Calling me names doesn't negate my arguments or make yours any stronger.

On your first point, while yelling "Everyone kill that guy" might not make everyone kill that guy, offering a substantial reward for doing so might. This is why crimes based on incitement and conspiracy exist.

On your second point, I don't see what alternative hypotheses about a particular scientific theory have to do with unqualified subjective opinions expressed in on-line comments. No-one is suggesting that scientists can't propose alternative theories about how the universe works, or for that matter that censorship is generally a good thing, so I don't know why you keep responding as if they are.

You did actually read the article, right? The entire point here is that misleading speech can in practice convey unwarranted credibility and thus cause harm to those who wrongly believe what is said.

I honestly have no idea where you got that from. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the need to prevent political operatives and corporate PR departments from misleadingly claiming to hold the same peer-approved credentials as real scientists and engineers and doctors is one of the most important reasons I hold the view I do on this subject.

In my country, for example, a drugs company may not lawfully run a TV ad that makes false claims about the effectiveness of its product. In fact, for drugs that require prescription by a qualified doctor, they aren't allowed to advertise them to the general public at all.

If you think this situation is broken and commercial drugs companies should instead be able to advertise to whomever they wish with as misleading a presentation as they wish, presumably this is because we can't trust doctors to give competent professional advice to their patients. I wonder, are you also then in favour of anyone being able to buy any approved drug without a doctor prescribing it based on a proper examination of the patient? For that matter, do you think we should do away with regulatory authorities for things like drugs or food standards altogether, so anyone can sell anything they want based on whatever claims they want to make?

I'm not sure I'd want to live in the world you'd create by undermining any level of professional qualification and expert status. In fact, it seems unlikely that most of us would live for very long, since one of the first things that would happen would be the complete collapse of modern medical practice as things like antibiotics rapidly became useless -- another background trend where the US is currently doing far more harm than most places in the developed world, by the way, but in this case with disturbing long term consequences for the entire human race.

As I don't live in the US, the obsession with the First Amendment in certain parts of the US population isn't really my problem, nor that of anyone else where I live.

An interesting claim. If speech is not dangerous, then why is it so important to you that freedom of speech be protected?

I don't know how to respond to such a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is. The scientific method is based on hypothesis, experimentation and observable results. It is the very essence of science that a hypothesis is only as valuable as the evidence that supports it, that a hypothesis must be falsifiable so that it can be tested, and that no matter how strong the evidence supporting a given hypothesis may be the hypothesis still falls if it is subsequently contradicted by new data. There is no such thing as an absolute fact in science, nor any room for subjective personal opinions. Axioms are the realm of mathematics, not science, and all kinds of things start going wrong when non-scientists start twisting real science to support their own preferred outcomes.

I think both you and the poster I originally replied to have missed the point here. The issue originally raised was that claiming an objectively false qualification when commenting on-line appears to convey a degree of credibility that is unwarranted.

I am not arguing against any forms of protected speech or in favour of arbitrary censorship. I didn't raise issues of fairness doctrines and media bias. These are, as far as I can see, completely unrelated to the discussion everyone else here is having.

I am just arguing that absolute freedom of speech should not and can not override all other rights, freedoms and responsibilities, and that as an example, there is no need to protect malicious and objectively untrue speech that has harmful consequences, as may well be the case when someone claims an unjustified qualification and uses the perceived credibility it grants to then say things that will cause harm to others.

Yes, regulatory capture is a Bad Thing. It often happens when you let politicians and the corporate interests that sponsor them dictate the terms of the debate rather than subject matter experts. That makes it an excellent argument for why subject matter experts must be free to say they are properly qualified and politicians must not be free to claim the same level of qualification when they have not earned it.

No, they aren't. That's the point. Some fields are sufficiently complicated that a normal person with no specialist training will not have sufficient skill and expertise to make their own informed judgements and will require expert advice to help them.

This doesn't mean those people are stupid. It doesn't mean they can't understand when the relevant issues are explained to them. But lawyers spend a professional lifetime studying the law, often only a relatively small part of it. Accountants have a full-time job keeping up with the rules and regulations for completing company financial statements and tax returns and so on. Doctors, at least in my country, spend years studying before they can practise professionally at all, and then years more in one of the few industries that still operates something like the old apprentice-journeyman-master model of close personal training, before they reach the point of making completely independent determinations about a patient's condition and the required treatment. No one person can possibly be an expert on all of these fields.

The rest of the first world called and asked for their money back.

That's the rest of the first world where special interest groups are way, way less influential than they are in the United States, in case you wondered which one I meant.

You maliciously accuse someone of a serious crime, say rape or child abuse, that they did not commit. They are found not guilty in court, yet still suffer irreparable damage to their personal relationships and professional career as a result of the allegations and the costs and distress caused by the resulting proceedings.

I don't think your freedom to tell lies about someone else and consequently destroy their life outweighs their right not to be defamed.

Are you suggesting that if you walked into a public place and seriously told a security guard that you were carrying a bomb and intended to blow it up, nothing would happen?

Personally, I don't think that's a very good idea. The consequences of just making that claim would cause significant harm to a lot of people, and I have no problem with the law prohibiting it.

(Of course you can take this idea too far, as we've seen in the UK in recent years when absurd legal cases have been brought against people who made "threats" that obviously weren't intended seriously. And then you get the argument about what "obvious" means and how security people can't have any sense of humour or indeed any other form of common sense in these matters. But this isn't the kind of grey area situation I'm talking about here.)

Yes, I am, because I find the idea that absolute freedom of speech does or should trump all other rights, freedoms and responsibilities to be dangerous, both in principle and in practice.

It is also contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law just about everywhere. There is literally no country on the planet -- including the United States of America -- where you can say whatever you want, regardless of the truth of it or the damage it may cause, and be immune to any consequences in law. Life just doesn't work that way, because in reality words are very powerful things, and any such law would therefore be futile.

It is important to protect speech under some circumstances. For example, it is necessary to the successful operation of any civilised society that anyone is free to express their honestly held belief on a matter of political policy, no matter how unpopular it may be, without fear of legal sanction. Indeed, one of the very few situations here in the UK where essentially absolute freedom of speech does apply is when Members of Parliament say something in the House.

However, that example is also a good demonstration of the danger of placing freedom of speech above other laws. We have an election coming up, and we've recently seen some very dubious allegations made against political figures from rival parties under cover of parliamentary privilege. Naturally, those allegations go straight into the headlines regardless of any truth or otherwise they may have, potentially affecting how people will vote at the election. The most the alleged tax dodgers can personally do in return is challenge politicians to repeat their claims outside of Parliament, where they would be subject to the same defamation laws as anyone else, but funnily enough you don't see a lot of headlines when a politician does not stand by their earlier claims in that way.

In any case, protecting intentional falsehoods is a very dubious path to follow. Why should deliberately misleading someone and consequently causing them harm not be subject to penalty and compensation in law like any other type of deliberate harm? What moral, ethical or other practical justification can there be for protecting someone who, for example, claims to be a doctor and writes a trusting patient a false prescription for a drug that then kills them?

I understand the point you're trying to make, but in reality, the danger of people giving advice that actually matters when they are not qualified to do so and other people are likely to be harmed as a result is exactly why professions such as law, accountancy, engineering and medical practice are regulated by law in many places, and claiming to be qualified in these professions when you are not is then against the law.

I came across Prelude to Axanar recently. It's original material, it's crowd-funded, it seems quite faithful to the traditional Trek mythos, it has a cast of well-known sci-fi actors (including several actual Trek veterans) and it has a crew with some serious credentials between them as well. If you're looking for new Trek ideas from outside JJ world, you might like to check it out. It looks like although this was made in a retrospective/documentary style, it's intended to set the scene for a major feature to come later that would be filmed from a real time perspective as most Trek is.

I'm late to the party, but since it was me you asked, my answer would have been exactly what the other two responders said: early updates that fix glitches (ask anyone who uses Reddit how long it takes to get RES updates on Firefox these days) and occasionally something proprietary for my/my business's own purposes.

More generally, I'm getting awfully bored with browsers and plug-ins throwing constant warnings and sometimes outright blocked functionality in the way of doing the work I need to do every day, all in the name of security and stopping me from being exposed to vulnerabilities that never actually seem to have caused me problems in the first place. Google seem to have backtracked on removing NPAPI from Chrome (and therefore completely blocking various plug-ins like Silverlight and Java even for those who do still have legitimate uses for them). Let's hope Mozilla grow a pair and admit they called this one wrong as well.

And a system so "secure" that the user can no longer use it for its original purpose is a failure. My house would be more secure against intruders if I concreted over all the windows and doors, but it wouldn't be a very useful house any more.

You can, but 99.999% of Firefox users won't, and probably 99.99% couldn't do it even if they wanted to. Even the geeks who could mostly won't have the time to learn a major OSS code base like Firefox's in order to actually do it.

I've looked at contributing to this sort of project a few times to see if I could help out. I've then given up when I realised it would take me longer just to set up the development environment and be able to build it than it would take me to write from scratch and give away entire useful software packages of my own, or to chip in a significant amount of extra help to some existing small but useful project on someone's GitHub that they are otherwise trying to maintain alone or with just a couple of regular contributors.

In practice, that lack of user base then has a direct effect on some add-on developers, and if those developers stop producing or maintaining their add-ons then even users who have compiled their own unlocked version of Firefox won't be able to enjoy them. Killing off part of an ecosystem affects everyone.

Better signal-to-noise ratios in widely used package manager/app store systems is often helpful. As you say, we don't need thousands of copies of the same trivial tool, and we certainly don't need many of them to be substandard implementations or outright malware.

However, you can achieve that through some sort of endorsement or prioritisation process, without adopting a zero tolerance attitude. The words "without any possible user override" should make anyone nervous about the future of a software ecosystem, because the words "so anything the user wants to do is subject to approval by a gatekeeper with their own best interests at heart" implicitly follow.

The state of the browser world is not a happy one at the moment, at Google/Chrome is already almost established as the new Microsoft/IE from the first big browser wars, and now both Mozilla and Microsoft seem determined to chase Google instead of staying true to the different, distinctive, but still widely valued principles and policies they followed a few years ago. If Chrome want to go killing off useful but older technologies and adding bleeding edge features every few weeks, let them, some people will enjoy it. But let Microsoft continue to focus on things like stability, quality of implementation and large deployments over pushing bleeding edge developments, and let Mozilla continue to provide an independent competing browser and an open ecosystem with a solid basic product and the flexibility to install or even write plug-ins to enhance it as each user wanted.

There's plenty of room for everyone, and there's a certain hypocrisy in arguing for locking down the plug-in ecosystem to prevent the proliferation of substandard clones at a time when both the IE and Firefox teams seem obsessed with chasing Chrome instead of playing to their own strengths and innovating in other ways.