Michael

It all depends on how much you want to pay for equipment. You can purchase HD quality cameras using hard drives or you can have low quality cameras using VHS. Still pictures can be high quality at a very low price but a camera such as those used at football games cost about $100K per camera plus several million dollars worth of support equipment. Most of the cameras in the US are owned by businesses so they use cheap low quality equipment and many are 20 years or more old. It is not just the cameras and equipment that they have to upgrade, they also either need to upgrade the cabling in the building or use wireless. Initially when HD became available, golf tournaments tried to use some handheld HD cameras that used wireless (fixed cameras used cables) but the picture quality was poor since too much compression was needed (now that problem has been fixed).

Although there are now hand held HD cameras at a reasonable cost, HD security cameras and equipment are still fairly expensive.

dlake02

I said "society." Not America. There are social problems of varying kinds in every country.

Let's not go for childish jingoism here. The roots of hatred run deep.

Nokoman

Thanks for the reply. WOW. I never knew the costs were so high. Can you explain this. ( I'm clueless about these things ) Over ten years ago my friends were in the Hogs Breath in Key West. He called me and told be to go to the Hogs Breath website . I Got to their live cam site and bingo there were my chums, large as life and pretty damned clear. I can't imagine a pub paying a vast sum 10 years ago for a bit of trivial fun.

Like I said I'm pretty clueless. Is there a huge difference between the technology in a webcam and a CCTV?

sir_eccles

According to wikipedia (I know) GeoEye-1 is the best up there right now and can only see things of about half a meter so probably couldn't see individuals.

Cost and time. Likelihood is most security cameras have been there for years if not decades. Older they are more likely they are analogue with limited recording space and resolution, probably tape.

sir_eccles

The webcam had no need to record and preserve the images. Streaming high quality is easy. Now say you want to record that high quality video 24/7 and keep it for say a year.

lizzyq

IUD or IED? Dunno where a bloke would wear an IUD but I suspect it would be very, very uncomfortable.

Nokoman

I guess I'm a bit of a dumbo over this. I'd have thought recording the images in reasonable quality would have been easy and affordable in this day and age.

They sent back images from the moon 40 years ago. I can transfer video clips from my $80 to my computer and burn them to a disc.

Is it that hard?? I guess I'm really clueless??

Michael

You have to get the picture to the source. You are doing it over a high speed internet and get reasonable quality. Most commercial buildings aren't wired for that kind of throughput. Wireless is a problem since there are a limited number of bands that everybody uses (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) so that maximum transmitting power is limited so that everybody doesn't interfere too much with each other (standard WI-FI). The maximum distance class 1 transmitters (maximum transmission power allowed) are about 500' reliably if not going though walls and much less than that if walls are between the receiver and transmitter. If a building had 6 security cameras, they would likely have a lot of collusions with the transmissions from other security cameras causing breakups if using HD and wireless.

So businesses could probably upgrade each security camera to HD for a reasonable price but trying to get the data to the receiver is the major problem.

In fact, in my condo if I use my WI-FI on the 5 GHz band (new band), I consistently get about 27 mb/s throughput but if I use my WI-FI on the 2.4 GHz band (old band) I average about 5 mb/s but vary between 1 and 10 mb/s. The reason that the 5 GHz band has better throughput is that it can't get through walls as easily as the 2.4 GHz band so my neighbors don't collide with my packets as easily.

Some problems can be gotten around many of these collusion problems by buffering the video so that many retries can be attempted but that causes delays. The reason many can stream movies from the internet without breakups is because of the buffering on the computer before the video starts to display but in my case since I see about 50 other routers on the 2.4 GHz band, I would likely have some breakups (or pauses since most movie streaming will pause when the buffer is low) if I used my WI-FI on the 2.4 GHz band to watch movies even with all the buffering. However normally security camera equipment doesn't pause the stream since it could miss parts of the video since there is only so much data that the security camera can hold before video is lost plus the businesses want to see the pictures real time.

Bob

It's expensive.

You're thinking of one camera but need to think hundreds with people going over the data. It's a lot of bandwidth too.

Jerseygirl

Makes you wonder why the parents buggered off back to Russia.

UkWinds5353

Never thought I'd say this what with my previous positive opinions about immigration but.... I think America should re-examine our immigration policy.We allow far too many people into America and several of them turn out to have extreme ideologies and they bring that thinking with them.We have more than enough American born extremist to deal with we don't need to import more of that ilk. Now we have Chechen terrorist bombing American cities and the ironic thing about that is the fact that america was sympathetic toward the Chechens and their struggle with the Russians insurgency. As an American I have had enough.I wish we could ship many of these trouble makers out the door.We could start with political trouble makers like Rupert Murdock that have done nothing but dumb downed a portion of America. People like that are turning this country into a nation of extremist thinkers. Ok, I'm off my soapbox.

Gordon Barlow

Some wise man has said that nations don't have principles, only national interests. "America" (i.e. the rulers of the USA) couldn't care less about the Chechens or any other foreign nationals, except insofar as their interests coincide. That's just the way of the world.

Trixie_b

I struggle with this post. You post that you'd close off immigration on a British expats board, where the very nature of the members in the main is that they've immigrated or are in the process of.

I'm thankful that countries will take asylum seekers in to prevent or at least reduce genocide. I agree that the process of that can be misused.

I agree, there are plenty of "nutters" out there. In every country of the world.

If you stopped immigration, how would you deal with those of us who have immigrated because of our American spouses? Those who have special skills that can't be found in the US? Those who are investing in the country?

Sally Redux

This sort of knee-jerk reaction is unfortunately quite predictable and I think we will all come across it.

Michael

We are all immigrants (except for the few native Americans Indians) and other than 9/11, the majority of the people killed in the US by terrorists were by native born white Americans with American ancestry of generations.