It's not by definition the fastest information can travel. It's the fastest according to our current understanding, which might be wrong.. The OP confused a priori with a posteriori truth -- logical certainty with scientific confidence.

Susan Pinker's The Sexual Parodox refers to the observation that as women's rights improve the number of women in traditionally men's professions keeps rising and then goes into reverse, settling at a lower level than the peak (but far higher than in the society with poor women's rights). The effect seems to be tat a desire for "equality" means that women are pushed into jobs they don't want to do because they're assumed to be socialised to the point of being incapable of deciding for themselves (what Pinker calls the "infantilisation of women"). Eventually, women get enough liberty to resist that. So both sides have a measure of truth. Those concerned for women's rights are correct that there can be social factors excluding women from certain professions, but the opponents are right that the search for numerical equality can lead to an overshoot and press individual women into unsuitable jobs. The challenge is to find out which side of that line we're on.

Well, if it automatically sent a rude message to anybody who posted bitstrips and then automatically blocked them, it would save me some work. And there'd be no back and forth.

That's fine. You're welcome to stay in your bunker.

Interesting that you got on well with those with whom you shared a common [1] native language, and didn't with those you didn't, isn't it?

[1] Approximately.

Sure the US Government is obsessed with rule of law. Like most governments in most places and at all times (since "rule of law" took hold), it's obsessed with finding ways to get away with circumventing it.

Well, wouldn't want to make the condition worse, after all,,,

Basically, the lesson they should have learned from Fukushima is not to build reactors in areas prone to tsunamis.

Exactly. I clicked through a few of the questions, and it was one of the few online contexts I can think of where pretending to be a teenage female gaming geek wouldn't get me into trouble.

In the UK, that "virtual stripping" would be illegal.

As it was reported in the UK, there is nothing that these people can be charged with on the basis of their interactions with the software, but the police will be looking closely at those people. It probably means they will be considered to have reasonable grounds to go rooting around their hard drives and so on.

At least the story seems to have been reported accurately on slashdot. The UK media represented everybody who interacted with the software as being a pedophile, with the charity only being able to identify about 1000. Great. So now if a 10-year-old asks for help, anybody who tries to help must be evil. Oh well, so long H. sapiens, we've had a good run...

I suspect that was the OP's point. "Evidence" does not mean "proof". A profile is evidence -- very weak evidence, sure, a long way from proof, but it's still evidence.

Ok, I am not a lawyer, and I am not a Canadian, but as far as I can see there are a few different questions:

• Who (if anyone) has criminal liability
• Who can get sued?
• Who can get successfully sued? And
• Do you have a moral obligation independent of the law?

Where I am (the UK) criminal liability is likely to lie with the company that developed the product (or that sold it, if it was misrepresented). If they are selling safety-significant software, they should have appropriate processes in place to ensure the software is of sufficient quality and to ensure that developers are working to those processes,

For "Who can get sued", the answer is "almost anybody", and it can be financially ruining, but as far as I can see a customer who suffers harm is in the first instance likely to go after the company that sold the app and the company that developed the app -- the company would have trouble passing the responsibility down to the developer if they did not have such processes and if they did not make them sufficiently known to the developer. That might not stop them trying, though, if they're desperate to pass the buck.

For "Who can get successfully sued, that depends on local legislation and how the product is represented. It's probably not you, but as I said, I am not a lawyer.

For "moral obligation" I would say that you have an obligation to raise your concerns with your management, and whatever their response to be aware of, and as far as is in your power apply, the appropriate measures that should be applied to safety significant software -- if you can get hold of a copy of IEC61508 or local standards and guidelines it would be a big help.

They've started introducing LED street lights in my UK city too, and the light they give is far better than the old sodium lights. Even if the LEDs don't last as long as claimed, I understand they only have to last a couple of years for them to have paid back the higher cost of the luminaries.

Yes, well, if you're saying they just processed the plastic, the same could be said of the USA.