Your website defines "dot-com" as "a company born to use the internet as its platform for business". So... Usenet counts as "the internet", but email doesn't?
Even weirder, clarinet founded in 1989, which distributed wire service articles over usenet for a modest fee, counts as "the first", but UUNet founded in 1987, which started operations as a usenet distribution hub, does not count.
Well, I think DVD's cost too much. Shouldn't the government step in there as well?
One, two, maybe three cellphone providers here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and has no competition because of government force. So it needs price regulation.
How about cars? They cost too much, don't you think?
One, two, maybe three cellphone providers here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and has no competition, because of the government licenses. So it needs regulation.
This page lists "44 top automobile manufacturers" Presumably there are far more than 44, if this is only the top 44. That is a free market, no need for price regulation due to extreme competition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry
While the government is at it, shouldn't all prices have to be approved, regulated and reviewed periodically by the government? I mean if one grocery store in LA is charging $0.15 for an apple and one in Seattle is charging $0.30 isn't there some gouging going on here?
Three, maybe four cellphone providers provide service here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and no competition because of the government license structure. So it needs government price regulation to fix the problem the government caused.
Shouldn't we just have the goverment set all prices for all goods and services? Wouldn't that be more fair?
For cellphone service, it sets all the operational rules and FCC regulations and basically controls the company with no difference between the small number of providers except capital structure, so the govt has the responsibility to complete it's work and set the price so as not to screw the customer, because it is an inherently non-capitalistic non-free market non-competitive system due to government interference (more so that usual, anyway).
What's the current status of understanding Linear-A, a language that people have been attempting to decipher for nearly a century?
Not much intelligence to be shared in Linear B... Only a few thousand tablet (pretty low apparent info density) and its theorized to only be a hundred or so different authors. Assuming we could translate it, we could translate all known linear B into a pretty slim English paperback book.
We can transfer a lot more bulk data now.... Just an old fashioned printed on paper encyclopedia set would be hundreds of times more data than all known linear B tablets... A small public library contains maybe millions of times more data than all of Linear B.
The opinion of what is violent is a bit variable culturally. Buddhist monks and Ancient Aztecs likely disagree. No point in pretending to use a filter that does not actually work. Even worse, if you give them a Barney DVD and send them on their way, they are going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about what is what.
Finally they have a huge advantage over us. They can give us someone elses culture, see what we think of it, and then say "just kidding" if it all works out. Even funnier, they can try to emulate star trek episodes from TV. I hope for some 7 of 9 and less of that living lava rock that lived in the tunnels. So, be prepared for some pretty goofy data from the aliens.
Good luck. What if they are horrified at genetically engineered monoculture agriculture because in their own past they genocided their 3rd world cultures using DRM-ed seeds, kind of like what we're trying to do now?
Or in their history they successfully used concentration camps to wipe out carnivores, and our digestive tract obviously evolved to eat meat...
Or their peculiar religion (not all that different from some of our own cults) requires ritual sacrifice of all whom use song and dance for non-religious purposes? Or all those that do or do NOT use medicinal plants in religious services?
Or consider worldwide mainstream media culture a form of genocide against the native cultures to be dealt with appropriately? Or they just think our mainstream media sucks, so all of us suck?
Our secret weapon is "they" probably have a small number of people to analyze the information we dump to them, but "we" have six billion theoretical exo-anthropologists to study what they give us. Regardless of the numbers, we will make far more creative discoveries than they will, in the short term.
Probably a fair exchange would be for them to request an amount of raw data sufficient to just barely overwhelm their staff and we'll get a similar quantity from them. Probably a heck of a lot of data, like a Project Gutenberg DVD worth. How fast they process our data will tell us a lot about them. I suspect the game extends to them showing off. Put on the best poker face and "Yeah did ya know I can read 10000 words per minute, how bout you?" when in reality they have barely figured out our alphabet...
Interstellar space travel is a stupendously expensive undertaking, and anyone attempting it will expect a return on their investment at the end.
OK, they wanna make a profit. Really boring reason to do something that interesting, but OK.
enslaved or slaughtered.
Slaughtered:
Not really profitable outside of GTA video games. Either way you've expended all that fuel for.... nothing? At best some taxidermy specimens for a museum? Seems unlikely to run a profit. The odds of a random species finding us tasty is about as likely as us finding another random species tasty (darn low, and lower the further you get genetically different). Also a rather expensive trip to the supermarket.
Enslaved:
The silkworm trade was not brought out of China by stealing every freaking silkworm in the kingdom... Technically you only need a sufficiently large breeding pool. Probably, not a terribly large number. Like an airliner full, maybe. At most, a small village has been proven by unintentional long term experiment to be about enough. So, why take us all, or even bother sorting out to take the "best"?
We could also reasonably suspect some knowledge of physics, astronomy(adjusted for their location of course) and similar knowledge
Physics gets pretty hard to discuss beyond F=ma without a common frame of technological reference and there are huge mathematical syntax issues.
Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points. "shelf stable" chemical propellants are pretty much constant across the universe, for a given temperature range. Permanent magnet technology. Even an old fashioned steam pressure/temp table (or other useful engineering liquids, like some hydrocarbons, or refrigerants) would be the same.
Now what would be fun would be figuring out the "new" stuff on each side. Just think of what has been developed here over the last couple decades... What is this 60 atom carbon molecule they find so entertaining? Why do they want us to stick this weird mostly rare earth ceramic in liquid nitrogen with wires hooked up to either side? WTF you claim you can polymerize fluorine? Then there's "helpful" advice, like don't accumulate too many atoms with a weight of 235 hydronium nuclei in one place or else!
Charities and other non-profit organizations are tax free in the US.
So downloading Debian would be tax free, but downloading Ubuntu (which BTW is Swahili for "couldn't install Debian") from Canonical Ltd. would be taxable?
I'm sure oprah, the soaps, etc, will all mobilize against the horrors of online socializing. It takes time away from watching their shows. Even worse, young people use those services and we have to sit thru the agonizingly overdone expose that anything young people do, is the devil, because they do it.
Expect to hear a lot more about "craiglist killer" etc from the mainstream media, at least until the MSM collapses and goes away.
Having said that, a dirty bomb requires nothing more than a few dozen smoke detectors,
No need for that, a granite countertop will do. Many granites are quite strongly radioactive compared to background radiation and are easily detectable using off the shelf geiger counters.
Alpha emitter smoke detectors will not work. Alphas are great for smoke detectors, after all, smoke isn't very dense, so there is a huge signal difference between "clean" and "smokey" air. But that makes it too hard to detect from far away, like more than a foot or so. Wave a cheap beta/gamma-only counter a couple feet away, hear nothing.
So, all you need for a dirty bomb is blow up a granite countertop (or tombstone) and tell the media it's something... else... and for a good time they should wave a counter over the dust.
You don't need an unsafe level of radiation for a dirty bomb, after all, that is a huge pain to deal with. All you need is something that clicks a bit more than average on TV. Click-click-click-click-click on the evening news.
Making radioactive contamination takes a heck of a lot more radioactive stuff than merely making radio-clicky-terror on TV. Even if you somehow got the good stuff, better to make a hundred harmless but very clicky "attacks" than one real genuinely dangerous attack.
Doesn't everyone know this? This seems terribly obvious.
Oh that irony: "Mild, harmless incident". Three Mile Island nearly blew off as later Chernobyl [wikipedia.org] - it was just luck that the crew found the error before.
Flat out blatant scaremongering misinformation.
Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator. Purified coal. Burns great. Perfect way to vaporize the fuel all over the countryside. No problem getting the smoke out of the containment dome, since they didn't have one.
TMI, like pretty much all non-Russian plants, uses water as a moderator. Not exactly a great fuel for vaporizing fuel rods. Containment dome designed to hold specifically for this situation. It worked as designed. Mild and harmless because it was designed to fail that way, and did.
I wont even bother listing differences like positive vs negative void coefficients that acted in our favor.
Also it was not luck that the TMI guys found the stuck valve... The third shift would have sat on their hinders all day in mystification because they had an inaccurate preconceived notion as to what is going on due to some broken equipment. Maybe they would have figured it out eventually, if they drank enough coffee, maybe not. However, the first shift guys came in with no preconceived notions to dispel, looked at all the gauges, more or less said "WTF were you thinking?", and shut it all down no problemo pretty much instantly.
Or any hospital with a radiology department, or any college offering a nuclear energy engineering degree, etc.
What's actually going on is a battle inside the government over how to excuse our defenses using two diametrically opposed strategies. Its good to see a failure of cooperation in the government, that gives some hope to the citizens.
One govt spokes-clown talks up inadequate defenses by making fun of the opposition. The idea is to compare the opposition to a bad mork and mindy episode or some other "make fun of the foreigner" cultural phenomenon. The purposed of the propaganda is to spread the idea that the opposition is too stupid to figure out where the target is because they aren't smart like us americans. Even the dumbest american knows, if you're looking for a sensitive target to attack, merely look for the "blurred" areas on google maps, but a dumb furriner could never figure that out. So, its OK that our defenses are no good, since our fiercest opponent is only Mork from Ork as portrayed by Robin Williams.
On the other hand some government clowns like to excuse inadequate defenses by claiming the opposition was stronger than the bad guy in a james bond movie. I actually saw one govt spokes-clown on TV after 9-11 rambling on about how it must have taken an extremely large amount of money, unbelievable training, and immense organizational skills to do the 9-11 attacks. Which is pretty stupid since fundamentally all they did was buy a couple airline tickets for the same day, about as astounding as any convention organizer. That propaganda has the purpose of making us feel OK that our defenses fail because the "others" are so strong.
So much xenophobia, expressed so many different ways....
Oddly the two propaganda crowds seem to fight each other because they pompously think their BS is better that the other guys BS. So this story is really that the "dumb furriner crowd", whom thought it would be funny propaganda to list all the obvious targets that no stoopid furriner could ever figure out but all red blooded americans obviously already know thus proving the furriners is dumb, is under heavy attack from the "james bond villian crowd" whom is doing the scare mongering thing by claiming the only protection we have is goldfinger doesn't know where our "gold" is located...
Moral of the story: Maybe this guy's daughter was in the same situation as me. Maybe she knew something was wrong, but no one would listen. People have a tendency to listen to an authoritative figure.
Indoctrinating that is the number one purpose of public schooling. Good luck with a solution to the problem that involves opposing that.
Another ultra low tech strategy that worked well at various times in my youth, and currently works well for me as a parent, is "buy a house two blocks from school".
In my city, even if you lived two blocks from school, the district would probably force them to bus to a school 15 miles away.
Original suggestion still stands, especially including that situation. Find a better place to live.
For kids who are normal, this sort of thing best viewed as a statistical problem: Of the thousands of children a school has to deal with, only a very small percentage of them will encounter such issues and then only very rarely. Attaching a GPS to this girl is ultimately a brilliant technical solution to a statistically insignificant problem.
The correct statistical analysis is how does the failure rate of the school bus system as a whole, compare to the combined failure rate of the GPS RX, the GPS battery, the phone, the phone battery, the interconnecting gadget and its cables, and the headend or whatever? Or if you just buy an off the shelf solution, what is the failure rate of the device, battery, cell service, GPS reception, and the likelihood of the kid simply losing the thing or another kid stealing it for the heck of it?
I would think it would be required to work, perhaps, once a lifetime, and the tracking gear would fail approximately 99/100th of the time. So, most likely, it would be useless.
Oddly enough, no one has suggested that given the cost of this device and the reoccurring costs, the cheapest and most resourceful and reliable solution is to pool the resources of a couple parents to hire a retired granny that lives across the street and has a clean background check, and have granny physically verify each kid gets on the correct bus for a small fee. Sort of a protection racket. I guess if the parents filed the correct paperwork w/ the school (possibly with help of lawyers?) there is nothing the school could do to stop the granny from being a "privately hired teacher's aide" or get granny a chauffeurs license with child endorsement or whatever your locality requires and have her drive the kids across the street to her house, or something, just to make it technically legal for her to help.
Or since tiered products are all the rage for mobile phone, internet access, and who knows what in the future, maybe parents could pay more for "guaranteed" delivery vs "best effort" delivery of their kids?
I discourage her from asking strangers on the street
Unrealistic threat assessment. The odds of a random person she approaches being evil are almost infinitely lower than the odds of someone whom approaches her being evil. Or, given the ratio of male to female predators, just tell her to ask a female, any female.
she's afraid of the police
Sadly, a realistic threat assessment for people of any age, not just kids.
compromised on convenience store attendants. It wasn't a perfect solution
Why? I think that's perfect. The odds of a random store clerk being evil are very low. In any transaction of evil, everyone knows she's on the surveillance camera, so thats kind of a downer for that plan. Most service clerks would love to help, hoping you'll say or write something nice to the boss or the newspapers. Its easy for you to find the store, gas stations are not exactly hidden from the street, and you've probably been there before so you know exactly where it is. Short of a donut store or a police station, I can't think of a more likely place to find a cop, hopefully a good one. Tell the kid, walk in the store, stand in front of the camera, and don't leave until you arrive. Away from the unfamiliar street means low odds of car accident. Most convenience stores are basically the same around the world, so no matter how lost she is, she'll be in semi-familiar surroundings, reducing panic and the bad decisions resulting in panic. Very hard to do better....
Pretty obvious, low tech solution to solve that problem.
No idea why you can't attend a small school in a big city, like I did and my kids do.
Now, dying cities might try to save money by merging schools into megaschools, but there are plenty of other good reasons to leave a dying city other than the teachers not knowing the names of the 45 kids in their class.
It is wrongly, yet widely believed, that a right to "More zero tolerance bullshit" is one of the constitutions amendments. Understanding that belief, explains a lot about Americans.
When I was a kid, we had an even simpler and even lower technology plan, which was, never go anywhere without "Matt" and "Dawn".
If your bus stop has only one kid whom uses it, then move out of the retirement village.
Another ultra low tech strategy that worked well at various times in my youth, and currently works well for me as a parent, is "buy a house two blocks from school". It is of course uphill both ways in the snow, but, at least its a short walk.
find a "safe" adult (police officer, female adult with kids)
Too complicated and still too paranoid.
Simpler answer is tell the kid, only ask for help from someone whom is currently ignoring them or obviously wants nothing to do with them. That'll work in any situation.
Slashdot Mirror
15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
http://www.iwhois.com/oldest/
The oldest company I am personally aware of, that as of today is still in business as a distinct entity, is
09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
Your website defines "dot-com" as "a company born to use the internet as its platform for business". So... Usenet counts as "the internet", but email doesn't?
Even weirder, clarinet founded in 1989, which distributed wire service articles over usenet for a modest fee, counts as "the first", but UUNet founded in 1987, which started operations as a usenet distribution hub, does not count.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET
Prior art:
http://www.finkproject.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fink/
Registered : 2000-12-27 22:07
Its good to hear Novell has caught up to the open source world of 2000, unfortunately for them, today is June 9th 2009.
Well, I think DVD's cost too much. Shouldn't the government step in there as well?
One, two, maybe three cellphone providers here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and has no competition because of government force. So it needs price regulation.
Seven pages of DVD manufacturers here to scroll thru:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DVD_manufacturers
Now that is a free market... No need for price regulation due to intense competition.
How about cars? They cost too much, don't you think?
One, two, maybe three cellphone providers here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and has no competition, because of the government licenses. So it needs regulation.
This page lists "44 top automobile manufacturers" Presumably there are far more than 44, if this is only the top 44. That is a free market, no need for price regulation due to extreme competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry
While the government is at it, shouldn't all prices have to be approved, regulated and reviewed periodically by the government? I mean if one grocery store in LA is charging $0.15 for an apple and one in Seattle is charging $0.30 isn't there some gouging going on here?
Three, maybe four cellphone providers provide service here, with the number of competitors artificially limited by government regulation to prevent interference and/or accept bribes. That is no free market and no competition because of the government license structure. So it needs government price regulation to fix the problem the government caused.
http://local.yahoo.com/CA/Los+Angeles/Food+Dining/Grocery+Stores
Lists 5106 grocery stores in LA. Plenty of competition and free market. No need for price regulation due to intense competition.
http://local.yahoo.com/WA/Seattle/Food+Dining/Grocery+Stores
Only lists 897 grocery stores in Seattle. Plenty of competition and free market. No need for price regulation due to intense competition.
Shouldn't we just have the goverment set all prices for all goods and services? Wouldn't that be more fair?
For cellphone service, it sets all the operational rules and FCC regulations and basically controls the company with no difference between the small number of providers except capital structure, so the govt has the responsibility to complete it's work and set the price so as not to screw the customer, because it is an inherently non-capitalistic non-free market non-competitive system due to government interference (more so that usual, anyway).
Short answer: no.
Short answer: yes.
Well .. What then ? ... you've traveled to a foreign land where you don't know the language and shown the barmaid on a napkin that you can add.
Ask her if she enjoys adding 42+27 ? That should be fairly universal.
What's the current status of understanding Linear-A, a language that people have been attempting to decipher for nearly a century?
Not much intelligence to be shared in Linear B... Only a few thousand tablet (pretty low apparent info density) and its theorized to only be a hundred or so different authors. Assuming we could translate it, we could translate all known linear B into a pretty slim English paperback book.
We can transfer a lot more bulk data now.... Just an old fashioned printed on paper encyclopedia set would be hundreds of times more data than all known linear B tablets... A small public library contains maybe millions of times more data than all of Linear B.
but not display any violent potential.
The opinion of what is violent is a bit variable culturally. Buddhist monks and Ancient Aztecs likely disagree. No point in pretending to use a filter that does not actually work. Even worse, if you give them a Barney DVD and send them on their way, they are going to have some pretty screwed up ideas about what is what.
Finally they have a huge advantage over us. They can give us someone elses culture, see what we think of it, and then say "just kidding" if it all works out. Even funnier, they can try to emulate star trek episodes from TV. I hope for some 7 of 9 and less of that living lava rock that lived in the tunnels. So, be prepared for some pretty goofy data from the aliens.
say nothing of atrocities
Good luck. What if they are horrified at genetically engineered monoculture agriculture because in their own past they genocided their 3rd world cultures using DRM-ed seeds, kind of like what we're trying to do now?
Or in their history they successfully used concentration camps to wipe out carnivores, and our digestive tract obviously evolved to eat meat...
Or their peculiar religion (not all that different from some of our own cults) requires ritual sacrifice of all whom use song and dance for non-religious purposes? Or all those that do or do NOT use medicinal plants in religious services?
Or consider worldwide mainstream media culture a form of genocide against the native cultures to be dealt with appropriately? Or they just think our mainstream media sucks, so all of us suck?
Our secret weapon is "they" probably have a small number of people to analyze the information we dump to them, but "we" have six billion theoretical exo-anthropologists to study what they give us. Regardless of the numbers, we will make far more creative discoveries than they will, in the short term.
Probably a fair exchange would be for them to request an amount of raw data sufficient to just barely overwhelm their staff and we'll get a similar quantity from them. Probably a heck of a lot of data, like a Project Gutenberg DVD worth. How fast they process our data will tell us a lot about them. I suspect the game extends to them showing off. Put on the best poker face and "Yeah did ya know I can read 10000 words per minute, how bout you?" when in reality they have barely figured out our alphabet...
Interstellar space travel is a stupendously expensive undertaking, and anyone attempting it will expect a return on their investment at the end.
OK, they wanna make a profit. Really boring reason to do something that interesting, but OK.
enslaved or slaughtered.
Slaughtered:
Not really profitable outside of GTA video games. Either way you've expended all that fuel for .... nothing? At best some taxidermy specimens for a museum? Seems unlikely to run a profit. The odds of a random species finding us tasty is about as likely as us finding another random species tasty (darn low, and lower the further you get genetically different). Also a rather expensive trip to the supermarket.
Enslaved:
The silkworm trade was not brought out of China by stealing every freaking silkworm in the kingdom... Technically you only need a sufficiently large breeding pool. Probably, not a terribly large number. Like an airliner full, maybe. At most, a small village has been proven by unintentional long term experiment to be about enough. So, why take us all, or even bother sorting out to take the "best"?
What would an alien civilization able to travel to earth consider a "resource"?
Intellectual property, religion, franchise agreements, and pr0n. All four are manifestations of pretty much the same idea.
We could also reasonably suspect some knowledge of physics, astronomy(adjusted for their location of course) and similar knowledge
Physics gets pretty hard to discuss beyond F=ma without a common frame of technological reference and there are huge mathematical syntax issues.
Chemistry would work the best since there are so many obvious constants. ionization constant of pure water. All the orbitals of an iron atom. A benzene ring is ubiquitous. Curie temperatures. Melting and boiling points. "shelf stable" chemical propellants are pretty much constant across the universe, for a given temperature range. Permanent magnet technology. Even an old fashioned steam pressure/temp table (or other useful engineering liquids, like some hydrocarbons, or refrigerants) would be the same.
Now what would be fun would be figuring out the "new" stuff on each side. Just think of what has been developed here over the last couple decades... What is this 60 atom carbon molecule they find so entertaining? Why do they want us to stick this weird mostly rare earth ceramic in liquid nitrogen with wires hooked up to either side? WTF you claim you can polymerize fluorine? Then there's "helpful" advice, like don't accumulate too many atoms with a weight of 235 hydronium nuclei in one place or else!
Charities and other non-profit organizations are tax free in the US.
So downloading Debian would be tax free, but downloading Ubuntu (which BTW is Swahili for "couldn't install Debian") from Canonical Ltd. would be taxable?
My own TV time has certainly dropped. These days, I'm more likely to be online instead of plopped in front of the TV.
That is why Dr Phil has episodes like "digital mistakes".
http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1008
I'm sure oprah, the soaps, etc, will all mobilize against the horrors of online socializing. It takes time away from watching their shows. Even worse, young people use those services and we have to sit thru the agonizingly overdone expose that anything young people do, is the devil, because they do it.
Expect to hear a lot more about "craiglist killer" etc from the mainstream media, at least until the MSM collapses and goes away.
Having said that, a dirty bomb requires nothing more than a few dozen smoke detectors,
No need for that, a granite countertop will do. Many granites are quite strongly radioactive compared to background radiation and are easily detectable using off the shelf geiger counters.
Alpha emitter smoke detectors will not work. Alphas are great for smoke detectors, after all, smoke isn't very dense, so there is a huge signal difference between "clean" and "smokey" air. But that makes it too hard to detect from far away, like more than a foot or so. Wave a cheap beta/gamma-only counter a couple feet away, hear nothing.
So, all you need for a dirty bomb is blow up a granite countertop (or tombstone) and tell the media it's something ... else ... and for a good time they should wave a counter over the dust.
You don't need an unsafe level of radiation for a dirty bomb, after all, that is a huge pain to deal with. All you need is something that clicks a bit more than average on TV. Click-click-click-click-click on the evening news.
Making radioactive contamination takes a heck of a lot more radioactive stuff than merely making radio-clicky-terror on TV. Even if you somehow got the good stuff, better to make a hundred harmless but very clicky "attacks" than one real genuinely dangerous attack.
Doesn't everyone know this? This seems terribly obvious.
Oh that irony: "Mild, harmless incident". Three Mile Island nearly blew off as later Chernobyl [wikipedia.org] - it was just luck that the crew found the error before.
Flat out blatant scaremongering misinformation.
Chernobyl used graphite as a moderator. Purified coal. Burns great. Perfect way to vaporize the fuel all over the countryside. No problem getting the smoke out of the containment dome, since they didn't have one.
TMI, like pretty much all non-Russian plants, uses water as a moderator. Not exactly a great fuel for vaporizing fuel rods. Containment dome designed to hold specifically for this situation. It worked as designed. Mild and harmless because it was designed to fail that way, and did.
I wont even bother listing differences like positive vs negative void coefficients that acted in our favor.
Also it was not luck that the TMI guys found the stuck valve... The third shift would have sat on their hinders all day in mystification because they had an inaccurate preconceived notion as to what is going on due to some broken equipment. Maybe they would have figured it out eventually, if they drank enough coffee, maybe not. However, the first shift guys came in with no preconceived notions to dispel, looked at all the gauges, more or less said "WTF were you thinking?", and shut it all down no problemo pretty much instantly.
Or any hospital with a radiology department, or any college offering a nuclear energy engineering degree, etc.
What's actually going on is a battle inside the government over how to excuse our defenses using two diametrically opposed strategies. Its good to see a failure of cooperation in the government, that gives some hope to the citizens.
One govt spokes-clown talks up inadequate defenses by making fun of the opposition. The idea is to compare the opposition to a bad mork and mindy episode or some other "make fun of the foreigner" cultural phenomenon. The purposed of the propaganda is to spread the idea that the opposition is too stupid to figure out where the target is because they aren't smart like us americans. Even the dumbest american knows, if you're looking for a sensitive target to attack, merely look for the "blurred" areas on google maps, but a dumb furriner could never figure that out. So, its OK that our defenses are no good, since our fiercest opponent is only Mork from Ork as portrayed by Robin Williams.
On the other hand some government clowns like to excuse inadequate defenses by claiming the opposition was stronger than the bad guy in a james bond movie. I actually saw one govt spokes-clown on TV after 9-11 rambling on about how it must have taken an extremely large amount of money, unbelievable training, and immense organizational skills to do the 9-11 attacks. Which is pretty stupid since fundamentally all they did was buy a couple airline tickets for the same day, about as astounding as any convention organizer. That propaganda has the purpose of making us feel OK that our defenses fail because the "others" are so strong.
So much xenophobia, expressed so many different ways....
Oddly the two propaganda crowds seem to fight each other because they pompously think their BS is better that the other guys BS. So this story is really that the "dumb furriner crowd", whom thought it would be funny propaganda to list all the obvious targets that no stoopid furriner could ever figure out but all red blooded americans obviously already know thus proving the furriners is dumb, is under heavy attack from the "james bond villian crowd" whom is doing the scare mongering thing by claiming the only protection we have is goldfinger doesn't know where our "gold" is located...
Moral of the story: Maybe this guy's daughter was in the same situation as me. Maybe she knew something was wrong, but no one would listen. People have a tendency to listen to an authoritative figure.
Indoctrinating that is the number one purpose of public schooling. Good luck with a solution to the problem that involves opposing that.
Another ultra low tech strategy that worked well at various times in my youth, and currently works well for me as a parent, is "buy a house two blocks from school".
In my city, even if you lived two blocks from school, the district would probably force them to bus to a school 15 miles away.
Original suggestion still stands, especially including that situation. Find a better place to live.
For kids who are normal, this sort of thing best viewed as a statistical problem: Of the thousands of children a school has to deal with, only a very small percentage of them will encounter such issues and then only very rarely. Attaching a GPS to this girl is ultimately a brilliant technical solution to a statistically insignificant problem.
The correct statistical analysis is how does the failure rate of the school bus system as a whole, compare to the combined failure rate of the GPS RX, the GPS battery, the phone, the phone battery, the interconnecting gadget and its cables, and the headend or whatever? Or if you just buy an off the shelf solution, what is the failure rate of the device, battery, cell service, GPS reception, and the likelihood of the kid simply losing the thing or another kid stealing it for the heck of it?
I would think it would be required to work, perhaps, once a lifetime, and the tracking gear would fail approximately 99/100th of the time. So, most likely, it would be useless.
Oddly enough, no one has suggested that given the cost of this device and the reoccurring costs, the cheapest and most resourceful and reliable solution is to pool the resources of a couple parents to hire a retired granny that lives across the street and has a clean background check, and have granny physically verify each kid gets on the correct bus for a small fee. Sort of a protection racket. I guess if the parents filed the correct paperwork w/ the school (possibly with help of lawyers?) there is nothing the school could do to stop the granny from being a "privately hired teacher's aide" or get granny a chauffeurs license with child endorsement or whatever your locality requires and have her drive the kids across the street to her house, or something, just to make it technically legal for her to help.
Or since tiered products are all the rage for mobile phone, internet access, and who knows what in the future, maybe parents could pay more for "guaranteed" delivery vs "best effort" delivery of their kids?
I discourage her from asking strangers on the street
Unrealistic threat assessment. The odds of a random person she approaches being evil are almost infinitely lower than the odds of someone whom approaches her being evil. Or, given the ratio of male to female predators, just tell her to ask a female, any female.
she's afraid of the police
Sadly, a realistic threat assessment for people of any age, not just kids.
compromised on convenience store attendants. It wasn't a perfect solution
Why? I think that's perfect. The odds of a random store clerk being evil are very low. In any transaction of evil, everyone knows she's on the surveillance camera, so thats kind of a downer for that plan. Most service clerks would love to help, hoping you'll say or write something nice to the boss or the newspapers. Its easy for you to find the store, gas stations are not exactly hidden from the street, and you've probably been there before so you know exactly where it is. Short of a donut store or a police station, I can't think of a more likely place to find a cop, hopefully a good one. Tell the kid, walk in the store, stand in front of the camera, and don't leave until you arrive. Away from the unfamiliar street means low odds of car accident. Most convenience stores are basically the same around the world, so no matter how lost she is, she'll be in semi-familiar surroundings, reducing panic and the bad decisions resulting in panic. Very hard to do better....
It seems linux use is incompatible with "making a child". Om the bright side, the non-working sound drivers might be a benefit.
linux-dude:~$ make child
bash: make: command not found
But we don't all live in tiny small towns...
Pretty obvious, low tech solution to solve that problem.
No idea why you can't attend a small school in a big city, like I did and my kids do.
Now, dying cities might try to save money by merging schools into megaschools, but there are plenty of other good reasons to leave a dying city other than the teachers not knowing the names of the 45 kids in their class.
It is wrongly, yet widely believed, that a right to "More zero tolerance bullshit" is one of the constitutions amendments.
Understanding that belief, explains a lot about Americans.
When I was a kid, we had an even simpler and even lower technology plan, which was, never go anywhere without "Matt" and "Dawn".
If your bus stop has only one kid whom uses it, then move out of the retirement village.
Another ultra low tech strategy that worked well at various times in my youth, and currently works well for me as a parent, is "buy a house two blocks from school". It is of course uphill both ways in the snow, but, at least its a short walk.
find a "safe" adult (police officer, female adult with kids)
Too complicated and still too paranoid.
Simpler answer is tell the kid, only ask for help from someone whom is currently ignoring them or obviously wants nothing to do with them. That'll work in any situation.