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Slashback: Summer, Sail, Sex Offenders
A new definition for optimism. Rei writes "According to a weblog entry from the Planetary Society, it appears that Cosmos 1 - the world's first controlled solar-sail spacecraft - has been found. The data is still tentative, but they have detected evidence of the spacecraft's signal in multiple tracking stations. There is a chance that it is in the wrong orbit, but it appears to be up there. This is after it was reported that the Volna rocket that launched it lost an engine after 83 seconds, and many had assumed that the craft was lost."
The power of the tag can only grow with time. An Anonymous reader writes "Saw your coverage of YubNub - I've been playing with a similar tool for a while that might interest your readers. It's called Ambedo and works in a way that you can tag search engines or bookmarks with a bookmarklet (you can also enter them manually if you want to). These are then added to you own tag directory. You then access these tags by typing them in a search box -- but all the matching is done client-side in javascript. It also has nice features like matching IP addresses, domain names, FedEx packages, calculator in the search box and so on."
If you like it so much, why don'tcha marry it? Mad Merlin writes "Groklaw has an interview with Chris DiBona of Google with regards to their Summer of Code program (as previously covered here). When asked why Google is doing the SoC program, Chris responds, 'It is simple: We love open source. A great number of Googlers have and are donating their 20% time to the open source efforts that we're doing.'"
Just kidding! scotty777 writes "Japan plans to give up its bid to have the world's first nuclear fusion reactor built in Aomori Prefecture. Japan Today reports the government decision, which means that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) site decision can be made. Japan Times reports that the government announced the decision by saying 'it plans to back down [from the Aomori site proposal] if the European Union stands firm on bringing the project to Cadarache, in southern France.'"
Surely this won't cause any controversy. davenaffis writes "Here's a little site I developed that uses Google Maps to map sex offenders. Only Washington, D.C. data is available right now, but I'll be adding more states soon."
Being able to plot the home locations of sex offenders on a map, as if they were tire-fitting chains or restaurants, is one step too far for me. I can see the logical extension from the things the Chicago Crime maps were achieving, but its really data that shouldn't be made accessible in such a contextless and simple manner. There could be people on the list for any number of reasons (not just the most serious offences..) who suffer greatly due to a 'Find your local sex offender' site.
I wouldn't be surprised if google maps chose to pull their data from being used by this site in such a way, it certainly wouldn't look good if anything unsavoury occurred. I'm all for cool and nifty uses of google maps, but this just doesn't seem tasteful.
Business Voyeur
The culture wars may turn literal.
Imagine this:
People from conservative websites search liberal websites for anyone admitting that they have smoked pot. They compile a database of who said they smoked pot, linking the person's name, the person's address, and the comment(s) where the person admitted to smoking pot.
Now liberals respond. To take revenge, they categorize the different types of beliefs held by conservatives, and begin compiling a database of people, evidence, addresses.
Hostilities rise. If you live in a tower, a grid of condos, anywhere where there are a lot of people- stories start to spread, and people take sides.
The "sex offender" b.s. is a very, very bad thing.
I remember reading last year sometime about a guy in Aurora, CO (It was in westword) was having sex with a woman that told her she was over 18. A while later, he was busted because the woman was 16 or so. The guy got nailed by the courts and his life is now ruined.
The general "Sex Offender" term is just wrong. I can see why it's a bad thing to have your normal raper out on the loose, but to have your life ruined because of some stupid chick? Come' on people.
What happens when a teenage boy gets convicted of Statutory rape because his girlfriends's dad walked in on them making hanky panky? Is he just another blip on the map- presumably a target for vigilantes or a scapegoat for community demagogues?
What happens when two consenting homosexual adults get railroaded by some backwater anti-sodomy laws? Now the ignorant have a map to the house for vandalism and hate crime intimidation?
Without context these maps have huge potential to inflict harm upon innocent people. These are just two of the examples that come off the top of my head.
Oh, looky, the plural of "anecdote" has suddenly become "data"!
Look, genius. It's not okay if even one person gets hurt because of this. Not. Okay.
And that's true no matter what he or she has done. Because there is an appropriate penalty for what they have done, and that is to be administered according to law, by a court.
Not by some yahoo like you who thinks that he is qualified to unilaterally judge what other people deserve.
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So you don't believe that the rehabilitation system works then. Certainly you lose your rights for the duration of the applied sentence, but once you are released and your parole period is up you are once more deemed to be an up-standing, reputable member of society.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Believe it or not, some people don't watch TV and don't feel intellectually superior about it, nor are we locked in our parents' basement. Personally, I don't make a conscious decision NOT to watch TV, I'd just rather do other things. I don't go to baseball games either. Does that make me anti-baseball? It's possible to decide not participate in a pastime without actively being against it. In fact, I think that's probably normal.
Obviously the guy was joking, the humor of which is that nobody would legitimately ask what TV is, but he was modded as flamebait and criticized as a zealot. Get a grip people. It's okay to laugh.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
But what even if all the guesses are correct there's still some ethical issues. Granted most of the issues involve even publishing the list of names to begin with. I mean wouldn't it be easy for someone to get the list and go around all vigilante style on the people on the list? Certainly it might be satisfying to attack a creep (even a reformed creep) but that's not justice. That's vengence.
Which brings me back around to the real point. Sex offenders are apparantly still dangerous to society following their release from prison. Shouldn't the solution to continue to segregate them from society rather than to just let 'em go and tell people, "Sorry, there's a dangerous new person in your neighborhood, watch your kids/wife/backside." We could put them in a concrete building with bars over the windows and locks on the doors.. a lot like.. more prison! If it's been shown that these people are a danger to society following their terms and that they are incapable of reform*, then it is obvious, at least to me, that the terms are not long enough to protect society from them and them from society.
*statistical incapability** is indistinguishable from real incapability if you cannot say for certain if they've been reformed until they die having not regressed.
**within a socially acceptable error margin. (is 3 standard deviations enough (~99.7% confidence)? 30 (100-(.98e-195) percent confidence)? I don't claim to have the answer)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Who is the bigger fool, one who trusts a somewhat inaccurate list to decide for them whether a person is safe to let thier children be around.
Or one who goes by thier own sensibilities, intuition and comminications with the person in general.
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We have no system of justice, and the law is whatever you can pay for.
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