The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Google Earth goes to pot

In the rolling-your-own sense

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

As regular readers know, we here at El Reg have had hours of fun playing with Google Earth. We've found marauding insects, mysterious scale reproductions of bits of the China/India border, not to mention swastikas and black helicopters too numerous to link to.

But never have we used it to track down fields of homegrown. No, we'll leave that to the fine officers of the Racine County Sheriff's Department.

According to reports, a man was arrested when officers found 18 pounds of homegrown in his car, after he was pulled over for one of those "routine traffic stops". The haul was worth between $63,000 and $140,000. Commentators suggest, however, that this estimate might be a little high for a couple of bags of buds.

Dean Brown, 37, of Racine, also had about his person a GPS navigation unit, in which he had cunningly stored the co-ordinates of various fields throughout the county.

You can guess what happened next.

Yes, the boys in blue (or possibly brown) went to investigate the fields, first checking the co-ordinates on Google Earth to work out the location. They found marijuana plants growing at four of the locations, and subsequently charged Brown with four counts of manufacturing marijuana, in addition to the charges of possession of marijuana with intent to deliver, and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Brown faces a maximum of 59 years' jail time, since he has been charged as a repeat drugs offender. ®

What you need to know about cloud backup

More from The Register

Thanks, NSA: Amazon sales of Orwell's 1984 rise 9,500%
Citizens of Oceania bone up on the new reality
 breaking news
BBC lied to Parliament about doomed £100m IT monster, thunder MPs
Axed DMI ballooned and burst while watchdogs sang Kumbaya
Microsoft to open Windows Stores inside 600 Best Buy locations
Product showcases 'must be seen to be believed'
 breaking news
Author Iain (M) Banks falls to cancer at 59
Misses the release of his final work
 breaking news
What did the Lehman Brothers implosion look like to a techie?
Insider tells all about the Gnab Gib at Lehmans
It's official: 'tweet' an English word – not just in the avian sense
If the Oxford English Dictionary says it is so, then it is so
 breaking news
The only Waze is Google: Ad giant tipped to gobble map app 'for $1.3bn'
Pac-Man-satnav-ish upstart in bidding war with Apple, Facebook
 breaking news
1-in-10 e-tomes 'are self-published'... most are 'rubbish' says book ed
Publishing man scoffs at go-it-alone writers, ursines still fouling in forests
 breaking news