Automated censoring of "toxic" content has lots of false positives? I'm shocked, shocked I say.
With any signal detection system the question of whether it is more vital to avoid Type I or Type II errors needs to be addressed. For example in criminal justice the consequences of falsely rebutting the presumption of innocence are so high that Blackstone was led to observe it was "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Just like any other commenter, I regard the comment I'm here writing to be of such value that it should be preserved, widely read and digested... but to be honest, on the internet talk is cheap, and it ain't gonna to stop the world turning were this comment to fall victim to AI spam filtering. Which is to say it's arguablybetter to avoid misses. A right to freedom of speech does not amount to a right to publish on any particular forum and framing this as kind of human rights issue is a little overwrought.
Now it would be a completely different question if comments were deliberately filtered based on the (un)popularity of the views expressed. That 'toxicity' would be used as a mask to filter legitimate viewpoints, rather than any hiccups in applying toxicity filters evenly across the ideological spectrum, is the more serious issue.
Re:Another bitcoin short-sell opportunity coming
on
The Silk Road Is Back
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· Score: 1
The value of money isn't attached to anything either. It's a collective fiction.
Poppycock. The value of money* is attached to a government's ability to raise taxes.
[*money, that is, in the sense of legal tender, i.e. to only exchange technology the state accepts in satisfaction of tax liability]
Have you actually read the IPCC working-group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change. I don't mean, a summary of it... Have you actually read the report?
I beg to differ. Even reading the Summary could be greatly beneficial for many of the victims of the disinformation campaign. The full WG1 report is a lot of reading. There's an overwhelming amount of science to get through and expecting non-specialists to tough it out is not entirely realistic. That, after all, is why the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) exists.
And the advantage is that on any area of science where you want to get your hands dirty, you can navigate from the SPM, into the the appropriate place of the Full Report proper and via the citations to the original publications in the scientific literature.
And on that point, don't waste your time right now reading the AR4 report. The AR5 report is due for release from the 27th of this month, starting with the SPM, from here.
And the SPM makes it so easy for non-specialists to get a handle on the science, it's simply unforgivable for anyone who presumes to venture an opinion on this issue not to have digested it.
What did you expect would happen? You expected the free-market to come in and provide books for a minor profit why?
Exactly! IF privatising the production of school books could lead to predictable negative outcomes, we ought express no surprise when those negative outcomes eventuate.
The difference is that now the cost of the books is being shifted to exactly the people that use them. The school children and their parents.
How do you factor in the free-rider effect of all those people who derive a benefit from living in an educated society without contributing. Left to its own devices, the market seems incapable of doing so.
... about how the "free-market" is evil because it wants to make a profit.
Clearly the market is driven by the profit motive of participants. And you would have to be blind to ignore the great social advantages to be gleaned from an exploitation of the profit motive via market mechanisms. Nor is it anything other than a platitude to observe that any intervention in market processes carries to risk, all too often realised, of slaying the goose who lays the proverbial golden eggs. However, it is an equal blindness to accept as a matter of faith, or of definition, that the outcomes of the free market will always produce the most "desirable" results --even on the basis of purely economic criteria, let alone on any criteria which may otherwise issue from human intelligence.
A free market cannot exist --or rather there is as yet no way available for it to exist --without the aid of the state (if only for the enforcement of proprietary rights and contractual obligations). Thus the basic question of market governance must be how much intervention is required. And this carries with it the corollary question: will that intervention be economically efficacious ( i.e. all to often "obvious" interventions negate the very outcome their authors wished to bring about).
Thus most governments make provision for the creation of corporations, because of the clear advantages the corporate form bestows on any economy where this intervention in the free market is tolerated. Indeed it would scarcely be possible even to conceive of the contemporary world without the contribution of the modern limited liability corporation (a creature of state, once again harnessing the profit motive of individuals for the greater good).
Arguably, the privatisation of school book production, in the naive belief that the private sector could more efficiently (read cheaply), do what the government printer was then engaged in, is a failure to anticipate how involving the market in educational policy would pan out. Ironically (in the sense of irony of fate), privatisation in the example turned out to be a poorly planed 'intervention.'
Sounds like it is time for the government to step in and break it up in smaller parts then. That should encourage some competition.
Except that in Australia it is Murdoch who generally gets to decide who the government is. HINT: If your policy is "to break it up into smaller units" you almost invariably loose government.
Rudd might just scrape in before the Tele & friends has had enough time to throw sufficient mud. Though they are throwing it by the bucket-load right now, it still looks pretty tight at the moment. It would be a bad loss for Murdoch should he fail to get his man in power this time round, so News Ltd will be at it no holds barred. Expect a propaganda campaign not seen since... oops, almost Godwineed myself!
Change: they reversed the direction of position, which reversal, for better or worse (worse imho) we adopted. The Brahmic number system starts with cattle-grid (except horizontal) numbering, ie . 1 is one line, 2 is two lines, 3 is 3 lines, 4 is two lines crossed. The Arabic system gave each of these numbers an individual symbol which convention (albeit with different symbols) we still use (as incidentally do modern Indian numeral systems).
Oh and I meant to write, the point of the post was not to claim Arabic invention ex nihilio of these disciplines, but to address the ignorant notion implied by the GP, that for the past 2000 (ahem..) years, Islamic culture has been barbaric in comparison to that of Europe.
These achievements where not made in a vacuum Algebra for example being a development on earlier Greek and possibly Chinese work.
Of course... human knowledge always progresses by out standing on the shoulders of earlier generations. And as regards Algebra and number theory, my understanding that it is Indian, even more than Greek mathematicians, who influenced Arabic scholars.
[T]he whole history of the "Islamic golden age" is more properly titled the Arabic golden age...
... and an example of exactly how bad fanatics are for science and progress.
Well in any number of ways. Not only do we have Christian mobs skinning Hypatia, but it has been argued [citation needed] that one of the effects of the crusades was to shift the Islamic world from a relatively tolerant and free-thinking culture to one of defensive belligerence and fundamentalism. And in turn the adoption of this defensive posture re-inscribes the danger fanaticism poses to the growth of human knowledge.
Well, we lifted it indirectly from the Arabs, as Arabic numbers came from the Western Muslims in Spain.
Yes, I should have written we lifted them from the Arabic rather than the Arabs. Though I thought that Fibonacci learnt the numeral system in Algiers (still Berbers not Arabs) rather than in Spain. Nor was Fibonacci necessarily the first to attempt to import them into Europe. But yes, still Western-Arabic.
The numbers used by actual Arabs look quite different.
I'm pretty sure the numerals used by Fibonacci looked a tad different from those we use today as well. At least the 1 and 9 in modern Arabic numerals look similar:), none of the Brahmi numerals bear any resemblance to ours.
Not to argue that the Crusades did not contribute (they clearly did), but your list omits the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which is generally reckoned to be the end of the Arabic Golden Age.
Also a few entries on your list --e.g. the Wendish, Northern and Albigensian Crusades --probably had little influence on the Middle East.
Except, of course, that the name is somewhat of a misnomer; since they actually come from India, and are known as "Hindu numbers" in the middle east.
Except of course we lifted it directly from the Arabs (who use a system developed from Hindu numerals) as evidenced by the fact that we still write our numbers backward. (Ie. from small to large in Arabic right to left direction.) Which is the opposite of how we [used] to speak our numbers, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen... four'n'twenty
I've just been highlighting this fact in teaching why *nix, r, w, x run 4, 2, 1 instead of the other way round (the first 8 binary numbers thus forming a truth table).
Who are the anarchists defending, when they kill innocent lives?
Well Earth First's (who might reasonably be characterised as eco-anarchists) slogan used to be "no compromise in defence of the Earth," so that might give you a clue.
The Bible was not originally written in English and all Englsh translations should be take with a grain of salt.
Translation in an absolute sense is of course not possible, especially between two languages as different as English and Classical Hebrew. People often naively assume that two separate words in Hebrew will isomorphically map to two distinct English words, eg, HRG to kill and RTsCh to murder. It isn't that easy.
It's "thou shalt not MURDER"
Not necessarily, no. Had you bothered actually to read the page you cite all the way to the end you would have found the author arguing something very different, namely: tempting though it might be to translate RTsCh as 'murder'...
As usual careful study teaches us that what initially appeared ridiculously obvious is really much more complex than it seemed at first glance.
Indeed...
[W]e may appreciate that the translation "thou shalt not kill" was not the result of simple ignorance on the side of Jerome or the King James English translators. Rather, it reflects their legitimate determination to reflect accurately the broader range of meanings of the Hebrew root.
The real problem here, IMHO, is a desire to shoehorn the meaning of Hebrew words into a translation that will conveniently eliminate the apparent logical inconsistencies as to when the Tanakh proscribes and prescribes killing. But the Bible is not book, it's a library (and even each 'book' of the OT is not necessarily a book). Searching for logical consistency across an entire library is likely to be a thankless endeavour.
You're using the common definition, not the legal one.
Very funny, you tell a lawyer (albeit a non-practitioner) he is using the common defn and not the legal one and then you quote from an online dictionary. Now it may be the legal defn in the US, I would not want to venture an opinion.
How do you explain that at common law truth was an irrelevance in criminal libel? Moreover in my jurisdiction, NSW, until 2006, truth by itself was no defence to defamation. More to the point, the UK [sic] 1952 Act and the proposed Bill, are explicit about justification and truth respectively being defences.
The distinction between a tort (and also a crime) and a defence may seem like a fine one, but it relates to the mistake the "puppy-huffing kiddy-fiddler" made in observing that "all statements are presumed false."
My understanding is this: The onus of proof lies upon a plaintiff to make out that the elements of defamation, namely that the defendant published defamatory imputations. While the courts (and we here rely on British as well as Australian precedent) have come up with a number of tests, perhaps the most accepted is that the imputation would lower the estimation of plaintiff in the eyes of a reasonable member of the community, or some similar formulation.
It is open to the defendant to raise a defence. Because they are the party raising it the affirmanti principle applies, i.e. the onus of proof is on the defendant to establish the substantial truth of the statements. Hence it appears to the legally naive that statements are presumed false. As an analytical type you will perceive the difficulty inherent in the notion of a "defence of justification/truth" existing and the necessity of a plaintiff to establish untruth as an element of defamation, no?
The current Bill makes this situation clear:
2 Truth (1) It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained is substantially true.
My emphasis
If it merely meant "saying bad things" it would also include mere insults and vulgar abuse, which are not legally defamatory
I never said it meant "saying bad things". Simply put it means injuring the reputation of a natural person. Should you care for a real dictionary defn, (as opposed to my simplified legal one), the OED has "the action of defaming, or attacking any one's good name." If insults and vulgar abuse sufficiently damages an individual's reputation then they are defamatory of course.
As to why Scotland has a separate system, your guess is as good as mine.
That was not my question. My question was what distinguishes a UK General Public Act from either an Act of the Scottish Parliament or an Act of the English Parliament?
Not to take issue with much of what you wrote, but...
by definition a defamatory statement is untrue
No, by definition a defamatory statement is one which injures the reputation of a natural person. Justification is a defence.
Four, there's no such thing as "UK law"; Scotland has a different system to England and Wales.
Genuine question: Can you explain the difference between the various categories of primary legislation, such as UK Public General Acts, under which classification both the 1952 and 1966 Defamation Acts are found; UK Local Acts; Acts of the Scottish Parliament; Acts of the English Parliament; Acts of the Old Irish Parliament; &c.? Non-UK/English/Scottish/Welsh lawyers could be forgiven for some confusion.
The point is that the law is going to recognise that making a reasonable statement based on proper scientific data is demonstrably true, and as such cannot be libel.
The better view is that it makes "scientific or academic journal[s]" (one presumes bona fide journals, though the Bill doesn't make it clear how that might be assessed.) a privileged forum, much as courts and parliament already are.
The internationally recognised process of peer review will be considered the arbiter of "proper scientific data" (my phrase). It leaves the door open for cases involving poorly collected data
By s7(5), a "fair and accurate copy of, extract from or summary" of the article is also privileged (again as is currently the case for court and parliamentary reporting).
The problem, which you point to is that it somewhat misconstrues the role of peer review to understand it as a guarantee of finality (ie. the truth of the publication). Rather peer review is a threshold, a seat at the table of the expert debate. We, the ordinary "(wo)men in the street," need to put some time between publication and acceptance of the conclusions in order to allow the expert community to render their judgement.
Not in all times and in all jurisdictions! Though I understand that current UK law 'justification' (truth) is already a complete defence without any additional requirement such as 'public interest;' and that s2 of the present Bill is merely reformulating (and renaming) rather than introducing a truth only defence. But them INAUKL, but an Australian one.
Until 2006 in a number of states in Australia, the older situation persisted, namely truth alone was not a defence to defamation. You had to show truth+X (where X is one of several criteria, usually 'public interest'), and since much of the news media published nationwide, this situation kept them somewhat in check. Then in 2006 all the states adopted a uniform code which created a Truth Only defence. A terrible mistake IMHO. But then I'm a judicial conservative, I realise most people disagree (as did I when I first learnt that truth was not an absolute defence).
... blame the ACMA for allocating that band for analog television signals.
The things your learn when you post wrong stuff on slashdot. Obviously I allowed my recent altercation with Telstra, whom I'm "forced" to use because of connectivity, to cloud my judgement. I'll just take my tin-foil hat off now.
Slashdot Mirror
Automated censoring of "toxic" content has lots of false positives? I'm shocked, shocked I say.
With any signal detection system the question of whether it is more vital to avoid Type I or Type II errors needs to be addressed. For example in criminal justice the consequences of falsely rebutting the presumption of innocence are so high that Blackstone was led to observe it was "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Just like any other commenter, I regard the comment I'm here writing to be of such value that it should be preserved, widely read and digested... but to be honest, on the internet talk is cheap, and it ain't gonna to stop the world turning were this comment to fall victim to AI spam filtering. Which is to say it's arguably better to avoid misses. A right to freedom of speech does not amount to a right to publish on any particular forum and framing this as kind of human rights issue is a little overwrought.
Now it would be a completely different question if comments were deliberately filtered based on the (un)popularity of the views expressed. That 'toxicity' would be used as a mask to filter legitimate viewpoints, rather than any hiccups in applying toxicity filters evenly across the ideological spectrum, is the more serious issue.
The value of money isn't attached to anything either. It's a collective fiction.
Poppycock. The value of money* is attached to a government's ability to raise taxes.
[*money, that is, in the sense of legal tender, i.e. to only exchange technology the state accepts in satisfaction of tax liability]
Have you actually read the IPCC working-group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change. I don't mean, a summary of it ... Have you actually read the report?
I beg to differ. Even reading the Summary could be greatly beneficial for many of the victims of the disinformation campaign. The full WG1 report is a lot of reading. There's an overwhelming amount of science to get through and expecting non-specialists to tough it out is not entirely realistic. That, after all, is why the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) exists.
And the advantage is that on any area of science where you want to get your hands dirty, you can navigate from the SPM, into the the appropriate place of the Full Report proper and via the citations to the original publications in the scientific literature.
And on that point, don't waste your time right now reading the AR4 report. The AR5 report is due for release from the 27th of this month, starting with the SPM, from here.
And the SPM makes it so easy for non-specialists to get a handle on the science, it's simply unforgivable for anyone who presumes to venture an opinion on this issue not to have digested it.
Can't see any problem with carbon based bricks. They'll burn nicely.
Chemistry not a strong point?
Good luck burning C02, (or the carbonates of which these bricks are most likely composed) dude!
Perhaps they should bring them to Canberra. With the amount of CH4 emissions released there, especially now during election time ...
If you're hungry, you're on a fad diet. ... When you're hungry, eat. When you're not hungry, stop eating. It's that simple
So I have to go an on fad diet before I'm ever allowed to eat?! Wow, I'm definitely not buying your book!
What did you expect would happen? You expected the free-market to come in and provide books for a minor profit why?
Exactly! IF privatising the production of school books could lead to predictable negative outcomes, we ought express no surprise when those negative outcomes eventuate.
The difference is that now the cost of the books is being shifted to exactly the people that use them. The school children and their parents.
How do you factor in the free-rider effect of all those people who derive a benefit from living in an educated society without contributing. Left to its own devices, the market seems incapable of doing so.
Clearly the market is driven by the profit motive of participants. And you would have to be blind to ignore the great social advantages to be gleaned from an exploitation of the profit motive via market mechanisms. Nor is it anything other than a platitude to observe that any intervention in market processes carries to risk, all too often realised, of slaying the goose who lays the proverbial golden eggs. However, it is an equal blindness to accept as a matter of faith, or of definition, that the outcomes of the free market will always produce the most "desirable" results --even on the basis of purely economic criteria, let alone on any criteria which may otherwise issue from human intelligence.
A free market cannot exist --or rather there is as yet no way available for it to exist --without the aid of the state (if only for the enforcement of proprietary rights and contractual obligations). Thus the basic question of market governance must be how much intervention is required. And this carries with it the corollary question: will that intervention be economically efficacious ( i.e. all to often "obvious" interventions negate the very outcome their authors wished to bring about).
Thus most governments make provision for the creation of corporations, because of the clear advantages the corporate form bestows on any economy where this intervention in the free market is tolerated. Indeed it would scarcely be possible even to conceive of the contemporary world without the contribution of the modern limited liability corporation (a creature of state, once again harnessing the profit motive of individuals for the greater good).
Arguably, the privatisation of school book production, in the naive belief that the private sector could more efficiently (read cheaply), do what the government printer was then engaged in, is a failure to anticipate how involving the market in educational policy would pan out. Ironically (in the sense of irony of fate), privatisation in the example turned out to be a poorly planed 'intervention.'
Sounds like it is time for the government to step in and break it up in smaller parts then. That should encourage some competition.
Except that in Australia it is Murdoch who generally gets to decide who the government is. HINT: If your policy is "to break it up into smaller units" you almost invariably loose government.
Rudd might just scrape in before the Tele & friends has had enough time to throw sufficient mud. Though they are throwing it by the bucket-load right now, it still looks pretty tight at the moment. It would be a bad loss for Murdoch should he fail to get his man in power this time round, so News Ltd will be at it no holds barred. Expect a propaganda campaign not seen since ... oops, almost Godwineed myself!
I agree that they didn't enhance the number system.
Are you seriously saying that you never use numbers smaller that 1?
Such as?
Change: they reversed the direction of position, which reversal, for better or worse (worse imho) we adopted. The Brahmic number system starts with cattle-grid (except horizontal) numbering, ie . 1 is one line, 2 is two lines, 3 is 3 lines, 4 is two lines crossed. The Arabic system gave each of these numbers an individual symbol which convention (albeit with different symbols) we still use (as incidentally do modern Indian numeral systems).
Enhance: The decimal point.
The Arabs didn't change or enhance anything that the Indians did ...
Sure they did.
Oh and I meant to write, the point of the post was not to claim Arabic invention ex nihilio of these disciplines, but to address the ignorant notion implied by the GP, that for the past 2000 (ahem ..) years, Islamic culture has been barbaric in comparison to that of Europe.
These achievements where not made in a vacuum Algebra for example being a development on earlier Greek and possibly Chinese work.
Of course ... human knowledge always progresses by out standing on the shoulders of earlier generations. And as regards Algebra and number theory, my understanding that it is Indian, even more than Greek mathematicians, who influenced Arabic scholars.
[T]he whole history of the "Islamic golden age" is more properly titled the Arabic golden age ...
Which term I employed elsewhere.
Well in any number of ways. Not only do we have Christian mobs skinning Hypatia, but it has been argued [citation needed] that one of the effects of the crusades was to shift the Islamic world from a relatively tolerant and free-thinking culture to one of defensive belligerence and fundamentalism. And in turn the adoption of this defensive posture re-inscribes the danger fanaticism poses to the growth of human knowledge.
Well, we lifted it indirectly from the Arabs, as Arabic numbers came from the Western Muslims in Spain.
Yes, I should have written we lifted them from the Arabic rather than the Arabs. Though I thought that Fibonacci learnt the numeral system in Algiers (still Berbers not Arabs) rather than in Spain. Nor was Fibonacci necessarily the first to attempt to import them into Europe. But yes, still Western-Arabic.
The numbers used by actual Arabs look quite different.
I'm pretty sure the numerals used by Fibonacci looked a tad different from those we use today as well. At least the 1 and 9 in modern Arabic numerals look similar :), none of the Brahmi numerals bear any resemblance to ours.
Not to argue that the Crusades did not contribute (they clearly did), but your list omits the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258, which is generally reckoned to be the end of the Arabic Golden Age.
Also a few entries on your list --e.g. the Wendish, Northern and Albigensian Crusades --probably had little influence on the Middle East.
Except, of course, that the name is somewhat of a misnomer; since they actually come from India, and are known as "Hindu numbers" in the middle east.
Except of course we lifted it directly from the Arabs (who use a system developed from Hindu numerals) as evidenced by the fact that we still write our numbers backward. (Ie. from small to large in Arabic right to left direction.) Which is the opposite of how we [used] to speak our numbers, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen ... four'n'twenty
I've just been highlighting this fact in teaching why *nix, r, w, x run 4, 2, 1 instead of the other way round (the first 8 binary numbers thus forming a truth table).
Please come up with an innovation that is less the MM [ftfy] years old please.
Just two off the top of my head for which we still use names derived from the Arabic, Chemistry and Algebra. There are plenty more of course.
Who are the anarchists defending, when they kill innocent lives?
Well Earth First's (who might reasonably be characterised as eco-anarchists) slogan used to be "no compromise in defence of the Earth," so that might give you a clue.
The Bible was not originally written in English and all Englsh translations should be take with a grain of salt.
Translation in an absolute sense is of course not possible, especially between two languages as different as English and Classical Hebrew. People often naively assume that two separate words in Hebrew will isomorphically map to two distinct English words, eg, HRG to kill and RTsCh to murder. It isn't that easy.
It's "thou shalt not MURDER"
Not necessarily, no. Had you bothered actually to read the page you cite all the way to the end you would have found the author arguing something very different, namely: tempting though it might be to translate RTsCh as 'murder' ...
As usual careful study teaches us that what initially appeared ridiculously obvious is really much more complex than it seemed at first glance.
Indeed ...
[W]e may appreciate that the translation "thou shalt not kill" was not the result of simple ignorance on the side of Jerome or the King James English translators. Rather, it reflects their legitimate determination to reflect accurately the broader range of meanings of the Hebrew root.
The real problem here, IMHO, is a desire to shoehorn the meaning of Hebrew words into a translation that will conveniently eliminate the apparent logical inconsistencies as to when the Tanakh proscribes and prescribes killing. But the Bible is not book, it's a library (and even each 'book' of the OT is not necessarily a book). Searching for logical consistency across an entire library is likely to be a thankless endeavour.
You're using the common definition, not the legal one.
Very funny, you tell a lawyer (albeit a non-practitioner) he is using the common defn and not the legal one and then you quote from an online dictionary. Now it may be the legal defn in the US, I would not want to venture an opinion.
How do you explain that at common law truth was an irrelevance in criminal libel? Moreover in my jurisdiction, NSW, until 2006, truth by itself was no defence to defamation. More to the point, the UK [sic] 1952 Act and the proposed Bill, are explicit about justification and truth respectively being defences.
The distinction between a tort (and also a crime) and a defence may seem like a fine one, but it relates to the mistake the "puppy-huffing kiddy-fiddler" made in observing that "all statements are presumed false."
My understanding is this: The onus of proof lies upon a plaintiff to make out that the elements of defamation, namely that the defendant published defamatory imputations. While the courts (and we here rely on British as well as Australian precedent) have come up with a number of tests, perhaps the most accepted is that the imputation would lower the estimation of plaintiff in the eyes of a reasonable member of the community, or some similar formulation.
It is open to the defendant to raise a defence. Because they are the party raising it the affirmanti principle applies, i.e. the onus of proof is on the defendant to establish the substantial truth of the statements. Hence it appears to the legally naive that statements are presumed false. As an analytical type you will perceive the difficulty inherent in the notion of a "defence of justification/truth" existing and the necessity of a plaintiff to establish untruth as an element of defamation, no?
The current Bill makes this situation clear:
2 Truth
(1) It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained is substantially true.
My emphasis
If it merely meant "saying bad things" it would also include mere insults and vulgar abuse, which are not legally defamatory
I never said it meant "saying bad things". Simply put it means injuring the reputation of a natural person. Should you care for a real dictionary defn, (as opposed to my simplified legal one), the OED has "the action of defaming, or attacking any one's good name." If insults and vulgar abuse sufficiently damages an individual's reputation then they are defamatory of course.
As to why Scotland has a separate system, your guess is as good as mine.
That was not my question. My question was what distinguishes a UK General Public Act from either an Act of the Scottish Parliament or an Act of the English Parliament?
Not to take issue with much of what you wrote, but ...
by definition a defamatory statement is untrue
No, by definition a defamatory statement is one which injures the reputation of a natural person. Justification is a defence.
Four, there's no such thing as "UK law"; Scotland has a different system to England and Wales.
Genuine question: Can you explain the difference between the various categories of primary legislation, such as UK Public General Acts, under which classification both the 1952 and 1966 Defamation Acts are found; UK Local Acts; Acts of the Scottish Parliament; Acts of the English Parliament; Acts of the Old Irish Parliament; &c.? Non-UK/English/Scottish/Welsh lawyers could be forgiven for some confusion.
The point is that the law is going to recognise that making a reasonable statement based on proper scientific data is demonstrably true, and as such cannot be libel.
The better view is that it makes "scientific or academic journal[s]" (one presumes bona fide journals, though the Bill doesn't make it clear how that might be assessed.) a privileged forum, much as courts and parliament already are.
The internationally recognised process of peer review will be considered the arbiter of "proper scientific data" (my phrase). It leaves the door open for cases involving poorly collected data
By s7(5), a "fair and accurate copy of, extract from or summary" of the article is also privileged (again as is currently the case for court and parliamentary reporting).
The problem, which you point to is that it somewhat misconstrues the role of peer review to understand it as a guarantee of finality (ie. the truth of the publication). Rather peer review is a threshold, a seat at the table of the expert debate. We, the ordinary "(wo)men in the street," need to put some time between publication and acceptance of the conclusions in order to allow the expert community to render their judgement.
The truth is an automatic defense against libel.
Not in all times and in all jurisdictions! Though I understand that current UK law 'justification' (truth) is already a complete defence without any additional requirement such as 'public interest;' and that s2 of the present Bill is merely reformulating (and renaming) rather than introducing a truth only defence. But them INAUKL, but an Australian one.
Until 2006 in a number of states in Australia, the older situation persisted, namely truth alone was not a defence to defamation. You had to show truth+X (where X is one of several criteria, usually 'public interest'), and since much of the news media published nationwide, this situation kept them somewhat in check. Then in 2006 all the states adopted a uniform code which created a Truth Only defence. A terrible mistake IMHO. But then I'm a judicial conservative, I realise most people disagree (as did I when I first learnt that truth was not an absolute defence).
The things your learn when you post wrong stuff on slashdot. Obviously I allowed my recent altercation with Telstra, whom I'm "forced" to use because of connectivity, to cloud my judgement. I'll just take my tin-foil hat off now.
Apple shouldn't be advertising 4G in Australia if it can't deliver 4G to Australia. It's entirely deceptive.
That's what I said.
As far as the "rest of the world," using something other than 1800, I stand corrected. My bad.