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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 22 2016, @08:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the "code"-of-ethics-needs-debugging? dept.

Earlier this week, a post written by programmer and teacher Bill Sourour went viral. It's called "Code I'm Still Ashamed Of."

In it he recounts a horrible story of being a young programmer who landed a job building a website for a pharmaceutical company. The whole post is worth a read, but the upshot is he was duped into helping the company skirt drug advertising laws in order to persuade young women to take a particular drug.

He later found out the drug was known to worsen depression and at least one young woman committed suicide while taking it. He found out his sister was taking the drug and warned her off it.

By sake of comparison, take a look at the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct (Adopted by ACM Council 10/16/92.)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:10AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:10AM (#431774)

    Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower's bank account, thereby creating new money.

    Huh? Maybe I'm missing something, but that seems to be exactly what we were taught in economics class back in 1993. The term back then was "the money-creating effect of banks".

    How does something that was in economics textbooks in the 1990'es become a bombshell report in 2014? Collective amnesia?