It was not brought up by name, though part of the selection process involved asking all of the prospective jurors if they could agree to and abide by the rules of the court. Those who did not answer in the affirmative were dismissed.

It was more a case of making sure everyone was working off of the same definitions. This actually came into play during deliberations - a few of the jurors had half-baked notions of things like "circumstantial evidence" and the aforementioned "burden of proof" that were cleared up by the definitions we were given. Without that common ground it's likely that we would have spent a great deal more time arguing over semantics rather than evidence.

I know it's popular here on Slashdot to consider anything government-related to be stupid and ineffective, but that really wasn't the case. There was a genuine effort by the judge to clarify and educate rather than obfuscate.

In our case we were given hardcopy instructions prior to beginning deliberations that included the definitions of all legal terms that were applicable, including one for burden of proof.

Basically, we were instructed to form our opinions on three things:

1. Our life experiences and education up to the point where we were sworn in as jurors and told to avoid doing outside research.
2. The evidence presented in the courtroom.
3. The definitions and instructions provided to us.

There can be a lot of downtime in a trial. I was recently a juror in a murder trial, and out of the 6 hours or so allotted on each day scheduling for hearings, maybe 3-4 hours total were spent in the juror box listening to testimony. The rest of the time we were locked in the deliberation room while the judge and attorneys discussed stuff.

We were not allowed to discuss any aspect of the case with each other until after closing arguments, so it was pretty common for people to pull out the phones while in the deliberation room and check email/browse/play games/whatever during these recesses.

Interestingly, we did have a case where a juror ignored the judge's admonition against outside research - she printed out a definition of "Burden of Proof" she found online and brought it into the deliberations. It was confiscated by the bailiff before anyone else could look at it and she was dismissed. We spent most of the rest of that day playing on our cellphones waiting for an alternate juror to come in.

They better hope for a REALLY dumb judge.

I think you mean a really dumb jury. Why else would they do this stuff in Texas?

(just kidding, Texans. Please don't shoot me.)

Why is it that we continue to use a technology based on a 1960's view of a problem when clearly there ARE other solutions and ways to approach said problem?

Which problem? Storing your data, retrieving your data, modifying your data while guaranteeing transactional integrity, analyzing your data in aggregate, providing ways to recover your data, providing ways to reset your data to a previous state?

I'm not saying a traditional relational database is the perfect solution to everything, but it's silly to think that every approach will address the same set of concerns.

Use an automated process that rebuilds your test environments nightly from production backups. Test environment synchronization and backup verification rolled into one.

Just to point, we are talking about American Football, not Football. It's not the same.

True. A medical story regarding non-American Football would likely cover one of these topics instead:

1. How a nudge to the shoulder can translate into a compound leg fracture.
2. How grabbing your shin while writhing on the ground can partially alleviate the pain of a compound leg fracture.
3. Whatever is in those magical spray cans the trainers carry around, and how they can instantly heal a compound leg fracture immediately after a penalty has been awarded.

Have they considered relabeling their laser intensity dials so they go up to 11?

In order to select the correct solution for you, we're going to need your address and a list of the expensive stuff you don't want stolen. Oh, and in case we drop by, please let us know the hours that you're usually at home. Would hate to make the trip out there only to find that you're away. Thanks!

I played the Torchlight demo and I could not stop thinking how much more similar it was to Fate than to Diablo.

There's a good reason for that. Travis Baldree, the lead developer of Torchlight, also designed Fate.

I find it ironic that you're laughing your ass off at the poor, ignorant Java kids when your grasp of the situation is so deficient.

First off, permgen is not just class definitions. One of the largest consumers of permgen space is intern'd Strings. Secondly, despite its name permgen does have garbage collection in modern VMs; it's not as frequent as what is done to reclaim heap but it does happen. Thirdly, the issue with Eclipse is that it doesn't set a correct pergmen size at startup due to an acknowledged bug, this isn't a case where it's eating up too much space because of a funky classloader.

No good programmer thinks that resource management is unimportant, regardless of language.

Oracle already has a J2EE server now that they own WebLogic through the BEA acquisition.

They had one prior to the acquisition with OAS. Didn't stop them from buying out their biggest competitor not named IBM.

I wonder if any of those viruses is a key "log"-ger. Better that than a worm, I guess.

I'll show myself out...

Clearly this idea was rejected because it is far too simple.

Very few things are easy when you're 5000 feet below sea level and dealing with pressures of 2k psi.