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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 19 2012 @ 10:08 AM EDT |
That's one way.
Another is for each party to bring in a teacher and actually teach its version
of the technical background, so the jury knows what each side is talking about.
Both ways will take extra time, which the judge DIDN'T allow. He wanted/had to
get this thing done fast.
The faster (and maybe better) way would have been for the judge to dredge
through the local high school / college / university / tech school faculties and
pick a teacher to give a basic tutorial.
How many of the jurors knew/know what a compiler is? Source code v object code v
bytecode v machine code?
The whole 'a number is a symbolic reference' bit makes a laughing stock of the
court.
A basic tutorial would have made Oracle either drop the joke, or openly state
that they were making a novel technical argument. (And if they had been up front
about it they could at least have made an honest argument for it.)
Consider:
1. You are a typical SoCal / San Fran vegan city type, put on a jury of other
city types to decide whether a veterinary hospital properly treated a
multi-million dollar horse for an complicated case of cross-species
encephalitis. You have never seen a horse, have never had a biology course, and
don't know what enceph-whatever is.
2. You are a member of a Amish community, asked to decide whether the operator
of a nuclear power plant properly handled an unexpected 'event' at the plant.
One issue is whether the plant's software and hardware was properly
designed/built for real-time operation in a high radiation environment.
Good luck.
I repeat: we cannot expect juries to deal with technical cases on the quick and
dirty. Its not going to work.
not a lawyer
JG [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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