Curious that an hour ago, this was the top post on hackernews, and now it has been relegated to the 3rd page.
I thought that was interesting too. I was excited that I got a post to the top and then was like what the heck?
All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
221–230 of 278 posts
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Police officers are also statistically more likely to abuse their spouses. Don't let the women you care about get involved with cops.
Lesbians too [0]. And people who don’t make much money [1]. And people who aren’t Asian [2]. And athletes, and people who like sports [3]. Applying group statistics to judge individual people is almost never proper, and lies at the root of an awful lot of inhumanity. I hope and imagine the women in question are capable of thinking (and judging) for themselves. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_le…
> Lesbians too [0]
> A 2010 CDC survey compared domestic violence victimization rates between lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women. The differences between most forms of reported domestic violence rates between lesbian women and heterosexual women were found to be non-significant due to insufficient statistical power.
??
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#223I hope all the cool people doing all the cool things in current year are not doing cool vandalism just because its a cool thing-to-do that they saw on Reddit in current year. Other cool things cool people are into in current year; Cyber trucks are still on the road, and data centers are still being built.
I’m with you. Vandalism is not the right path.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I for one do believe that is their primary function. However good intentions don't justify violating our rights or accepting the (demonstrated) potential for abuse.
It might be their intended use (from a police department's perspective), but it's certainly not their intended function. Flock collects these images, and uses them to train statistical models, and sells those models to police departments as a one-click crime solving solution. That means that their primary function is to passively aggregate driver behavior into an automated judgement system, where the entire judicial…
You may be right but that's too conspiracy-theory for me. Most things are as they appear. Either way, I don't support it.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. It has a different usage than "underdeveloped" and that usage at best doesn't have a clear meaning, and at worst does have a clear derogatory meaning
> Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. sorry, but no one is taking some random HN user's definition over established dictionaries on what a word means. perhaps you can convince enough people that the word will evolve into whatever you imagine it to mean, and then the dictionaries will be updated to match.
The dictionary is an attempt at systematically defining the semantic meaning of language subject to cultural constraints in the same way that a writing system is an attempt at visually rendering a spoken language subject to technological constraints. I know from personal experience that the people who work on dictionaries have a less authoritative view about them than you do.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#226I believe that the police with due dilligance will find that there has been a "behind closed doors" citizens plebisite to create a volunteer technical comittee to provide free service and down grades to varios publicy funded equipment as part of the future archiology initiativ.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
And vehicle theft doesn't even need cameras logging EVERYONE to Flock's databases - just cameras that only report in to the mothership when they see a plate on an internal "most-wanted" list. Person reports car stolen, cop adds car info to plate reader most wanted list, most wanted list is transmitted to cameras, cameras don't let plate readings leave RAM unless they're 90% or higher confident that it's on the most w…
Are the cameras doing the plate recognition and OCR locally? Or (my guess) they are uploading images to a Flock data center where they are processed and then the plate number and location data saved to a database where active search queries are processed?
The tech exists to do it on-camera (Ubiquiti among other vendors claims on-camera LPR), but I figure they're doing whatever is most battery-efficient since the ones I've seen all have solar panels.
I do wonder what they do on busy interstates though. Some of the ones I've had to go past would basically be sending a live video feed - LPR matches as text would save a ton of bandwidth and maybe even power compared to a cellular radio always transmitting.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Wikipedia and dictionaries are wrong. sorry, but no one is taking some random HN user's definition over established dictionaries on what a word means. perhaps you can convince enough people that the word will evolve into whatever you imagine it to mean, and then the dictionaries will be updated to match.
The dictionary is an attempt at systematically defining the semantic meaning of language subject to cultural constraints in the same way that a writing system is an attempt at visually rendering a spoken language subject to technological constraints. I know from personal experience that the people who work on dictionaries have a less authoritative view about them than you do.
dictionaries and common usage (e.g. wikipedia, forums, news, etc.) are certainly more authoritative than a random person unilaterally deciding that a word has no meaning and declaring "dictionaries and wikipedia are wrong"
if you poll 100 random english speakers and the majority come back saying that they have no idea what "third world" means, or say that the term is meaningless, i will concede and donate $1,000 to a charity of your choice.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
most likely the videos are deleted because it'd be a ginormous expense to keep it around; everything else, yeah, it's not being deleted.
It might be deleted at the PD, does not mean it wasn't uploaded to Flock DCs for metadata analysis and retained there.
My point is theres no way theybregain the video as anything other than cost of holding terabytes.
Of course they save the analysis and only thinkpeople care about the video. The journalists and police speak the same language of uncritical privacy violations.
Re: All of Winona Police Department's Flock cameras cut down and stolen
#230> and stolen I’m sure flock’s agreement with the Winona Police Department makes clear that they are only purchasing a license to use these cameras, so in fact the department’s cameras have not been stolen at all, they’ve merely been prevented from enjoying licensed use.
Why would you think that and be so confident?
Because it’s a matter of public record. Thousands of executed contracts between flock safety and its customers are public. Here’s one which makes clear that flock retains ownership and is actually entering into a hybrid hardware lease and concurrent services agreement.