Hacker News Reader

Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

Further, how are they defining "abandoned"?

[0] the ruling, page 60 outlines the terms

> [copyright owner] has issued an affirmative statement indicating that external server support for the video game has ended and such support is in fact no longer available or, alternatively, server support has been discontinued for a period of at least six months

[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.g...

Does the "or" belong to the affirmative statement or the support not being available no longer?

I am not a lawyer, but the awkward phrasing `or, alternatively,` seems to be the complex legalese separator clause here, which would seem to indicate to me it is not a part of the affirmative statement requirement, but an alternative to it.

(It is somewhat fascinating that lawyers use written languages like programming languages in trying to avoid logical ambiguity, but of course the legal approaches to such questions evolved so entirely different including very different environment pressures.)

It would be really neat if we could start using a progrmming language-like syntax for logical expressions instead of English.

Sure there would be learning involved, but not nearly as much memorization.

The Obama Administration's "CTO" office pushed for more laws to include working/testable Python code as artifacts to work through conditional logic in the law. A very small selection of Federal laws did get that added, I don't recall which ones.

Exploring the boundaries between legal code and programming code is a fascinating subject, and one of these decades maybe there will be the right combination of nerds in government to see something systematic attempted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com