This may be true, but I don't think it should be up to society to correct the mistakes of incompetent parents.

Parents have been perfectly capable of looking after their children without GPS tracking for millennia... IMHO with a little trust and good parenting, these devices are completely unnecessary.

I received the following chain email recently. Normally I hate passing on these things but I think this one is rather apt:

A boat docked in a tiny Goan village. A tourist from Mumbai (Mumbaite) complimented the Goan fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

"Not very long," answered the fisherman.

"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the Mumbaite.

The Goan fisherman explained that his small catch was Sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.
The Mumbaite asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, play guitar, sing a few songs... I have a full life."

The Mumbaite interrupted, "I have an MBA from IIM-A, and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."

"And after that?" asked the Goan.

"With the extra money The larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Panjim, or even Mumbai. From there you can direct your huge new enterprise."

"How long would that take?" asked the Goan.

"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the Mumbaite.

"And after that?"

"Afterwards? Well my Friend, That's when it gets really interesting," chuckled the Mumbaite, "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"

"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the Goan.

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, Sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings doing what you like with your buddies."

"With all due respect sir, but that's exactly what I am doing now. So what's the point wasting 25 Years?" asked the Goan. And the moral of the story is? Know where you're going in life. You may already be there.

Life in the present world is indeed a rat race. Many who have good qualifications too do not know where they are going in life.

This is a good point. To the end user Haiku doesn't appear to be all that different to BeOS back in the day, and it was difficult enough to actually do anything then anyway. In those 8 years modern operating systems, and more importantly the applications that run on those operating systems, have matured massively. IMHO It's unlikely Haiku can gain the momentum that BeOS craved so long ago, especially when there's not a lot that makes it stand out as a better alternative to Linux, for example.

What if you're on a plane? There's no coverage there and it's one of the places I'm most likely to want to listen to my music.

From Wikipedia:

It essentially gives programmers a way to split their code into "blocks" which can be run on different processors. libdispatch then decides which processor to run each "block" on, so that the load is spread efficiently. It's similar in concept to threading except that events can trigger a new work-block to be created rather than a thread waiting for an event.

It seems as though many have missed the fact that there will be an extra layer of protection in this scheme and have jumped to the conclusion that unauthorised people may gain access to one's criminal (and other?) records. The article states that people's ISA Statuses will be accessible to employers and voluntary organisations, and that

There is no mention of what the "ISA Status" that is visible to the employers actually includes and how detailed it is. It may be some arbitrary measurement of how much trouble you've been in or it could be details of your entire life history. Who knows.
Frankly, I find this quotation (ISA) quite concerning because it seems like this government body decides how much of your personal information is available to others:

However, it seems to suggest that based on all of this data the ISA will only give a "thumbs-up"or a "thumbs-down".
(Let's also remember that this is just a "feasibility study" and seemingly not certain.)

Student towns become much livelier places to be when the students are around.

But can I use it as a 10-inch phone?

I did a similar course about a year ago and we used Handel-C. Assuming your students have coded in C before they do not have to worry about picking up the syntax, but rather they can focus on the parallel aspects of embedded programming like parallel execution and channels. I found it adhered to ANSI C reasonably well and actually improved my knowledge of the hidden depths on data representation in C. It "feels" like using C but with a few Occam-inspired macros to help create parallel code. The similarity between C and Handel-C also helps to bring home concepts like recursion is not possible in hardware, but iteration is. Also the documentation is thorough and clear. The reason we were given for using Handel-C over VHDL was the difference in overhead of learning a new syntax and of lower-level programming. I guess the downside is that the resulting circuits are likely to be much less efficient than in VHDL.

Well done sir, you've just ruined Android. Now we can run all the bloatware that we have on our desktops on our phones, rather than developing the applications right (not using X11 and hundreds of dependencies) to start with. There's a reason Google decided not to use X11 and go with framebuffer apps instead.

A valid point. Will this legislation also be applied to regular digital cameras? Why does this just apply to mobile phones??