Sorry, but that is just emotional. The Government does 1000 times more to assist the poor than Church groups do. In fact, many of the NGO Church groups take money from the Government to give the help you are describing. Churches, Mosques, Temples are all businesses. You can say they are businesses for good purposes, but they are businesses none the less. A better way would be to start a business and call it based on my "faith" in Widgets. Then register as a Religious based NPO and take advantage of the same zero tax status as the others. Thus we could all stop paying taxes. (I'm being ironic of course). The power to tax is the power to destroy? LOL. Yes, but its easier just to declare a Church unlawful, and leave it at that. Congress can destroy something like a church without needing to tax it to death. By your logic, Congress should dissolve since it "might" run afoul of the constitution. Taxes are not to destroy the payer, they are to distribute money to areas which the individual can not reach, and the group requires to benefit the social good. Yes, of course there are boondogles coming out of congress, but that's just the nature of democracy. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Winston Churchill

They already are penalized: The software gets a bad reputation and is no longer purchased or used.

I think nothing more needs to be said...

German law is already clear: The owner of the connection is responsible for the traffic on the connection. If there is wireless, it must be secured in such a way to ensure that others are not using or misusing the connection to download or share infringing material. Either way, the owner is responsible. Now that the connection address can be subpoena'd for the real owner name it means that a lot of lawsuits are coming in Germany.

You're measuring something which has too many variables. Test your theory on a smaller environment, such as in a single shop, and you see that cameras do deter crime. The rate varies depending on the camera location and visibility, and also will vary over time. The greatest drop is seen closest to the installation, and then it falls off a bit over time.

please read my previous comment above. Its about economics and cash flow.

Tickets for illegal driving habits are a positive cash flow for the ticking agency, and thus an incentive to follow to completion. Tracking an individual for criminal activity (such as your hit and run) is a cost center activity which, no matter what you think about the system, costs money. Yes, it keeps the police in a job, but ultimately the amount of incidents versus man hours to process makes each decision a prioritization. Your illegal turn on a scooter brings in 100 quid (or so) and finding and procecuting a hit and run (when you appear not to be dead) is put in the prioritization cue with the rest of the more severe crimes. It has nothing to do with CCTV and everything to do with economics and prioritization of available man hours. More cops and more of the petty crime gets investigated. Simple math. That all said, CCTV makes the investigation faster and in many cases simpler then without it. That is the point of the artical IMHO. More cameras means that the priority list I spoke of dips down farther into petter crimes simply because Cops need less time per incident to investigate and take to the prosecutor.

I believe it is a valid argument. First off you are correct to question it but for a different reason: the exhaust regulation is fairly new, thus the main pressure comes from taxes. The point I was making is that this system reinforces the need to keep your vehicle current. But if you would like me to elaborate on the topic of age pressure I can.

First there is TÜV, the German street-ready tests. The older the car gets the more expensive the upkeep to pass the inspection. This isn't always a deterent in itself, since older cars can pass the inspection without too much hassle, it adds to the overall cost as a vehicle ages.

Second, fuel efficiency is a serious issue in Germany where normal gas costs 2-4 times what it does in some areas of the US. Thus newer cars, especially those German vehicles which are very efficient, so far as to shut off when they stop a red light, save money. Or said in another way, older cars can cost significantly more per Km to keep running.

Lastly, if you look at your map, and tracked inhabitants under those "few" dots, you would see that a significant portion of German population lives or works in those listed areas. And the areas are growing fast with plans to reduce exhaust levels across the country over the next years. Thus if you are not a farmer, you have a good chance of living, working, or needing to pass through one of these areas. You don't need to pass regulations for the Autobahn, but if you wish to exit in Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Bremen, Dusseldorf etc. you need to pass the inspection.

Insightfull? I rate this a Funny!

I live in Germany and I completely agree with the above statement "and I find 160 km/h (100 mph) a very decent cruising speed.". But in Germany the older your car is the more expensive the taxes are. In some major cities they have made older, higher poluting, cars completely illegal to drive. The result is that a large amount of cars on the road are 3 years or less old. And of these, a majority are German made and German engineered. And in Germany it costs upwards of 1K Euro to earn a driving license, which can be revoked or mandatory additional driving lessons can be applied, costing significant additional cash.

The final result: attentive drivers, and very well maintained high end vehicles. Add in the high quality of most German roads, including signs, water drainage, and careful maintenance. All of this (in addition to the "German" quality of placing attention to the task at hand) and you have the conditions for safely driving at 100 mph or faster. I feel safe in Germany at this speed, I would not feel safe on any suburban US Freeway, or most rural ones which are fairly well driven.

The states simply doesn't have the road quality, the attentive drivers who adhere to the rules, and the high average quality of vehicles. It wouldn't work and would be dangerous, It wouldn't work in Sweden either, so don't feel bad.

I think we agree on this one. And I think that most security staff would have trouble spelling interoperability.

ok, Multiplexers don't usually have a VGA output, so you are probably working with BNC input CRT monitors, correct? Either way, if you are using a combination of live viewing and playback, then you'll need some sort of software package to perform this.

I did mean Internet Explorer when I used IE, because I was trying to understand if you needed a dedicated box. It seems like you might. Any security system you actually use somewhat frequently should probably have its own dedicated client/workstation.

I hate to tell you, but your software client options will be limited to the vendor you purhcased your DVR from. If its a upper market device, you might be able to purchase a separate management software piece from another vendor which has written drivers to control the device. Otherwise you're stuck with the client available from the manufacturer.

What box do you have? I would need the actual manufacturer and model to help you with any specifics.

Good question. The answer is simple, but not nice to hear. Each codec requires a decompression part to play the video, and each vendor typically has a slightly altered version of any or all of the codecs used. For example, MPEG4 could be used for compression, but what does that really mean? Apple, Windows, Real Media, Adobe all have their own CODEC of MPEG4. So in short, if you use VLC or Windows Media player to play back video, these have installed codecs from these major media vendors. But the DVR manufacturer can't have access to these without paying royalties, which for security video makes no business sense. Plus, less then 20% of systems use audio, and so they drop that part to reduce bandwidth. So in reality Mpeg isn't always Mpeg, even when it is. Make sense? The DVR vendor should offer just the codec in a form that could be loaded on a different system, instead of a full binary.

The second point is your avi. The problem is two-fold. You can't record in uncompressed avi format. You'd get only a few hours on a Tb hard drive, and security applications require days or weeks of recording. Once you have your video in MPEG4, for example, and you have a vandalism you want to export, if you transcode it to avi you lose all evidentiary value, since the video was altered in the transcoding. Plus you might need 15 minutes of video, and uncompressed avi then would have trouble fitting on a DVD. That all said, most credible DVR vendors allow for avi export as a fall back.

Police review is an industry problem. Its not just your DVR. American Dynamics, and a few others, allow for a CD/DVD to playback in any windows system without having to install anything, and with having only user (nor super or admin) rights. This makes it easy. But because of the lack of this feature in many systems, Police in the UK now are requiring DVR manufactures to provide their codec to a independant software house which makes simple and universally compatible playback software.

Why do you believe you'll get better performance on the Mac? There are vendors which provide non activeX clients, such as Exacq or American Dynamics, but those won't work with the system you have now. If you have VGA monitors and splitters something isn't designed correctly. If you use mostly direct monitor viewing, then you probably don't need a client system, unless you need to review stored video. But then you don't need a dedicated system. If you have an IE client, use a normal workstation for the search functions only when you need it. Most DVRs have a spot/alarm monitor output, which can often be programmed to sequence between camera views. This might be enough for you. If not, you'll need someone to take a closer look at your system.

Sorry, but your completely wrong. The idea of motion detection on digital video recorders is over 10 years old. All DVRs of any value have motion detection built in, and the BT878 MJPEG cards mostly used with Zoneminder are garbage. The MJPEG codec is the wrong one to use for most applications because of the high storage requirements. Yes, you can process motion detection faster, but you loose out on bandwidth and storage. Zoneminder can use IP cameras, so that is a plus in its favor.

Also, your point about no CPU usage at full 24/7 is also incorrect. The BT878 cards require software compression, which means CPU overheard just to lay down the video. There are other cards, such as from Vidicon, which allow for hardware compression thus offloading the bulk of th CPU requirements.

Again this is nice, but very home-brew type of solution. If you are a professional or just a larger business who takes into account the man hours required to build, and most importantly to maintain this system, you should go to one of the "commercial DVR systems". These will give you the required reliability and low maintenance, in addition to a smooth interface usable by more then the IT guy.