"Here's the story. We got an Obama sign a few months ago and it was stolen off our lawn within five days. Just yesterday we got another one (after searching for some time) and put it up on the lawn again. This morning it was gone, so we decided we'd make our own homemade sign and set up a camera to catch the thief in the act."
She's really behind the paradigmatic curve, here. First of all, this is Web .05-level technology (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot</a>). Second, it's clear that the crowdsourced participatory community has downvoted her content multiple times -- and they've expressed this webocracy-enable opinion even though she didn't bother to include a simple AJAX-based method for removing her sign. Rather than accept this and move on, she's trying to trap and shame downvoters in order to keep promoting her repost of a repost (the content of which has been hosted at numerous other occasions, already).
This could actually work as a startup idea. You setup a ustream webcam, and for $99/month the startup will have some low wage worker monitoring your feeds and in case of burglary or fire they can call police. Or better yet crowd source it and have people monitor the feed to earn "bounty" for catching a particular event. i.e. $1000 bounty if you catch some burglars in action.
If there's any relevant point to be made here, it's that apparently some people really don't have anything better to do than watch a yard sign.<p>I wonder if there's some way to harvest these attentive-moron-hours for some more useful purpose.
I used to work on automated surveillance. I can't wait until someone puts these services in the cloud to everyone will have access to the tools the feds are making. It actually doesn't make any sense that someone would be watching such a boring feed to catch the person in the act.<p>You need an intelligent DVR to find when the scene changes in a certain area, or an active system to detect if the sign has be taken. A pixel diff isn't enough considering wind, lighting changes, etc.
Look the person put masking tape on the window to block out the neighbor's house across the street.<p>If I were a sign thief and I saw this I would just stand out of frame and nab the thing with a lasso
Because of the title I thought it was and obvious flag (what does it have to do with HN??!). After reading the article I think I was wrong. It's not very hackey, but at least it's tech news, and of a very extravagant kind.