"The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence," wrote US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1927 in his defence of freedom of speech. Ninety years on, his position is often taken as read: in the marketplace of ideas, eventually the truth will out. So it's no surprise that many were aghast when, last week, Germany's justice minister introduced a draft law that would fine social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, up to €50 million if they failed to remove hate speech within 24 hours of a complaint.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.

In his 60-year reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland, King George III suffered from recurrent episodes of both physical and mental illness. Researchers have programmed a computer to'read' the famous King's letters, analaysing the characteristics of his writing. The results suggest that King George III suffered from'acute mania' - a term used to describe an excitable, hyperactive condition. In his 60 year reign as King of Great Britain and Ireland, King George III suffered from recurrent episodes of both physical and mental illness. Researchers from St George's University, London, programmed a computer to'read' hundreds of King George III's letters, to understand his mental state.

WikiLeaks has released'Dark Matter', the latest batch of documents in its Vault 7 series, detailing the hacking techniques allegedly used by the CIA on Apple devices. One of the most concerning of these is'NightSkies', a tool dating back to 2008. WikiLeaks says it was "expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. Whether agents gained access to Apple's supply chain in order to carry this out is unclear, but WikiLeaks mentions it as a possibility. "While CIA assets are sometimes used to physically infect systems in the custody of a target it is likely that many CIA physical access attacks have infected the targeted organization's supply chain including by interdicting mail orders and other shipments (opening, infecting, and resending) leaving the United States or otherwise," it wrote in a press release. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its ...

Instagram is preparing to launch a new feature enabling users to make bookings through the app, according to a new report. The Facebook-owned photo-sharing site will soon provide a way for users to book appointments with businesses, transforming it into a marketplace in the mould of Yelp and OpenTable. People will be able to book a haircut by visiting a barber's Instagram page and tapping a button to schedule it, reports Bloomberg. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Over 200 years after steamships first began crossing the ocean, wind power is finding its way back into seafaring. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning'rotor sails' to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions. The company behind the technology, Finnish firm Norsepower, says this is the first retrofit installation of a wind-powered energy system on a tanker. Global shipping firm Maersk is planning to fit spinning'rotor sails' to one of its oil tankers as a way of reducing its fuel costs and carbon emissions The rotor sail was invented by German engineer Anton Flettner. It is effectively a large, spinning metal cylinder that uses something called the Magnus effect to harness wind power and propel a ship.

It's been an uphill battle for the coastal prefecture of Fukushima, Japan, since an earthquake and tsunami devastated the region in 2011, causing a nuclear disaster at its power plant. Six years later, workers are still battling to decommission the plant, where radiation is deadly. Officials expect the cleaning won't be finished for decades. "This is an accident that does not exist in the past tense, but in the present progressive form," Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori said earlier in March, criticizing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for not explicitly the disaster in his annual speech. "It's not possible to avoid using the important and significant terms of the nuclear plant accident of nuclear power disaster."

DeepCoder is an artificial intelligence system built by the researchers at Microsoft and the University of Cambridge. Based on a technique called program synthesis, DeepCoder can write working code after searching from a huge code database. It tries to make the best possible arrangement for the harvested code fragments and improves its efficiency over time. We have developed about the very basic artificial intelligence systems to the ones capable of helping humans. Now, various neural networks have started to write their own code, they can fix security flaws in routers.

Quantum Computing "Today's conventional computing technology is compared to reading every book in a library, one by one. Set a reminder in 90 minutes... Is Jeff bezos a nice guy? Is arsenal winning the league? Ride the train, don't jump in front of it Thank You! @vhirsch me@vhirsch.com Sir Francis Bacon, 1561-1626 Is Knowledge still power? Quantum Computing "Today's conventional computing technology is compared to reading every book in a library, one by one.

FBI bosses have been grilled over a secret facial recognition program that allows agents to access photos of tens of millions of Americans. The agency came under fire for its unrestricted access to ID photos in 18 states to help identify potential suspects - including innocent people who have never been charged with a crime. Privacy advocates suggested the technology fosters racial bias and compared the system to'Nazi Germany', at a congressional hearing yesterday. The system allows agents to access and algorithmically match the photos of tens of millions of Americans. More than 400million pictures of Americans' faces are kept in local, state and federal law enforcement facial recognition systems, the Government Accountability Office reported last year.