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iPhone App Tracks Sex Offenders 358

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-sweaty-app-for-that dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "All 50 states in the US require the 50,000 people convicted of sexual offenses to sign a register so that their whereabouts can be tracked and monitored. The Telegraph reports that now users of the iPhone Offender Locator application can search for sex offenders living nearby a friend or colleague whose address is stored in their Apple iPhone address book, or they can type in a street address to generate a list of convicted sex offenders in the local area. 'Offender Locator gives everyone the ability to find out if registered sex offenders live in their area,' says the application developer, ThinAir Wireless, on its iTunes page. 'Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.' Offender Locator uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to pinpoint the user's location, and then provide a map listing sex offenders in the local area. Tapping on one of the 'pins' dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions."

Comment sneaky business (Score 1) 334

by lordharsha (#28878211) Attached to: EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On

EMI probably read this, figured something had to be done to get rid of piracy, and decided to hamper their sales. This way when the next study is conducted, they can blame piracy.

Before someone points it out, this is supposed to be funny. I might be overly paranoid, I might hate them greedy buggers, and a little conspiracy theory does the soul good, but this is probably just corporate stupidity. Been seeing a lot of it lately.
The Military

DARPA Builds Smarter Version of Microsoft's Clippy 140

Posted by samzenpus from the dead-but-dreaming-of-electric-sheep dept.
holy_calamity writes "Microsoft's animated paperclip may be long dead, but a $150m DARPA project has resurrected the idea of a virtual assistant. AI researchers from more than 60 institutions worked on the project entitled CALO. CALO is designed to help ease the bureaucratic burden of the military. A consumer spinoff, Siri, is coming to the iPhone later this year. It responds to conversational voice commands to take over multi-step tasks like choosing and booking restaurants or cabs."

Comment Bullies in the playground (Score 4, Insightful) 172

by lordharsha (#28863743) Attached to: China Bans Games That "Glorify Gangsters' Lives"

*sigh* Gorram governments.

When I was a kid, politics was this big boring thing that all the grown ups with moustaches and beards went on and on about.

Now that I'm older, it's a hell of a lot more like a pissing contest, with each country trying to introduce more asinine laws and control each and every moment of their citizens lives. Hell, it's almost like a black comedy.

I'd laugh at the whole thing, but some of the shit that the governments of the world do in our name really scare me. Eventually enough people are going to come to their senses and fight back.

That's it for my rant. Mod me up, mod me down, ignore me, but I felt I had to get my 2c in.
Programming

Submission + - The Best First Language For A Young Programmer (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year C.S. curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As McAllister sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck, McAllister writes. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

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