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Zero VGS posted:I am not a lawyer but what's the problem with finding a way to provide the patch both publicly and anonymously at the same time? I'm assuming if you have the technical knowledge to write a patch, you could also fire up TOR and make an untraceable GitHub with the source code and compiled EXE, or whatever you youngsters do. Then even if this abandonware holding company awakens, it's never going to be your problem. The check is entirely a CPU call asking "how many cores do you have" from a time when the answer would be 4 if you were using a high end system, then attempting to use that information for threading, etc. The answer provided by modern CPUs is simply too high for it to handle, so it gives up trying to launch. It has nothing to do with copy protection, as far as I can see. The game was last updated something like 15 years ago, and is technically still sold only insofar as very little gets pulled from Steam's store just for being old as dirt. It's not a holding company, it's a well known company who I'm being specifically vague about. I expect that if there are any sales it would be on the order of single digits per year at this point, but it's still owned, and the company still has lawyers who could be very rude about the whole thing.
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May 20, 2024 05:19
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Organza Quiz posted:I don't understand what the issue is with them being married? Why is it any different to any other strata company acting like a strata company? Like I don't know if they're doing anything wrong in this case in terms of the leak and who pays for it but what necessitates all this emphasis on husband and wife? That the husband was claiming to represent the owner's association / owners, never disclosed his relationship to the management company, and the financial conflict of being able to represent the owners but also fine the owners and route that money to his own company. If we the owners want to fight the management company, they apparently have an unlimited free lawyer for themselves, and we have to pay $400/hr for ours, when we were under the initial impression that this lawyer was supposed to be representing us. Volmarias posted:The check is entirely a CPU call asking "how many cores do you have" from a time when the answer would be 4 if you were using a high end system, then attempting to use that information for threading, etc. The answer provided by modern CPUs is simply too high for it to handle, so it gives up trying to launch. It has nothing to do with copy protection, as far as I can see. There were patches doing almost exactly this for some popular games like Call of Duty 3 Advanced Warfare (it was an EXE patch to allow it to run on dual-core, the Pentium Anniversary Edition, as it did a core check and would refuse to run, but on a technical level it ran perfectly fine) https://n4g.com/news/1614274/trick-call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-exe-mod-for-playing-it-on-dual-core-cpus I dunno, make an anonymous email and ask the devs if they would grant permission? I don't see why they'd object if you're not touching copy protection (I am not a lawyer, but I did work for a game dev and we would have been fine blessing that). If they agree in email just save that for a rainy day, and still publish the patch anonymously unless you're really dying for clout. Or, anonymously offer it to the devs to implement themselves into the Steam patching, if they think they'll make a few more bucks they might be arsed to do it. Edit: Whatever you do don't piss off Activision, they hired Boeing general counsel as their chief legal officer, cross them and you'll have an unfortunate suidide-accident-disease https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/activision-blizzard-hires-boeing-general-counsel-as-legal-chief Zero VGS fucked around with this message at 05:48 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 05:40
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In what way does this guy claim to represent the owner's council? If the owners have engaged him as a lawyer against the management company then yes there's an extremely obvious conflict of interest but it doesn't sound like that's the case? What you're describing sounds like he acts as the management company's lawyer, in which case he may have introduced himself and said he's there to help but that doesn't mean anything. Yeah there is an obvious power imbalance between a company that has an in-house lawyer and a bunch of people who would have to pay for their own one, but that's just society.
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May 20, 2024 05:53
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Organza Quiz posted:In what way does this guy claim to represent the owner's council? If the owners have engaged him as a lawyer against the management company then yes there's an extremely obvious conflict of interest but it doesn't sound like that's the case? What you're describing sounds like he acts as the management company's lawyer, in which case he may have introduced himself and said he's there to help but that doesn't mean anything. The letters we got via certified mail said "This office (Law offices of [husband name]) represents the Unit Owners Association" but the owners and trustees I asked had no knowledge of who engaged him in the first place. He never once disclosed his relationship to the management company (he's the co-owner) ever in the last decade, I had to uncover that from Googling. Then the wife blasted all the owners in an email and said "The lawyer for the owners association sent these two units collection letters". They have gone out of their way to *never* identify him as the lawyer for the management company.
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May 20, 2024 06:32
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Are the fines being paid to the management company instead of the HOA? The couple may be able to collude to have fines assessed, but they shouldn't end up in their pocket. A practical solution is to run for your condo board and get a new management company. Hopefully they don't have a long term contract.
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May 20, 2024 07:08
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Not entirely serious a suggestion but you could ask him, as the owner association lawyer, how to challenge the decision and what he recommends for fighting the notices, then report him for a legal ethics violation if he takes the bait and tries to act as your lawyer against himself.
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May 20, 2024 07:31
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Guy Axlerod posted:Are the fines being paid to the management company instead of the HOA? The couple may be able to collude to have fines assessed, but they shouldn't end up in their pocket. These particular fines are described as lawyer fees for the efforts to collect on the plumbing repairs, and to pay them we are supposed to log directly on to the management company's portal and pay there by credit card. But all other condo fees are paid this way straight to the management company as well. The seem to get mashed together then deposited into the association bank account each month. The management company pays all expenses for the condo association by writing checks out the association bank account, some checks are made out to say the gas company, but most checks are written back to the management company again, with no explanations in the memos. And yeah, a lot of owners want to shitcan this management company. This is an at-will state so I don't think they can have a long-term contract. But many owners are MIA absentee landlords with no way to contact them, and the bylaws say we need 51% present for a quorum which I'm not sure that many could ever be tracked down. It's gonna be interesting.
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May 20, 2024 07:34
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Kalman posted:At least for the U.S., all of this sort of thing falls under expert witnesses and the Daubert decision is where I’d start. Interesting, thanks. One of the rules there is that the evidence must have "general acceptance" within the relevant scientific community. Over time what is generally accepted within a community can change* - this seems to happen more frequently in some fields (psychology, medicine) than others (say chemistry and I'd guess forensic science) due to how easy it is to collect data reliably. What happens to past convictions when evidence that was used in them no longer has "general acceptance"? If the accused has exhausted their appeal rights previously does this let them appeal their case again somehow? I guess they have to do this themselves, no one is going to go and review past prosecutions for instances where that type of evidence was used? e: Actually this must be the case because I remember that a bunch of convictions getting overturned when DNA evidence was allowed. *That article is about changes in medical standards of care but the same could happen for e.g. "the defendant doing X is the only explanation for symptom Y observed on the complainant" or "The results of diagnostic test A is a reliable indicator that B happened". distortion park fucked around with this message at 08:41 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 08:38
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If your appeals are exhausted, I think you’d be boned, though one of the crim folks here might know some way of challenging a conviction in that circumstance. But in a civil case, yeah, you’re not getting that money back. (Or giving it back, if you benefited from the old understanding.)
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May 20, 2024 14:26
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distortion park posted:Interesting, thanks. One of the rules there is that the evidence must have "general acceptance" within the relevant scientific community. Over time what is generally accepted within a community can change* - this seems to happen more frequently in some fields (psychology, medicine) than others (say chemistry and I'd guess forensic science) due to how easy it is to collect data reliably. What happens to past convictions when evidence that was used in them no longer has "general acceptance"? If the accused has exhausted their appeal rights previously does this let them appeal their case again somehow? I guess they have to do this themselves, no one is going to go and review past prosecutions for instances where that type of evidence was used? e: Actually this must be the case because I remember that a bunch of convictions getting overturned when DNA evidence was allowed. Behind the Bastards had a two part episode related to this. Surprise: it's not great. quote:What's really insane is how little the fact that he's obviously a fraud helps the people that he had helped to get convicted. In two thousand and three, the Mississippi Supreme Court held that, quote, "just because doctor West has been wrong a lot does not mean without something more that he was wrong here" in a trial for another man he'd helped to convict Guess which state is spoilered above.
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May 20, 2024 15:34
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Kalman posted:If your appeals are exhausted, I think you’d be boned, though one of the crim folks here might know some way of challenging a conviction in that circumstance. I only did 6 months of public defense and never got past pretrial and indictment stuff, but IIRC in these kinds of cases the convict could file a habeus petition (and hope the judge didn't just rubber stamp DENY) and/or hope the DA is willing to take a look and push for the case to be reopened on the government end.
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May 20, 2024 16:52
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Volmarias posted:The game is effectively abandoned by the publisher, who still exists and still owns the IP to my knowledge, so it isn't true abandonware. Volmarias posted:What is the legality of publicly providing a patch to modify the .exe to work for newer systems? What about providing an already patched .exe file?
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May 20, 2024 16:55
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Arsenic Lupin is in deep poo poo in the homeowners thread https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3774735&pagenumber=665&perpage=40 She obviously needs some kind of lawyer(s) but what lawyers does she need? Tunicate fucked around with this message at 21:09 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 19:22
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Volmarias posted:Behind the Bastards had a two part episode related to this. Surprise: it's not great. Thanks for the podcast link, I'm pretty sure they're talking out if their arses like any podcaster half the time but there are some interesting studies and case histories referenced, like this one. Does fingerprint evidence get presented to the jury with an explanation of what conditions the comparisons were done in (ie was it blind, multiple examiners, out of a line up etc?) and with some sort of estimation of accuracy attached nowadays? When I worked for a chemicals company we'd send multiple batches of the same sample to our testing labs and see if their in-lab and between-lab variations matched their specs (a bit like in that study aboved) - is this done regularly for forensic/fingerprint labs? It sounded from the podcast like there was some sort of professional body attached to work on standards.
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May 20, 2024 19:31
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Tunicate posted:Arsenic Lupin is in deep poo poo in the homeowners thread he needs a real estate lawyer
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May 20, 2024 19:35
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EwokEntourage posted:he needs a real estate lawyer Actually he needs the mother of all real estate lawyers
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May 20, 2024 20:19
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Nice piece of fish posted:Actually he needs the mother of all real estate lawyers Actually she
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May 20, 2024 20:52
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I believe the problem is that they need a well, actually
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May 20, 2024 20:57
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I have an appointment with a real estate lawyer tomorrow morning. And yes, I'm a she.
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May 20, 2024 21:03
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Another thing I'm noticing while combing through the registry of deeds. There's a "Delegation of Authority" document where the trustees of our Condo Association appoint the management company to administer all affairs of the association (basically the document where we hired them). The director of the management company, solely notarized the document herself with her Notary Public stamp. Isn't that a big fuckin' no-no?
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May 20, 2024 21:57
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A notary is just someone who says "I saw them sign this." She is just claiming she watched herself sign the thing, which, obviously she did if she signed it. If it's been the document that's been used for years, the authenticity isn't really in dispute. So not a big deal, though really they should have gotten a third party to witness  Not a real estate lawyer and your state laws may make it important though Slaan fucked around with this message at 22:28 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 22:25
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You are not supposed to notarize documents that effect you personally. A document signed by trustee, who are acting as trustee and not in their individual capacity, and an employee of the management company, acting on behalf of the management company, can be notarized by an employee of either of those companies, since the document effects the entities and not the individuals. If the director signed, as director of the company, and then notarized it as an individual, its could be legal (and just inadvisable) or illegal/ineffective, depending on your state and various laws, and the manner/capacity in which you sign and/or notarize. Unlikely any court will give a poo poo unless you have other evidence of fraud. A lot of business contracts are not notarized. Also if you are operating under a contract or previously operated under a contract, a court likely won't care in form it is signed since the parties manifested intent to be bound by the contract.
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May 20, 2024 22:36
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EwokEntourage posted:an employee of the management company, acting on behalf of the management company, can be notarized by an employee of either of those companies, since the document effects the entities and not the individuals Thanks, that's certainly a surprising distinction. My state says "the notary public is a spouse, domestic partner [...] of the principal, " is prohibited. They are the principal. The notary individual isn't named on the document besides the notary stamp, the rest just names her company, but she is a principal of the company named, and the document is hiring her company. EwokEntourage posted:Unlikely any court will give a poo poo unless you have other evidence of fraud. I appreciate that. One more thing to add to the pile. We might be able to skip court if this all looks fishy enough for the owners to vote out the management company and they somehow don't fight it. The management company are turbo-olds so maybe by this point they lack the time or energy, that's probably our only hope. Zero VGS fucked around with this message at 23:09 on May 20, 2024 |
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May 20, 2024 23:04
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Not really about your facts, but also consider it depends on how “principal” is defined. Is the principal the person signing, or the entity that is subject of the contract ? A wife may be unable to notarize her husband’s contract selling their material home, but she could probably notarize a a business contract, in her role as secretary of a company, that her husband, as ceo of the company, signed on behalf of the company. It really depends on the role each person is playing and the facts.
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May 20, 2024 23:22
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EwokEntourage posted:Not really about your facts, but also consider it depends on how “principal” is defined. Is the principal the person signing, or the entity that is subject of the contract ? A wife may be unable to notarize her husband’s contract selling their material home, but she could probably notarize a a business contract, in her role as secretary of a company, that her husband, as ceo of the company, signed on behalf of the company. It really depends on the role each person is playing and the facts. The Principal is the person that tells the teachers what to do!!
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May 20, 2024 23:25
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Things I did not expect to see today: A Mississippi judge eviscerates qualified immunity. (CourtListener PDF) Order on Motion to Dismiss – #34 in Green v. City of Jackson, Mississippi (S.D. Miss., 3:23-cv-00126) – CourtListener.com ORDER denying 9 Motion to Dismiss. Signed by District Judge Carlton W. Reeves on 5/20/24. (AC) (Entered: 05/20/2024)
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May 21, 2024 03:26
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toplitzin posted:Things I did not expect to see today: Does SCOTUS stay rulings sua sponte? If not, they might start now just for emphasis
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May 21, 2024 03:36
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toplitzin posted:Things I did not expect to see today: Judge Reeves is awesome, and has put out a decent number of mike-drop decisions.
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May 21, 2024 04:27
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That was a pleasure to read. Very clear and direct
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May 21, 2024 04:46
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EwokEntourage posted:You are not supposed to notarize documents that effect you personally. A document signed by trustee, who are acting as trustee and not in their individual capacity, and an employee of the management company, acting on behalf of the management company, can be notarized by an employee of either of those companies, since the document effects the entities and not the individuals. If the director signed, as director of the company, and then notarized it as an individual, its could be legal (and just inadvisable) or illegal/ineffective, depending on your state and various laws, and the manner/capacity in which you sign and/or notarize. Unlikely any court will give a poo poo unless you have other evidence of fraud. 1. Affect, you uncultured swine. 2. The laws for permitted notarization vary wildly, to the point where I have (talking about your give a poo poo point) notarized stuff permitted by local law and sent it to be filed in a state where that notarization would be prohibited by statute, with no issues.
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May 21, 2024 04:46
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toplitzin posted:Things I did not expect to see today:  Devor posted:Does SCOTUS stay rulings sua sponte? If not, they might start now just for emphasis In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court, citing "nah uhn" and "we specifically said not to use the logic from Dobbs in anything else, because we all know it was bullshit, please stop citing it"
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May 21, 2024 05:48
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toplitzin posted:Things I did not expect to see today: This is really clearly written (as are some of the UK appeal court decisions I've read recently). One think that I don't understand after reading it is if overcoming qualified immunity requires the actions taken by the law enforcement officials to be previously covered by precedent, how new precedent is meant to be established? e.g. in this case presumably the police officer's argument is that pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is not obviously unconstitutional to a reasonably competent police officer (or I suppose that their witness was now lying), as it is not covered by precedent. If that is grounds for striking down the case how are courts meant to decide whether or not pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is unconstitutional? You could wait for lawmakers to pass a law saying this explicitly, but it doesn't seem like that would be about the constitutionality issue either, it's just a new law (and anyway surely one exists already?)
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May 21, 2024 09:00
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I've been doing a bunch of reading around the use of expert witnesses in murder trials and there are just so many dodgy convictions(that last link is at least 20). Lots of them seem to involve circumstantial evidence, conflicting medical evidence (lots of "non-specific" "unascertained" etc. in this failed appeal, which was eventually overturned) and 0 attempt at a rigorous statistical analysis, even though in lots of them all or most of the deaths are only being considered suspicious on the basis of intuitions about statistics. It seems like with a good prosecutor you could go find the latest lottery winner, charge them with cheating since it's duh it's very unlikely they would win the lottery, trawl through their texts and if you found a message like "I'm gonna win this week, I know it!" and could put up some expert witness talking about how they couldn't rule out the they'd hacked the lottery machines you'd have a good chance of getting a conviction from a jury.
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May 21, 2024 10:47
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distortion park posted:This is really clearly written (as are some of the UK appeal court decisions I've read recently). One think that I don't understand after reading it is if overcoming qualified immunity requires the actions taken by the law enforcement officials to be previously covered by precedent, how new precedent is meant to be established? e.g. in this case presumably the police officer's argument is that pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is not obviously unconstitutional to a reasonably competent police officer (or I suppose that their witness was now lying), as it is not covered by precedent. If that is grounds for striking down the case how are courts meant to decide whether or not pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is unconstitutional? You could wait for lawmakers to pass a law saying this explicitly, but it doesn't seem like that would be about the constitutionality issue either, it's just a new law (and anyway surely one exists already?) That's basically the catch-22 of qualified immunity, yes. Functionally it's a way to make sure police officers don't face consequences. There's immunity unless it's been decided, and qualified immunity prevents it from being decided, and every case is always at least marginally factually distinguishable so no new incident has ever been precisely decided. distortion park posted:I've been doing a bunch of reading around the use of expert witnesses in murder trials and there are just so many dodgy convictions(that last link is at least 20). Lots of them seem to involve circumstantial evidence, conflicting medical evidence (lots of "non-specific" "unascertained" etc. in this failed appeal, which was eventually overturned) and 0 attempt at a rigorous statistical analysis, even though in lots of them all or most of the deaths are only being considered suspicious on the basis of intuitions about statistics. A good book on this is https://www.amazon.com/Cadaver-King-Country-Dentist-Injustice/dp/161039691X
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May 21, 2024 11:17
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Re: forensics, the National Research Council put out a report in 2009 that was harshly critical of the use of anything not DNA in criminal prosecutions. It pretty bluntly stated that all other methods of “matching” forensic evidence to an individual was not reproducible. Even fingerprinting had issues. It’s a good (if depressing) read: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/228091.pdf
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May 21, 2024 13:46
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Some great reading suggestions, thanks, have bought the book and will read that report. I've also read this advisory paper by the UK Statistics society on use and misuse of statistics in medical misconduct investigations but it seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the relevant parties. There's some stuff early on in that NRC paper where the courts are like "yes it would be better if these fields had evidence showing they worked, but they can't do that at the moment, so we won't require it". But it makes me think - have their been any trials into how reproducible the results of jury trials are? If you take a contested trial and show it to 10 different jurys, how often do they come to the same conclusion? It seems like a doable if expensive experiment (I guess it would be hard to get a similar sample of people to a real jury into your experimental population).
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May 21, 2024 15:55
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Smiling Knight posted:Re: forensics, the National Research Council put out a report in 2009 that was harshly critical of the use of anything not DNA in criminal prosecutions. It pretty bluntly stated that all other methods of “matching” forensic evidence to an individual was not reproducible. Even fingerprinting had issues. Even straight DNA evidence can be misleading as it is sometimes poorly understood by the prosecution or even maliciously misrepresented or taken out of context. DNA requires context and a whole chain of evidence and purity/forensic quality standards. It is not foolproof, dependent on laboratory standards and subject to some weird exceptional situations (chimerism, for one).
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May 21, 2024 17:23
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distortion park posted:Some great reading suggestions, thanks, have bought the book and will read that report. I've also read this advisory paper by the UK Statistics society on use and misuse of statistics in medical misconduct investigations but it seems to have been thoroughly ignored by the relevant parties. There's some stuff early on in that NRC paper where the courts are like "yes it would be better if these fields had evidence showing they worked, but they can't do that at the moment, so we won't require it". I recall hearing about a study doing that. The problem is that you're not studying a jury, you're studying a group of people who know they are being judged based on how they respond to the stimuli you're providing. This is why some behavioral studies need to be done in a way where the participant doesn't realize what's actually being examined or when, instead telling them that they'll be participating later in something radically different than what you're actually looking for. The only way to even approach this would be to hold the same jury trial 10 times, with the same people, acting in exactly the same way, using people actually called for jury duty. distortion park posted:This is really clearly written (as are some of the UK appeal court decisions I've read recently). One think that I don't understand after reading it is if overcoming qualified immunity requires the actions taken by the law enforcement officials to be previously covered by precedent, how new precedent is meant to be established? e.g. in this case presumably the police officer's argument is that pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is not obviously unconstitutional to a reasonably competent police officer (or I suppose that their witness was now lying), as it is not covered by precedent. If that is grounds for striking down the case how are courts meant to decide whether or not pointing out the desired photo in a lineup is unconstitutional? You could wait for lawmakers to pass a law saying this explicitly, but it doesn't seem like that would be about the constitutionality issue either, it's just a new law (and anyway surely one exists already?) Weird, almost as if it can be used by people enforcing the existing hierarchy from ever being held accountable for their illegal actions in perpetuating that hierarchy?
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May 21, 2024 17:46
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distortion park posted:But it makes me think - have there been any trials into how reproducible the results of jury trials are? If you take a contested trial and show it to 10 different jurys, how often do they come to the same conclusion? It seems like a doable if expensive experiment (I guess it would be hard to get a similar sample of people to a real jury into your experimental population). From experience with mock juries for large trials, juries definitely do not come to the same conclusion even when presented with the same exact information. (Three groups of jurors would listen together, but deliberations were in separate groups.) Now that’s a mock, so imperfect, but there’s not exactly a good way to conduct research on real juries, so it’s the best we have afaik.
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May 21, 2024 20:42
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Smiling Knight posted:Re: forensics, the National Research Council put out a report in 2009 that was harshly critical of the use of anything not DNA in criminal prosecutions. It pretty bluntly stated that all other methods of “matching” forensic evidence to an individual was not reproducible. Even fingerprinting had issues. That report is junk. A committee took statements from a bunch of true believers and wrote down what they said. There are some valid criticisms in it - who doesn't want a national standards board for pathologists supplementing state-level medical boards? - but their conclusion is that every single branch of science should be inadmissible. That includes pathology, drug labs, computer forensics, taking pictures of blood stains, matching a shoe print to the type of shoe it came from, everything. They then conclude that any scientific discipline that collects and analyzes samples doesn't actually apply the scientific method (which is lol). In short it's about as reliable as an RFK anti-vax screed.
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May 21, 2024 23:37
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