On 08/26/2016 05:55 PM, Craig Haynie wrote:
On 08/26/2016 05:39 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Actually, that is central to the legal questions. People on Planet
Rossi have the peculiar notion that contracts are enforced based
strictly on the words in them. If you can write a clever enough
contract, you can force someone to pay you no matter what happens in
the real world...
It all depends on the court and the jury; but certainly, if you can
prove fraud, the case goes out the window. Otherwise, some courts
respect strict interpretation, and don't draw assumptions about the
intent of the contract. Many contracts are written for strict
interpretation, and outside of fraud, there are good reasons to
believe that this test was never intended by Rossi to 'prove' the
thing worked.*It looks to me like he intended it to be a performance
test, and nothing more. *
But a "performance test" would absolutely show whether it worked. That's
/exactly/ what it would show, in fact.
How could it not be intended as a demonstration that it worked? Either
it performs as asserted or it's broken, and this test should have shown
that.
This is not like a "safety" test of a new drug, that doesn't check to
see if it works -- in this case, "performance" was all there was to it.
