And exactly where do you think this would be happening? At the school as the kid gets on with the bus drivers and teachers watching, or at the bus stop with parents, kids, and the bus driver as eye witnesses? What kid would believe that, a few blocks from home? If you ever become a parent, I'd hope you teach your children much better than that.
The closest I've EVER seen to that is the most likely kidnapping situation.
I was a friend of the family, and I saw the kid walking away from the bus as it was starting to rain, so I pulled up, beeped my horn, and told him to get in. He didn't know if I was really suppose to pick him up. Really, I hadn't been asked, but I was in the right place at the right time. And I really took him home so he wouldn't be soaked by the time he got there.
According to the FBI, statistically about 76% of child kidnappings involve family or acquaintances. The remaining 24% are the most likely to involve a firearm. "Get in the car or I'll shoot you, and then kill your mommy too" has a lot more power than "Hey little Jimmy, how is 2nd grade going? Want a lolly pop? Lets go for a ride."
The only real kidnapping I've been involved in was a family kidnapping. No, I was on the good side. The mother was staying with some family. She was going to bring her son to stay with his father. Mother and father both agreed on this. He was staying with the grandmother for a few minutes while we ran to the store. We got back, the son is missing. A family member at the house tells us (rather impolitely) that grandmother doesn't approve of the son going to stay with his father. The mother is furious, scared, crying. I, the good friend of both the mother and father, call the police, explain the situation, and an officer is dispatched immediately. If the little boy wasn't involved, it would have been almost funny, as the grandfather threatened to physically harm and/or kill me. I was being polite. The cop, a nice guy, probably late 20's, over 6' tall standing right beside me, and the grandfather being a frail old man. I can take a punch from a big guy if I have to, so I wasn't scared in the least. I was polite and as physically non-aggressive as could be (calm voice, hands down at my sides, not moving forward or back). All I said were things like "Sir, please do not threaten me. Sir, please do not come any closer to me. Sir, I'd appreciate if you wouldn't threaten to injure me. All we are asking for is for her son to be returned."
The officer was kind enough to say "I could take every one of you to jail for kidnapping, and you will spend years behind bars. Or, you can return her son."
After all was said and done, he officer said he thought the grandfather was going to swing at me. If he did, he would have been in handcuffs. He did ask if we wanted to press charges. This was the mothers call. She didn't want them in jail, but she did worse. They were to never see her or her son again. With that, we drove away.
We don't know exactly what was said to the son for the few hours that he was taken, but he was terrified of both his mother and father. Luckily, I'd been friends with them for a while, and he did trust me still (they forgot to instill fear of me into him.), so I was able to calm him down, and let him know that whatever he was told was wrong, and his parents really do love him.
Non-custodial kidnappings happen more than you'd like to think. Not every one ends up as an arrest, so all the police would have is a record of a call to a domestic dispute with no arrests made and no charges filed. This doesn't end up in the statistics.
My ex-wife did something very similar. She had the kids in the car, and was threatening to leave so I'd never see them again. A friend of mine coincidentally came over. He parked behind her car, and then sat on the front bumper of my car. She could
You missed my other long post, where I gave a whole slew of options, from cell phone based, to GPS dog collars, to building his own micro linux machine.
I've actually been paying attention to this stuff, and working with variations for a while. nothing for kid tracking, but vehicle tracking for businesses and personal use.
For example, I set up my car to send GPS and video to a web site, so I could be tracked crossing the country (California to Florida). If I disappeared for any reason, it would be clear where to start looking. Since my stops weren't planned (drive until I'm tired, sleep for a few hours, and continue).
I did get a call in the middle of nowhere (Arizona, I believe), where I was tired, so I pulled into a brand new rest area. I got a call about 15 minutes later because Google Maps didn't show anything there. It looked like I had run off the road, but it was dark out and I had parked facing away from the highway, so the video just showed black.
I'd prefer to be woken up because someone was concerned and verifying I was ok, than something happened, and the car had run too far off the road to notice. If I hadn't answered, there would have been a 911 call placed, and my last known coordinates were shown on the web page.:) If it had been an accident, the timestamp would have shown when the last update was sent.
It's all perspective. Which is worse, a kid on the wrong bus, and the driver bringing it back to dispatch, or an adult friend or relative in a wrecked car in the middle of nowhere, unconscious and dying, one phone call away from being saved, since no one can see the car that ran off the road?
I did get a whole bunch of calls when my last known position was in Texas near a bridge, in the middle of the night. The fuse blew in the power inverter, and the laptop ran on it's battery for about an hour before it shut down. From then on, there was no one to know if I was ok, but I had frequent calls checking up on my status. Luckily the entire drive only takes about 2.5 days, so I was less than a day from my destination. I opted not to stop and waste time trying to find a fuse, when I could just keep driving.
I'm surprised the driver didn't radio in and say that he had a misplaced student, and a flurry of activity after. I don't know about your school district, but every school district I know of has a radio.
I just asked my friend's 13 year old son, and he confirmed the bus he rides has a radio. He can hear dispatch talking over it, but it's a short drive and he's never seen her actually use it.
I know a teacher that was moved over to dispatch (school district politics suck). They run dispatch from before the first driver hits the road in the morning until every bus drops off it's kids and calls in to notify they're shutting down for the night.
I'd say you should go tear them a new hole, but I'm sure you already did.
At the school, that only lasted for a couple weeks. It was time for the kids to get familiar with the bus, driver and kids. if the driver knew he brought a kid in the morning, he'd wait until that kid came out in the afternoon, or they'd confirm that he went home with his/her parents. I do remember the occasional incident, where every bus was held from departing because a kid snuck onto the wrong bus. The ones that I knew the circumstances, the kid wanted to go play at a friends house, and the school hadn't been told this was authorized. That always ended up being a good thing, because the parents didn't know either. Our school zone was huge, it was possible to end up 30 miles from where you belonged if you managed to do it. They've since built new schools, and subdivided it drastically.
The bus drivers got to know the kids that are suppose to be on his bus and where they get off. Sometimes a kid wouldn't be paying attention, and failed to get off, and he'd yell back "Billy, this is your stop!"
I moved to this school district and rode school buses for the first time in 1979, when I was 5 years old. To this day, I remember it was bus 58-79, the driver was Mr. Lightburn, and it was 3rd from last in the line. It wasn't until middle school that I knew what the CNG sticker was on the side of it was, and it wasn't until high school that the real understanding of what that really meant. As it turned out, it was the only one in the fleet, and they were testing to see if it was economical and could last. I just did a quick search, and couldn't find any reference to CNG buses in that area, so I'm guessing they're all diesel now.
If the kid can't remember what bus (s)he rides, and gets on a bus with a completely strange rider and kids after a sufficient training period (2 weeks was always more than sufficient), that kid will probably end up needing to ride on the short bus, and be walked from the special classes to the bus anyways.
There are things that kids are suppose to be taught anyways, like your home address and phone number(s). My parents did it right, I never got lost, but I still remember our home address where I lived from when I was born to 5 years old. They did a good job, if I can remember that little piece of trivia from being a child, 30 years later. Not that I'd ever need it, but I still know the old home phone number too.
I guess this happens more often than we'd like to know, and when they grow up, they're the people that get drunk, break into a neighbors house to go to sleep, because they forgot which house was theirs. Badly trained kids become badly trained adults.
When I was in kindergarden, they went with the low-tech system. Every kid had a name tag that they had to wear all day. It had their name, grade, teacher, and bus number. Teachers aids were by the buses and would verify the bus number on the tag matched the bus. If they kid got on the wrong bus, they were turned away and walked to the right one.
How much does it cost for a 3x5 index card and a safety pin? A whole lot less than an electronic tracking system, and recurring cell bills for your kid.
This is probably a bigger project than you want to take on, and you very likely won't get the result that you think you want.
There are a few essential parts to what you're looking for.
1) The GPS receiver, which must have a view of the sky. It'll be hit and miss inside many vehicles, and probably worthless if she's sitting away from the windows in a bus, and unusable in a building. At least you'll have an idea of the building she entered.
2) The transmitter. You can use a modified alphanumeric pager, but that hopes your modifications are perfect, and aren't prone to failure. You can also use a cell phone or other cellular device (like a USB EVDO modem). Pay attention to the rate plan that you pay for. If it doesn't allow for unlimited data, don't send data once every 5 seconds. If you send data once every 10 to 15 minutes, does that give you the resolution that you require?? 15 minutes is one mile of walking for a normal person (average person's walking rate is 4mph).
3) Something to process the data to send out.
4) Something to receive the data (your web server), map it, and display it to you.
5) Batteries. You'll have a limited lifespan on any device, so it will need recharging nightly.
I highly recommend one of the obvious choices. Get her a cell phone. Verizon used to sell a Chaperone phone, which only had 4 buttons that you could program. They could be set to say call home, your cell, your wife's cell, and a neighbor. It also sent GPS data up to their server, so you could either view from your Chaperone-Parent phone that was linked to it, or from their web site.
You could also get any GPS enabled cell phone (not Verizon, they're pissy about enabling GPS), and put a whole variety of applications on it to send updates to somewhere. Even Google Latitude may be an option, but I find sometimes it forgets to check in.
You could also use something like a Garmin DC 30. That's a GPS tracking device for animals. It has a 17 hour battery life.
If you're hell bent on building your own, consider this..
1) You could get an Openmoko phone, which has integrated GPS, accelerometers, and (obviously) cell access. You drop in any GSM SIM from the provider of your choice, and you're online. It does run Linux, so you can write your own script to pull the GPS data, and upload it to the server. It's cute and rubber covered, so it's less likely she'll break it by dropping it. I don't suggest trying too many times though.
3) You could tie together a Gumstix computer, Gumstix GPS module, Verizon Wireless EVDO USB device, battery pack, and your own scripting to pull the GPS data.
Writing GPS software isn't impossible. You can open the serial port and read the strings. You have to read multiple strings to get all the data. Then once you have a full dataset, upload it. Alternatively, you can use GPSd, **IF** it will compile for the platform. I've done both, it's up to you to which you use. it was fun writing my own. I'd probably go the GPSd route, since I've already done it, and don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel any more.
You're not going to find the mythical devices that they use on TV and movies, that are a thread like GPS transmitter to sew into her jacket, that has an infinite battery life, and always sends the exact location, regardless of environmental variables (buildings, clouds, distance from cell networks).
I'm not going to say you're way off, as you're probably in the right ballpark, but a bit off. I'm not going to try to give the right answer.
If you know 1 gal fuel creates x BTU, then calculate hours based on RPM and displacement, using stoichiometric mixture (14.7:1 air to fuel by MASS), but skewing it by load. Heavier loads make the engine make more heat. For example, a full size truck with a 350ci engine has a larger radiator than a performance car with a 350ci engine, even if the performance car is designed to produce more power. Realize more kinetic energy is created than heat (hopefully).
It's still a lot of heat. How many millions of vehicle hours are being used (consider like man hours worked on a project), makes for a lot of heat.
Even if it were say 1% of the energy that the sun throws towards the earth, it's still an addition. That doesn't account for the heat put off by industry. 100 different 1% additions make for a 100% increase in the heat absorbed by the planet. It all adds up.
Even nuclear isn't "clean" as far as putting off heat. They have huge cooling towers. I lived near one as a kid, and there's a large dead zone where the cooled water is dumped into the ocean.
These little bits are what Vegas thrives on. You can play quarter slots all day. Every quarter you lose is a quarter they win, and when you have a few thousand people spending one (or multiple) quarters a spin, and a spin every 5 to 10 seconds, that's a LOT of money.
But, that's just like if everyone in America leaves one 60w lightbulb on all the time, that accounts for quite a few megawatts.
So we have direct heating from the bulbs and power plants, and slightly indirect heating from the pollution. We are still ruining the planet.
It's sad the the Microsoft sales people are better.
People bitch about the MS tax, and go pirate Windows and Office for their home computers, but that doesn't even make a dent in their income. They make HUGE money off government and corporate contracts.
The important part was "Beyond the redirects, it's not clear whether the group was able to obtain sensitive information from the Army's servers. "
They didn't get any "sensitive" information. Sure as heck they didn't get any classified information. They breached a public web site, hosted on a public network. I seriously doubt the server was even physically close to any classified information, much less attached to a network with any, or contained any itself.
They screwed with the gov't, which still makes them fair game for jail time, but I'm sure they didn't get troop movements, nuclear launch codes, or the base commander's daughters cell number.:)
Well, before they started calling it SQL injection, it was just invalid input. Since I was programming for an audience of millions, if even 0.1% of them were script kiddies, and 0.01% of them were good, my servers would have a life expectancy of days at most.
What's the big difference between:
SELECT user FROM auth WHERE username = 'foo';DROP TABLE auth;
and
(please forgive me for how wrong this is)
$result = `grep %in{search} *.txt`;
Where $search is "; sudo cat/dev/zero >/dev/sda;"
Just the degree of damage. If people would learn that not everyone plays nice, there would be less holes to fix later. Sometimes that's hard to explain until your first client gets really mad because you failed to validate an external input. Of course, I'll always be more than happy to say "didn't I tell you to always validate and sanitize your user input?":)
This isn't too hard to find out. Look for GS military IT jobs, and see what they're hiring for. Lots of Windows crap. They still do have *nix positions, just not as many.
Of course, a 1 admin to 10 windows machine ratio is acceptable, as a 1 admin to 50 Linux machine ratio is acceptable. They have a LOT of workstations out there that need tending to.
I couldn't do it that day, I was limited to 45mph at best because of the traffic. Most of the time it was less.
My current car as T-Tops, and I have encountered rain with them off, while driving on an interstate. I was fine, but my back seat passenger was furious. And wet.:)
I was living in LA with my future wife (now ex-wife) when Lost started. In the first or second season, they had a little plot piece, showing something was weird with the island. It would be bright and sunny, then suddenly a downpour, and just as suddenly it would be gone.
I laughed that it was just like Florida.
I had a convertible once. Silly thing to do to a car. It was bright and hot, so I was cruising along at about 45mph (in traffic) with the A/C on max, since it was a typical summer at somewhere just over 90 degrees.
I saw some rain ahead, and planned to pull over at the next place I could. Within 30 seconds I was drenched, as I pushed over to the shoulder as fast as I could.
By the time I got stopped, put the top up, and got back into traffic, the sun was shining, and no rain. In less than 5 minutes, the roads were dry too. The only wet thing was me. I was going to take the top back down, but 15 minutes later, the sky dumped on me again.
It's the same anywhere here in Florida. I've been all over the state, and seen it all. The only big difference is a few degrees between the Northwest corner, and the Southeast tip.
Sorry about that. I actually know the difference, but I still say the wrong thing sometimes. I don't do a lot of work with concrete, but for things like setting fence posts. I've only fixed decorative/privacy fence for friends for a while, but when there's a gate, it helps that the fence doesn't move. Here in Florida, we have very soft sandy soil, so things move without reinforcement. When I set up for 8 55 gallon rain barrels, the footing had to be firm on the structure.
I wasn't aware that all cement was exothermic. I just knew about quick dry. 1.5 tons falling can tend to hurt someone.
That's a blatant lie. The weatherman was joking about it a few nights ago, but it's true.
Season 1 - Hot: February 15 through December 15
Highs from the high 80's to low triple digits.
Lows in the mid 70's to high 80's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
Season 2 - Cold: December 16 through February 14
Highs in the mid 60's to low 80's,
Lows from the high 20's to mid 70's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
I've lived here for 30 years. That's always an accurate prediction. The only variation is when a tropical storm or hurricane blows through, and they only increase the chance of rain from 50% to 100%.
I've noticed, new asphalt in the Florida summer (say 90F to 110F) roads turn into mirages, Entire cars can disappear in the at less than 1/10 mile. You can see the heat rising from them.
In older asphalt roads, where they're sun bleached and worn, the heat isn't as much of a problem.
And I've never seen it on concrete roads.
I've wondered about roads and roofs being a contributing factor to global warming. There's a lot of square miles of roofs and roads that have increased relation to the population. It's always been notable that cities are hotter than the countryside surrounding them.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines. We're taking massive amounts of stored energy (oils, etc) and turning them into heat and motion. How many BTU per hour does an average car put off? In passenger vehicles, even in the winter, a small fraction of that heat is redirected into the passenger compartment, and can turn it into a freakin' oven. Look at the size of the heater core versus the radiator.
In the summer, that's increased, as the load on the cooling system is added onto by running the A/C in the car (more load on the engine). The amount of heat moved from the passenger compartment to the outside should be a wash, as should the heat transfer from a building.
It's all the information. You could write a regular expression based on it. It'll be kinda long though.:) I'd do it with a database and Perl or PHP myself, but that's just me.
The group numbers are used out of order for "administrative" reasons.
The groups are assigned as:
ODD 01 -> 09
EVEN 10 -> 98
EVEN 02 -> 08
ODD 11 -> 99
Area 000 is never issued.
Group 00 is never issued.
Serial 0000 is never issued.
The Area (state) code is based on where the card is issued, not where the person was born. If you were born in NYC, but your number was issued in California, you would have a California area (state) code.
Now, the SSN is generally requested by the hospital, so if you have a baby born in the US, part of the stack of paperwork includes the SSN request form. In those cases, obviously the birth state and SSN state should match, unless for some odd reason the request is sent to another state.
When I was born, there was no requirement to get a SSN issued immediately, and my family moved when I was 5, so my SSN was issued by the second state.
The logic to test if a SSN has been issued is pretty easy with a couple tables in a DB, or a whole lot of hard coded crud that has to be updated monthly.
That's actually not a bad idea. Kinda expensive, but....
I did some quick looking, as I have a splitting headache right now. I found the "Stalker Lidar gun". it advertises a useful range of 5' to 4000', and will report both speed and distance. Those would both be very useful for ground/object avoidance. The stalker doesn't show an external interface, but some others that I glanced at did, but didn't have range specs.
For ground avoidance, assuming maintaining 400' AGL, if you always indicated 0 speed, even though your VSI (calculated from the accelerometers) could show climbing or diving, you would actually be following the terrain very well. With a forward facing one also, you'd have 60 seconds warning (at 60mph) for a forward stationary obstacle. Then again, if your obstacle happens to be something like a commercial airliner, it may be on approach at 135 knots (155mph), you'd be down to a 12 second reaction window at best, assuming a dive to get under his wings. Climb is a bad idea, since you probably don't have the thrust of a fighter jet, and banking to turn would put the UAV near the wing, which could mean your neat little toy could get ingested by his really large engines. in any case, I don't know that 12 seconds would be enough to get you far enough away from his wake turbulence.
But, that whole argument is a good reason to actually read the sectionals, and program in off-limits areas.
Nice clear air is a great thing, but there are other objects besides aircraft and buildings to worry about.
This is a story I can say I actually experienced, rather than hearing 2nd hand. I was on the downwind leg in a Cessna 150, perfectly happy about learning to fly. A turkey buzzard was soaring on a thermal in front of me, so he was effectively standing still. I didn't see him until just a few seconds before he would have impacted my plane. He was more towards the right wing, so I banked hard left, and he went under my right wing. If I had stayed on course, he would have impacted me at about 75mph (65 knots). If he had hit the prop, it would have been real hard to see (bird parts on the windshield), and it may have damaged the prop, but I was already in close enough to make my landing with no power. If he had damaged the wing, it would have been much more difficult. If he had impacted the windshield without hitting the prop, I could have had a dead bird and windshield pieces smack me in the head at 75mph (more or less. There are lots of things that pilots have to look out for. If you look around for bird impacts, you'll see what can happen.
One of the big questions would be, how secret is your UAV, and where is it flying? An acceptable thing may be a self destruct. Spray fuel from the engine throughout the air frame for 5 seconds, then ignite. If it's done right, there won't be much to find. Civilians can't exactly get a hold of C4 to leave a self-destruct charge by the computers. Ahhh, what a pound of C4 would do to a computer.:)
Slashdot Mirror
And exactly where do you think this would be happening? At the school as the kid gets on with the bus drivers and teachers watching, or at the bus stop with parents, kids, and the bus driver as eye witnesses? What kid would believe that, a few blocks from home? If you ever become a parent, I'd hope you teach your children much better than that.
The closest I've EVER seen to that is the most likely kidnapping situation.
I was a friend of the family, and I saw the kid walking away from the bus as it was starting to rain, so I pulled up, beeped my horn, and told him to get in. He didn't know if I was really suppose to pick him up. Really, I hadn't been asked, but I was in the right place at the right time. And I really took him home so he wouldn't be soaked by the time he got there.
According to the FBI, statistically about 76% of child kidnappings involve family or acquaintances. The remaining 24% are the most likely to involve a firearm. "Get in the car or I'll shoot you, and then kill your mommy too" has a lot more power than "Hey little Jimmy, how is 2nd grade going? Want a lolly pop? Lets go for a ride."
The only real kidnapping I've been involved in was a family kidnapping. No, I was on the good side. The mother was staying with some family. She was going to bring her son to stay with his father. Mother and father both agreed on this. He was staying with the grandmother for a few minutes while we ran to the store. We got back, the son is missing. A family member at the house tells us (rather impolitely) that grandmother doesn't approve of the son going to stay with his father. The mother is furious, scared, crying. I, the good friend of both the mother and father, call the police, explain the situation, and an officer is dispatched immediately. If the little boy wasn't involved, it would have been almost funny, as the grandfather threatened to physically harm and/or kill me. I was being polite. The cop, a nice guy, probably late 20's, over 6' tall standing right beside me, and the grandfather being a frail old man. I can take a punch from a big guy if I have to, so I wasn't scared in the least. I was polite and as physically non-aggressive as could be (calm voice, hands down at my sides, not moving forward or back). All I said were things like "Sir, please do not threaten me. Sir, please do not come any closer to me. Sir, I'd appreciate if you wouldn't threaten to injure me. All we are asking for is for her son to be returned."
The officer was kind enough to say "I could take every one of you to jail for kidnapping, and you will spend years behind bars. Or, you can return her son."
After all was said and done, he officer said he thought the grandfather was going to swing at me. If he did, he would have been in handcuffs. He did ask if we wanted to press charges. This was the mothers call. She didn't want them in jail, but she did worse. They were to never see her or her son again. With that, we drove away.
We don't know exactly what was said to the son for the few hours that he was taken, but he was terrified of both his mother and father. Luckily, I'd been friends with them for a while, and he did trust me still (they forgot to instill fear of me into him.), so I was able to calm him down, and let him know that whatever he was told was wrong, and his parents really do love him.
Non-custodial kidnappings happen more than you'd like to think. Not every one ends up as an arrest, so all the police would have is a record of a call to a domestic dispute with no arrests made and no charges filed. This doesn't end up in the statistics.
My ex-wife did something very similar. She had the kids in the car, and was threatening to leave so I'd never see them again. A friend of mine coincidentally came over. He parked behind her car, and then sat on the front bumper of my car. She could
You missed my other long post, where I gave a whole slew of options, from cell phone based, to GPS dog collars, to building his own micro linux machine.
I've actually been paying attention to this stuff, and working with variations for a while. nothing for kid tracking, but vehicle tracking for businesses and personal use.
For example, I set up my car to send GPS and video to a web site, so I could be tracked crossing the country (California to Florida). If I disappeared for any reason, it would be clear where to start looking. Since my stops weren't planned (drive until I'm tired, sleep for a few hours, and continue).
I did get a call in the middle of nowhere (Arizona, I believe), where I was tired, so I pulled into a brand new rest area. I got a call about 15 minutes later because Google Maps didn't show anything there. It looked like I had run off the road, but it was dark out and I had parked facing away from the highway, so the video just showed black.
I'd prefer to be woken up because someone was concerned and verifying I was ok, than something happened, and the car had run too far off the road to notice. If I hadn't answered, there would have been a 911 call placed, and my last known coordinates were shown on the web page. :) If it had been an accident, the timestamp would have shown when the last update was sent.
It's all perspective. Which is worse, a kid on the wrong bus, and the driver bringing it back to dispatch, or an adult friend or relative in a wrecked car in the middle of nowhere, unconscious and dying, one phone call away from being saved, since no one can see the car that ran off the road?
I did get a whole bunch of calls when my last known position was in Texas near a bridge, in the middle of the night. The fuse blew in the power inverter, and the laptop ran on it's battery for about an hour before it shut down. From then on, there was no one to know if I was ok, but I had frequent calls checking up on my status. Luckily the entire drive only takes about 2.5 days, so I was less than a day from my destination. I opted not to stop and waste time trying to find a fuse, when I could just keep driving.
I'm surprised the driver didn't radio in and say that he had a misplaced student, and a flurry of activity after. I don't know about your school district, but every school district I know of has a radio.
I just asked my friend's 13 year old son, and he confirmed the bus he rides has a radio. He can hear dispatch talking over it, but it's a short drive and he's never seen her actually use it.
I know a teacher that was moved over to dispatch (school district politics suck). They run dispatch from before the first driver hits the road in the morning until every bus drops off it's kids and calls in to notify they're shutting down for the night.
I'd say you should go tear them a new hole, but I'm sure you already did.
At the school, that only lasted for a couple weeks. It was time for the kids to get familiar with the bus, driver and kids. if the driver knew he brought a kid in the morning, he'd wait until that kid came out in the afternoon, or they'd confirm that he went home with his/her parents. I do remember the occasional incident, where every bus was held from departing because a kid snuck onto the wrong bus. The ones that I knew the circumstances, the kid wanted to go play at a friends house, and the school hadn't been told this was authorized. That always ended up being a good thing, because the parents didn't know either. Our school zone was huge, it was possible to end up 30 miles from where you belonged if you managed to do it. They've since built new schools, and subdivided it drastically.
The bus drivers got to know the kids that are suppose to be on his bus and where they get off. Sometimes a kid wouldn't be paying attention, and failed to get off, and he'd yell back "Billy, this is your stop!"
I moved to this school district and rode school buses for the first time in 1979, when I was 5 years old. To this day, I remember it was bus 58-79, the driver was Mr. Lightburn, and it was 3rd from last in the line. It wasn't until middle school that I knew what the CNG sticker was on the side of it was, and it wasn't until high school that the real understanding of what that really meant. As it turned out, it was the only one in the fleet, and they were testing to see if it was economical and could last. I just did a quick search, and couldn't find any reference to CNG buses in that area, so I'm guessing they're all diesel now.
If the kid can't remember what bus (s)he rides, and gets on a bus with a completely strange rider and kids after a sufficient training period (2 weeks was always more than sufficient), that kid will probably end up needing to ride on the short bus, and be walked from the special classes to the bus anyways.
There are things that kids are suppose to be taught anyways, like your home address and phone number(s). My parents did it right, I never got lost, but I still remember our home address where I lived from when I was born to 5 years old. They did a good job, if I can remember that little piece of trivia from being a child, 30 years later. Not that I'd ever need it, but I still know the old home phone number too.
I guess this happens more often than we'd like to know, and when they grow up, they're the people that get drunk, break into a neighbors house to go to sleep, because they forgot which house was theirs. Badly trained kids become badly trained adults.
When I was in kindergarden, they went with the low-tech system. Every kid had a name tag that they had to wear all day. It had their name, grade, teacher, and bus number. Teachers aids were by the buses and would verify the bus number on the tag matched the bus. If they kid got on the wrong bus, they were turned away and walked to the right one.
How much does it cost for a 3x5 index card and a safety pin? A whole lot less than an electronic tracking system, and recurring cell bills for your kid.
This is probably a bigger project than you want to take on, and you very likely won't get the result that you think you want.
There are a few essential parts to what you're looking for.
1) The GPS receiver, which must have a view of the sky. It'll be hit and miss inside many vehicles, and probably worthless if she's sitting away from the windows in a bus, and unusable in a building. At least you'll have an idea of the building she entered.
2) The transmitter. You can use a modified alphanumeric pager, but that hopes your modifications are perfect, and aren't prone to failure. You can also use a cell phone or other cellular device (like a USB EVDO modem). Pay attention to the rate plan that you pay for. If it doesn't allow for unlimited data, don't send data once every 5 seconds. If you send data once every 10 to 15 minutes, does that give you the resolution that you require?? 15 minutes is one mile of walking for a normal person (average person's walking rate is 4mph).
3) Something to process the data to send out.
4) Something to receive the data (your web server), map it, and display it to you.
5) Batteries. You'll have a limited lifespan on any device, so it will need recharging nightly.
I highly recommend one of the obvious choices. Get her a cell phone. Verizon used to sell a Chaperone phone, which only had 4 buttons that you could program. They could be set to say call home, your cell, your wife's cell, and a neighbor. It also sent GPS data up to their server, so you could either view from your Chaperone-Parent phone that was linked to it, or from their web site.
You could also get any GPS enabled cell phone (not Verizon, they're pissy about enabling GPS), and put a whole variety of applications on it to send updates to somewhere. Even Google Latitude may be an option, but I find sometimes it forgets to check in.
You could also use something like a Garmin DC 30. That's a GPS tracking device for animals. It has a 17 hour battery life.
If you're hell bent on building your own, consider this..
1) You could get an Openmoko phone, which has integrated GPS, accelerometers, and (obviously) cell access. You drop in any GSM SIM from the provider of your choice, and you're online. It does run Linux, so you can write your own script to pull the GPS data, and upload it to the server. It's cute and rubber covered, so it's less likely she'll break it by dropping it. I don't suggest trying too many times though.
3) You could tie together a Gumstix computer, Gumstix GPS module, Verizon Wireless EVDO USB device, battery pack, and your own scripting to pull the GPS data.
Writing GPS software isn't impossible. You can open the serial port and read the strings. You have to read multiple strings to get all the data. Then once you have a full dataset, upload it. Alternatively, you can use GPSd, **IF** it will compile for the platform. I've done both, it's up to you to which you use. it was fun writing my own. I'd probably go the GPSd route, since I've already done it, and don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel any more.
You're not going to find the mythical devices that they use on TV and movies, that are a thread like GPS transmitter to sew into her jacket, that has an infinite battery life, and always sends the exact location, regardless of environmental variables (buildings, clouds, distance from cell networks).
I'm not going to say you're way off, as you're probably in the right ballpark, but a bit off. I'm not going to try to give the right answer.
If you know 1 gal fuel creates x BTU, then calculate hours based on RPM and displacement, using stoichiometric mixture (14.7:1 air to fuel by MASS), but skewing it by load. Heavier loads make the engine make more heat. For example, a full size truck with a 350ci engine has a larger radiator than a performance car with a 350ci engine, even if the performance car is designed to produce more power. Realize more kinetic energy is created than heat (hopefully).
It's still a lot of heat. How many millions of vehicle hours are being used (consider like man hours worked on a project), makes for a lot of heat.
Even if it were say 1% of the energy that the sun throws towards the earth, it's still an addition. That doesn't account for the heat put off by industry. 100 different 1% additions make for a 100% increase in the heat absorbed by the planet. It all adds up.
Even nuclear isn't "clean" as far as putting off heat. They have huge cooling towers. I lived near one as a kid, and there's a large dead zone where the cooled water is dumped into the ocean.
These little bits are what Vegas thrives on. You can play quarter slots all day. Every quarter you lose is a quarter they win, and when you have a few thousand people spending one (or multiple) quarters a spin, and a spin every 5 to 10 seconds, that's a LOT of money.
But, that's just like if everyone in America leaves one 60w lightbulb on all the time, that accounts for quite a few megawatts.
So we have direct heating from the bulbs and power plants, and slightly indirect heating from the pollution. We are still ruining the planet.
It's sad the the Microsoft sales people are better.
People bitch about the MS tax, and go pirate Windows and Office for their home computers, but that doesn't even make a dent in their income. They make HUGE money off government and corporate contracts.
The important part was "Beyond the redirects, it's not clear whether the group was able to obtain sensitive information from the Army's servers. "
They didn't get any "sensitive" information. Sure as heck they didn't get any classified information. They breached a public web site, hosted on a public network. I seriously doubt the server was even physically close to any classified information, much less attached to a network with any, or contained any itself.
They screwed with the gov't, which still makes them fair game for jail time, but I'm sure they didn't get troop movements, nuclear launch codes, or the base commander's daughters cell number. :)
Ok, how about...
; update users set password = password('') ;
It was just a freakin' example, not a dictation of how to break things. {sigh}
Well, before they started calling it SQL injection, it was just invalid input. Since I was programming for an audience of millions, if even 0.1% of them were script kiddies, and 0.01% of them were good, my servers would have a life expectancy of days at most.
What's the big difference between:
SELECT user FROM auth WHERE username = 'foo';DROP TABLE auth;
and
(please forgive me for how wrong this is)
$result = `grep %in{search} *.txt`;
Where $search is "; sudo cat /dev/zero > /dev/sda ;"
Just the degree of damage. If people would learn that not everyone plays nice, there would be less holes to fix later. Sometimes that's hard to explain until your first client gets really mad because you failed to validate an external input. Of course, I'll always be more than happy to say "didn't I tell you to always validate and sanitize your user input?" :)
This isn't too hard to find out. Look for GS military IT jobs, and see what they're hiring for. Lots of Windows crap. They still do have *nix positions, just not as many.
Of course, a 1 admin to 10 windows machine ratio is acceptable, as a 1 admin to 50 Linux machine ratio is acceptable. They have a LOT of workstations out there that need tending to.
I couldn't do it that day, I was limited to 45mph at best because of the traffic. Most of the time it was less.
My current car as T-Tops, and I have encountered rain with them off, while driving on an interstate. I was fine, but my back seat passenger was furious. And wet. :)
I know it's a little different from there to here.
I grew up near Crystal River/Inverness. I moved to Tampa. I have family in Pensacola, and friends in Jacksonville and Miami.
I was living in LA with my future wife (now ex-wife) when Lost started. In the first or second season, they had a little plot piece, showing something was weird with the island. It would be bright and sunny, then suddenly a downpour, and just as suddenly it would be gone.
I laughed that it was just like Florida.
I had a convertible once. Silly thing to do to a car. It was bright and hot, so I was cruising along at about 45mph (in traffic) with the A/C on max, since it was a typical summer at somewhere just over 90 degrees.
I saw some rain ahead, and planned to pull over at the next place I could. Within 30 seconds I was drenched, as I pushed over to the shoulder as fast as I could.
By the time I got stopped, put the top up, and got back into traffic, the sun was shining, and no rain. In less than 5 minutes, the roads were dry too. The only wet thing was me. I was going to take the top back down, but 15 minutes later, the sky dumped on me again.
It's the same anywhere here in Florida. I've been all over the state, and seen it all. The only big difference is a few degrees between the Northwest corner, and the Southeast tip.
Sorry about that. I actually know the difference, but I still say the wrong thing sometimes. I don't do a lot of work with concrete, but for things like setting fence posts. I've only fixed decorative/privacy fence for friends for a while, but when there's a gate, it helps that the fence doesn't move. Here in Florida, we have very soft sandy soil, so things move without reinforcement. When I set up for 8 55 gallon rain barrels, the footing had to be firm on the structure.
I wasn't aware that all cement was exothermic. I just knew about quick dry. 1.5 tons falling can tend to hurt someone.
That's a blatant lie. The weatherman was joking about it a few nights ago, but it's true.
Season 1 - Hot: February 15 through December 15
Highs from the high 80's to low triple digits.
Lows in the mid 70's to high 80's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
Season 2 - Cold: December 16 through February 14
Highs in the mid 60's to low 80's,
Lows from the high 20's to mid 70's.
50% chance of afternoon and evening showers and thunderstorms.
I've lived here for 30 years. That's always an accurate prediction. The only variation is when a tropical storm or hurricane blows through, and they only increase the chance of rain from 50% to 100%.
Quick dry cement has an exothermic reaction, but still, I'd take that over molten asphalt. :)
It's a little of this, or a little of that.
I've noticed, new asphalt in the Florida summer (say 90F to 110F) roads turn into mirages, Entire cars can disappear in the at less than 1/10 mile. You can see the heat rising from them.
In older asphalt roads, where they're sun bleached and worn, the heat isn't as much of a problem.
And I've never seen it on concrete roads.
I've wondered about roads and roofs being a contributing factor to global warming. There's a lot of square miles of roofs and roads that have increased relation to the population. It's always been notable that cities are hotter than the countryside surrounding them.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines. We're taking massive amounts of stored energy (oils, etc) and turning them into heat and motion. How many BTU per hour does an average car put off? In passenger vehicles, even in the winter, a small fraction of that heat is redirected into the passenger compartment, and can turn it into a freakin' oven. Look at the size of the heater core versus the radiator.
In the summer, that's increased, as the load on the cooling system is added onto by running the A/C in the car (more load on the engine). The amount of heat moved from the passenger compartment to the outside should be a wash, as should the heat transfer from a building.
It's all the information. You could write a regular expression based on it. It'll be kinda long though. :) I'd do it with a database and Perl or PHP myself, but that's just me.
I'd be a little more worried about Skynet. It's real, being developed as we speak by DARPA, the DHARMA Initiative, and Area 51.
Everyone knows the Cylons are just fantasy written to propel the Mormon and Scientology causes.
(this ought to start some trouble)
You'll find it amazingly difficult to do much these days without one though.
When my daughter was born 2 years ago, I've been surprised how many times I've needed her SSN.
It's not trivial, but not impossible.
The first 3 digits are the area (state) code.
The next 2 digits are the group.
The last 4 digits are the serial number.
There is no check digit, so no further math is required to validate it.
State codes are listed here http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/stateweb.htm
The highest issued group as of May 01 2009 is listed here: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssns/highgroup.txt
You can pull the high group file back to November 2003 from the SSA site here: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/employer/ssnvhighgroup.htm
The group numbers are used out of order for "administrative" reasons.
The groups are assigned as:
ODD 01 -> 09
EVEN 10 -> 98
EVEN 02 -> 08
ODD 11 -> 99
Area 000 is never issued.
Group 00 is never issued.
Serial 0000 is never issued.
The Area (state) code is based on where the card is issued, not where the person was born. If you were born in NYC, but your number was issued in California, you would have a California area (state) code.
Now, the SSN is generally requested by the hospital, so if you have a baby born in the US, part of the stack of paperwork includes the SSN request form. In those cases, obviously the birth state and SSN state should match, unless for some odd reason the request is sent to another state.
When I was born, there was no requirement to get a SSN issued immediately, and my family moved when I was 5, so my SSN was issued by the second state.
The logic to test if a SSN has been issued is pretty easy with a couple tables in a DB, or a whole lot of hard coded crud that has to be updated monthly.
That's actually not a bad idea. Kinda expensive, but....
I did some quick looking, as I have a splitting headache right now. I found the "Stalker Lidar gun". it advertises a useful range of 5' to 4000', and will report both speed and distance. Those would both be very useful for ground/object avoidance. The stalker doesn't show an external interface, but some others that I glanced at did, but didn't have range specs.
For ground avoidance, assuming maintaining 400' AGL, if you always indicated 0 speed, even though your VSI (calculated from the accelerometers) could show climbing or diving, you would actually be following the terrain very well. With a forward facing one also, you'd have 60 seconds warning (at 60mph) for a forward stationary obstacle. Then again, if your obstacle happens to be something like a commercial airliner, it may be on approach at 135 knots (155mph), you'd be down to a 12 second reaction window at best, assuming a dive to get under his wings. Climb is a bad idea, since you probably don't have the thrust of a fighter jet, and banking to turn would put the UAV near the wing, which could mean your neat little toy could get ingested by his really large engines. in any case, I don't know that 12 seconds would be enough to get you far enough away from his wake turbulence.
But, that whole argument is a good reason to actually read the sectionals, and program in off-limits areas.
Nice clear air is a great thing, but there are other objects besides aircraft and buildings to worry about.
This is a story I can say I actually experienced, rather than hearing 2nd hand. I was on the downwind leg in a Cessna 150, perfectly happy about learning to fly. A turkey buzzard was soaring on a thermal in front of me, so he was effectively standing still. I didn't see him until just a few seconds before he would have impacted my plane. He was more towards the right wing, so I banked hard left, and he went under my right wing. If I had stayed on course, he would have impacted me at about 75mph (65 knots). If he had hit the prop, it would have been real hard to see (bird parts on the windshield), and it may have damaged the prop, but I was already in close enough to make my landing with no power. If he had damaged the wing, it would have been much more difficult. If he had impacted the windshield without hitting the prop, I could have had a dead bird and windshield pieces smack me in the head at 75mph (more or less. There are lots of things that pilots have to look out for. If you look around for bird impacts, you'll see what can happen.
Here's a few.
turkey buzzard vs Cessna 402
Owl vs motorcycle.
Bird vs T-44
One of the big questions would be, how secret is your UAV, and where is it flying? An acceptable thing may be a self destruct. Spray fuel from the engine throughout the air frame for 5 seconds, then ignite. If it's done right, there won't be much to find. Civilians can't exactly get a hold of C4 to leave a self-destruct charge by the computers. Ahhh, what a pound of C4 would do to a computer. :)