Thursday, July 12, 2018

Cali Backs Off Gun Registration

Cali's latest anti gun law required all owners of "assault weapons" to register them by electronically sending in 3 photos of each gun in question showing left side, right side, and a close-up of the serial number. There's more, but given that everyone had about 2 weeks to comply, the system failure was easily predictable.

My camera is a Sony Cyber Shot, a typical pocket camera. It has a default picture size of about 2Mbytes unless you set it to something reasonable. Or maybe you want close-ups of flowers in which you can count pollen grains, whatever. I bet most people leave the default settings on their cameras and collect very detailed snapshots.

Now multiply the 6Mb of snapshots by the number of people with "assault weapons" trying to get registered in 2 weeks. Yup, crashed the system. The program has been halted, probably only temporarily, but who knows. Governments are notorious for being the last to upgrade anything so there's probably some poor IT wonk trying to explain to a senior bureaucrat why it's going to take about 50 years to get all those pics downloaded over the states 1200 baud modems.

Just a thought, but any time the government demands photos, set your camera to the highest level and make any snapshot you send a 6Mb file.

1 comment:

jon spencer said...

Why settle for a jpeg, send a full sized RAW or TIFF photo.
How long would it take to clog their machines with each 200+ MB pictures?
Might even send a few copies to make sure they can pick the one picture that they want to use.
A govt. worker might have to look at each picture to see if the serial number is not blurred so that it can be seen.