[SystemSafety] Claims for formal methods

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2014-02-20 13:46 , C. Michael Holloway wrote:
> Not that my opinion need matter much, but I concur fully with Mr. Raftery.  Editing the archive is a
> blight on the integrity of the list.  In some ways, doing so seems worse to me than anything Mr.
> Jones wrote.
> 
> On 2/19/14 6:08 PM, Heath Raftery wrote:
>> ...
>> That would be a real blight on the impartiality of this list. You're entitled to censor the
>> service as you wish, but removing criticism of the establishment would represent a dramatic drop
>> in the integrity I perceive this resource to present.

My first reaction is, oh bloody hell, can't we all just drop it?

My second reaction is to explain. It's fine to have a viewpoint. Thanks for sharing. But we're not
in Kansas any more. There is a question of (deep breath) judgement.

Please inform yourselves first about the law regarding publishing in Germany. It's not the States
and it's not the UK. A named publisher is personally liable for the contents of any WWW page. I am
personally liable for material published on systemsafetylist.org. So are a couple of others, namely
the Rector of the University of Bielefeld and the Minister of State for Science and Research.

Whatever your and my views on free speech, and believe me I am personally for it, I am unwilling to
experience the consequences of liability for abusive comment by others. The phrase used is clearly
abusive and its target was an unspecific but clearly identified group of professionals, any one of
whom could take offence at being called XXXXXX at any time, claim damages from me (likely
successfully, since I am clearly liable) and cause the site to be shut down. Indeed, I suspect that
if certain people in my university were to find out, we might be off the air in a coupla days;
that's local power politics for you, academic freedom or no.

I don't want any of those things to happen. I can only ensure that by substituting the abusive term.
Any other suggestions are welcome, but privately.

Substituting the term is not trivial, and has and will continue to involve a certain amount of work
by my team.

Rigorously, it's worse than that. I don't want to hinder anyone from calling anyone else a headless
chicken here if they want. But suppose someone did (why y'all looking at me?), any member of the
public could read it and complain to the local prosecutor and I'm in for a misdemeanor (as
publisher, not as perpetrator). The chances of this happening in, ahem, "liberal" Bielefeld are
around zero. After all, we're not Bavaria. But it did just happen in Bavaria. Somebody called
somebody's *car* a bad name, was overheard by someone else, prosecuted and fined €700. (It was
probably a BMW. If it had been a Merc he'd probably have gotten a reward.) Silly, isn't it?

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de