UK School Introduces Facial Recognition

Penguin_me writes "A UK school has quietly introduced new facial recognition systems for registering students in and out of school: 'HIGH-TECH facial recognition technology has swept aside the old-fashioned signing of the register at a school. Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. It is one of the first schools in the UK to trial the new technology with its students. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.'"

Brilliant!

[Anonymous Coward]

"UK School Introduces Facial Recognition"

This is very good progress. It is important to keep up with the development of various sexual perversions in our modern fast-paced society. Therefore, recognizing facials as a new part of the curriculum of sexual education in schools is a good thing, even if only in one school in the UK for now. But it is a start, and hopefully facials are recognized soon in every school. It is about time to introduce the recognition of facials!

Re:Why do this?

[SlashSlasher]

Now the police will have a full biometric database of the entire population. They used to have to make up a baseless accusation to add you to their database and take your DNA. That's very useful when you run your country like a supermax prison. London has more camera surveillance than most of the prisons in my country. If they wrap George Orwell's corpse in wire they can power the whole thing by how fast he's spinning in his grave. To everyone who thought I was a paranoid freak: I'll take that apology now.

Re:I wonder how it copes with twins?

[sakdoctor]

This absolutely sucks. In my day, all we had to do to sneak out of class, was wait for teacher to turn their back.

Now days kids have to wear Thermoptic Camouflage armour. What is the world coming to.

Re:For the watchful...

[AHuxley]

.NET, C# and silverlight.

Re:Yet another kettle of worms opened...

[expat.iain]

... Muslim head scarves / veils, anyone?

Not for me, thanks. They don't match with my complexion.

Re:Bloody idiots

[ZeroExistenZ]

what happens if THE SYSTEM is the cause of the fire? Hence, you have no records and can't gather any?

You're thinking too localized. For missioncritical systems, you'd use an offsite datacenter with a decent SLA-contact. It's up to the datacenter to take the precautions to not have their servers go up in flames (that's why some of these datacenters are bunkered and have high security) and preferably have a redundant setup, spread over more then 1 location which is easy these days with virtualization.

Re:Why do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

though not enough of an adult to go and see a film showing stuff that you're pretty much expected to be doing if you're married. Err...

You must not be married.

Re:I wonder how it copes with twins?

[CrimsonScythe]

Twins? Easy! The evil twin always has a goatee.

Re:Bloody idiots

[ZeroExistenZ]

You'd still need to get the data back to the site.

That should be no problem, there are alot of options.

What if at the datacenter, nodoby is reachable

Pay nodoby a bit more to be present or pick a good datacenter, there should be at least one person physically at the datacenter and a few on call to make sure they can meet their SLA's.

or what if all faxes and phones of the school (needed to receive the list back from the datacenter) are submerged in water too?

When I drive to work I browse the web on my cellphone and check my email, even email. (texting and phoning is bad and dangerous!)
In this day and age, nearly everybody has a cellphone. Why not setup a PBX too on the datacenter with a female voice so you can run down the list? Or a SMS portal: "text class2bstudents to 555-555 for a list of present students. It's easy to hook up. You could also train a pigeon, put it in a glass windowed box with a hammer and the text "break glass in case of *icon of a burning computer* *icon of a floating computer* *icon of someone throwing around computer* *icon of someone shooting a computer* *icon of teens screaming and running around in panic* *black icon indicating power outage* So in the case of such an emergency, you will have the pigeon fly to the datacenter, performing a pre-trained task to have another pigeon print out a list by the push of a button, and then subsequently presses a button preparing another pigeon (with a little conveyor belt) with the printout and releasing it (catapult launching mechanism) to fly back...

The possibilities are endless, to each problem there is a solution... I'm a consultant btw, you could hire me for all your technical problemsolving and projectmanagement. Currently we are training dolphins (after a proof of concept, we went away of the idea to use sharks after overseeing some variables), in case of a ship sinking, unable to send an emergency signal, the challenge here is still to have the dolphins walk to the datacenter once they reach a shore.