Ambivalence
Veteran
Joined: 8 Nov 2008
Age: 46
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,613
Location: Peterlee (for Industry)
13 Oct 2010, 6:28 am
ruveyn wrote:
MONKEY wrote:
I'm glad I live in Britain, we seem to be at least a bit saner. As far as I know teaching evolution in science class has never really been much of an issue, not to mention Darwin's face is on every £10 note.
you guys have t.v. cameras (CCTV) on every light post and you don't think that is strange?
Heh. It is ridiculous, but one consequence is we know how exactly much use CCTV cameras usually are in practice.
Seriously; take a low quality camera, point it nowhere in particular, record it on a very low frame rate on an antique video tape multiplexed so there are nine or sixteen images on every frame...
To get decent results from CCTV you need either an operator with a PTZ camera recording suspicious stuff in realtime, or a static camera recording one particular view (like, pointed and focussed on a door, to get people's faces) in realtime. As soon as slow framerate, multiplex and moving cameras come into it they're a farce, at least for identifying people; you can usually follow people from place to place looking at a multiplexed tape, but not well. And tapes are only held for a month in most places.
And yeah, I know. Modern technology means you can record direct to HDD and so on... except in practice they're still pretty crap and not that widespread because people don't change their CCTV systems very often. And never mind that it'd be entirely feasible to record realtime without compression given the size and cheapness of big HDDs these days... the designers of these things still want to compress them. *sigh*
If Big Brother is watching us, I pity the poor sod.
Heck, I'd pity Argus. Trawling through CCTV is boring beyond belief.
