CCTV is Great - For Car Parks

One of the Great Lies of the Labour's surveillance society is that being watched - specifically by the greatest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world - makes us safer. Guess what - it doesn't:

The use of closed-circuit television in city and town centres and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer.

Actually, I'm being unfair: CCTV is useful for one particular application.

The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks.

So there we have it: the vast majority of CCTV cameras are a waste of money. They should be removed - or at least deployed to where they serve some purpose: to car parks.

Reasons Not to Use Closed Source: No. 471

I've written a couple of times about cases that demonstrate graphically why closed source software is a Bad Thing, but even they pale somewhat beside this story.

The robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn't the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

A dispute over the latter meant that the software simply stopped working. And since it was closed source, nothing could be done about it. The results were dramatic:

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

I bet the garage owners wished they'd chosen open....