For this sort of thing I'd go to ebay and search on "video server." These things usually support NTSC and PAL cameras and provide them IP/web connection and motion capture with FTP and Email. The advantage of these is you're not stuck with the el-cheapo built-in cameras most IP cams have. You can get a hi-rez (>=600 line) starlight cam using a Sony Effio chip or similar for probably less than $100 (also on ebay) and get good nighttime vision and great daytime color with decent resolution as well. It's not HD, but it gives you options you won't have with an integrated IP cam unit AND it's relatively cheap. Generally you can use wget to grab stills from these, as there's usually a still grab URL. And many have motion detection FTP features as well, that can auto-upload an image to a website based on the alarm trigger, which by the way you could do with a button as most have external alarm NO/NC switch terminal inputs that will trigger the capture.

Don't forget to mention how well (or how poorly) lcds work in bright sunlight...

Obligatory Dilbert reference:

wally: "When I started programming, we didn't have any of these sissy "icons" and "windows". All we had were zeros and ones — and sometimes we didn't even have ones. I once wrote a database using only zeros."
dilbert: "You had zeros? We had to use the letter "O"."

133M OS? Bloated. My first decent coding job was working on a 4-user OS that ran in 8K. Supported text terminal based business apps written in a tight tokenized language by swapping segments of them in 256 byte chunks from floppy (with a small cache) and the DB stored on floppies as well. And I can tell you we didn't waste bytes on using either null as a string terminator OR a length byte, 7-bit characters with the high bit being the terminator saved us all kinds of space (made supporting international character sets a pain, but we did that too for many of them). When we finally got around to porting the environment to Linux, it scaled REALLY well. The dang thing could run 1000 users from a PC based server (this was in the early '90s with sub-gigabyte memory). This was when the GUI-heavy competition was struggling to support 20 users.

Well, if robocalls aren't a "zone of lawlessness" I don't know what is...

Hmmm... i wonder if I could scrape 800notes.com and create a blacklist...

I don't suppose the list is available?

Bugs happen. Vulnerabilities may exist. Get used to it. You have to start somewhere. The important thing is to reject the incessant creeping featurism that is the source of most bugs and vulnerabilities.

It's the SMARTPHONE that's not the necessity. For >$80/mo given the data plan, I just don't need it. My iPad I pay for once, and can wifi from then on with it. When I need a mobile phone, I have a pay-as-you-go dumb cel phone that costs me $100/yr.

Yes, we're trying to address the "zone of lawlessness" inside the NSA...

I hear there are zones of lawlessness in people's homes and in various public spaces such as parks, parking lots, street corners and alleys, where people actually TALK to each other without being surveilled! And bad guys who talk in code so that even if they are being surveilled, it's as if their conversation is encrypted by their brains! Horrors, whatever shall we do! Think of the children!

The government doesn't want anything to stand in the way of people taking the internet for granted or reducing their usage due to expense. Otherwise the surveillance network doesn't work as well. Also, jammers have a tendency to interfere with their IMSI catchers. Can't have that now, can we?

Probably because "constitutional republic" makes it sound like you're a Republican, and "democracy" makes it sound like you're a Democrat.

Well, it's a better way to get Media coverage of your protest than camping out in Zucatti park. At least for the first few times until the WH tells the media to lay off covering such incidents. And soon you'll have to go completely autonomous once they set up the radio jammers.

They're just trying to keep up with the US.