It's the same in the UK. I first became aware of it after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. He was the innocent electrician shot in 2005 as part of a terrorism panic. Every detail released by the police to justify the killing turned out to be a lie. Having paid attention since then I've come to realise it is standard practice.
Police behaviour in public inquiries (usually stonewalling and obfuscating) has been so bad that the government has just passed a law placing a "duty of candour" on the police and other civil servants, with criminal penalties for serious breaches.
That was less than a month ago so we'll see how it works.
Similar story with the infamous NYC case of Kitty Genovese in the mid 1960s, whom was sexually assaulted and murdered. The police claimed dozens of people heard and saw her screams, but nobody did anything. The truth was many people called the police, but nobody came. It was an essentially a coverup, but it did end up becoming a symbol of NYC’s moral decay. The narrative wasn’t officially challenged until many years later. (There is a recent is documentary out there where her brother digs into it all).
Duty of Candour is a lot stronger than perjury. You can obstruct an investigation in all kinds of ways without perjuring yourself (especially since the standard of evidence is quite high). Duty of Candour basically makes any kind of obstruction an offense.
Now that youtube and meta and tiktok choose what is put in front of you they are the publishers. But the law, passed for the early web, is stuck in the past.
Congratulations, you fell victim to the 'platform vs publisher' liability misinformation. It doesn't work like that and has never worked like that, nor should it except for the perfidious pushers of that misinformation.
A prioritization or recommendation algorithm does not count as publication. The work was already published by somebody else. Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
If a librarian put a book out on the front table with a "recommended reading" sign then yeah that seems fair for them to carry some liability if that book were actually libelous. And so it should be for recommended posts on sites like Youtube, Instagram, etc. A chronological or alphabetical index is a factual catalogue of information. A recommendation is you vouching for the material. Totally different.
> Do you blame a library card catalog for listing by subject, title, or chronology?
I would if someone reordered them based on some subjective "engagement" metric.
The card catalog is not a recommendation engine. YouTube's recommendations are... literally a recommendation engine. I think platforms should be legally liable for the things they promote via subjective choices. Pity the law isn't set up that way.
It worked like that before they changed the law and it can work like that again.
> The work was already published by somebody else.
This is just wrong. It is literally the platform that does the publishing. However, section 230 says that we won't treat the platform as the publisher.
This is not some logical necessity. It's just a law that we can change.
When Starmer announced digital ID he also talked about the regulation of social media. Sure, nobody has confirmed the plan, but the two things are clearly connected in the prime minister's thinking.
On the other hand, according to The Times yesterday the cabinet isn't happy with digital ID. It's as obvious to them as it is to everyone else that digital ID won't make a jot of difference to illegal working. And may well lose them votes.
If names must be unique you don't need to rename them because they are unique.
I'm not being facetious. It's a design choice. Many languages don't but Java and C# for example require modules to have globally unique fully qualified names.
Maybe this was the intention of the C++ committee. C++ does support hierarchical module names so Java style naming is possible. If everyone adopts it then name clashes won't be a problem.
"Everyone" is an awful lot of people. In practice, there will be conflicts and there must be a good plan for handling them. Editing third party source code to change names is not a good plan.
For example, without assuming wrong names on the part of third party developers, a project could compile multiple variants of the same library with the intent of segregating multiple copies of the same symbols (e.g. buried in other libraries as transitive dependencies, in different dynamic link libraries that are selected at runtime, in executable variants that are compiled collectively for convenience).
This would be manageable with explicitly controlled object and library file names, but ambiguous if linking is funneled through ambiguously named modules.
Global uniqueness works in Java. Modules are named with the organisation's DNS name in reverse (guaranteed unique) plus the module name or whatever additional structure you want. So Microsoft's evil module might be `com.microsoft.evil` or `com.microsoft.marketing.web.evil`.
But as you say, this doesn't solve the problem of including multiple versions of the same module.
> But as you say, this doesn't solve the problem of including multiple versions of the same module.
The solution that Java has for that is literally re-writing the bytecode of version A to be "in a different module" and re-writing the bytecode of the code that depends on version A to use the "new" module. That's not going to fly for C++ as I understand it, but maybe I'm missing something.
Java bytecode files are not only portable and well designed but specifically organized with tables of names (so that the bytecode proper can concisely refer to names by index).
The inconvenience of handling a binary format should be much smaller than the challenge of parsing C++ sources to find names.
The fine article has a carefully crafted set of media queries. They react to every increase in the zoom level by shrinking the text. I would have read the article but my tired old eyes were unable to squint hard enough. Thanks web designers!
Unfortunately, it's an arms race of cheating. Everyone else was the president of 5 school clubs, volunteered at a soup kitchen and animal shelter for 2 years, tutored disadvantaged kids for 4 hours a day, was a varsity athlete in 3 sports, played the trombone in band, and won 10 academic awards... so everyone has to say that in order to at least seem like an average candidate to college admissions.
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