• @[email protected]
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    12 years ago

    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.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 years ago

        I misunderstood the problem. I thought the thieve came on bike to steal something. I did not get that the bike itself was what got stolen.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      For those looking for the handout:

      person: A B C D E F G H I J K L

      round 1: L L L L R R R R — — — -

      round 2: L L R R R — — — L R L -

      round 3: L R R — — L R — L L — R

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        This would be easier to parse with a monospaced font. I’m not sure how that works in lemmy so this might take an edit or two…

        
        round 1: L L L L R R R R — — — -
        
        round 2: L L R R R — — — L R L -
        
        round 3: L R R — — L R — L L — R```
        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          Oh i get it. So if in round 1 it tilted down on the right. Round 2 it was even then round 3 it tilted down on the right then it was person G and they are heavier. However if it was reversed and tilted on the left then even then left then it was still person G but they are lighter. Because that pattern only occurs once. This is brilliant. Thankyou to you and the person you corrected the formatting of.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      How do you solve that? I saw a solution in the comments where it says to start with numbering all the people and butting 1234 and 5678 on the see saw, then it says if they weight the same then continue and that seems to work. But if they dont weigh the same it doesnt work and it doesnt say what to do in that case.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        you can do it like you weight 6v6 then 3v3 then for the last weighing you weight the 2 out of 3.

        or you weigh 4v4 to find out which grouping of 4 the light weight person is in, then do 2v2 and 1v1.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            That’s not the question. Either the scales balance, and the third is heavier or lighter, or the scales don’t balance and you get both answers, but the question is purposely framed this way

            • I mean that not knowing it is part of the question, and the proposed solution doesn’t work without knowing if the person is heavier or lighter.

              If you know if the person is heavier or lighter, the question becomes trivial.

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                The question is to figure out who is different, not how they are different. That takes one more step, half the time.

                • Yes, I’m aware. But with 12 people you can’t simply divvy the groups in threes constantly, because if you weigh and the groups are unequal, then you don’t know in which group the different person is (yet). E.g., weighing ABCD - EFGH can tell you the different person is in IJKL if the groups are even, but if they’re uneven you don’t know in which of the other two groups the different person is.

                • @[email protected]
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                  22 years ago

                  The question was to find who doesnt weigh the same and if its heavier or lighter. Watch the clip again.

  • @[email protected]
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    2 years ago

    “This argument didn’t go down well.”

    🤣🤣🤣 LMAO

    What an awesome punchline, should have been on its own line for more impact.

  • @[email protected]
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    1352 years ago

    This post just shows that the police rarely if ever review any video as this method would’ve been learned as a result of repeatedly reviewing video.

    • @[email protected]
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      92 years ago

      We just give all the tools to solve crimes to people who have no idea how to use them, no biggie.

      • @[email protected]
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        102 years ago

        *have a perverse incentive to not know how to use them or to know things about their job generally.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Sat on jury duty. We literally said not guilty because the officer was supposed to follow a process for line ups and they didn’t even do the bare minimum. They were like we got out guy

    • @[email protected]
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      2 years ago

      I once had a friend who was robbed of all kinds of stuff including a PS3, and that the guy was signed into his Netflix changing account profiles the very same day. I told him he can just get a tracking number by calling Playstation and that the active police officer can use it to track them. Thing is, the officer ghosted him for like 8 months despite having everything they needed to immediately find the exact location of the perpetrator actively using the stolen property.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        They don’t care really. As has been my experience anyway.

        I once had my car window smashed, a mix of gear taken…some was expensive, some was personal to me. I felt violated. Called the police, explained, gave S/Ns to what I could, told them exactly who did it. He didn’t give a shit. Actually made me feel like I was wasting his time. I think Seinfeld covered this…

        “We’ll let you know if we find anything” “Do you ever find anything?” “No”

        But oh, my reg is out of date and the plate scanner picked it up? Boom, they really kick it into gear. So that’s $130… i could just go take care of the tags immediately with a friendly warning but now don’t even want to. And in the end I end up pretty fucked.

        If only they put that effort into other things I just might have gotten my linear power amps back. Props to anyone who knows that product.

  • teft
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    2 years ago

    Yeah, pigs don’t like to be corrected. Or made to look like they don’t know what they’re doing.

    • tquid
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      2622 years ago

      And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 years ago

        I reported my bike stolen in college and I got a call the next day that they had found it parked in front of a nearby church.

        It was stolen on a Sunday. I guess someone didn’t want to be late to service.

        • @[email protected]
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          192 years ago

          What you’re entering the third act of your love story and you have to get to the church in time to break up the wedding and declare your love, what’s a little bike theft? The universe will take care of it.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        It probably depends a lot on where you live. My wife’s bike got stolen and she was woken up by police coming to check on it (one of the maintenance guys at our apartment noticed a man at 7-Eleven riding it and recognized it; came back running to check if it’s indeed missing and called the police). We fully expected the police would do nothing about it (it was the cheapest Walmart bike), but an hour later they called that they found the bike and have the culprit in custody. It did help that the bike was a girly mint green with a wicker basket, so they instantly recognized it when they saw it.

        Then again, in San Francisco, when my wife got her car window smashed and wallet stolen (she was late for class and dropped her wallet under the car seat, didn’t stop to take it; but it wasn’t the wallet that caught the thieves’ attention, it was the breast pump bag that looked like a laptop bag; they threw it on the floor when they saw what it was), we never heard anything back from the police.

      • SuperDuper
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        11 year ago

        And they absolutely hate ever doing anything about bicycle theft in particular.

        FTFY

      • Clay_pidgin
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        412 years ago

        I have heard that very often. I wonder if bikes are harder to track down than other property for some reason.

        • @[email protected]
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          372 years ago

          smaller, therefore easier to hide. Not registered with a central authority like, for example, cars.

          • @[email protected]
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            412 years ago

            There’s plenty of cases where they don’t look for cars either.

            Or the cops themselves just straight up steal the car themselves.

            My wife’s car was ordered to be towed by, according to the impound lot, the police.

            Neat thing was that there was no ticket with the car, no police station within 3 miles had a record of a ticket for her or the car, and the area she had parked had no signs that suggested it was illegal to park where she did, nor does the city have any ordinance about overnight parking.

            Best we can figure, is a cop or the tow company that works with the city, just decided to tow a car for funsies and the 500 bucks it took to get it out of impound.

            The police and every organization associated with them are corrupt to the core.

            • @[email protected]
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              32 years ago

              Reading that I almost had a thought like it must have been a mix-up or something, but no, US police will murder people with less thought, so that type of fuckery is completely expected.

          • snowe
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            42 years ago

            There is bike registration. https://bikeindex.org

            It’s helped track down bike trafficking gangs sending bikes to Mexico. The police just don’t care at all

            • @[email protected]
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              52 years ago

              Love bikeindex, I actually got my stolen bike back thanks to that site. It was literally two years later but still, the police wouldn’t have even made a report probably in the city I was at, with bike theft so ubiquitous.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          Anything that’s not serialized and recorded is basically impossible to find. If you have serial numbers then they can inform local pawn shops, but even then the shops probably aren’t checking serials for anything under $500.

          And if the thief just sells it on craigslist then no one is checking serials.

          • @[email protected]
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            452 years ago

            Which proves that cops really DO actually do their jobs.

            Because protecting the property of the rich is the exact core purpose of policing.

            • @[email protected]
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              202 years ago

              Technically it’s maintaining social order. So get back to work menials or be reported to the Enforcers for organized discontent.

              • I Cast Fist
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                82 years ago

                Maintaining social order, especially in the form of violent repression against demonstrations, indirectly protects the rich’s properties, so all in a day’s work.

        • Redex
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          252 years ago

          I’m pretty sure any petty theft is very hard to track down. Not just bikes, if someone broke into your house and stole some minor things it’s almost certainly not gonna get found. Bikes are the same, it’s very easy to resell them and repaint, and nobory registers bikes.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Because even if they look for it and find it, whoever is riding just says it theirs and there is literally nothing the police can do unless it was caught on video or there is a meaningful identifying feature like a serial number or something else specific and unique.

          Seeing a sketchy guy with a black and red bike with the same bike rack you had isn’t enough to prove anything.

          If an officer approached me riding my bike around and asked me to prove it’s mine, I couldn’t either despite not being a thief.

        • @[email protected]
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          662 years ago

          Given the number of times I’ve seen cops on police forums and r/protectandserve use terms like “bikefags”, I think it’s just the typical cop disgust of anything they perceive to be weak or effeminate.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            Yeah, I don’t get that. Bicycling requires strength and endurance. It exposes you to the elements. Why is sitting in a cushy car something some people think as being more macho? Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?

            • @[email protected]
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              82 years ago

              Bicycling requires strength and endurance.

              So does cleaning a house, but that’s “women’s work”.

              Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?

              That’s it. You didn’t get it at first because made the mistake of associating manliness with things like patience, strength, hard work, endurance both of toil and hardship; all things that do make up ideals of manliness to normal people. But you need to approach it from the perspective of a wastrel, a weak, foolish, and lazy person who demands the respect and deference of being manly without putting in the hard work—something he has avoided all his life. He might praise hard work in abstract, but he has no discipline for it and doesn’t respect those who actually do it, he just considers them beneath him. To such a person, the defining aspect of manliness and machismo is mastery, mastery over others and their wills, and since mastery through work is a waste of time to him, he turns to shortcuts.

              From there, it’s not hard to see where the thought process goes. Since strength is to him based on control and mastery, he picks something that gives him more command over the road in a direct and in-your-face way. The man who drives a lifted Ram 2500 can confront you by running you the fuck over. By contrast, in his opinion, cyclists are entitled jackasses in miniscule booty shorts who can only confront you on the road by screaming “CRITICAL MASS! FUCKING CAGER!” and throwing sparkplugs at your windows. The difference in power dynamic is proof enough to our friend of who the “real man” is.

              To take the mentality to its conclusion, the easiest way to gain mastery in general is through authority, and the easiest way to get that, even easier than joining a gang, is by becoming a cop.

          • @[email protected]
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            362 years ago

            As a gay cyclist I know I’m doing something right by pissing off cops without doing anything wrong

    • 🐑🇸 🇭 🇪 🇪 🇵 🇱 🇪🐑
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      1002 years ago

      Fun fact. Cops on average have lower IQ and often fail literacy tests. Furthermore it appears that critical thinking is discouraged in the job, with candidates being selected who lack critical thinking abilities over those that have them.

  • FALGSConaut [comrade/them]
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    612 years ago

    Their method actually does make sense, you just have to remember they aren’t cops to solve (boring) crimes like petty theft. Why get it done as efficiently as possible when you can milk it for hours of overtime? 12 hours of footage means 6+ hours of overtime even watching it at x2 speed, and it’s the kind of thing you can basically have going on in the background. Cops being willfully ignorant for their own benefit makes sense to me

    • mosiacmango
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      You know what’s even better than milking it for 6hrs of OT? Saying its “to hard” to the victim, going home and then lying about doing 6hrs of OT and getting paid anyway.

      Cops lie about OT systemically. Its absolutely rampant. The only consequence they ever get is either a few hrs suspension without pay or fired, and most states are happy to hire them next door immediately so they can do it again.

  • @[email protected]
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    252 years ago

    I’m realizing now that this would have been super useful when I worked in Loss Prevention way back when. Wish I had known…

  • @[email protected]
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    652 years ago

    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.

    • ThenThreeMore
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      252 years ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    442 years ago

    Oh yea this is how I managed to convince our building management company to identify bicycle thieves in our communal garage.

  • @[email protected]
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    42 years ago

    I get the sentiment, but you want them to waste public resources doing it on all these different clunky uis and software? Sometimes these take minutes to load new information to parse.

    Maybe waste your time pinpointing it instead of expecting public resources to do what you could do for them?

    • Deceptichum
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      252 years ago

      Oh shit, a few minutes to do their job. The fucking horror, wouldn’t want to cut into their being an utter fucking bastard time, where they’re probably harassing a minority or beating their wife.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 years ago

        It’s public money, why waste it when you could provide it for them.

        But argue fallacious points.

        • @[email protected]
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          132 years ago

          Who is “you” in this sentence? I mean, I could probably write security camera software, but I don’t, and have no plans to. I imagine most of the people here are the same.

        • @[email protected]
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          202 years ago

          So when there is a pothole in front of your driveway, you’re going out and filling it in yourself, right? Because why waste the city’s valuable time when you could do it yourself?

            • Aatube
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              They said in front. So right after you go out

              Even if it was in your driveway, unless you’re a cement construction worker you’d probably have no way to fix it and contact somebody

        • Deceptichum
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          Okay so genius, are the cops going to provide the footage for the person to watch themselves to narrow down the time?

          How the fuck do you expect this person to work it out if the ones with access to the evidence to do so refuse to do so?

          And further fucking more, how is doing their job, wasting public money? There’s a lot of money wasted on police, investigating a robbery for a real person is not one of them.

    • @[email protected]
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      Yeah, every time I have ever had to hand over footage to the police for thefts at our family store, I clip and organizr that shit. I also include a paper identifying each file, the timestamps and what happened during them, any details I identified that they can corroborate (physical description, identifiable clothing/tattoos, make and model of vehicle, license plate number, etc.). I often end up putting in 1-2 hours of work on it watching, editing and transferring footage.

      If you want traction and results from the police, you need to make it as easy as possible for them by doing the heavy lifting yourself. The cynical view is that thats because they just don’t care, but also, in fairness, your case is one of dozens of cases on their desk and the cases never stop coming. This is your priority, so put in the effort instead of expecting others do so. That being said, that is much easier when you have direct access to the cctv footage. I’m guessing this student didnt.

    • gregorum
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      32 years ago

      That’s an interesting way to say that they shouldn’t get paid if they’re not doing their jobs. 

    • BombOmOm
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      102 years ago

      on all these different clunky uis and software

      As someone who has used security cam software before. I swear they are designed to be as unhelpful, slow, and convoluted as possible.

    • @[email protected]
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      372 years ago

      I mean… their job supposedly is to protect and serve the citiens so yeah… I’d expect them to use their tools to do their job.

      • @[email protected]
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        It’s your software/hardware and you know how to operate it. Would take you a fraction of the time as well.

        Maybe public cameras sure, but private that’s not their tool by any stretch of the imagination.

        And most public cameras don’t record for privacy reasons.

        • @[email protected]
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          182 years ago

          In what world do random citizens own and operate the security cameras of, well, anything? As opposed to the people that work there, or I dont know the police? Whose job is allegedly to solve crimes?