From Soup To Nuts

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In all fairness, it's hard to tell. That "slashdot pulse" stuff has been posting questions of this quality for quite some time. Add in the slashtv and slashbi crap, and it's actually plausible that they are trying to leak more of this crap into the mix.

It's a sad state of affairs when something so blatantly stupid is close enough to the day to day stuff that it becomes hard to recognize it as a joke. Even a few years ago my first reaction to this post would have been to laugh. My first reaction today was "oh great, and so it continues". Stuff has gotten so bad that this only stands out as slightly more extreme than normal.. and that's really bad.

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Shanghai - Ein neuer Lebensmittelskandal erschüttert China - diesmal geht es um falsche Schweineohren. Die Polizei gehe im Osten des Landes Vorwürfen nach, dass Händler statt echter und als Leckerbissen geltender Schweineohren Produkte aus Gelatine verkauften, berichtete am Mittwoch die amtliche Tageszeitung "China Daily".

Der Gelatine-Trick flog auf, nachdem sich mehrere Verbraucher beschwerten, dass auf einem Markt in Ganzhou in der Provinz Jiangxi gekaufte Ohren bei der Zubereitung einen üblen Geruch verströmten. Bei Labor-Untersuchungen stellte sich dann heraus, dass die Ohren aus Gelatine und Natriumoleat, einem Seifenzusatz, verfertigt wurden.

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Judge Alsup then reminded Boies that, in order to claim infringer damages, Oracle will have to prove a "causal nexus", i.e a connection, between the infringement and the body of profits being sought. To this Boies replied:

I still think it's possible to demonstrate a nexus by showing that speed was very important to Google in getting Android out, and by copying they accelerated that.

It was at this point that the Judge made the revelation that caused a flurry of excitement:

I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?

Boies obviously misunderstands and responds:

I want to come back to rangeCheck.

To which Judge Alsup deliver's a body blow which indicates he at least does understand how straightforward it would be to program rangeCheck from scratch:

Judge: rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it--

And the lawyer reveals he doesn't:

I'm not an expert on Java -- this is my second case on Java, but I'm not an expert, and I probably couldn't program that in six months.

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