281–290 of 322 posts
I'm still surprised Facebook still has Facebook.com/somescript.php style links unless it's not as simple as it looks in the url. I know there's about 4 layers of loadbalance/cache and layers of that in data centers but any idea about the framework or code design?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As an example for the first point: Fewer-than-average professional scientists have known the desperation of poverty nor the devastation wrought by broken homes, disability, or crimes of passion. Scientists may be somewhat better prepared to find facts in a case, but may have diminished sensitivity to both the motivation for a crime and for the impact of a verdict. An educated, reasoning, and principled jury pool shou…
True but its' a jury of your peers. If you are an impoverished individual who only took to crime to feed your family, then a jury of your peers would be people from your neighborhood who are similarly poor.
Specializing the "peer" criteria seems to run big risks of having people judged by a group of peers who may all disagree with certain laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True but its' a jury of your peers. If you are an impoverished individual who only took to crime to feed your family, then a jury of your peers would be people from your neighborhood who are similarly poor.
So if you want to commit crime, you'd move to a neighborhood with a lot of criminals who will be likely to give you a pass? Specializing the "peer" criteria seems to run big risks of having people judged by a group of peers who may all disagree with certain laws .
If you're a starving peasant, who poaches on the King's land, do you want the jury to be filled with other starving peasants who poach for survival or aristocrats who cannot understand why you have robbed them of a chance to hunt pheasant next feast day?
I don't have the evidence so I can't make a judgement about whether Zenimax or Carmack is in the wrong here, but this does point out something strange in our court system and that is where a "jury of peers" which translates to normal people with little to no knowledge of the underlying subject matter. As our society becomes more specialized it seems a bit absurd to have people make judgements mostly based on how well…
Having just served on a jury, I can say that I've actually gained some confidence in the American justice system and its use of a jury of peers. When it comes down to it, the task for the jury is fairly straightforward, narrow, and well-defined: to examine the facts as laid out in the trial and to objectively execute the law as it is defined at the time while being fair and impartial. Their backgrounds and prior know…
I was really impressed how well they grasped the concepts of American justice. When someone said "he's guilty because of X", a lot of people jumped in and said "we're supposed to look at alternative explanations and if they are reasonable, we need to find him innocent."
It much improved my faith in the jury system.
This was in SF and I will say that all the 20-something tech guys did their best to get our of jury service. In fact, all of them did.
Interesting rant on expert witnesses. Mostly interesting because I've done some expert witness testimony and found it fascinating. I completely resonate with John's issue with the expert's testimony and his understanding of it. John mentioned that their own expert testified differently but he didn't say whether or not their lawyers attempted to impeach their expert with cross examination. In the two cases I participa…
To the last point, courts do actually try to solve this. The goal of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... that gets used is, in fact, to abstract things, eliminate the non-copyrightable parts, and try to see if any important stuff is left. Wikipedia actually has a fairly good explanation of it in practice. So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law,…
I think a better analogy would be that most parts of software (i.e. functions) can be thought of as words in literary works, it's not how you spell them but rather how you string them together that makes the work unique.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/02/oculus-execs-liable-f...
"While the jury found that Oculus had not misappropriated trade secrets from ZeniMax—a major part of the case—it determined that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey had violated a non-disclosure agreement with the company when working on early prototypes of the Rift VR headset"
"Oculus is liable for $300 million in the verdict ($50 million for trademark infringement, $50 million for copyright infringement, and $200 million for breaking the NDA), while Luckey owes $50 million and former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe owes $150 million (both for false designation). Oculus CTO John Carmack, who previously worked for ZeniMax and was accused of stealing code and destroying evidence, is not personally liable for any damages. ZeniMax had sought damages of $6 billion in the case."
The problem for John Camack was I think he was on both sides of the table writing code - so he wrote the code at Zenimax & re-wrote the code at Oculus. From a layman's perspective, he very well could have been "copying". Normally when you design clean room implementations, you use different people and make sure that the people who write the code never see the prior written code and the person giving the spec doesn't…
That's one of many messed up things about this case. When Zenimax sued Oculus they assumed Carmack had been working as part of the existing Oculus team, but he'd actually started up an entirely separate project, working with Samsung on mobile VR, it just hadn't been announced yet.
That caused problems for Zenimax, and the list of misappropriated trade secrets shrank to seven software features that the expert witness was certain had been copied, whereas it was originally "all software and all hardware except the display and lenses."
Another witness with actual expertise in VR quickly established that none of the seven features were even trade secrets.
Carmack is a hero for me but he seems to come across as very naive here. I employ other people now and employees who argue this sort of stuff isn't copying are toxic to the culture and ethics of work. When you are paid a salary every month, I actually don't care if you are productive. But the least I expect you to be is loyal. And I am no monster for expecting that.
You have unrealistic expectations for 2017, i think. The loyalty you receive will be proportional to the loyalty you demonstrate. When I am paid a salary every month, my expectation is that I am being paid for services rendered, and that what I am paid is a fraction of the value I produced. There is no loyalty demonstrated there; it's just business. As the company I work for now had in the past kicked me to the curb…
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This is a very common argument against juries, and I think it's one of the most powerful. Of course if you start to fill a jury with people competent in the area being judged, you run different risks, such as bias within the field. And it's still not clear that it would help with delivering justice. But if we take the idea of a jury to be about judging by one's peers, it should be patently clear (heh) that the jury o…
I once espoused a similar opinion, but have since changed my mind. I'm a physicist, and once expressed to a judge I had met on the trail that I wished I could be judged by my academic peers. It was my belief that they would be more receptive to logical argument, understanding in their analysis, and more committed to fundamental principles. The judge was visibly surprised, but said little. What later changed my mind w…
So drug dealers would want to be judged by a jury of drug dealers, for example.
It's kinda hard to square John's post-trial comments "I never tried to hide or wipe any evidence, and all of my data is accounted for, contrary to some stories being spread." with ZeniMax's post-trial comments at http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2017/02/01/zenima... that " (vi) Carmack intentionally destroyed data on his computer after he got notice of this litigation and right after he researched on Google…
"right after he researched on Google how to wipe a hard drive" I find it difficult to believe that Carmack needs to google how to wipe a hard drive ...
(OTOH I have researched this issue a few times a year despite rarely personally applying the information, so this Google trail is hardly evidence about anything)