Can anyone explain this?

[AJH]

I wonder if their number plate recognition database will be available for the openweknowwhereyoulive.org scheme to supplement that being gathered by users everywhere ;^)?

AJH

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Just as an aside I visited the SavaCentre in Colliers Wood today (to use the M&S, naturally ;-)) and they have number plate recognition on the entrance and exit to the car park - your car number is flashed up with the arrival/departure time. No arguing there if you overstay the allowed time. Which is a generous 5 hours. Perhaps they're intending reducing the number of checkouts in use even more.

[AJH]

This is what's happening on posh housing estates here, it takes you back for the first time when you recognise that number in front of you! They record the entry and exit times and store them. It doesn't take too big a leap of imagination to see how this information and that collected by the neighbourhood watch could be of interest, possibly to divorce lawyers ;-).

AJH

[Martin Pentreath]

As we're veering spectacularly off-topic, have a butcher's at this stuff:

't know if it works for for the systems described here though, unless they flash.

[Huge]

It doesn't work for anything, flash or no flash.

[PeterMcC]

John wrote in

If you go to Google Oz, select Maps and choose Street View, you can virtually walk any of the major cities. A bit impressive.

[ThePunisher]

It's lens bloom from the hatchback car in the car park, gilders lol!

[ARWadworth]

The pixels on the left had me wondering as well. I would say it is reflection off a sun roof.

Adam

[dennis]

It doesn't work if they do flash so its irrelevant.

[Derek Geldard]

Is that some kind of hemiplegic disease affecting goldsmiths ;-) ?

Derek.

[geoff]

In message , Derek Geldard writes

More dutch elm, I would have thought

[Alan]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" wrote

No system is perfect. It may recognise the number on the way in and not on the way out hence your stay may be registered as more than 5 hours. If it's free parking for 5 hours than a large charge, say, £100, for overstaying your welcome expect a letter from a third party debt collection company threatening to send the boys around :)

As for the Google image, If the photograph was being taking by a satellite on a line by line basis as it was moving above the ground, with a line being a single row of pixels vertically on the photo, and the plane was flying in the same direction and close to the same relative speed the image of the aircraft would be foreshortened. Take an image of an aircraft cut it into strips, keep every 10th strip and throw the rest away, re-assemble what you have left and you get the image similar to that shown on Google, especially if the aircraft was climbing or banking when the image was captured.

[Andy Burns]

At the closest zoom google earth images are shot from a plane, not a satellite, the furthest zoom is still taken from satellite images, at some point in-between they seem to be assembled from a collage of shrunken plane images.

[PeterMcC]

Andy Burns wrote in

That'll be it then: a shrunken plane image

:)

[dave]

Well it looks (to me) like a windfarm er, windmill!

[AJH]

Having looked at the image now I looked at some I have taken at 2000 metres 1/800 second and they seem similar.

I considered the foreshortened airplane theory but don't know enough about air traffic control to decide whether it is probable, I'd have thought that was too close for comfort.

Using weknowwhereyoulive public domain number recognition software I see there are faded numbers either side of the feature, 008???? on the building with the strange ridge arrangement to the W and similarly indistinguishable numbers on the SE corner of the building under the feature.

Then looking at the car parking spaces and the slight difference in angle of the cars under the feature my guess this is an artifact of the orthogonal rectification which has torn at the seam where images have been stitched, when I have stretched images to fit a grid I have had similar effects but the software has given me the option of morphing pixels from either side to avoid this effect.

AJH

[Ariadne]

It could be a distorted reflection of a large wing mirror.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Alan saying something like:

Careful, you'll have "The Selfabuser" after you for suggesting that, when it's obviously 'lens bloom'. A very feasible explanation though, as we can see the object is not symmetrical (ie, banking, turning) and is definitely something airborne.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Ariadne saying something like:

On what? A huge motorcycle?

[geoff]

In message , Grimly Curmudgeon writes

it's an albino pterodactyl, anyone can see that