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Comment Re:Every firm I've worked at (Score 1) 66

But often it ends up the wrong tool for the job, used like a database or application. When the person who made the spaghetti-sheets leaves, everyone is left scratching their heads.

MS-Access would be a better fit, but it's often frowned upon because amateurs have also damaged its reputation. It's possible to write maintenance-friendly apps with MS-Access, it's just not tuned that way out of the box, and "maintain-ifying" an app is not taught.

(Web equivalents of MS-Access so far suck. The web ruins every CRUD/biz/data idea, I've come to conclude, probably because of the LSD-laced DOM.)

Comment Re:Ok (Score 1) 66

So Bricklin would not have gotten a patent, that's all that means.

Similar happened for lawsuits over dBASE's IP. With a little digging, a couple of similar languages and systems were found for older bigger computers. There was very little in dBASE that was original. The cloners just used synonyms for commands and key-words.

DOS did similar word-play per CP/M. In the early days of software, almost everyone was a dirty rat-thief, perhaps because patenting software was a legally murky area.

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 144

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule.

Not quite- that's how you get the proximate cause felony murder rule, of which only a couple of jurisdictions in the US, and none outside of the US in the Western world recognize due to its obvious injustice.

No, it's how you get mens rea for the felony murder rule. You didn't carry the gun with the intent to kill, only to intimidate, but you still had a guilty mind, and if you then used the gun to kill someone in the heat of the moment, there's your mens rea.

And remember that actual cause does not mean literally pulling the trigger. At least in the U.S., the courts apply a "but for" test. If the event would not have happened without the previous event, then the previous event is considered the actual, not proximate cause. The police would not have shot the other person but for the perpetrator pointing a gun at someone (and possibly shooting at the police).

IMO, that's not meaningfully different than involuntary manslaughter convictions for allowing unsafe working conditions at a construction site or leaving your loaded gun out where a child can take it, both of which have happened.

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