Just to play devil's advocate, you could consider banning this app to be the equivalent of banning telescopes, windows, and going to a night club. Just because there are people who abuse the data doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used. You wouldn't consider banning all telescopes just because some creeper could peer in at your daughter undressing in her room. Some people just really want to see the stars.

The problem may just be with the people using the data to stalk a person, not with the app itself.

The civilizations that had a "flood myth" also happen to correspond to every civilization that lived in the Mesopotamian area near the Black Sea. No other civilizations outside of that area have a flood myth. There's a lot of evidence that a flood occurred in that area, but there's no evidence of a "global" flood. Civilizations in the Americas don't have the same myth.

Also, having a "creation" myth is par for the course. Doesn't mean there's any proof that any of those happened. Just that somebody tried to explain what happened (we're still, to this day, trying to explain where we came from).

Driving, drinking, and owning your own place are different. Each one of those actions was accepted when I reached the "appropriate" age. I was actively encouraged to do each one of them by other people.

I drank underage in college, just like a lot of other people. I knew people who refused to drink until they reached 21 though, just because the state had told them drinking before then was not allowed.

If you never tell the kids that being monitored like a dog is wrong, there will be people who don't question it and allow it to become the norm. These are the same kids who are likely already following the rules (and hence, the ones you wouldn't have to worry about).

The statement about std::vector is... mostly wrong.

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/stl/vector/operator%5B%5D/

operator[] does not do a runtime check, and will result in code that potentially segfaults if you do an out of bounds array access (similar to doing the same thing with a C-style array. The "at" function will throw an exception and signal an error.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't use operator[]. I use it all the time, because I often already know the size of the array (I use iterators far more often than operator[] though). The fact that there is no check is one of the advantages of C++, as in Java, there is always a check that can't be disabled (thus effecting speed).

You'll also notice this function returns a reference, not a pointer. It's impossible to pass a NULL with a reference in C++. No matter how you look at it, it's impossible for an access to a vector to return NULL. You either have "at", which throws an exception, or operator[], which gives you junk.

As C++ is a systems language, this is fine and expected. As an application level language, this is unacceptable.

The argument, "Look! I can do this and it's bad!" is because it's perfectly possible for the greatest programmer in the world to have an off-day and mess up. It's just a part of being human. It's nice when the programming language makes messing up harder to do, which C++ does not do well. That's why people say C++ is bad. The only current problem is that for the systems-level domain of highly efficient code, there aren't a whole lot of choices.

Now I'm not Linus, so I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure he's not telling them to really go kill themselves. He's ranting on a social media site about a security policy that annoys him (and frankly, I agree. Requiring a root password to add a printer or change the timezone may be going a bit far for a non-server machine).

This isn't some carefully thought out philosophical post about the uses of the root password. It's a rant filled with hyperbole that only turned into a news story because Linus Torvalds said it (a guy who is known for using hyperbole very often to make inflammatory remarks).

I'm also pretty sure he didn't start ranting to his daughter. The conversation probably went, "Why is it requiring the root password for that?" "I don't know daddy." "Ugh, here's the password. *silently grumble*"