Slashdot Mirror
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."
I heard it was transmitting this:
4 8 15 16 23 42
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.
Was deemed Carnival Cruise Line's least effective tag line of last year's ad campaign.
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.
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
Haven't the sex offenders already "served their time"? Or is their set of rights smaller than your or mine...
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!!
What a crazy random happenstance!
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.