it will be to question the legitimacy of caches that will continue to have adequate permission until they do not.

Welcome to No One Cares, population 7 billion.

I was not questioning your professional qualifications, but absent any metrics, saying that c:geo puts more load on the server than approved methods do is speculation. I also question the claims about the load this app is placing on GS's servers in general. If it was really a problem, GS could say that it was violating the terms of the Google Developer Distribution Agreement and attempt to get it yanked from the market. Or, maybe they've decided the resulting negative PR would be worse than living with the extra load, such as it is. It is really up to GS to decide how they want to handle this, not the TOU scolds that appear every time c:geo is mentioned. It is a very strange situation to have the most popular geocaching app be "unauthorized", yet that is apparently how GS has decided to respond to it so far.