• @[email protected]
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    157 months ago

    There’s a similar logic applied to fault finding, start at the middle of the circuit.

    If the fault is before that point, start at the quarter point, if it’s after, three quarters, and keep splitting until you find it.

  • @[email protected]
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    1857 months ago

    It’s not that the cops don’t know how to search a video, they simply don’t want to, because theft of property from you, a working-class nobody, is nothing to them.

      • @[email protected]
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        27 months ago

        And also that - depending on the format of the video and software involved - doing a “binary search” might not be that simple

        With my own NVR system, it takes great quality video and I can pull files of it, but the actual interface is pretty janky to say the least, and accessing stuff like the fisheye cameras only really works well within the vendor’s app.

      • @[email protected]
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        37 months ago

        As a rule, do not talk to cops. If you need to talk to cops, you either don’t, or go through a lawyer.

        • @[email protected]
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          47 months ago

          I’m not in the US. We don’t have the same lunatics you do. They’re just slightly demented here.

          • @[email protected]
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            27 months ago

            Neither am I but ours are so paranoid they will still wear stab vests under their hoodies when doing plain clothes patrols even if the majority don’t carry a gun.

  • @[email protected]
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    397 months ago

    My bike was stolen, and I live in a small enough town that the cops actually did go through the footage to find the thief.

    He called back 15 minutes later for more details and mentioned he was 15 minutes into the footage.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 months ago

      It sounds dumb, but if the footage was on tape and not easily seekable, then I can see that happening.

      • @[email protected]
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        77 months ago

        It should still at least have a fast-forward option. You go at the highest speed possible until the bike disappears. Then you rewind at a slower speed until it shows up again. Then you can play the tape from there.

  • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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    1027 months ago

    I had a bike stolen from a convenience store once. I talked the clerk into letting me review the footage. I found the guy stealing the bike on tape, along with the licence plate of the car that dropped him off. Through a bunch of sleuthing I found out his name and exactly where he lived. I called the cops with all of this information and evidence and told them I want to press charges. Then basically said “lol, fuck off”. So I kept trying to find out where the bike was. It was an expensive bike and I wanted it back. While looking for the bike I found out the thief had sold it for money that he spent on meth, and then got caught with the meth, so he was actually in jail. I called the cops back and told them I have one of their inmates on video stealing my bike, I have the license plate number of his collaborator, and I have witnesses. I want to press charges, and they already have the guy in custody. Again, their answer was basically “lol, get fucked. We don’t help people”. Fuck the police.

    • @[email protected]
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      177 months ago

      Wait couldn’t you have filed a lawsuit? I mean yeah, the cops didn’t do their job (I guess they could be sued for that too). But you would need proof in text form so just ask them again in a mail or letter. If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

      • @[email protected]
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        137 months ago

        If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

        Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

        The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

        The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.

        • DerGottesknecht
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          67 months ago

          Ahm, I think you want to reread the Source. Its even worse with several women getting raped and tortured for 14 hours because of lazy police.

      • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet
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        217 months ago

        Against who? A meth addict bike thief definitely doesn’t have any money. Do you mean against the police? Possibly? Idk. I lived in a conservative town where the Chief of Police was basically idolized. I definitely didn’t want to paint a target on my own head. This was 20 years ago, so if I had other options, they’re gone now.

  • @[email protected]
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    97 months ago

    The cops don’t like when you point out how intelligent they are (or aren’t really)?

    I am shocked

    /s

  • Stern
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    237 months ago

    Cops are only useful if you need someone to get to the scene two hours late, and then shoot your dog.

  • @[email protected]
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    97 months ago

    I’m a quality director and I did this the other day to identify the exact range of bad laminate in a number of film rolls!

  • @[email protected]
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    7 months ago

    This is an innate skill in the days of the internet for anytime you are looking for just the right moment in a video of any kind. 🤔

  • Dragon Rider (drag)
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    7 months ago

    Drag has been in exactly this same situation. Stupid pigs.

    Also binary search isn’t a sorting algorithm. It’s a search algorithm. It only works on a data set that has already been sorted.

  • @[email protected]
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    437 months ago

    Man, as someone who worked surveillance for years, I can’t believe that anyone would have a hard time with this.

    It was so, so, so, so easy to find when something vanished.

    Now, did so and so walk in the building? Yeah, kiss my ass. Not happening.

    • @[email protected]
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      247 months ago

      I worked at a major outdoors retailer with a “gun library” of high-end firearms.

      In one of our quarterly steel audits (where we pull all 10,000 guns put hands on them, verify the serials, etc) we discovered a $10,000 rifle was missing.

      The thing is, the case it was in obscured the gun itself from the security cameras. It was behind like 6 other guns in a glass case any customer could item and pull the guns out to look at them (guns themselves were trigger-locked of course).

      So we had to have the gun library manager sit there and watch 3 month’s of surveillance video of a specific case that was proclaimed opened 20 times an hour in a highly-trafficked area of the store. Because of all the activity, the video had to be watched in real time, and we were open 13 hours a day.

      The manager ended up quitting over the boredom combined with stress.

      • @[email protected]
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        57 months ago

        I can’t imagine having someone watch 3 months x 13 hours of real-time security footage is worth the 10k, unless the insurance would pay his salary.

        But now I know why stores sometimes have their most expensive stuff just sitting there in full view. It’s not just for the customers’ viewing.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 months ago

          Yeah it’s a sunk cost fallacy. 91 days x 13 hours = 1,183 hours. Even assuming the manager is making $10 an hour they wouldn’t recoup the loss unless they found it early.

          Ofc no manager makes $10/hour.

          Let’s make some assumptions. just picking a retail place with firearms managers and i see cabela’s listed on glassdoor reporting $53-91k. Let’s go with the low end 53k. Let’s also assume 40 hours per week and the manager is doing no more than 20% unpaid hours, so 2080 salary hours + 208 “good worker” hours = 2288 total hours worked in a year. 53k salary / 2288 hours = $23/hour effective pay rate. That’s even before considering the benefits package

          $10,000 item / $23 per hour = ~435 hours of real time footage before it is a guaranteed sunk cost. This means finding it within first ~37% of footage. Meanwhile 435 hours would effectively take the manager off the floor for a quarter of the year.

          I didn’t need to do math to tell you that this is a task given to someone to make them quit. Manager did something else and this how the company decided to get rid of them.

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            It’s not the 10 grand. It’s that a gun was stolen. Someone who walks into a store and steals a gun is the kind of person you want to identify and track down. If we catch them stealing a gun on camera, we can follow them out of the store with the other cameras and grab a plate number from a car.

            It happened on another occasion where we saw the gun being stolen in real-time. We were able to track them on camera and call the police with a plate number and have the gun recovered.

            We didn’t physically stop them from stealing the gun because that’s the kind of syluspect who will start shooting, and half the customers would pull out their own handguns and “help” by putting more lead into the air.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

        My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

        Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

        And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

        Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

        The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 months ago

        Oh god, yeah I’d be out. I would not do that.

        Watching surveillance is truly like watching paint dry. Realtime? Yeah, just shoot me.

        The only time I ever struggled was when cash went missing and I had to watch sale for sale. Even then, I could fast forward.

        I always went for voids and “nosales” first. Nine times out of ten that’s where I’d find the theft. More clever thieves made my life hell though.

  • Lovable Sidekick
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    137 months ago

    I remember marveling at how simple and obvious binary search was when I first learned about it in programming.

  • Queen HawlSera
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    267 months ago

    He was never interested in finding the bike, he just wanted to “take notes” and go back to his donuts.