OT - Technology is amazing

[Jack Simth]

They can actually do that sort of thing ... if you are outside, anyway. However, they can't do so for the entire population, as the satelites with the strength to do that kind of thing do so, not by increased resolution, but by taking a picture through a telescope - when one of those takes a picture of you, it's pretty much just taking a picture of you, and was probably pointed at you specifically. The ones on that site, however, are taking pictures of gargantuan swaths of ground at once, with a resolution just barely sufficent to distinguish individual cars on the freeway (in good traffic, anyway - bumber-to-bumper traffic jams would merge together into long snakes). They may eventually put something up there that can, indeed, catch everyone at everything done outside in a 200 mile radius at once - but it wouldn't be very useful for those most likely to put it up (the military), as it would mostly be information overload without a specific spot to check out. Law enforcement agencies might like it - if all that data was recorded, it would be useful for answering such questions as "where did the guy who robbed the convienence store at 83rd and Pine at 2:33 am this morning go to take off his mask?" - but unless they could phrase a question in such a manner, or had some form of AI to sort through it, that level of detail would be useless. Of course, a 200 mile radius at, say, 10 pixels per square inch results in about 5*10^15 pixels - at 1 byte per pixel, you are talking roughly 5000 terrabytes (before compression). If you take them at 1 per second, you are talking 432,000,000 terrabytes just to store one day's worth (again, before compression). Fortunately, I don't believe we have enough silicone on the planet to make such a memory device....

[ June 12, 2004, 07:09: Message edited by: Jack Simth ]