|
That's not hard. I once saw a professor emeritus from a major CS/EE university who had founded their CS program and semiconductor program, had a bazillion highly ranked papers in those fields, a ton of patents including several that laid the foundations for modern integrated circuits, was an IEEE Fellow, a National Academy of Engineering member, and more I don't remember, testifying that the term RAM as commonly used in CS and EE includes hard disks, CD-ROM, and floppies. I was doing some work for the opposing side and asked their lawyers how that expert could possibly say that. Surely if his friends or colleagues found out it would tarnish his reputation I though. What they told me was that STEM communities, both academic and industrial, are well aware of how expert witness gigs work. Lawyers tell you what they need to do, and you find some argument for their position that isn't definitely a lie (in this case RAM stands for "Random Access Memory", and hard disk, CD-ROM, and floppy are indeed memory and have random access so of course are RAM), write up a report stating that, show up at the trial, have your impressive credentials read, and spend maybe an hour being examined and cross examined. In exchange for this you get enough money for a big fancy RV or a nice boat. So when his colleagues learn that he said it is normal in CS to include floppies and disks and CD-ROM when talking about a computer's RAM they don't think he'd gone nuts or senile. They just think he must have wanted an RV or boat or to remodel his house and took an expert witness gig. Our expert, who had a similar list of credentials, was using the gig to pay for a $100k car. |