Slashback: Summer, Sail, Sex Offenders

Slashback this evening brings you updates on recent and ongoing stories about the lost (or just possibly not lost) solar sail launched earlier this week, Website tagging (this time client-side), Google's Summer of Code, and more -- read on for the details.

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."

Comments

Now why Did I think....

[3seas]

The Solar Sail was lost due to no wind in space?

LOST????

[808paulson]

I heard it was transmitting this:
4 8 15 16 23 42

Three things

[Linus Torvaalds]

Solar sail - if we launched it, and it's transmitting a signal, and it's in orbit, and we still can't find it, what are the chances that we'd discover an asteroid headed our way? Put more funding into astronoomy please.

Ambedo - the first thing I did was view source. It's not a good sign when its own website makes basic HTML and Javascript errors.

Sex offenders - this list contains people who have done nothing more than urinate in public. This kind of map only encourages vigilantes and hysteria.

Re:Three things

[Deliberate_Bastard]

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.

The solar sail wasn't lost...

[LowbrowDeluxe]

It was just on a three-hour tour...

(There's gotta be a better Gilligan joke in all of this, I just can't think of it now.)

Re:The solar sail wasn't lost...

[Rei]

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip.
That started out in the Barrents sea
Aboard a sub-sea ship

The sub was unpronouncable
The Volna's risk unsure
One spacecraft took off that day for a three month tour ("a three month tour...")

The Volna burn was getting rough, the tiny craft was tossed
If not for the courage of the CPU, the Cosmos would be lost ("the Cosmos would be lost..").

The craft impacted far away, on a tiny desert moon
With Obi-Wan!
The Princess, too!
The Jedi Knight!
And his droids!
A speeder car!
The wookie, and Solo (Han)
Here on Parody Isle!!

"Summer, Sail, Sex Offenders"

[Anonymous Coward]

Was deemed Carnival Cruise Line's least effective tag line of last year's ad campaign.

Mapping Michigan Sex Offenders

[Pathwalker]

For a while now, I've been crawling the Michigan Sex Offender Registry, and plotting the locations on my own little mapping site.

For an example, look here.

The biggest suprise I've had is the ammount of incorrect data in the database. Only about 25% of the entries geocode on the first pass. I've had to do "best matching" to correct misspelled street names, I've seen birth years with obviously transposed digits, and some quite amusing obvious test entries.

In addition to the sex offender data, I also map the locations of domains with dns-loc location records, sites registered with geourl.org, or my own Geographic Crawler experiment, sites on or considered for the Superfund NPL list, and any other data I can force into a format I can plot.

Re:Mapping Michigan Sex Offenders

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

For a while now, I've been crawling the Michigan Sex Offender Registry

My! That's a healthy hobby you have there. Hobbies are good, they make you into a nice well-rounded person.

A map too far?

[Sv-Manowar]

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.

Re:A map too far?

[Nasarius]

Allowing parents to know if sexual predators live in their neighborhood is probably a good thing.

Why? What good can possibly be done with this information? Maybe you'll be excessively paranoid about your kids when they're out, but what good does that do anyone? Lock up the real criminals longer, don't bother with crap like this that encourages paranoia and lynch mobs.

Re:A map too far?

[radiumsoup]

Not at all too far - in fact, I think we should expand on this idea. I want a map of everyone who has stolen a car. I like my car, I don't want to move into a neighborhood where a former car theif lives. You know he'll (or she'll) just go right back out and steal my car UNLESS they're on a searchable map. You've done it once, you'll do it again.

Oh, and I want a map of everyone who has back taxes yet to pay - you know they want to steal my car along with the car theif to pay some of those back taxes.

Don't forget the people who have late library books - they're cleptos, and just want to take my garden gnomes out front...

Mapping this kind of thing isn't a detternt - look at how many registered sex offenders there are. And it doesn't help parents to "make good decisions", either - if you aren't watching your kids enough already, it doesn't matter if there's a sex offender *LIVING* nearby... if something happens, you are partly responsible for not being prepared and educating your kids, and keeping track of them, and following up when they say they're giong to a friend's house...

Parents need to be prepared for the worst, but having a list like this will only make it possible for these people to be punished while they're not in prison or on parole or probation by some holier-than-thou zealot with a shotgun and too much Bud Light in his system. Click and shoot.

Sex offenders have no rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't the sex offenders already "served their time"? Or is their set of rights smaller than your or mine...

Re:Sex offenders have no rights?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Their set of rights is smaller than yours or mine.

There exist lists of convicted sex offenders. They have to register when they move. They have to register every year even if they don't move. If the community they move into doesn't want them around, they can get a petition thrown together and the sex offender cannot live there. Oh, and they'll know when he moves in. Usually some group will make a big stink about the whole deal.

Once you commit a sex crime (or are convicted of ANY felony) you lose the majority of your rights.

Re:Sex offenders have no rights?

[thegrassyknowl]

Their set of rights is smaller than yours or mine. Why? They'd done the time. Their rights and liberty have been deprived as punishment. You do realise the seriousness of your thinking? For any offence where there is a court ordered conviction (and that can mean repeatedly unpaid parking tickets that a court will eventually enforce) then you would have a smaller set of rights than others. Once you commit a sex crime (or are convicted of ANY felony) you lose the majority of your rights.

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.

The Culture Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

(Warning Soviet Joke Imminent)

[fimbulvetr]

In Soviet America, Sex Offenders map YOU!

ITER intro

[interiot]

For those who need an intro to ITER:

ITER is a proposed international tokamak (magnetic confinement fusion) experiment designed to show the scientific and technological feasibility of a full-scale fusion power reactor.

ITER will use a hydrogen plasma torus operating at over 100 million Celsius. It will produce approximately 500 megawatts of fusion power sustained for up to 500 seconds (compared to JET's peak of 16 MW for less than a second). ITER will not generate electrical power.

ITER is the experimental step between today's studies of plasma physics and tomorrow's electricity-producing fusion power plants.

It sounds like the plans for it were pretty much ready to go, they just couldn't decide where to build the thing. So, all systems are go now?

In other news: the idiot mapper

[Anonymous Coward]

The idiot mapper.
So far only 1 idiot is listed there, but it is the biggest idiot on this planet.

ethics?

[Heisenbug]

This is a nifty hack, but I wonder what your thoughts are on the ethics of it. If the database is inaccurate to the point where you have to make guesses about what the correct data really is, it's also likely that it points to a fair number of entirely innocent people. By making it easy for folks to find entries near them, you're aiding a process with the potential to do a lot of harm, for better or worse.

This is the kind of project I can easily imagine myself starting -- but around the time I was making guesses about misspelled street names, I think I'd can it and move on to something with less potential to ruin lives. With no negative judgment implied, why didn't you?

On a separate note, at a first glance I see a surprising number of pairs of dots very near to each other. Is this some kind of bug in the data or the mapping process? Am I just inventing patterns where there aren't any? Or perhaps there's some strange tendency for sex offenders to settle in pairs ...

Thanks for the interesting link.

Agreed, it's unjust without context

[DoctaWatson]

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.

Re:Sex Offender boogeyman

[KenFury]

Quick story; friend of mine went out to a bar, met some girl and had sex with her. Turns out she was 16, god only know how a 16 year old got into a bar where everyone is 21 or over. Anyways, he got charged with rape and spend over 10k getting out of the charges.

PUBLIC EXHIBIITONISM == LISTABLE SEX OFFENCE.

[goombah99]

Things that can get you on a registered sexual offender list:

public urination, exhibitionism, nudism, streaking, flashing, mooning, outdoor consensual sex, lewd behaviour.

Dont believe me?

utah law book says:

(d) "Sex offender" means any person convicted by this state or who enters a plea in abeyance for violating Section 76-7-102, 76-9-702.5, 76-5a-3, 76-10-1306, or 76-5-301.1

and all of those are for lewd behaviour that specifically includes public urination, streaking, and mooning.

LAW LINK

"The study found that people charged with crimes such as public urination, flashing, consensual sex between teenagers, possession of child pornography and adult prostitution are all classified as sex offenders in some states."

Link to source

"Plaistow Deputy Chief Kathleen Jones also said that not every person on the sex offender list has necessarily committed an egregious crime such as rape or molestation because a conviction of indecent exposure, even in cases such as public urination, can land someone on the list."
Link

"According to Michigan State Police Sgt. Troy Fellows, urinating in public is classified as indecent exposure, and requires sex offender registration after three convictions...[And] Judges [can] to order registration after any number of convictions..."

Link