begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 12:07:05PM -0700: > SJS wrote: > >I'm told that fluorescent tubes ... fluoresce ... when brought in to the > >vicinity of high-powered transmission lines. If you lived near enough to > >such a line, and could light up your garage without running wires, I > >don't think I'd have any problem with you doing so. > > You may not, but the law is explicit on this. This is theft.
Maybe. The problem is that to make the "theft" charge stick, you're deprived of the ability to use fluorescent lighting in your garage. I live farther away from the transmission lines, so I can do exactly the same thing, and the law wouldn't begin to care. What is legal isn't always what is right, and what is right isn't always legal, and sometimes none of it makes any sense. So while the law would consider that sort of thing theft, *I* wouldn't; and if you sued the power company for wearing out your fluorescent tubes through inappropriate power leakage, I'd side with you. Note that I restated the problem slightly... on the one hand, there's the building and placing of an induction loop, on the other, there's engaging in an action that's quite reasonable for anyone to do, but which is slightly more to one's advantage due to someone else's (in)action. > You may disagree with the law, but it both exists and is quite clear on > the subject. So those people who protest the uber-high-powered transmission lines by waving around fluorescent tubes could be arrested for theft. There's something that stinks about that. -- Not everything is in black and white: sometimes it's in white and black. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
