I’m sure it didn’t go well. If it was somehow framed in a sycophantic way where the police were led to believe it was their idea, I’m sure it would have gone better. Wait that might not be too difficult to do.
Na. If it’s British police it’s just an excuse. All they’re there for after all these years of Tory cuts is to give you a reference number so you can make an insurance claim.
Jesus fucking Christ, I know police are dumb, in fact if your IQ is too high you can actually be legally barred from employment as a police officer in the United States of america. Look it up. But fuck incompetence of these Jokers continue to tickle my asshole in a negative way
I fuckin hate cops as much as the next person but people love to spout this fact, but there is literally only 1 police department ever that has been documented doing this, and it was the one police department in Connecticut.
However the court did in fact rule it was legal, yes.
But the way everyone talks about it you’d think this was some super widespread policy that many departments use. And as far as I can tell there’s only ever been the 1 example. It’s the same case that every single article about it refers to.
What if you had to guess a number between 0 and 100 and the other person (or an application) only told you if the number is bigger or smaller? That’s the form that’s usually presented to CS students and most people end up figuring it out on their own. Then the trick is knowing how to generalize it.
I’m pretty sure I was serious. I don’t know how people can be that clever. It seems simple once it’s explained, sure, but I wouldn’t be able to come up with that on my own without someone else giving me a problem that points me in that direction.
Some security camera systems have this built in. They show snapshots of various times where you choose the total period, say 24 hours. Then you glance through the snapshots that are all displayed at once on the screen and click on the last one where your bike was still there. That will then “zoom in” the timeline and show another set of snapshots, though this time within a smaller total time window. Keep clicking on the last panel with the bike, and it will soon show you the clip of the bike being stolen.
Really helpful to find out when something changed.
If you’ve got 14 billion years, a theft takes a minute, then you need 53 recursion levels of binary search to find the moment of the theft. (14 billion years can be split into about 7.3e15 1-minute segments, 53 levels of binary search allow you to search through 9e15 segments)
That means OP assumed that it’d take 1 minute to decide whether at a certain still frame the theft had already occured or not, to compute the new offset to seek to, and the time it’d take to actually seek the tape to that point.
Not an unreasonable assumption, but a very conservative estimate. Assuming the footage is on an HDD and you’ve got an automated system for binary search, I’d actually assume it’d take 5 seconds for each step, meaning finding a 1min theft on 14 billion years of footage would take 5 minutes.
According to my napkin math it would take longer than an hour if the tape was ~3.3*10^218 sec long (or three million trillion trillion… (18 trillions) …trillion years). Assuming you have only have two options to choose between but can pick which alternative in in 5 seconds (2^720) and you want to get down to a 1 minute intervall.
So i mean its not impossible to find a tape long enough though it seems unlikely that we would be so off in our estimates of the age of the universe.
Yeah, seriously. What is even the context of this? We have no idea. The cops might have been like “We need a warrant to look at that footage you idiot.”
Whoever owns the camera presumably has an interest in reducing/solving crime in the area (why else have cameras?), so they would likely be happy to make the footage available to police if asked nicely, with no warrant required.
Yeah, in general, but not necessarily in that circumstance. A lot of time talking to tech people (I’m a softwar engineer) they can can be smug about this while leaving out important context.
No, I’ve been in this situation as a victim. My bike was stolen and they said it would take hours to search the CCTV. I told them about binary search, they didn’t understand.
Gitgui is pretty great too if you need a bit of interactivity. It’s bare bones and no bullshit but can still do like 90% of what all the other fancy tools can do.
I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.
Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.
Let’s assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search… Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that’s much more complicated than what this post says.
You’re making this way more complicated than it actually is. The guy definitely can give estimates for when he parked the bike and when he found out that it was stolen. It’s not that complicated.
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