I'll take actual case law and statutes rather then the random opinions of bloggers and journalists who skimmed a few cases for exceptions.
Did you even look at the sites I linked to? The first TWO were legal websites!
The law seems clear - the Owner is responsible UNLESS the one bitten was an illegal intruder, or the bite was provoked via an illegal act.
You set yourself a high bar when you said "all 50 states", "will be put down"(not may), and "will, not might, be liable". Which is why I stopped after 3 sites, and didn't bother looking up more states.
Given that I've listed 3 sources, how about you quote some actual case law holding dog owners responsible for bites against illegal intruders? I figure the reason it's hard to find is that it's so settled that most lawyers laugh the criminals out of their office, long before it reaches the court.
Oh, just another nail - California Civil Code 3342 states: (a) The owner of any dog is liable for the damages suffered by any person who is bitten by the dog while in a public place or lawfully in a private place, including the property of the owner of the dog, regardless of the former viciousness of the dog or the owner's knowledge of such viciousness. A person is lawfully upon the private property of such owner within the meaning of this section when he is on such property in the performance of any duty imposed upon him by the laws of this state or by the laws or postal regulations of the United States, or when he is on such property upon the invitation, express or implied, of the owner.
Note the 'lawfully'. If you've broken into somebody's home you're not there lawfully, ergo if the dog bites you it's your own fault.
And by the way, if you obey an unlawful order, you're held every bit as responsible as if you acted alone, but so is the officer who gave you that order.
It gets even worse for the officers - not only can they be held liable for any unlawful orders they give, they can also be held liable for the actions of the soldiers under them, even if they have no knowledge of the actions of said soldiers.
I'm a Technical Sergeant(E-6) in the USAF. I'm a 'non-commissioned officer', or NCO. I did not accept a commission, I enlisted. At a very vague level, commissioned officers are all approved/commissioned by congress(it's a massive list buried somewhere). My rank is not dependent upon that.
Article 133 is completely irrelevant to me. My boss, a 1st Lt. (O-2), can be court-martialed under that clause, I cannot be. Articles 92&134 are generally the catchall of choice for enlisted personnel.
Because there seems to be some confusion: When I said 'upgrades are going to come down', I meant that upgrades using new technology are going to be downward directed and funded. I really meant 'come down the pipe'.
IE you KNOW that the plane isn't going to end it's life with the same electronics it started with.
To answer the AC questions(I don't normally reply to them at all): 1. Yes, I know that military upgrades tend to get more expensive as time goes on. Wasn't trying to imply that. 2. Yes, electronics systems tend to shrink over time, but one problem you have with military types is that we always seem to demand NEW capabilities while keeping all the old ones. Plus, not everything shrinks - the radar isn't likely to get smaller. We're more likely to demand yet another radio than simply replace one with a newer, smaller radio unit that does the same thing. We might need another module to add data networking to interface with F-22s, which are supposed to be able to act like mini-AWACs, etc...
Before we reach that limit, the price will go high enough to make it too expensive to ever actually risk an advanced fighter in actual combat
Sounds like a great defensive strategy. It's too expensive to risk on offensive operations, yet you need advanced fighters to fight advanced fighters, so unless you can somehow afford to risk them, you aren't going to be attacking somebody with them.
I say this because it'll be too expensive to risk on offensive operations long before it's too expensive to risk on defensive ones.
Dogfighting and shoulder launched SAMs are pretty much two completely different subjects.
Even the expensive shoulder-launched missiles lack the range to attack a plane at altitude. Today they're pretty much only threats during take off and landing.
Cruise missiles are extremely expensive and have the disadvantage that you need to determine the target before launch(normally). With a fighter you can launch and finalize the target during the mission. I agree that drones will eventually be everywhere, because they have most of the same capabilities. One capability that a drone might not have is absolute ability to operate through jamming. A manned plane will still be able to hit targets despite having communications jammed, that's a little more problematic with drones. Of course, military communications are already extremely hard to jam. Oh, and stealth - while there are ways to transmit 'stealthily', it's still subject to detection if the enemy is good enough. A manned plane can more realistically go radio silent than a drone.
Other questions: Purpose: Hitting high value/mobile targets in high threat environments where you need the ability to dynamically adjust depending on changing conditions Strategy: Get in fast, hit hard, leave fast. Be hard to see/hit even while you're there. Cost/benefits: Debatable, but on average I'll fall back to an old statement: "The biggest waste of military spending is a military that loses" Evasion: Not if you put $XM worth of missile systems right in it's path. However, fighters are highly mobile, so odds are 90% of the SAMs won't be in range of the plane if the mission is properly planned(the US puts a LOT of effort into this). You have to distribute your sites carefully otherwise you'll suffer from a mixture of them being avoided, hit first, distracted, decoyed, or otherwise neutralized while a plane hits the high value targets that they were protecting.
The F-35 is designed to fight against other aircraft that haven't been developed.
Correct.
The F-18 / F-16 are still more than equal to other current fighters.
Incorrect. They've been bypassed by the latest generation of foreign fighters. The only thing keeping US air forces dominant at the moment is superior ancillary equipment(like missiles), the size of our forces, training, and doctrine.
"Probably"? It already is. Or did you mean that the F-35 will probably become a drone?
I think an air attack drone might be interesting to see. The current generation are all biased towards ground attack - Much like how the A-10 would make for a rather lousy anti-air asset, they're just not equipped to do the task.
appalling inefficiency of Boeing's design process in deliberately leaving unused space on the F-18 for future upgrades ($$$).
What you call "Appalling inefficiency" I call 'looking ahead'. With an average service life of 30 years or more, you KNOW components and upgrades are going to come down, and if you already have some space, putting them in becomes a whole lot easier, not to mention cheaper.
One example I can think of would be for installing new communication systems.
To me it isn't. Can you go into a retail store and see a sign that says "Apple products" with nothing underneath them, and then a big arrow pointing to Samsung, HP, Acer tablets and laptops? That's the assertion here is that you can't use the word "Apple" with bupkis there. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that done - and probably because it's been litigated away by manufacturers and trademark holders.
Bad analogy-It's more like I walk into said retail store and ask an employee "Where do you have your apple laptops" and getting back "Sorry, we don't have apples; but our laptops are over there".
In the article it shows what happens. 1. The user searches for a "MTM special ops" watches. 2. Amazon's search engine doesn't find the MTM watches because MTM doesn't allow amazon to sell them. 3. The search engine automatically loosens the search - removing the quotes restricting it to "mtm special ops", so now it's looking for mtm & watch. 4. This still(likely) results in no listings 5. The search engine loosens the search AGAIN - probably looking for something like 'best 2 out of 3 for "MTM" "special ops" "watches". 6. "special ops watches" gives returns, so amazon's servers display them.
1. B-52s are easily reached today by anybody anywhere near tech parity. You're looking more at a new generation of AWACs for this sort of drone control. 2. As far as I'm aware they've never solved the reattachment problems for air launched drones/planes 3. If you're in visual range, still in atmosphere, latency would be 'negligible'. The more autonomous the drone, the less latency matters. If it automatically dodges/adjusts to launch at the target, so much the better.
That's why you use it in addition to terrain/celestial mapping - inertial guidance tells you approximately where you are so you can more quickly match it to the map.
Indeed. It's extremely expensive, but we have had guided cruise missiles that use terrain mapping that predated GPS by a considerable margin. Said systems aren't agile enough for drone work, but we've come a long ways in what we can do. IE Terrain mapping vs. 3.2 isn't good enough for drone work, but maybe 10.6 is.
Well, one of the sites that has a few of them is an independent reviewer. He still buys the stuff, just points out that 'buyer beware' and that you might want to order 2-3 of whatever, from different sources, while noting that he's got about a 10% failure rate, while the stuff is on average half the price or less. So on the whole he's ahead.
Oh, and going by the prices I've been seeing, and having visited Walmart over the weekend, it has like a 20% markup over chinese direct-market, not 500%.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have read too many reviews of Chinese dealers to not have a healthy sense of 'buyer beware'.
I've heard of things like '4GB' USB drives turning out to be 64-256MB models with the controller chip reprogrammed to report 4GB-which you don't find out until you try to read data written to the drive past the real limit. Class 10 SD cards that turn out to be no faster than class 4. Etc...
Running your "Legions of Terror" through the ghettos will only result in making the country more like Brazil or Columbia.
Incorrect. I'd be a lot more bloody in that case(evil, remember?). The idea is that you go through the ghettos and KILL the troublemakers. I'd say that I'd decimate them, but to be honest, I'd probably kill more than 1 in 10. They continue to be a problem, I simply have them all killed.
And you eradicate needless unemployment by having the government hire the people that can't otherwise find work. There's always some public good that those people could be working on. Even if it's picking up garbage, or constructing public amenities.
Remember the 'fill a book' part? It's called the 'Federal Jobs Program' in there. Short idea: Pay about 50% of prevailing wages for the skillset, but be heavy on the benefits - healthcare, education, housing, food, etc... Other than self-maintenance(communal child care, for example), concentrates on building 'infrastructure', which I hazily define as 'anything expected to last more than 20 years that will improve productivity or quality of life for the citizens of the country'.
It's only admirable if you did something else that was good instead.
I was just reading that the glut of college graduates has gotten so bad that a high school grad that goes directly into trade work(IE mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc...) has equivalent to higher income than the 'average' college grad once you factor in loan debt, delays to the job market, etc...
If you're going to stick to low crime areas in America, you're probably going to stick to low crime areas in Europe too.
That would mean avoiding tourist traps, at least for the petty theft stuff.
The point I was trying to make is that violent crime in the USA is actually incredibly concentrated, on average. To my knowledge, it's actually more concentrated/uneven than in the UK - IE our good spots are really, really good(Europe's are just 'really good'). Our bad spots are, well, extremely bad, in a 'you're safer in Somalia' sense. At your worst, your bad spots aren't that bad.
I'll note that if I was addressing crime in Europe I'd probably do the same thing - look for patterns of high crime concentration, and focus my efforts of fixing those problem areas.
I like to joke about what I'd do if I was "Evil Overlord of the USA, because president isn't enough power". One of the steps(the whole plan would be a small book) involves running my Legions of Terror through the ghettos to clean them up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Obviously. I managed to sum up 90% of your post with six words.
Cameras do a lot more than just identify perps.
Never said they didn't. Remember start of that sentence? "A hidden camera might record everything". That covers all your items. All I said was that a camera alone might not be ENOUGH to identify a generic criminal sufficiently to effect an arrest and conviction. IE we have too many low level scumbags, not enough officers, and facial recognition software is still too expensive and unreliable to sort through that many faces. We have to put a name to the face before we can send the po-po out to arrest him. Plus, well, even if we have the scumbag's name that doesn't mean we know which of his multitude of friends, relatives, and girlfriends he's shacking up with this week, so finding him to arrest him is something of a challenge(which they aren't going to bother with for petty theft).
Oh, and #8 shows that you watch too much CSI. Even a high definition camera is going to have difficulty doing anything with a reasonably written 'list', even ID'ing it as a list, unless it's focused directly on it, which a security camera isn't going to be.
While camera resolution has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, there's still quite a few camera systems out there that actually have WORSE resolution than the old analogy TV's did. You're going to have a hard time ID'ing tattoos or other specific features.
Most 'generic scum' criminals are stupid, and that's how they get caught, by doing something stupid. I'm not a big enough target to attract the rings and targeted criminals who are actually smart.
LAW ABIDING CITIZENS is the default state, that means those are the people who become criminals.
In most cases, criminals who commit violent crimes are career criminals, with a raft of arrests/convictions.
If you haven't been arrested by the time you're ~25, the odds that you'll be arrested at all will drop tremendously. If you're arrested as a teenager, the odds you'll be arrested as an adult are an OOM or more higher than somebody who didn't get arrested.
The average rapist commits 15-16 rapes on average before being caught(per my recent SARC briefing). I imagine that the ratio is even worse for 'mere' burglars.
Less than 20% of criminals get their guns legally(IE before they have the felony criminal record). Felony guns that were obtained at a gun show are less than 4%, and 'private sale' is so small of a category it's not even specifically mentioned.
My cameras aren't discrete, but finding the DVR itself would actually take them awhile even with a sledgehammer and drywall saw. I would be getting an email shortly after the break-in anyway, so even if the cops are slow to get there, I very much doubt they'd have found my DVR by the time they have my house surrounded.
There's actually two different schools of thought when it comes to cameras - many stores have big obvious camera installations even today because they believe the camera's visibility to be a deterrent. It reminds potential thieves that they're there. A hidden camera might record everything, but if the person doing the stealing is generic scumbag #5, they may not have enough information to track him down and charge him. In order to be effective at catching him, somebody would have to be paying attention to the camera and be ready to intercept at the door.
So - Visible cameras are more likely to deter a crime while Invisible cameras are more likely to record a crime
Which one do you want? Personally I'd rather just not deal with the hassle of catching the crook, I'd prefer they just went elsewhere to begin with. One interesting setup I saw was an attempt at both worlds - they had big visible fake or otherwise inoperable cameras placed in various spots, with a number of discretely hidden cameras to do the actual recording - the idea being that if somebody was trying to hide some activity from the visible cameras, they'd actually make themselves highly visible(on average) to the real ones...
Having said that, I would guess most of the junk currently up there was already chosen to avoid that side effect.
I thought about mentioning that, deleted it during editing. Secondary radiation can be a real concern, but it's generally still a lot less energetic than the primary stuff, so even if the material isn't ideally suited to be radiation shielding, there's relatively few materials that would make the situation worse. Then you have some shielding specifically chosen to NOT be easy to irradiate, like water, behind all your recycled shielding.
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I'll take actual case law and statutes rather then the random opinions of bloggers and journalists who skimmed a few cases for exceptions.
Did you even look at the sites I linked to? The first TWO were legal websites!
The law seems clear - the Owner is responsible UNLESS the one bitten was an illegal intruder, or the bite was provoked via an illegal act.
You set yourself a high bar when you said "all 50 states", "will be put down"(not may), and "will, not might, be liable". Which is why I stopped after 3 sites, and didn't bother looking up more states.
Given that I've listed 3 sources, how about you quote some actual case law holding dog owners responsible for bites against illegal intruders? I figure the reason it's hard to find is that it's so settled that most lawyers laugh the criminals out of their office, long before it reaches the court.
Oh, just another nail - California Civil Code 3342 states:
(a) The owner of any dog is liable for the damages suffered by any person who is bitten by the dog while in a public place or lawfully in a private place, including the property of the owner of the dog, regardless of the former viciousness of the dog or the owner's knowledge of such viciousness. A person is lawfully upon the private property of such owner within the meaning of this section when he is on such property in the performance of any duty imposed upon him by the laws of this state or by the laws or postal regulations of the United States, or when he is on such property upon the invitation, express or implied, of the owner.
Note the 'lawfully'. If you've broken into somebody's home you're not there lawfully, ergo if the dog bites you it's your own fault.
And by the way, if you obey an unlawful order, you're held every bit as responsible as if you acted alone, but so is the officer who gave you that order.
It gets even worse for the officers - not only can they be held liable for any unlawful orders they give, they can also be held liable for the actions of the soldiers under them, even if they have no knowledge of the actions of said soldiers.
I'm a Technical Sergeant(E-6) in the USAF. I'm a 'non-commissioned officer', or NCO. I did not accept a commission, I enlisted. At a very vague level, commissioned officers are all approved/commissioned by congress(it's a massive list buried somewhere). My rank is not dependent upon that.
Article 133 is completely irrelevant to me. My boss, a 1st Lt. (O-2), can be court-martialed under that clause, I cannot be. Articles 92&134 are generally the catchall of choice for enlisted personnel.
Because there seems to be some confusion: When I said 'upgrades are going to come down', I meant that upgrades using new technology are going to be downward directed and funded. I really meant 'come down the pipe'.
IE you KNOW that the plane isn't going to end it's life with the same electronics it started with.
To answer the AC questions(I don't normally reply to them at all):
1. Yes, I know that military upgrades tend to get more expensive as time goes on. Wasn't trying to imply that.
2. Yes, electronics systems tend to shrink over time, but one problem you have with military types is that we always seem to demand NEW capabilities while keeping all the old ones. Plus, not everything shrinks - the radar isn't likely to get smaller. We're more likely to demand yet another radio than simply replace one with a newer, smaller radio unit that does the same thing. We might need another module to add data networking to interface with F-22s, which are supposed to be able to act like mini-AWACs, etc...
'Those who wish for peace should prepare for war'.
1. What foreign power? Russia, China, India, Japan, etc... It's a deterrent.
2. Russia, China. Plus it's predicted to get worse in the future.
Before we reach that limit, the price will go high enough to make it too expensive to ever actually risk an advanced fighter in actual combat
Sounds like a great defensive strategy. It's too expensive to risk on offensive operations, yet you need advanced fighters to fight advanced fighters, so unless you can somehow afford to risk them, you aren't going to be attacking somebody with them.
I say this because it'll be too expensive to risk on offensive operations long before it's too expensive to risk on defensive ones.
Dogfighting and shoulder launched SAMs are pretty much two completely different subjects.
Even the expensive shoulder-launched missiles lack the range to attack a plane at altitude. Today they're pretty much only threats during take off and landing.
Cruise missiles are extremely expensive and have the disadvantage that you need to determine the target before launch(normally). With a fighter you can launch and finalize the target during the mission. I agree that drones will eventually be everywhere, because they have most of the same capabilities. One capability that a drone might not have is absolute ability to operate through jamming. A manned plane will still be able to hit targets despite having communications jammed, that's a little more problematic with drones. Of course, military communications are already extremely hard to jam. Oh, and stealth - while there are ways to transmit 'stealthily', it's still subject to detection if the enemy is good enough. A manned plane can more realistically go radio silent than a drone.
Other questions:
Purpose: Hitting high value/mobile targets in high threat environments where you need the ability to dynamically adjust depending on changing conditions
Strategy: Get in fast, hit hard, leave fast. Be hard to see/hit even while you're there.
Cost/benefits: Debatable, but on average I'll fall back to an old statement: "The biggest waste of military spending is a military that loses"
Evasion: Not if you put $XM worth of missile systems right in it's path. However, fighters are highly mobile, so odds are 90% of the SAMs won't be in range of the plane if the mission is properly planned(the US puts a LOT of effort into this). You have to distribute your sites carefully otherwise you'll suffer from a mixture of them being avoided, hit first, distracted, decoyed, or otherwise neutralized while a plane hits the high value targets that they were protecting.
The F-35 is designed to fight against other aircraft that haven't been developed.
Correct.
The F-18 / F-16 are still more than equal to other current fighters.
Incorrect. They've been bypassed by the latest generation of foreign fighters. The only thing keeping US air forces dominant at the moment is superior ancillary equipment(like missiles), the size of our forces, training, and doctrine.
The reaper will probably become a drone.
"Probably"? It already is. Or did you mean that the F-35 will probably become a drone?
I think an air attack drone might be interesting to see. The current generation are all biased towards ground attack - Much like how the A-10 would make for a rather lousy anti-air asset, they're just not equipped to do the task.
appalling inefficiency of Boeing's design process in deliberately leaving unused space on the F-18 for future upgrades ($$$).
What you call "Appalling inefficiency" I call 'looking ahead'. With an average service life of 30 years or more, you KNOW components and upgrades are going to come down, and if you already have some space, putting them in becomes a whole lot easier, not to mention cheaper.
One example I can think of would be for installing new communication systems.
To me it isn't. Can you go into a retail store and see a sign that says "Apple products" with nothing underneath them, and then a big arrow pointing to Samsung, HP, Acer tablets and laptops? That's the assertion here is that you can't use the word "Apple" with bupkis there. I'm pretty sure I've never seen that done - and probably because it's been litigated away by manufacturers and trademark holders.
Bad analogy-It's more like I walk into said retail store and ask an employee "Where do you have your apple laptops" and getting back "Sorry, we don't have apples; but our laptops are over there".
In the article it shows what happens.
1. The user searches for a "MTM special ops" watches.
2. Amazon's search engine doesn't find the MTM watches because MTM doesn't allow amazon to sell them.
3. The search engine automatically loosens the search - removing the quotes restricting it to "mtm special ops", so now it's looking for mtm & watch.
4. This still(likely) results in no listings
5. The search engine loosens the search AGAIN - probably looking for something like 'best 2 out of 3 for "MTM" "special ops" "watches".
6. "special ops watches" gives returns, so amazon's servers display them.
1. B-52s are easily reached today by anybody anywhere near tech parity. You're looking more at a new generation of AWACs for this sort of drone control.
2. As far as I'm aware they've never solved the reattachment problems for air launched drones/planes
3. If you're in visual range, still in atmosphere, latency would be 'negligible'. The more autonomous the drone, the less latency matters. If it automatically dodges/adjusts to launch at the target, so much the better.
What if you get a B52 (Service Ceiling of 15km) loaded with drone control equipment that avoids direct conflict due to cruising so high up.
B-52's are easy to reach today if you're fighting somebody even close to parity.
Still, that's pretty much an add-on to an AWACs craft, though the additional controls/crew might dictate using a larger craft.
As others have pointed out, that same fragile bag of fluids is also the component that can't be hacked.
They may not be 'hackable', but they are subvertable - just look at the various pilots who have defected to various places.
That's why you use it in addition to terrain/celestial mapping - inertial guidance tells you approximately where you are so you can more quickly match it to the map.
Indeed. It's extremely expensive, but we have had guided cruise missiles that use terrain mapping that predated GPS by a considerable margin. Said systems aren't agile enough for drone work, but we've come a long ways in what we can do. IE Terrain mapping vs. 3.2 isn't good enough for drone work, but maybe 10.6 is.
Well, one of the sites that has a few of them is an independent reviewer. He still buys the stuff, just points out that 'buyer beware' and that you might want to order 2-3 of whatever, from different sources, while noting that he's got about a 10% failure rate, while the stuff is on average half the price or less. So on the whole he's ahead.
Oh, and going by the prices I've been seeing, and having visited Walmart over the weekend, it has like a 20% markup over chinese direct-market, not 500%.
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have read too many reviews of Chinese dealers to not have a healthy sense of 'buyer beware'.
I've heard of things like '4GB' USB drives turning out to be 64-256MB models with the controller chip reprogrammed to report 4GB-which you don't find out until you try to read data written to the drive past the real limit. Class 10 SD cards that turn out to be no faster than class 4. Etc...
"Serious" can be highly variable, going all the way from 1 frame a day for long term stop motion work to over a thousand per second.
~60 fps would be an option for some high motion stuff.
Running your "Legions of Terror" through the ghettos will only result in making the country more like Brazil or Columbia.
Incorrect. I'd be a lot more bloody in that case(evil, remember?). The idea is that you go through the ghettos and KILL the troublemakers. I'd say that I'd decimate them, but to be honest, I'd probably kill more than 1 in 10. They continue to be a problem, I simply have them all killed.
And you eradicate needless unemployment by having the government hire the people that can't otherwise find work. There's always some public good that those people could be working on. Even if it's picking up garbage, or constructing public amenities.
Remember the 'fill a book' part? It's called the 'Federal Jobs Program' in there. Short idea: Pay about 50% of prevailing wages for the skillset, but be heavy on the benefits - healthcare, education, housing, food, etc... Other than self-maintenance(communal child care, for example), concentrates on building 'infrastructure', which I hazily define as 'anything expected to last more than 20 years that will improve productivity or quality of life for the citizens of the country'.
It's only admirable if you did something else that was good instead.
I was just reading that the glut of college graduates has gotten so bad that a high school grad that goes directly into trade work(IE mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc...) has equivalent to higher income than the 'average' college grad once you factor in loan debt, delays to the job market, etc...
If you're going to stick to low crime areas in America, you're probably going to stick to low crime areas in Europe too.
That would mean avoiding tourist traps, at least for the petty theft stuff.
The point I was trying to make is that violent crime in the USA is actually incredibly concentrated, on average. To my knowledge, it's actually more concentrated/uneven than in the UK - IE our good spots are really, really good(Europe's are just 'really good'). Our bad spots are, well, extremely bad, in a 'you're safer in Somalia' sense. At your worst, your bad spots aren't that bad.
I'll note that if I was addressing crime in Europe I'd probably do the same thing - look for patterns of high crime concentration, and focus my efforts of fixing those problem areas.
I like to joke about what I'd do if I was "Evil Overlord of the USA, because president isn't enough power". One of the steps(the whole plan would be a small book) involves running my Legions of Terror through the ghettos to clean them up.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Obviously. I managed to sum up 90% of your post with six words.
Cameras do a lot more than just identify perps.
Never said they didn't. Remember start of that sentence? "A hidden camera might record everything". That covers all your items. All I said was that a camera alone might not be ENOUGH to identify a generic criminal sufficiently to effect an arrest and conviction. IE we have too many low level scumbags, not enough officers, and facial recognition software is still too expensive and unreliable to sort through that many faces. We have to put a name to the face before we can send the po-po out to arrest him. Plus, well, even if we have the scumbag's name that doesn't mean we know which of his multitude of friends, relatives, and girlfriends he's shacking up with this week, so finding him to arrest him is something of a challenge(which they aren't going to bother with for petty theft).
Oh, and #8 shows that you watch too much CSI. Even a high definition camera is going to have difficulty doing anything with a reasonably written 'list', even ID'ing it as a list, unless it's focused directly on it, which a security camera isn't going to be.
While camera resolution has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, there's still quite a few camera systems out there that actually have WORSE resolution than the old analogy TV's did. You're going to have a hard time ID'ing tattoos or other specific features.
Most 'generic scum' criminals are stupid, and that's how they get caught, by doing something stupid. I'm not a big enough target to attract the rings and targeted criminals who are actually smart.
LAW ABIDING CITIZENS is the default state, that means those are the people who become criminals.
In most cases, criminals who commit violent crimes are career criminals, with a raft of arrests/convictions.
If you haven't been arrested by the time you're ~25, the odds that you'll be arrested at all will drop tremendously. If you're arrested as a teenager, the odds you'll be arrested as an adult are an OOM or more higher than somebody who didn't get arrested.
The average rapist commits 15-16 rapes on average before being caught(per my recent SARC briefing). I imagine that the ratio is even worse for 'mere' burglars.
Less than 20% of criminals get their guns legally(IE before they have the felony criminal record). Felony guns that were obtained at a gun show are less than 4%, and 'private sale' is so small of a category it's not even specifically mentioned.
My cameras aren't discrete, but finding the DVR itself would actually take them awhile even with a sledgehammer and drywall saw. I would be getting an email shortly after the break-in anyway, so even if the cops are slow to get there, I very much doubt they'd have found my DVR by the time they have my house surrounded.
There's actually two different schools of thought when it comes to cameras - many stores have big obvious camera installations even today because they believe the camera's visibility to be a deterrent. It reminds potential thieves that they're there. A hidden camera might record everything, but if the person doing the stealing is generic scumbag #5, they may not have enough information to track him down and charge him. In order to be effective at catching him, somebody would have to be paying attention to the camera and be ready to intercept at the door.
So - Visible cameras are more likely to deter a crime while Invisible cameras are more likely to record a crime
Which one do you want? Personally I'd rather just not deal with the hassle of catching the crook, I'd prefer they just went elsewhere to begin with. One interesting setup I saw was an attempt at both worlds - they had big visible fake or otherwise inoperable cameras placed in various spots, with a number of discretely hidden cameras to do the actual recording - the idea being that if somebody was trying to hide some activity from the visible cameras, they'd actually make themselves highly visible(on average) to the real ones...
Having said that, I would guess most of the junk currently up there was already chosen to avoid that side effect.
I thought about mentioning that, deleted it during editing. Secondary radiation can be a real concern, but it's generally still a lot less energetic than the primary stuff, so even if the material isn't ideally suited to be radiation shielding, there's relatively few materials that would make the situation worse. Then you have some shielding specifically chosen to NOT be easy to irradiate, like water, behind all your recycled shielding.