It's a little unclear, but the first paragraph of the article (as well as the summary) mentions "cellphones, social media and the Internet" - if they were denied access to all three (the second as a function of the last, of course) then I'm not surprised they felt cut off; if you don't happen to have memorised a large swathe of seemingly arbitrary numbers to punch in to a landline phone, you are cut off without tech.
Absolutely agreed - the tantrum sounds childish and absolutely unacceptable, but it'd be a rare 16 year old who would particularly want to be involved with a group of people well outside her age group who she more than likely feels herself to have little in common with. The lack of basic politeness sounds unfortunate, but I don't think that's the fault of the tech.
Even so, Google is not in any way implying that the autocompleted term is factually correct, only that it was a string of words searched for by other users. That they block certain terms could muddy the issue if it were done for reasons of accuracy, but it isn't, and thus it doesn't imply any endorsement of the statement.
The words appearing on the screen have more context than is being taken into account by the court; the 'fact' that Google presented - that many previous users had searched for the term "x is a fraud" - is provably true, whether or not the allegations of fraud are. I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't play it like that in court, actually - they tried to argue that they hadn't produced the content, rather than debating the facts implied by its appearance.
Obviously they should refrain from disparaging words and remarks in the auto-complete as they cannot possibly predict or verify if such words are libelous or slander against a person.
I find it surprising that you (and the judge) consider autocompleted text to be potentially libellous - as I mentioned in another post, Google's autocomplete function isn't saying (or even implying) that "x is a fraud" is a factual statement, it's saying that "x is a fraud" is a string of words being searched for regularly.
They make no judgement on the veracity, or even the coherence, of the sentence - they simply present it as something that people have been typing in to the search box. To me, that seems very, very different from Google making or publishing the statement in question.
Slander is slander, if you make a loophole for people who can wrap the slander into an algorithm...you make it legal
A reasonable point, but whether this is, in fact, slander is far from clear cut. Google's autocomplete function isn't saying (or even implying) that "x is a fraud" is a factual statement, it's saying that "x is a fraud" is a string of words being searched for regularly. That's a very significant difference, which seems to be going somewhat under the radar here.
applaud/plôd/ Verb 1. Show approval or praise by clapping: "the crowd whistled and applauded"; "his speech was loudly applauded". 2. Show strong approval of (a person or action); praise: "Jill applauded the decision".
The site is already running. They suggested $4million just for a year's upkeep on USAspending.gov - you can get rid of the developers right there, it's already put together and just needs the sysadmins to keep it ticking over, so that's $500k saved. Same for designers and graphic artists (and five designers plus a graphics guy seems very steep even for a new project, especially if you already have developers to turn the designer's pretty pictures into code), so another $480k saved. I'm not sure about the need for a $200k CEO on a relatively small government project with a fairly definite remit, but let's leave him there for the sake of argument.
Five staff collating data, two editing, and one or two sysadmins sounds more than adequate for a site which analyses and publishes publicly available data. Even with a nice office, secretary, manager, leased equipment costs, and so forth, the figure is little more than a third of what you suggested, and barely an eighth of what the department wants from their budget.
Unless you've got reasonable evidence to suggest that an already established site needs a large and expensive design and development team just for upkeep, I stand by my original comment that I'd be more than happy to be the one disappearing with the extra cash.
I think we might all be better off if the police just went back to the old, much more lethal methods of threat mitigation.
I pretty much agree, although probably for different reasons to you. As I mentioned in another post, most arguments in favour of the use of tasers revolve around the assumption that they're being used in place of guns - while that is sometimes true, it is absolutely no always the case. Even the worst officer is going to think twice about putting a bullet in someone, but the relative safety and moderate clinical detachment of using a taser invites them to be used much more freely.
If police restrictions treated the use of a taser as equivalent to the use of a gun, I would absolutely applaud them for making people safer. As it stands, their overall affect is to drastically increase the total number of people on the receiving end of a weapon of some kind, and that is not something that most people who support their use seem to take into account.
Only valid on the assumption that a gun would have been used in place of the Taser. Unless you're telling me that the police would shoot someone for refusing to promptly follow an order (while posing no direct threat), that's demonstrably not the case.
I don't actually object to tasers per se, but I do object to police guidelines which allow their use against people who pose no threat to either the officers or the public around them. Most of the pro-taser arguments revolve around their use as a defensive weapon, but their actual use is not limited strictly to defence. I know such policies would be imperfectly applied, but it would still be better than the current system in which they can be legitimately used as immediate 'punishment' for failing to comply with police commands.
$4 million? A pittance! Apparently a paid registration system costs ten times that.
Servers and hosting cost a few thousand to a few tens of thousands per year, full time developers and admins cost a less than $100k per year. All I can say is that whoever managed to walk off with the rest of the cash has got it made.
A fair point. I'd probably compare cocaine to alcohol rather than tobacco - something that turns up at parties and clubs, not something you take a quick break from work for at 11am - but I agree with what you're getting at, that significantly increased consumption would be problematic. On the other hand, I'd rather be in a club filled with people taking MDMA than one filled with people drinking alcohol.
As you said, it's a speculative subject on which we're going to disagree, but my opinion is that the consumption rate wouldn't jump vastly from where it stands now. I'll politely refuse most drugs if I'm offered them now, and that wouldn't change if they became legal; on the other hand, those people I know who do chose to take drugs seem to have little problem acquiring them. I'm inclined to think that most people would carry on along roughly the same lines, although probably after a brief surge due to the novelty of choice.
Even if they believe to the best of their knowledge that it was just names and emails, it does occur to me that if their system has been compromised in one way it is not entirely unreasonable to believe that the attacker managed more discreet access to more sensitive data.
Also vaguely interesting is the fact that I also got the message, having not had any contact with College Board for about five years. Not that I would expect my data to have magically disappeared from their systems, I suppose, but it's a vivid reminder of the long memory of the internet.
Come to think of it, that should probably be "any tax revenue greater than €y-z is a net win.", where €z is the cost of enforcement and incarceration due to the prohibition of drugs.
The GGP must be proposing lifting those restrictions for cocaine as well, otherwise there will be a black market anyway.
That's a very misleading false dichotomy. Of course there will be a black market for any restricted good, that doesn't mean that the only valid options are total prohibition or zero-tax unrestricted sale. Reducing the problem from a very expensive law enforcement issue on which no revenue is earned, to a customs issue on which potential profits for smuggling are much lower and tax is earned on the majority of sales, would be a major (and, as far as I can see, very beneficial) change.
Germany the yearly tax revenue from alcohol taxes is 3,5 billions EUR, but estimated 24,4 billions EUR are spent due to alcohol-related damage to the economy (medical services, accidents, insurances etc.). About 1 billion EUR is spent on alcohol advertisement each year. Similar situation is estimated for tobacco. So the two major legal drugs create more damage to the economy than the state could possibly repair through taxes. Why should it be different with cocaine?
Logically, tax revenues should not need to cover the total cost of treatment, only the cost of any potential increase in health problems after legalisation. There are drug related health costs now, after all, and the tax offset is zero. If illegal drug addiction currently costs €x in medical treatment, and would cost €x+y after legalisation, any tax revenue greater than €y is a net win.
Bearing in mind the fact that legalised drugs would be quality controlled, rather than cut with who knows what, and that there is (admittedly debatable) evidence that both consumption and addiction rates went down after the end of prohibition in the US, there is a very reasonable chance that 'y' would be a low or even negative number.
Let me be the first to say though, 9 tons of processed plant matter should not be worth $250 million. Isn't that $14k/lb? Who the heck is snorting it at that price?
It's been said a before, I know, but it's a direct result of the legal restrictions on the trade - they reduce supply and increase the risks of doing business, both of which increase the sale price. Of course, the profits to be had go (by definition) to outlaws, and those who already operate outside the law are more likely to protect their business by violent means, further increasing price by (literally) killing off competition, as well as creating the destabilising gang warfare as seen in Mexico.
If the manufacture and sale of drugs were a legitimate business, of course, then this revenue stream to organised crime would be dramatically curtailed, and the combination of increased tax revenue and reduced enforcement costs would more than account for any predicted increase in addiction treatment costs. The one thing I can't work out is why there is so little debate on the matter among those with the power to change it, despite repeated calls for reform from their scientific advisers. I'm not that surprised that they ignore the scientists, but I am surprised that they miss an opportunity to take money and power from the criminals and exploit it themselves.
They haven't banned the product, just the advertising. Not to imply this is a good decision, by any means, but a decision by the ASA is very different to an outright product ban.
It could happen, I guess, but it'd be a fairly odd thing to do. The average member of the public isn't going to see a nondescript metal box and say "Oh no, that looks like the design of a gun-type nuclear device", and anybody in a position to recognise the thing for what it might be (probably only the bomb disposal team) will be armed with Geiger counters. People would probably panic far more at seeing one of these on the street compared to the reaction that an accurate replica of a nuclear weapon would receive.
Having just consulted a map, it appears that one is 20 miles down the road from the other. It's quite possible that both are going to be covered by the rollout - the article is a little unclear, but seems to support this.
Maybe so, I find the newspaper's mocking edit to the newspaper's article to be wholly unprofessional, not to mention having a distinct overtone of the snide, slimy breed schoolyard bully about it:
A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)
Even if the blogger was totally fabricating these claims (seemingly unlikely, given the changes made to the article's presentation) there would be absolutely no call for any journalist to resort to petty mudslinging like this. If they feel they are in the right, wouldn't a personal reply explaining that have been far, far preferable?
That's arguable either way - it's certainly not a copyright issue, but plagiarism is a much broader term - but it's gone way beyond that since the newspaper have chosen to act like rude, unprofessional asshats.
They paraphrased this guy's findings, he contacted them and asked for attribution. Had they been reasonable people, they then had the option to say: "Of course, we've added a thank you and a link to the bottom of our article." or (in private, as a direct response to the blogger in question) "It is publicly available information; as such we don't feel that attribution is necessary or appropriate in this case, and therefore we will not be providing it.".
I don't doubt he would've complained if they'd chosen the latter, and I may even have agreed with him, but it would've been an issue with two reasonable points of view in play. What the newspaper actually chose to do was publicly add the following to the article: "A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)". All the evidence suggests that they are snide, rude, and childish - I'm far more concerned about that than about the technicalities of plagiarism.
Unfortunately the anti-nuclear lobby is milking the Fukushima problems for all they're worth, and it seems to be working quite well for them.
I know politicians are bound, to a lesser or greater extent, by public opinion, but I was still genuinely surprised to see someone with a doctorate in physical chemistry citing Fukushima as a reason to cut back on nuclear power. I assume there was more to it behind the scenes, but it's still a shame to see such unsound reasoning being given credibility.
European stations doing it seems to be more a matter of being hyper-empathetic to people that aren't actually going to be watching the broadcast.
I was thinking the same - maybe there's no harm in pre-emptively placating the segment of society who seem to enjoy finding things to be offended by, but it seems to me just another sign of the paranoia conjured by the word 'nuclear'. There hasn't been a 'nuclear disaster', there's been a terrible earthquake and tsunami, which killed thousands, and there's been a minor radiation leak which (as far as I am aware) has killed nobody.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little unclear, but the first paragraph of the article (as well as the summary) mentions "cellphones, social media and the Internet" - if they were denied access to all three (the second as a function of the last, of course) then I'm not surprised they felt cut off; if you don't happen to have memorised a large swathe of seemingly arbitrary numbers to punch in to a landline phone, you are cut off without tech.
Absolutely agreed - the tantrum sounds childish and absolutely unacceptable, but it'd be a rare 16 year old who would particularly want to be involved with a group of people well outside her age group who she more than likely feels herself to have little in common with. The lack of basic politeness sounds unfortunate, but I don't think that's the fault of the tech.
Even so, Google is not in any way implying that the autocompleted term is factually correct, only that it was a string of words searched for by other users. That they block certain terms could muddy the issue if it were done for reasons of accuracy, but it isn't, and thus it doesn't imply any endorsement of the statement.
The words appearing on the screen have more context than is being taken into account by the court; the 'fact' that Google presented - that many previous users had searched for the term "x is a fraud" - is provably true, whether or not the allegations of fraud are. I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't play it like that in court, actually - they tried to argue that they hadn't produced the content, rather than debating the facts implied by its appearance.
Obviously they should refrain from disparaging words and remarks in the auto-complete as they cannot possibly predict or verify if such words are libelous or slander against a person.
I find it surprising that you (and the judge) consider autocompleted text to be potentially libellous - as I mentioned in another post, Google's autocomplete function isn't saying (or even implying) that "x is a fraud" is a factual statement, it's saying that "x is a fraud" is a string of words being searched for regularly.
They make no judgement on the veracity, or even the coherence, of the sentence - they simply present it as something that people have been typing in to the search box. To me, that seems very, very different from Google making or publishing the statement in question.
Slander is slander, if you make a loophole for people who can wrap the slander into an algorithm...you make it legal
A reasonable point, but whether this is, in fact, slander is far from clear cut. Google's autocomplete function isn't saying (or even implying) that "x is a fraud" is a factual statement, it's saying that "x is a fraud" is a string of words being searched for regularly. That's a very significant difference, which seems to be going somewhat under the radar here.
You mean "laud".
No, actually, I don't.
applaud /plôd/ Verb
1. Show approval or praise by clapping: "the crowd whistled and applauded"; "his speech was loudly applauded".
2. Show strong approval of (a person or action); praise: "Jill applauded the decision".
The site is already running. They suggested $4million just for a year's upkeep on USAspending.gov - you can get rid of the developers right there, it's already put together and just needs the sysadmins to keep it ticking over, so that's $500k saved. Same for designers and graphic artists (and five designers plus a graphics guy seems very steep even for a new project, especially if you already have developers to turn the designer's pretty pictures into code), so another $480k saved. I'm not sure about the need for a $200k CEO on a relatively small government project with a fairly definite remit, but let's leave him there for the sake of argument.
Five staff collating data, two editing, and one or two sysadmins sounds more than adequate for a site which analyses and publishes publicly available data. Even with a nice office, secretary, manager, leased equipment costs, and so forth, the figure is little more than a third of what you suggested, and barely an eighth of what the department wants from their budget.
Unless you've got reasonable evidence to suggest that an already established site needs a large and expensive design and development team just for upkeep, I stand by my original comment that I'd be more than happy to be the one disappearing with the extra cash.
I think we might all be better off if the police just went back to the old, much more lethal methods of threat mitigation.
I pretty much agree, although probably for different reasons to you. As I mentioned in another post, most arguments in favour of the use of tasers revolve around the assumption that they're being used in place of guns - while that is sometimes true, it is absolutely no always the case. Even the worst officer is going to think twice about putting a bullet in someone, but the relative safety and moderate clinical detachment of using a taser invites them to be used much more freely.
If police restrictions treated the use of a taser as equivalent to the use of a gun, I would absolutely applaud them for making people safer. As it stands, their overall affect is to drastically increase the total number of people on the receiving end of a weapon of some kind, and that is not something that most people who support their use seem to take into account.
Only valid on the assumption that a gun would have been used in place of the Taser. Unless you're telling me that the police would shoot someone for refusing to promptly follow an order (while posing no direct threat), that's demonstrably not the case.
I don't actually object to tasers per se, but I do object to police guidelines which allow their use against people who pose no threat to either the officers or the public around them. Most of the pro-taser arguments revolve around their use as a defensive weapon, but their actual use is not limited strictly to defence. I know such policies would be imperfectly applied, but it would still be better than the current system in which they can be legitimately used as immediate 'punishment' for failing to comply with police commands.
$4 million? A pittance! Apparently a paid registration system costs ten times that.
Servers and hosting cost a few thousand to a few tens of thousands per year, full time developers and admins cost a less than $100k per year. All I can say is that whoever managed to walk off with the rest of the cash has got it made.
A fair point. I'd probably compare cocaine to alcohol rather than tobacco - something that turns up at parties and clubs, not something you take a quick break from work for at 11am - but I agree with what you're getting at, that significantly increased consumption would be problematic. On the other hand, I'd rather be in a club filled with people taking MDMA than one filled with people drinking alcohol.
As you said, it's a speculative subject on which we're going to disagree, but my opinion is that the consumption rate wouldn't jump vastly from where it stands now. I'll politely refuse most drugs if I'm offered them now, and that wouldn't change if they became legal; on the other hand, those people I know who do chose to take drugs seem to have little problem acquiring them. I'm inclined to think that most people would carry on along roughly the same lines, although probably after a brief surge due to the novelty of choice.
Even if they believe to the best of their knowledge that it was just names and emails, it does occur to me that if their system has been compromised in one way it is not entirely unreasonable to believe that the attacker managed more discreet access to more sensitive data.
Also vaguely interesting is the fact that I also got the message, having not had any contact with College Board for about five years. Not that I would expect my data to have magically disappeared from their systems, I suppose, but it's a vivid reminder of the long memory of the internet.
Come to think of it, that should probably be "any tax revenue greater than €y-z is a net win.", where €z is the cost of enforcement and incarceration due to the prohibition of drugs.
The GGP must be proposing lifting those restrictions for cocaine as well, otherwise there will be a black market anyway.
That's a very misleading false dichotomy. Of course there will be a black market for any restricted good, that doesn't mean that the only valid options are total prohibition or zero-tax unrestricted sale. Reducing the problem from a very expensive law enforcement issue on which no revenue is earned, to a customs issue on which potential profits for smuggling are much lower and tax is earned on the majority of sales, would be a major (and, as far as I can see, very beneficial) change.
Germany the yearly tax revenue from alcohol taxes is 3,5 billions EUR, but estimated 24,4 billions EUR are spent due to alcohol-related damage to the economy (medical services, accidents, insurances etc.). About 1 billion EUR is spent on alcohol advertisement each year. Similar situation is estimated for tobacco. So the two major legal drugs create more damage to the economy than the state could possibly repair through taxes. Why should it be different with cocaine?
Logically, tax revenues should not need to cover the total cost of treatment, only the cost of any potential increase in health problems after legalisation. There are drug related health costs now, after all, and the tax offset is zero. If illegal drug addiction currently costs €x in medical treatment, and would cost €x+y after legalisation, any tax revenue greater than €y is a net win.
Bearing in mind the fact that legalised drugs would be quality controlled, rather than cut with who knows what, and that there is (admittedly debatable) evidence that both consumption and addiction rates went down after the end of prohibition in the US, there is a very reasonable chance that 'y' would be a low or even negative number.
Let me be the first to say though, 9 tons of processed plant matter should not be worth $250 million. Isn't that $14k/lb? Who the heck is snorting it at that price?
It's been said a before, I know, but it's a direct result of the legal restrictions on the trade - they reduce supply and increase the risks of doing business, both of which increase the sale price. Of course, the profits to be had go (by definition) to outlaws, and those who already operate outside the law are more likely to protect their business by violent means, further increasing price by (literally) killing off competition, as well as creating the destabilising gang warfare as seen in Mexico.
If the manufacture and sale of drugs were a legitimate business, of course, then this revenue stream to organised crime would be dramatically curtailed, and the combination of increased tax revenue and reduced enforcement costs would more than account for any predicted increase in addiction treatment costs. The one thing I can't work out is why there is so little debate on the matter among those with the power to change it, despite repeated calls for reform from their scientific advisers. I'm not that surprised that they ignore the scientists, but I am surprised that they miss an opportunity to take money and power from the criminals and exploit it themselves.
They haven't banned the product, just the advertising. Not to imply this is a good decision, by any means, but a decision by the ASA is very different to an outright product ban.
It could happen, I guess, but it'd be a fairly odd thing to do. The average member of the public isn't going to see a nondescript metal box and say "Oh no, that looks like the design of a gun-type nuclear device", and anybody in a position to recognise the thing for what it might be (probably only the bomb disposal team) will be armed with Geiger counters. People would probably panic far more at seeing one of these on the street compared to the reaction that an accurate replica of a nuclear weapon would receive.
Call me when you get that Gbit wireless working.
Having just consulted a map, it appears that one is 20 miles down the road from the other. It's quite possible that both are going to be covered by the rollout - the article is a little unclear, but seems to support this.
Re-reading my post, it would appear that lack of sleep causes me fail English, but hopefully the point still makes it through.
Maybe so, I find the newspaper's mocking edit to the newspaper's article to be wholly unprofessional, not to mention having a distinct overtone of the snide, slimy breed schoolyard bully about it:
A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)
Even if the blogger was totally fabricating these claims (seemingly unlikely, given the changes made to the article's presentation) there would be absolutely no call for any journalist to resort to petty mudslinging like this. If they feel they are in the right, wouldn't a personal reply explaining that have been far, far preferable?
That's arguable either way - it's certainly not a copyright issue, but plagiarism is a much broader term - but it's gone way beyond that since the newspaper have chosen to act like rude, unprofessional asshats.
They paraphrased this guy's findings, he contacted them and asked for attribution. Had they been reasonable people, they then had the option to say: "Of course, we've added a thank you and a link to the bottom of our article." or (in private, as a direct response to the blogger in question) "It is publicly available information; as such we don't feel that attribution is necessary or appropriate in this case, and therefore we will not be providing it.".
I don't doubt he would've complained if they'd chosen the latter, and I may even have agreed with him, but it would've been an issue with two reasonable points of view in play. What the newspaper actually chose to do was publicly add the following to the article: "A quick domain name lookup...which is free and public information...will give you those details, which we acquired - you know, being a newspaper with research capabilities and all - of our own accord (although some are trying to claim this information as their own “discovery” as a way to promote their own personal website! But enough of that...)". All the evidence suggests that they are snide, rude, and childish - I'm far more concerned about that than about the technicalities of plagiarism.
It's a chance to publicly prove that you're smarter than the FBI's crypto team - what more motivation could you want?
Unfortunately the anti-nuclear lobby is milking the Fukushima problems for all they're worth, and it seems to be working quite well for them.
I know politicians are bound, to a lesser or greater extent, by public opinion, but I was still genuinely surprised to see someone with a doctorate in physical chemistry citing Fukushima as a reason to cut back on nuclear power. I assume there was more to it behind the scenes, but it's still a shame to see such unsound reasoning being given credibility.
European stations doing it seems to be more a matter of being hyper-empathetic to people that aren't actually going to be watching the broadcast.
I was thinking the same - maybe there's no harm in pre-emptively placating the segment of society who seem to enjoy finding things to be offended by, but it seems to me just another sign of the paranoia conjured by the word 'nuclear'. There hasn't been a 'nuclear disaster', there's been a terrible earthquake and tsunami, which killed thousands, and there's been a minor radiation leak which (as far as I am aware) has killed nobody.