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UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

theguardian.com

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Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#61

Post by lupire »

tyingq wrote: post #58
lupire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The percentage isn't the problem. The problem is of the settlement amount doesn't include damages and also legal fees, both of which should be the responsibility of the perpetrators.

"The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't ta…

You're comparing apples to oranges. "Ambulance chasers" (a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice), offer their services in a competitive market. If they charge too much, again, that should be determined by having a separate pool for fees separate from damages, and be a dispute between the perpetrator and the lawyer, not the victim and the lawyer.

The cost of the legal work is uncorrelated to the size of the damages.

Limiting legal fees just makes it not cost effective to pursue justice for smaller damages with more complex cases.

It's absurd bordering on evil to say the problem here is that people got paid too much for their excellent work (fighting against the resources of a corrupt major corporation and a corrupt major world government!) not that the perpetrators was under punished for their horrific crime.

The heroes who saved 700 people's lives deserve the money more than super-wealthy psychopathic perpetrators.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#62

Post by FpUser »

lupire wrote: post #50

> the convictions of 39 former postmasters ... the UK's most widespread miscarriage of justice. There's no way this is true. > There were more than 700 prosecutions based on Horizon evidence. The commission and the Post Office are asking anyone else who believes their conviction to be unsafe to come forward. On second thought, I guess it may be, since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent pe…

>"since even after the abuse was proven they are still holding innocent people on false charges."

Well, same government first destroyed immigration papers and then deported and otherwise ruined the lives of their own citizens ( Windrush scandal ). I'd love to see the perpetrators in jail but fat chance.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#64

Post by cabernal »

This and the John Deere bug posted earlier make me a bit concerned over the accumulating evidence of unreliable software ruining people's lives...

What can be done? Mandatory audits, pen testing?

If this is an organizational problem, more vacation? limiting overtime? rethinking employee incentives?

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

lupire wrote: post #61
tyingq wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't ta…

You're comparing apples to oranges. "Ambulance chasers" (a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice), offer their services in a competitive market. If they charge too much, again, that should be determined by having a separate pool for fees separate from damages, and be a dispute between the perpetrator and the lawyer, not the victim and the lawyer. The cost of the legal work is uncorrelated to…

> "Ambulance chasers" (a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice), offer their services in a competitive market.

I wonder how other countries get by without "ambulance chasers". The only country I know that has them is the US, and their existence is the sign that something is fundamentally wrong.

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#66

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #35

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

> I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things. This culture ruined these peoples lives. Things must change. This isn't a unique issue to Fujitsu it is something most of the software industry is doing, this story could be about just about any piece of software.

Damn straight. I'm really big on software Quality. It's kind of my driving passion.

It has been my experience, that an attitude of Quality is actively discouraged in today's "rush to a crappy, lashed-together-with-baling-wire-and-bandaids MVP" SV culture.

We glorify and make heroes of those that deliberately publish garbage, but make money doing so.

When we look to an industry to police itself; it never does. But the rules and regulations applied from non-domain-expert politicians are often ineffective, burdensome, and really only apply to a bygone era (See ISO 9001/CMMI).

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#68

Post by serial_dev »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #35

Software is in the walls. At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening and if the Fujitsu's of the world don't have an answer then we can expect regulation that will likely embed practices that don't help. I don't think we take software reliability seriously enough, most of our focus is on speed of release, ever quicker cycles and it being OK to break things.…

> At some point legislators are going to come and ask the question how we stop things like this happening

Bob Martin talks about it a lot, how the software developers of the world need to have an "oath", like the hippocratic oath. Two posts that summarize things well (but there might be more where he talks about these things) https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2011/01/17/software-cr... https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2015/11/18/TheProgramm...

Re: UK court clears post office staff convicted due to ‘corrupt data’

#69

Post by hobs »

lupire wrote: post #61
tyingq wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The percentage isn't the problem" I disagree. Even the ambulance chasers here in the U.S. take around 40% as their contingency fee. 80% is just...wow. Edit: "ambulance chasers" in this context means very opportunistic lawyers that are primarily motivated by money, and not helping their clients. I don't see how that term is disparaging any victims/clients. The comparison is that even outright greedy lawyers aren't ta…

You're comparing apples to oranges. "Ambulance chasers" (a terrible slur that looks down on weak victims pursuing justice), offer their services in a competitive market. If they charge too much, again, that should be determined by having a separate pool for fees separate from damages, and be a dispute between the perpetrator and the lawyer, not the victim and the lawyer. The cost of the legal work is uncorrelated to…

Then why not give them 99.9% of the take if they are such big heroes?

Because for the lawyers to get all the money each time harm happens means they more from harm to people than the people themselves benefit, this is a perverse incentive to keep the system exactly as it is for people who often become our lawmakers.

This also applies to 80/20 splits.

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