how many ls can you find in:
q: in st: first contact why werent the borg able to differentiate picard and lily from the other characters in the holodeck? st first contact:

(they enter a nineteen-thirties night club pursued by two borg)
maitre d: im sorry, gentlemen but were closing, and you do
  understand we have a strict dress code? so if you boys dont leave
  right now ill...
(the borg discover the maitre d is a hologram)

to clarify the two borg scan the character and figure out hes a hologram.
st tng i borg:

crusher: thats right. hes gotten every one. eight out of eight. that
  blows the top right off the spatial-acuity percentiles.
laforge: its the prosthetic eye. it seems to be giving him very
  complex visual information.
crusher: like some kind of holographic imaging system.
laforge: that could be helpful. hugh, id like to take a closer look
  at your eyepiece. is that okay?
borg: here. (he takes the eyepiece off and hands it to geordi)

st voyager relativity:

seven: my ocular implant can detect irregularities in space-time. 
torres: torres to bridge. weve found the problem.

so my question is, since the borg were able to figure out these were holo images inseconds simply by scanning them, and their occular implants were so advanced as to see temporal fluctuations at a level above starfleets abilities hundreds of years later, how were they not able to pick out picard and lily out of the crowd immediately?

a: scanning them means attempting to disrupt the rendering of the holo-characters, and this requires focused energy.
the interaction between the maitre d and the borg in scene from first contact implies that the holo-characters need to be scanned one-by-one to determine if they were corporeal or holographic.



as you can see from 0:18-0:27 in the clip above, one drone holds the maitre d still with its arm and then the two drones both scan the maitre d simultaneously.
what is really happening when the drones scan the maitre d?  the drones are using beams of energy from their ocular implants to disrupt the characters holographic matrix, and then use the resulting disruption to decide that the character is not real.
this suggests that in order to scan the population of the holodeck all at once, the borg need to use enough energy to simultaneously disrupt the matrices of all of the holo-characters.
i doubt that their ocular implants could produce this kind of energy.  the implants have a maximum energy output and generating a room-wide disruption beam from the ocular implants would only distribute a small amount of energy to each holo-character, which would likely not disrupt them at all, rendering the test inconclusive.
given that borg drones dont typically have to wade through mixed crowds of people and holograms trying to discern real from fake, one wouldnt expect drones to come equipped with a better means for accomplishing this than what we see in the scene from first contact.  (however, having now had to do this, they may adapt in the future and not be so easily slowed down by such an obstacle.)

a: i am not sure they were all-out looking for picard to begin with.  quite reasonably the holo characters would be still more things to assimilate, if not be outright fought.
we know they are characters in a play, but the borg do not, and would not have presumed to be free to wade through them unfettered.

a: some borg from the same sphere were shown being tricked by the enterprises emh program, so its probably a localised issue. maybe it was caused by being sent back in time and losing direct contact with the collective?

a: my best guess was that they just didnt realize they were just holograms. it seemed that when analyzing the ship previously, they focused on offensive and defensive capabilities. they probably never thought of a recreational holigram room. they were taking in and processing the data, and making a hive mind decision. it didnt take too long for them to realize the holigram people and start really looking hard. thats right when picard got the tommy gun. he realized the jig was up. 

user
I counted one hundred and thirty-six "l"s in that text.
assistant