Paleontologists are ALWAYS arguing about which fossil is which species. And how many species are represented. And they KNOW that they don't have all the evidence they need. All they can really say is how similar something is to something else, and if it's fairly close, they can't really tell whether two different fossils are from separate species. But discovering new species gets your name in the books, so many tend to jump on any excuse to invent a new species.
And as this article shows, even when you have live animals it isn't always obvious where the bounds should be drawn. (And dogs are an easy case!)
It's more complex than that. Consider the butterfly ring around California's San Joaquin Valley. There's a gap at the Sacramento river, but there's a "species" of butterfly that lives in the mountains surrounding the valley. Each adjacent group of these butterflies can breed with the adjacent groups, but the groups at the opposite sides of the gap can't interbreed. Not even with artificial assistance. And I'm sure it's more complex than I've indicated, but that's all I remember from the article.
Or consider the Cilchid fishes from Lake Victoria. When the water is clear several "species" won't interbreed, but when the water becomes muddy, they will, because they can't tell each other apart. (Species identification is based around color patterns.)
There are lots of other examples. The very concept of species is basically an idea that makes it convenient to think about something that isn't really basic to life. It's a sort of a stand-in for "will the genes match to product viable offspring?", but it's not even really that, because we think about species of bacteria.
An optimal C implementation will not necessarily be faster than an optimal implementation in some other language...but it won't be significantly slower. (That usually means it won't be slower at all, but some other languages allow one to implement section in assembler, which can theoretically be faster than C.)
However, the optimal C implementation may well be so complex that it never gets written. (As well as the optimal solution in any other language.) So this isn't a particularly relevant argument. One should deal with usual cases, and put a bounds around how sub-optimal you are. In such cases actual C implementations are frequently inferior to actual implementation of several other languages. Which is best depends on the problem under consideration. C is a very good language in many ways, but it has it's weaknesses. It's strength, which is hard for other languages to overcome, is it's breadth of libraries. Calling C libraries from other languages often adds in significant overhead, but many (most) languages have been forced to allow this because they just don't have the time to reimplement things from scratch. Callbacks make this especially tricky.
The real answer is that speed of execution, while important, isn't usually the only deciding factor. It's quite often how easy it is to implement. I often choose a simpler implementation over a faster one, because the faster one isn't worth the effort. (Remember the 80-20 rule.)
You're probably right, but so is he. Someone who studies a trade learns much more narrowly than the person he describes himself to be, so it's not surprising if they are much better within their focus.
Sorry, but that isn't true. Sensationalism is, I'll grant, the main media bias, but it isn't the only one. Editorial policy is quite strong. (If you think FOX is the only Republican media, you are quite wrong. But all the major media have a "conservative" agenda, because they are all owned and operated by organizations controlled by wealthy people [and usually men]. These people have much to lose if things change. They may disagree on the best strategy for maintaining their dominance, but they agree on the goal.)
P.S.: If you think EITHER the Republicans OR the Democrats are the good guys, you need to take a closer look at either history or current affairs. Anywhere you look proves that they are both self-serving bastards, and that very few of them have the welfare of the citizenry at heart.
He wasn't claiming it was a good system. Merely that this was the way the system way.
Yes, he was claiming that acting for the general good would only get you in trouble, so you should only act selfishly. I hope he's not right. Unfortunately, there's more that a modicum of evidence that at least occasionally he IS right (about this).
Yes, police oversight is needed. But also just laws. When even idealized police enforce unjust laws, the result is not justice. And a just court system. When a party can prevail in court merely because he's wealthier, or has less to lose, then you don't get a just legal system.
My suspicion is just like FOSS means that there will be no next Microsoft, open access for music means that there will be no next (who's the current superstar?).
N.B.: Joan Baez or Bob Dylan style figures will still emerge, but they won't have the dominance that they did when the media companies controlled who could get published. It may be more like the 1960's when you had the Beatles, but you also had Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, and MANY others. (I listed the ones *I* liked. Others would have very different lists.) Diversity of style, not everyone in lockstep.
P.S.: Copyright laws still need to change. Joan Baez should never have been allowed to copyright folksongs. Technically, I suppose that she only copyrighted a particular arrangement of them, but she didn't list what was new and what was old. This shouldn't be allowed unless ANY change that you make allows you to claim a new copyright. And any would include just changing the key or the tempo.
I don't think I trust anything they offered at this point, no matter what they promised. They may not quite be MS, but they're clearly about as honorable.
Of course, this was made clear by the Sklyarov affair, where they first instigated persecution of Sklyarov by the feds, and then denied responsibility. At that point I stopped trusting anything they said. So far this has seemed a wise decision.
I don't know about Univac, but in one RCA computer version (model 2?) the upgrade to the next faster version was to swap a long cable for a shorter one. Doesn't quite seem to be the same as what I think this patent is talking about, though. (OTOH, I never read software patents. It's too dangerous. [Well, also I read one once, and decided that the process was totally useless. But mainly it's the danger of "intentionally violating" the patent.])
Depends on just how "application" gets defined. And you can believe their public justifier if you want to, but don't expect me to agree. I ran more than 3 apps at once on a MSWind3.1 (Wrong version?). That was why TSRs were invented. It didn't require any gig of RAM, or even ANY hard disk.
(You can claim that a TSR wasn't really running on the system, but that's not how it looked to the end user. It just didn't do any background processing.)
You just don't hear about it until it happens here. Or notice it. Austrailia and New Zealand were in the news a while back for something about as bad, but I don't live there. I did, however, notice that they weren't better places to live.
The only way this could be a species extinction event is if it set off a major war...which, of course, it could. OTOH, it could quite easily be a civilization killer without any hysteria being necessary. Current evidence seems to show that modern plants are pretty well adapted to a narrow range of temperatures (which varies with the species). When the temperatures go outside that range they become much less nutritious. Ditto, but differently, for ease of growth.
E.g., if you grow corn (maize) under conditions of high temperature and high carbon dioxide, then you get plenty of growth, but few ears, and ears that are low in nutritional value. (I don't know what assumptions they made about humidity.) Now high temperature here is about current tropics temperature, which is forecast for the temperate zone (though of course it won't be as constant there) which is where most of the farming is currently done. I suspect that they didn't need to alter the temperature, as they needed to enclose the plants in a greenhouse to control the CO2 levels, so temperature my well be just reporting what happened automatically. I think they were really investigating the reaction of plants to increased levels of CO2.
Also, with increased temperatures, weather patterns change. Moist areas become dry, etc. This means that areas that are currently farming areas can expect to experience periodic crop failures, becoming expected crop failures as the change proceeds. But all currently suitable areas are already under development. And most unsuitable land is already owned by someone who's doing as they choose with it. So relocation may not be possible. (And it's not clear where there would be to relocate to.)
So one thing that's needed is new plant strains that are more drought resistant and which will retain their nutritional characteristics under increased levels of CO2. Not easy. Drought tolerance has already been pushed rather hard, and nobody has much experience with how plant metabolic pathways change when atmospheric CO2 increases.
There are other problems, but that's one. And do note that IF civilization hiccups, one can expect a large die-off. 90% wouldn't be too high to predict...which means that a hiccup would turn into something quite a bit more serious. We've turned into a species where just about nobody knows how to raise food, and where there isn't going to be much place to raise food anyway, and in any case most of the plants we eat don't grow locally anyway. So most of the population will become desperate, which means that even those who *do* know how to raise food, won't be able to, because you can't do that around desperate people. And just where does your current water supply come from? It probably won't be there if the power's off. Do YOU know how to build a privy? And where? Building one in the wrong place is an excellent way to spread many diseases, e.g. typhoid. The list goes on. If you live in a city, don't expect to survive. If you live in a suburb, don't expect to survive.
So if we can, it's rather important to take steps to ensure that civilization doesn't fall. Unfortunately, greedy, short-sighted, and/or power-hungry individuals have sabotaged most attempts that I'm aware of to establish buffers against such a fall. So if there is one, it's going to be very hard. (I didn't say politicians, because many of them weren't politicians. Just most.)
Unfortunately, those models are going to BE in a preliminary state until long after it's too late to fix things. Based on current event evidence (rather than models) the models have been understating the seriousness of the situation. So fixing the models correctly, when it ever happens, if it ever does... (We still can't make weather predictions good for a month ahead of time)... will probably just show that the situation is much worse than our current models show. And it will probably take a decade or so to rewrite the models and test them if any basic theories need changing...so by then New York may be under water (probably only a foot or so at that time, but with more on the way). Or you can bet that if we just ignore the problem it will go away... but *I* wouldn't give you good odds.
In any active science you are going to get continual alteration and refinement. And occasional large changes. You also get everyone overblowing the importance of the thing they've just been working on. And occasional refutations of earlier claims that are sometimes verified and othertimes not.
Science is a messy, chaotic process. Sorry if you thought it was clean and simple. For clean and simple you need a historical retrospective of last century (or earlier). It was never clean and simple while it was happening, I don't care WHAT they claim on TV, Or General Science I. Or any other hagiographical literature.
So... to an extent you're right: If the authors are correct, then the models will need to be rewritten. But as the way they are tested is by validating them by predicting the present from historical records, I don't expect major changes in the predictions. Possibly major changes in the theoretical underpinnings...which might give different values for which variables are more important...and might not. But you should expect that the authors have overstated the importance of their results. They've got to argue that what they did is important, after all.
Not so recent. Yes, many dinosaurs WERE warm-blooded. (Shouldn't be surprising, as birds are descendants of dinosaurs, and we know they're warm blooded.)
Were ALL dinosaurs warm-blooded? Dunno. I doubt it, but can't think of any actual evidence. (Remember, dinosaur is more specific than "Big huge animal that lived a long time ago". [Actually, also less specific. They weren't, by and large, huge. Only an occasional species went that direction.])
Thanks. Still a bad design, but I'm glad to hear there's a way around it. Actually, though, I've been generally avoiding it by avoiding gtk based applications. (A real pain, since that's the library I'd rather use...due to the C linkage.)
What I really don't like is the C++ interface. That doesn't play nicely with most other languages. (C is much better in that regard.)
Perhaps, though, I just haven't looked recently. Does Qt now have a C interface library?
I don't really like C, as it's too pointer happy. But it does have the advantage for an interface language that more languages can easily interface with C than any other particular language. (I count each separate assembler as a separate language.) OTOH, I think that many gtk widgets are horribly ugly. Especially the file directory widget. It's far superior to allow a file name to be typed as a single string than to require each directory in the path to be a separate button. (Granted, I've not used this widget. I don't know how it looks to program for. But speaking as a user, "UGH!".)
MS is a repeating criminal, which has not been reformed. It has no inherent right to exist, being a legal fiction.
The correct action is to cancel it's corporate charter and refuse it the right to do any business at all. If this action were taken by even a few countries, I believe that MS would get the message. If it didn't, then a few more should suffice. E.g., if the US and EU both refused to allow MS to do business within their borders, it would be rather effective almost immediately.
N.B.: I'm not talking about a temporary suspension of the right to do business. I'm talking about permanently canceling the corporate charter, and refusal to recognize the existence of the company. I'm sure that there are many technicalities that would need to be dealt with, but there are precedents in how to handle them. (Louisiana, at least, used to have canceling corporate charters as a punishment for misbehaving corporations, though it was rarely enforced, and originally I believe that all US corporate charters were temporary and expired.)
I agree that copyright used to be a net societal gain. That went out with the Sonny-Bono copyright extension act, and was made a ludicrous argument by the DMCA.
Similarly patents were once a net social gain, but when the laws became convoluted they became a net social cost. Trademarks, however, still appear to be net social gains.
When figuring whether something is a social gain or cost it's important to look at the implementation. Details matter.
I agree, one should be willing to serve on the jury. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to lie during questioning. This usually results in my being struck. (I was on a jury once, but it was so open-and-shut that the lawyers nearly didn't bother to screen the jurors.)
Watching the trial of SCOx and watching various other company trials much less intensively...
I don't think they'd be in much trouble. Being a corporation seems to grant you a free pass to thumb your nose at normal regulations without much worry. Bois has been denied the right to practice in a few states, but that hasn't kept him from practicing in other states. And that's all the sanctions he's gotten for some pretty serious abuses. SCOx and it's legal representatives have just straight ignored court orders several times...and there's been no punishment for that. (Yeah, they're going to lose, but it was blatantly obvious 5 years ago that they had no case at all. And when they were ordered to present any evidence they had, they didn't come up with any.... Sorry, the company closed for Xmas vacation, and we couldn't contact the directors. So they were ordered again to provide any evidence by [I think] January 27th. Again nothing. And no repercussions for their ignoring the court orders.)
So it's my belief, after observing the noticeable evidence, that there won't be any repercussion if the RIAA and it's expert play fast and loose with what the court has ordered.
Slashdot Mirror
Paleontologists are ALWAYS arguing about which fossil is which species. And how many species are represented. And they KNOW that they don't have all the evidence they need. All they can really say is how similar something is to something else, and if it's fairly close, they can't really tell whether two different fossils are from separate species. But discovering new species gets your name in the books, so many tend to jump on any excuse to invent a new species.
And as this article shows, even when you have live animals it isn't always obvious where the bounds should be drawn. (And dogs are an easy case!)
It's more complex than that. Consider the butterfly ring around California's San Joaquin Valley. There's a gap at the Sacramento river, but there's a "species" of butterfly that lives in the mountains surrounding the valley. Each adjacent group of these butterflies can breed with the adjacent groups, but the groups at the opposite sides of the gap can't interbreed. Not even with artificial assistance. And I'm sure it's more complex than I've indicated, but that's all I remember from the article.
Or consider the Cilchid fishes from Lake Victoria. When the water is clear several "species" won't interbreed, but when the water becomes muddy, they will, because they can't tell each other apart. (Species identification is based around color patterns.)
There are lots of other examples. The very concept of species is basically an idea that makes it convenient to think about something that isn't really basic to life. It's a sort of a stand-in for "will the genes match to product viable offspring?", but it's not even really that, because we think about species of bacteria.
Make it a better challenge: Use arrays with multiple subscripts.
An optimal C implementation will not necessarily be faster than an optimal implementation in some other language...but it won't be significantly slower. (That usually means it won't be slower at all, but some other languages allow one to implement section in assembler, which can theoretically be faster than C.)
However, the optimal C implementation may well be so complex that it never gets written. (As well as the optimal solution in any other language.) So this isn't a particularly relevant argument. One should deal with usual cases, and put a bounds around how sub-optimal you are. In such cases actual C implementations are frequently inferior to actual implementation of several other languages. Which is best depends on the problem under consideration. C is a very good language in many ways, but it has it's weaknesses. It's strength, which is hard for other languages to overcome, is it's breadth of libraries. Calling C libraries from other languages often adds in significant overhead, but many (most) languages have been forced to allow this because they just don't have the time to reimplement things from scratch. Callbacks make this especially tricky.
The real answer is that speed of execution, while important, isn't usually the only deciding factor. It's quite often how easy it is to implement. I often choose a simpler implementation over a faster one, because the faster one isn't worth the effort. (Remember the 80-20 rule.)
You're probably right, but so is he. Someone who studies a trade learns much more narrowly than the person he describes himself to be, so it's not surprising if they are much better within their focus.
Sorry, but that isn't true. Sensationalism is, I'll grant, the main media bias, but it isn't the only one. Editorial policy is quite strong. (If you think FOX is the only Republican media, you are quite wrong. But all the major media have a "conservative" agenda, because they are all owned and operated by organizations controlled by wealthy people [and usually men]. These people have much to lose if things change. They may disagree on the best strategy for maintaining their dominance, but they agree on the goal.)
P.S.: If you think EITHER the Republicans OR the Democrats are the good guys, you need to take a closer look at either history or current affairs. Anywhere you look proves that they are both self-serving bastards, and that very few of them have the welfare of the citizenry at heart.
You *can* sue them, but it can be dangerous. Best move out of the county first, and try to get the venue changed to your new address.
(Caution: IANAL)
He wasn't claiming it was a good system. Merely that this was the way the system way.
Yes, he was claiming that acting for the general good would only get you in trouble, so you should only act selfishly. I hope he's not right. Unfortunately, there's more that a modicum of evidence that at least occasionally he IS right (about this).
Yes, police oversight is needed. But also just laws. When even idealized police enforce unjust laws, the result is not justice. And a just court system. When a party can prevail in court merely because he's wealthier, or has less to lose, then you don't get a just legal system.
See any problems with our current system?
My suspicion is just like FOSS means that there will be no next Microsoft, open access for music means that there will be no next (who's the current superstar?).
N.B.: Joan Baez or Bob Dylan style figures will still emerge, but they won't have the dominance that they did when the media companies controlled who could get published. It may be more like the 1960's when you had the Beatles, but you also had Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, and MANY others. (I listed the ones *I* liked. Others would have very different lists.) Diversity of style, not everyone in lockstep.
P.S.: Copyright laws still need to change. Joan Baez should never have been allowed to copyright folksongs. Technically, I suppose that she only copyrighted a particular arrangement of them, but she didn't list what was new and what was old. This shouldn't be allowed unless ANY change that you make allows you to claim a new copyright. And any would include just changing the key or the tempo.
I don't think I trust anything they offered at this point, no matter what they promised. They may not quite be MS, but they're clearly about as honorable.
Of course, this was made clear by the Sklyarov affair, where they first instigated persecution of Sklyarov by the feds, and then denied responsibility. At that point I stopped trusting anything they said. So far this has seemed a wise decision.
I don't know about Univac, but in one RCA computer version (model 2?) the upgrade to the next faster version was to swap a long cable for a shorter one. Doesn't quite seem to be the same as what I think this patent is talking about, though. (OTOH, I never read software patents. It's too dangerous. [Well, also I read one once, and decided that the process was totally useless. But mainly it's the danger of "intentionally violating" the patent.])
Depends on just how "application" gets defined. And you can believe their public justifier if you want to, but don't expect me to agree. I ran more than 3 apps at once on a MSWind3.1 (Wrong version?). That was why TSRs were invented. It didn't require any gig of RAM, or even ANY hard disk.
(You can claim that a TSR wasn't really running on the system, but that's not how it looked to the end user. It just didn't do any background processing.)
You just don't hear about it until it happens here. Or notice it. Austrailia and New Zealand were in the news a while back for something about as bad, but I don't live there. I did, however, notice that they weren't better places to live.
The only way this could be a species extinction event is if it set off a major war...which, of course, it could. OTOH, it could quite easily be a civilization killer without any hysteria being necessary. Current evidence seems to show that modern plants are pretty well adapted to a narrow range of temperatures (which varies with the species). When the temperatures go outside that range they become much less nutritious. Ditto, but differently, for ease of growth.
E.g., if you grow corn (maize) under conditions of high temperature and high carbon dioxide, then you get plenty of growth, but few ears, and ears that are low in nutritional value. (I don't know what assumptions they made about humidity.) Now high temperature here is about current tropics temperature, which is forecast for the temperate zone (though of course it won't be as constant there) which is where most of the farming is currently done. I suspect that they didn't need to alter the temperature, as they needed to enclose the plants in a greenhouse to control the CO2 levels, so temperature my well be just reporting what happened automatically. I think they were really investigating the reaction of plants to increased levels of CO2.
Also, with increased temperatures, weather patterns change. Moist areas become dry, etc. This means that areas that are currently farming areas can expect to experience periodic crop failures, becoming expected crop failures as the change proceeds. But all currently suitable areas are already under development. And most unsuitable land is already owned by someone who's doing as they choose with it. So relocation may not be possible. (And it's not clear where there would be to relocate to.)
So one thing that's needed is new plant strains that are more drought resistant and which will retain their nutritional characteristics under increased levels of CO2. Not easy. Drought tolerance has already been pushed rather hard, and nobody has much experience with how plant metabolic pathways change when atmospheric CO2 increases.
There are other problems, but that's one. And do note that IF civilization hiccups, one can expect a large die-off. 90% wouldn't be too high to predict...which means that a hiccup would turn into something quite a bit more serious. We've turned into a species where just about nobody knows how to raise food, and where there isn't going to be much place to raise food anyway, and in any case most of the plants we eat don't grow locally anyway. So most of the population will become desperate, which means that even those who *do* know how to raise food, won't be able to, because you can't do that around desperate people. And just where does your current water supply come from? It probably won't be there if the power's off. Do YOU know how to build a privy? And where? Building one in the wrong place is an excellent way to spread many diseases, e.g. typhoid. The list goes on. If you live in a city, don't expect to survive. If you live in a suburb, don't expect to survive.
So if we can, it's rather important to take steps to ensure that civilization doesn't fall. Unfortunately, greedy, short-sighted, and/or power-hungry individuals have sabotaged most attempts that I'm aware of to establish buffers against such a fall. So if there is one, it's going to be very hard. (I didn't say politicians, because many of them weren't politicians. Just most.)
Unfortunately, those models are going to BE in a preliminary state until long after it's too late to fix things. Based on current event evidence (rather than models) the models have been understating the seriousness of the situation. So fixing the models correctly, when it ever happens, if it ever does... (We still can't make weather predictions good for a month ahead of time) ... will probably just show that the situation is much worse than our current models show. And it will probably take a decade or so to rewrite the models and test them if any basic theories need changing...so by then New York may be under water (probably only a foot or so at that time, but with more on the way). Or you can bet that if we just ignore the problem it will go away... but *I* wouldn't give you good odds.
Then you don't understand science.
In any active science you are going to get continual alteration and refinement. And occasional large changes. You also get everyone overblowing the importance of the thing they've just been working on. And occasional refutations of earlier claims that are sometimes verified and othertimes not.
Science is a messy, chaotic process. Sorry if you thought it was clean and simple. For clean and simple you need a historical retrospective of last century (or earlier). It was never clean and simple while it was happening, I don't care WHAT they claim on TV, Or General Science I. Or any other hagiographical literature.
So... to an extent you're right: If the authors are correct, then the models will need to be rewritten. But as the way they are tested is by validating them by predicting the present from historical records, I don't expect major changes in the predictions. Possibly major changes in the theoretical underpinnings...which might give different values for which variables are more important...and might not. But you should expect that the authors have overstated the importance of their results. They've got to argue that what they did is important, after all.
Not so recent. Yes, many dinosaurs WERE warm-blooded. (Shouldn't be surprising, as birds are descendants of dinosaurs, and we know they're warm blooded.)
Were ALL dinosaurs warm-blooded? Dunno. I doubt it, but can't think of any actual evidence. (Remember, dinosaur is more specific than "Big huge animal that lived a long time ago". [Actually, also less specific. They weren't, by and large, huge. Only an occasional species went that direction.])
Thanks. Still a bad design, but I'm glad to hear there's a way around it. Actually, though, I've been generally avoiding it by avoiding gtk based applications. (A real pain, since that's the library I'd rather use...due to the C linkage.)
What I really don't like is the C++ interface. That doesn't play nicely with most other languages. (C is much better in that regard.)
Perhaps, though, I just haven't looked recently. Does Qt now have a C interface library?
I don't really like C, as it's too pointer happy. But it does have the advantage for an interface language that more languages can easily interface with C than any other particular language. (I count each separate assembler as a separate language.) OTOH, I think that many gtk widgets are horribly ugly. Especially the file directory widget. It's far superior to allow a file name to be typed as a single string than to require each directory in the path to be a separate button. (Granted, I've not used this widget. I don't know how it looks to program for. But speaking as a user, "UGH!".)
MS is a repeating criminal, which has not been reformed. It has no inherent right to exist, being a legal fiction.
The correct action is to cancel it's corporate charter and refuse it the right to do any business at all. If this action were taken by even a few countries, I believe that MS would get the message. If it didn't, then a few more should suffice. E.g., if the US and EU both refused to allow MS to do business within their borders, it would be rather effective almost immediately.
N.B.: I'm not talking about a temporary suspension of the right to do business. I'm talking about permanently canceling the corporate charter, and refusal to recognize the existence of the company. I'm sure that there are many technicalities that would need to be dealt with, but there are precedents in how to handle them. (Louisiana, at least, used to have canceling corporate charters as a punishment for misbehaving corporations, though it was rarely enforced, and originally I believe that all US corporate charters were temporary and expired.)
I agree that copyright used to be a net societal gain. That went out with the Sonny-Bono copyright extension act, and was made a ludicrous argument by the DMCA.
Similarly patents were once a net social gain, but when the laws became convoluted they became a net social cost. Trademarks, however, still appear to be net social gains.
When figuring whether something is a social gain or cost it's important to look at the implementation. Details matter.
Does Debian own and trademarks? I'd be surprised if not. (And I RUN Debian on my system...I've just never paid attention.)
I'd need significant proof, however, before I took his claim about trademarks being bad seriously. (And I mean concrete examples, not arguments.)
As noticed above, CentOS and IceWeasel are reasonable counter-examples.
I agree, one should be willing to serve on the jury. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to lie during questioning. This usually results in my being struck. (I was on a jury once, but it was so open-and-shut that the lawyers nearly didn't bother to screen the jurors.)
Watching the trial of SCOx and watching various other company trials much less intensively ...
I don't think they'd be in much trouble. Being a corporation seems to grant you a free pass to thumb your nose at normal regulations without much worry. Bois has been denied the right to practice in a few states, but that hasn't kept him from practicing in other states. And that's all the sanctions he's gotten for some pretty serious abuses. SCOx and it's legal representatives have just straight ignored court orders several times...and there's been no punishment for that. (Yeah, they're going to lose, but it was blatantly obvious 5 years ago that they had no case at all. And when they were ordered to present any evidence they had, they didn't come up with any. ... Sorry, the company closed for Xmas vacation, and we couldn't contact the directors. So they were ordered again to provide any evidence by [I think] January 27th. Again nothing. And no repercussions for their ignoring the court orders.)
So it's my belief, after observing the noticeable evidence, that there won't be any repercussion if the RIAA and it's expert play fast and loose with what the court has ordered.