Sure. How about putting a caricature of the Pope in your weekly column or showing a picture of an Iranian woman in bikini? Surely you must have known that it would offend somebody. The problem is that what you described is harassment, stalking etc. All easily handled by different laws in most civilized countries.
Creating a law against 'offending someone' in general would be mostly a tool for powerful groups to shut the critics up. Just look at how the libel laws are being used in the UK: McLibelSimon Singh Case and many more...
This is a very naive idea. You cannot realistically track every person's wealth as it jumps up and down with the time. People don't hold their wealth in cash - they have stocks and bonds and real-estate.
Suppose my stock would jump in value pushing my personal wealth over the limit - what should the government do? Take over a part of my portfolio? Which part of it? What should the government do with it? How would the government *know* I busted the limit in the first place?
If that seems to easy, how about a case of a successful start-up. Suppose I own a company that makes it big and Amazon (or whoever) offers $300 million to buy it. In market terms, I now personally own 300 million dollars worth of wealth even without selling it. What's the government to do with me?
And what if I sell the company for 'the cap' plus various lifetime services for me and my family?
I know where *I* would draw the line. It's the International Declaration of Human Rights. If there is a law that violates it or an order given to you by your commander that violates it, you should intentionally fight against it.
Any other laws should be generally respected - especially by an outsider such as Google is in Indonesia. If bad laws shall be broken then by somebody from the society that has written the law.
So if you are looking for *evil* companies that don't care about human rights, Google is probably the wrong one to criticize. There are worthiertargets.
No. The thing is that NASA had special requirements different from everybody else. When these requirements were fulfilled, other uses for the results were found. To say that these things would have been developed anyway and for less is very bold. For instance, if I look at the Pioneer/Voyager missions - they were delivered in time, in budget and with outstanding quality - exceeding pretty much all of the required parameters.
Now I have worked in private industry for a lot of years and have yet to witness such a spectacular success
Yes, that's a valid point. But the decision that a company makes should be whether or not to withdraw from the country or whether or not to pressure the government for a change but not whether or not to break the law. That should be used only in extreme cases (aka Oskar Schindler) but not in issues such as removing a video from your server.
Given that people are dying as a direct result of this video I can see the justification of some limited censorship
I disagree with the above statement. This is a way to grant power to extremist groups. If societies are 'unprepared' for free speech, as you say, they should have laws about the matter. And in fact they do - there are laws against (religious) slander, even laws protecting a specific religion such as Islam.
I don't think that Google should break the laws in such country in order to make a point - that should be done by activists from inside if they think the law was unjust. So Google should remove the video from the countries where the law requires it. However, it should not cater to extremist groups giving them the power to change things through violence.
NASA invested its money and brainpower into many things to push them to higher durability and power and lower size and weight.
The first practical integrated circuit was developed on the order of NASA for the use on the Apollo guidance computer. (And yes DoD pitched in too on that for their ICBM).
They worked with Black and Decker on modernizing their first generation of battery operated power tools.
They contributed to research and funding of countless computing systems to make them smaller and more robust.
As well as developments of new lightweight durable fabrics and materials for the spacecraft as well as the devices and clothing.
The list goes on - optics, food preservation and purification, robotics, guidance systems etc. etc.
Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned that in a Science Friday episode that at the time the Apollo program was the biggest thing out there. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut - or at least work in the industry. It inspired a whole generation to be scientists and engineers - that might be even more valuable than the technologies that were directly developed by the program.
Nowdays there's no such thing in the US. Instead the space program is big in China and a generation of science hungry kids is growing up there.
But returning to the second point, I agree you couldn't have double-blind trials as the patient would know whether they got nothing or not. You could still have a blind trial where the researchers did not know who was in the control group or not for the duration of the experiment.
Not quite. In a true controlled double blind study the researcher or his staff must make sure the subjects are taking the treatment - give the pill, injection etc. personally. They don't know whether it's placebo after it was randomized but they do see the patient is taking it. In this case they would see the patient is getting nothing.
In terms of ethics, if the goal of the trial is to determine whether a placebo has a clinical effect or not, then you are effectively testing a potentially workable treatment (the placebo, even though not pharcologically active) against something known to have no direct effect itself (nothing). So you can still tell patients that there is a 50% chance of getting a treatment that may have a positive effect (but not containing an active ingredient). The other 50% seem to have no hope at all, and they would know it (so you may even invoke the nocebo effect).
It does seem problematic. But if you are interested in whether placebos have clinical effect, how else could it be tested?
This would not work in countries I know of where it is required by law that the subjects know what kind of treatment they are getting (and details about how exactly the experiment is performed). Such laws were implemented after some experiments have gone awry in the past (such as some reproductions of the famous Millgram experiment that had left the subjects with lasting psychological problems). It's the reason why no such studies exist. Feel free to look for them.
Depends on what you mean. If you're asking whether giving nothing to a patient may make them better then the answer is yes. The human body has this stupid tendency to heal itself over time in a lot of cases.
If you mean whether it would help the study to give the control group nothing then the answer is no. It would not be double blind anymore because it would be obvious as to who is getting nothing. Note also that there is no way of conducting it in an ethical way - in the previous case you could tell the patients that there is only 50% chance that they would be getting an active treatment. In the case of placebo study what would you tell them? That they either get no active ingredient or they get nothing at all?
No. The double-blind is to eliminate any manipulation of the results, conscious or unconscious, by both the test subject and the examiner.
There is no actual deception in medical studies involved due to ethical reasons - the human subjects are informed beforehand that there is a 50% chance that they will receive treatment without active ingredients and they consent to it.
Now how would you do a double blind study comparing a 'placebo effect' to 'no effect'? Because that is something you must prove in order to show that there is something like a 'placebo effect' and enumerate how 'strong' it is. To date there was no such study published anywhere.
This article has been criticized to oblivion - just use google. Or better yet, just use your brains - how would one measure the effectiveness of placebo? There is no way to conduct a double blind study of placebo. What would the control group get?
ur editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended.
Come again?! You were 'not able to lift the ban'? It's your f&*%# website! You can do as you please!
Let me go on a wild speculation and say you were not WILLING to lift the ban because you like to pander to the big media overlords. And now when you reap the hate of the general public you are suddenly sorry. Well tough for you! The dent in your reputation is well deserved.
I think the problem is that very few managers, even people with technical background, have a good idea about what a top developer/software designer should be like. In my interviews I've been asked to demonstrate what design patterns I know, I've been asked about intricacies of programming languages (such as C++ templates), I was asked about all sorts of technical know-how.
Yet I've never had anyone ever ask me about the maintainability of my code (beyond asking about coding guidelines), or clarity and simplicity of design.
All the while IMO this is the very mark of a great developer - the ability to find elegant, maintainable solutions to any problems.
It's actually quite baffling to me why managers don't look for these things - the 'Keep it Simple Stupid' lesson has been in their books for decades now
It starts with Sweden clearing him for travel. And he does so.
You don't need any clearance to travel and Sweden didn't issue any such thing. Unless an arrest warrant is placed on your head you can leave as you please. And Assange did leave.
He's a suspicious sort, and offers to come back if he gets a guarantee he won't be extradited to the US. Sweden said no. He offers to meet in person, in the UK. But Sweden said no.
Here's where your story really stops adding up. He didn't offer a thing. He fought the arrest the best he could and when he lost he skipped bail and hid in Ecuadorean embassy. Only after that he and Ecuadorian officials started giving interviews and statements where they demanded he'll be given assurances.
Feel free to correct me and show what official way he used to ask to be interviewed on the English soil.
Sweden has not charged him with any crime.
This is the favorite spiel of Assange's lawyer. Yes, he has not been charged. An arrest warrant was issued and under Swedish law he cannot be charged before he is actually arrested.
Why has Sweden said "no" to ever offer?
What offers did he make to 'Sweden'? Through what channels? And when? Citation needed!
I'm not sure on the timeline, but I didn't think that Julian was a criminal at the time Ecuador initially extended the offer for asylum.
Yes, you are clearly not sure on the timeline. But regardless of timelines, I doubt his bail conditions included stepping on Ecuadorian soil.
I didn't think it that unusual, other than the lengths that Sweden has gone to to get Julian back after they told him they would not charge him and he was released and told he could go.
Sweden issued an arrest warrant. Assange escaped Sweden. Then the Swedish prosecutor issued an European Arrest Warrant, sent it to Interpol and requested extradition.
That's it. That's all the length that the prosecutor has gone through. All the rest is Assange's and his lawyers theatrics
The fear is a justified assumption that the masses are irrational and prone to hysteria. A bit of history:
As the research of chemistry boomed in the first half of 20th century, a lot of compounds were discovered with potential use in the food industry. By the end 1950's there were gazillion different artificial food additives used widely in most commercially available products - most without documented research on their effects that would detail things like interaction with other additives.
To address this issue a European Food Safety Authority was formed in the 60's whose task was to test and catalog all currently used food additives - put safety margins on their use and weed out the really dangerous ones. Non-european countries soon joined the effort. The result was the E-system catalog and every food producer could proudly announce on his packaging that they use only the 'E' additives and list them all to help make the customers well informed.
Except that people are irrational and prone to hysteria.
Sorry, but those mostly sound like made up bullshit job titles.
Then you know nothing about the software business. The Facebook platform is a well designed interface that attracted a lot of corporate attention to Facebook. Go on and read up on it. It was one of the most successful things Facebook did and, it's where Google's attempts at social network failed. From what I can tell, the design manager, platform marketing director and director of platform partnerships must have made a really good job.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do have so many people problems accepting there are non-native English speakers? It's not difficult.
Or perhaps to do a good ol' "DROP TABLE flights;"?
Sure. How about putting a caricature of the Pope in your weekly column or showing a picture of an Iranian woman in bikini? Surely you must have known that it would offend somebody. The problem is that what you described is harassment, stalking etc. All easily handled by different laws in most civilized countries.
Creating a law against 'offending someone' in general would be mostly a tool for powerful groups to shut the critics up. Just look at how the libel laws are being used in the UK: McLibel Simon Singh Case and many more...
This is a very naive idea. You cannot realistically track every person's wealth as it jumps up and down with the time. People don't hold their wealth in cash - they have stocks and bonds and real-estate.
Suppose my stock would jump in value pushing my personal wealth over the limit - what should the government do? Take over a part of my portfolio? Which part of it? What should the government do with it? How would the government *know* I busted the limit in the first place?
If that seems to easy, how about a case of a successful start-up. Suppose I own a company that makes it big and Amazon (or whoever) offers $300 million to buy it. In market terms, I now personally own 300 million dollars worth of wealth even without selling it. What's the government to do with me?
And what if I sell the company for 'the cap' plus various lifetime services for me and my family?
I know where *I* would draw the line. It's the International Declaration of Human Rights. If there is a law that violates it or an order given to you by your commander that violates it, you should intentionally fight against it.
Any other laws should be generally respected - especially by an outsider such as Google is in Indonesia. If bad laws shall be broken then by somebody from the society that has written the law.
So if you are looking for *evil* companies that don't care about human rights, Google is probably the wrong one to criticize. There are worthier targets.
No. The thing is that NASA had special requirements different from everybody else. When these requirements were fulfilled, other uses for the results were found. To say that these things would have been developed anyway and for less is very bold. For instance, if I look at the Pioneer/Voyager missions - they were delivered in time, in budget and with outstanding quality - exceeding pretty much all of the required parameters.
Now I have worked in private industry for a lot of years and have yet to witness such a spectacular success
Yes, that's a valid point. But the decision that a company makes should be whether or not to withdraw from the country or whether or not to pressure the government for a change but not whether or not to break the law. That should be used only in extreme cases (aka Oskar Schindler) but not in issues such as removing a video from your server.
Given that people are dying as a direct result of this video I can see the justification of some limited censorship
I disagree with the above statement. This is a way to grant power to extremist groups. If societies are 'unprepared' for free speech, as you say, they should have laws about the matter. And in fact they do - there are laws against (religious) slander, even laws protecting a specific religion such as Islam.
I don't think that Google should break the laws in such country in order to make a point - that should be done by activists from inside if they think the law was unjust. So Google should remove the video from the countries where the law requires it. However, it should not cater to extremist groups giving them the power to change things through violence.
That would only bring more violence.
Don't understand. If anything your remark only supports the point that companies should comply with the law.
Google complies with the laws of the country it operates in. If they are required by law to remove something, they do it.
Are you suggesting that big companies in general should be exempt from the law and obey it only as they see fit?
NASA invested its money and brainpower into many things to push them to higher durability and power and lower size and weight.
The first practical integrated circuit was developed on the order of NASA for the use on the Apollo guidance computer. (And yes DoD pitched in too on that for their ICBM).
They worked with Black and Decker on modernizing their first generation of battery operated power tools.
They contributed to research and funding of countless computing systems to make them smaller and more robust.
As well as developments of new lightweight durable fabrics and materials for the spacecraft as well as the devices and clothing.
The list goes on - optics, food preservation and purification, robotics, guidance systems etc. etc.
Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned that in a Science Friday episode that at the time the Apollo program was the biggest thing out there. Every kid wanted to be an astronaut - or at least work in the industry. It inspired a whole generation to be scientists and engineers - that might be even more valuable than the technologies that were directly developed by the program.
Nowdays there's no such thing in the US. Instead the space program is big in China and a generation of science hungry kids is growing up there.
Would you be angry at J.K. Rowling for stopping someone from putting out a HARRY POTTER series?
No. But I would be angry if she tried to stop somebody putting out review of a Harry Potter book based on the Harry Potter TM.
What a jerk.
But returning to the second point, I agree you couldn't have double-blind trials as the patient would know whether they got nothing or not. You could still have a blind trial where the researchers did not know who was in the control group or not for the duration of the experiment.
Not quite. In a true controlled double blind study the researcher or his staff must make sure the subjects are taking the treatment - give the pill, injection etc. personally. They don't know whether it's placebo after it was randomized but they do see the patient is taking it. In this case they would see the patient is getting nothing.
In terms of ethics, if the goal of the trial is to determine whether a placebo has a clinical effect or not, then you are effectively testing a potentially workable treatment (the placebo, even though not pharcologically active) against something known to have no direct effect itself (nothing). So you can still tell patients that there is a 50% chance of getting a treatment that may have a positive effect (but not containing an active ingredient). The other 50% seem to have no hope at all, and they would know it (so you may even invoke the nocebo effect).
It does seem problematic. But if you are interested in whether placebos have clinical effect, how else could it be tested?
This would not work in countries I know of where it is required by law that the subjects know what kind of treatment they are getting (and details about how exactly the experiment is performed). Such laws were implemented after some experiments have gone awry in the past (such as some reproductions of the famous Millgram experiment that had left the subjects with lasting psychological problems). It's the reason why no such studies exist. Feel free to look for them.
Depends on what you mean. If you're asking whether giving nothing to a patient may make them better then the answer is yes. The human body has this stupid tendency to heal itself over time in a lot of cases.
If you mean whether it would help the study to give the control group nothing then the answer is no. It would not be double blind anymore because it would be obvious as to who is getting nothing. Note also that there is no way of conducting it in an ethical way - in the previous case you could tell the patients that there is only 50% chance that they would be getting an active treatment. In the case of placebo study what would you tell them? That they either get no active ingredient or they get nothing at all?
No. The double-blind is to eliminate any manipulation of the results, conscious or unconscious, by both the test subject and the examiner.
There is no actual deception in medical studies involved due to ethical reasons - the human subjects are informed beforehand that there is a 50% chance that they will receive treatment without active ingredients and they consent to it.
Now how would you do a double blind study comparing a 'placebo effect' to 'no effect'? Because that is something you must prove in order to show that there is something like a 'placebo effect' and enumerate how 'strong' it is. To date there was no such study published anywhere.
This article has been criticized to oblivion - just use google. Or better yet, just use your brains - how would one measure the effectiveness of placebo? There is no way to conduct a double blind study of placebo. What would the control group get?
It's already happening
Yup. They sold their video content filtering engine to the Chinese government and are proudly announcing it on their homepage.
From the 'apology':
ur editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended.
Come again?! You were 'not able to lift the ban'? It's your f&*%# website! You can do as you please!
Let me go on a wild speculation and say you were not WILLING to lift the ban because you like to pander to the big media overlords. And now when you reap the hate of the general public you are suddenly sorry. Well tough for you! The dent in your reputation is well deserved.
This.
I think the problem is that very few managers, even people with technical background, have a good idea about what a top developer/software designer should be like. In my interviews I've been asked to demonstrate what design patterns I know, I've been asked about intricacies of programming languages (such as C++ templates), I was asked about all sorts of technical know-how.
Yet I've never had anyone ever ask me about the maintainability of my code (beyond asking about coding guidelines), or clarity and simplicity of design.
All the while IMO this is the very mark of a great developer - the ability to find elegant, maintainable solutions to any problems.
It's actually quite baffling to me why managers don't look for these things - the 'Keep it Simple Stupid' lesson has been in their books for decades now
It starts with Sweden clearing him for travel. And he does so.
You don't need any clearance to travel and Sweden didn't issue any such thing. Unless an arrest warrant is placed on your head you can leave as you please. And Assange did leave.
After his lawyer was notified that an arrest warrant is coming his way
Then, he is called back.
He is not just 'called back'. An arrest warrant was placed on his head. Because he was abroad a European Arrest Warrant was issued and served. Then Assange used every possibility to fight extradition.
He's a suspicious sort, and offers to come back if he gets a guarantee he won't be extradited to the US. Sweden said no. He offers to meet in person, in the UK. But Sweden said no.
Here's where your story really stops adding up. He didn't offer a thing. He fought the arrest the best he could and when he lost he skipped bail and hid in Ecuadorean embassy. Only after that he and Ecuadorian officials started giving interviews and statements where they demanded he'll be given assurances.
Feel free to correct me and show what official way he used to ask to be interviewed on the English soil.
Sweden has not charged him with any crime.
This is the favorite spiel of Assange's lawyer. Yes, he has not been charged. An arrest warrant was issued and under Swedish law he cannot be charged before he is actually arrested.
Why has Sweden said "no" to ever offer?
What offers did he make to 'Sweden'? Through what channels? And when? Citation needed!
I'm not sure on the timeline, but I didn't think that Julian was a criminal at the time Ecuador initially extended the offer for asylum.
Yes, you are clearly not sure on the timeline. But regardless of timelines, I doubt his bail conditions included stepping on Ecuadorian soil.
I didn't think it that unusual, other than the lengths that Sweden has gone to to get Julian back after they told him they would not charge him and he was released and told he could go.
Sweden issued an arrest warrant. Assange escaped Sweden. Then the Swedish prosecutor issued an European Arrest Warrant, sent it to Interpol and requested extradition.
That's it. That's all the length that the prosecutor has gone through. All the rest is Assange's and his lawyers theatrics
What's to fear!?!
The fear is a justified assumption that the masses are irrational and prone to hysteria. A bit of history:
As the research of chemistry boomed in the first half of 20th century, a lot of compounds were discovered with potential use in the food industry. By the end 1950's there were gazillion different artificial food additives used widely in most commercially available products - most without documented research on their effects that would detail things like interaction with other additives.
To address this issue a European Food Safety Authority was formed in the 60's whose task was to test and catalog all currently used food additives - put safety margins on their use and weed out the really dangerous ones. Non-european countries soon joined the effort. The result was the E-system catalog and every food producer could proudly announce on his packaging that they use only the 'E' additives and list them all to help make the customers well informed.
Except that people are irrational and prone to hysteria.
'OMG! We are eating numbers!' ensued.
So that's what's 'to fear'.
Yes it is!
Sorry, but those mostly sound like made up bullshit job titles.
Then you know nothing about the software business. The Facebook platform is a well designed interface that attracted a lot of corporate attention to Facebook. Go on and read up on it. It was one of the most successful things Facebook did and, it's where Google's attempts at social network failed. From what I can tell, the design manager, platform marketing director and director of platform partnerships must have made a really good job.
And now these people are moving on...