Road rage camera

Hum, not my experience. I've used a number of my own hard drives longer than that, and never had a single failure. If I think of the many hundreds of drives I've used at work over the last 10 years, I can count failures on one hand, and mostly there was either an obvious cause or I didn't know the drive's history from new and it was probably previously abused.

All the drives I bought 15 years ago are still usable in current computers. However, at some point in the near future, I expect parallel ATA interfaces to vanish from motherboards, as SATA drive sales very rapidly overtook PATA drive sales in middle of last year.

If mounted on your property (for surveillance) it must be static and not steerable...

An episode of South Park comes to mind.

But the brake/break thing does get on my nerves. Sorry.

Nonsense.

I'm surrounded by disk drives, a number of them over 15 years old, which are still working fine.

Generally, the only reason I chuck them away is because the capacities become too small by current standards - I chucked away everything smaller than 1Gb recently, all still in working order.

It will be if you buy a sensible standard, such as SCSI, rather than the consumer crap which changes every 15 minutes.

I'm surpised to hear that - under what law?

Wouldn't the best option be to mount a mobile phone on your dash? Most now come with a video option at a click of a button and what ever happens presumeably you're going to have to activate it, unless you want something set to constant recording.

Not sure of the law, but here's the guidance notes from the Information Commissioner. I had cause to look at these when I put in CCTV after a spate of vandalism.

Ah, fascinating. Many thanks for that, Bob.

It appears from my skim read that you can have steerable cameras, as long as you don't use them to "pick up what particular people are doing". There's a grey area in that which is wider than the English Channel, of course.... :o)

On 30 May 2005, RedOnRed wrote

Would it be legal to reach over and touch the phone to start recording while you're driving, or would using the camera function fall foul of the "must-not-handle" laws re: phones and driving?

(Just stirring the pot a bit, y'unnerstan'....)

Yes, the anti- "security man perv follows girls in short skirts" bit!

Yes, I remember that now (it's a while since I put in my camera...). I was probably thinking that the only way you could prove that was to make it non steerable...!

My Canon Powershot camera will record up to 3 minutes video in decent quality. The problem is activating the camera fast enough to capture enough video to act as evidence. It's very difficult to do, the best way is to have a camera permanently recording and to have it mark the video as "interesting" hence not to be overwritten when you poke a button.

Now the bad news, in my work I've had cause to prepare material for prosecution of drivers where they have convicted themselves by making a video of their journey. It was not their intent to provide the material by which they were prosecuted but the video is evidence and can cut both ways.

Hi Harvey, I am not a lawyer, but isn't the issue about "hand held" devices? So if it's in a cradle, it's okay?

Someone will know better (errr, Help!)

Mungo

Harvey Van Sickle wrote:

On 31 May 2005, wrote

Certainly not me!

I understood from some marketing stuff -- about the lousiest authority one can cite -- that to be "hands free", a handset had to be not only mounted in a cradle, but also remotely operable. (That is, I was led to believe that the law was broken if you had to touch the handset to make it answer/dial etc.)

But IANAL either, so beats me....