College Threatens Students Over Email Addresses

superdave98 writes "As a sign that a CIO has way too much time on his hands, Santa Rosa Junior College is sending emails threatening lawsuits to staff and students who have the letters 'SRJC' in their private email addresses. They contend that people could be confused and think these are official email addresses. Sure, I suppose people who fall for 419 scams probably could be fooled, but not any reasonable humans. I can't believe they found a lawyer who thought this was a good idea."

Comments

Greed is Good

[Drakkenmensch]

For 150 dollars an hour, a lawyer will never tell you any idea of yours is bad, even if it's suing McDonalds because your hot coffee is (gasp!) HOT, and should not have been poured all over your crotch.

Re:Greed is Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, if coffee is too hot to be poor over your crotch then how the hell wouldn't it ALSO be too hot to be drank?

And I don't care if you're a testosterone-driven moron who thinks he's a hot stud because he can drink boiling hot coffee. Normal people can't and restaurants keep making fucking boiling hot coffee, that's just insane.

Re:Greed is Good

[inviolet]

79 year old Stella Liebeck suffered third degree burns on her groin and inner thighs while trying to add sugar to her coffee at a McDonalds drive through. Third degree burns are the most serious kind of burn. McDonalds knew it had a problem. There were at least 700 previous cases of scalding coffee incidents at McDonalds before Liebeck's case. McDonalds had settled many claim before but refused Liebeck's request for $20,000 compensation, forcing the case into court. Lawyers found that McDonalds makes its coffee 30-50 degrees hotter than other restaurants, about 190 degrees.

You know that coffee is brewed with water that is on the verge of boiling, right? Ditto for hot tea, at least if you follow worldwide British/Indian custom. So if your coffee is served fresh, as Starbucks does serve it, then it will be about 190 degrees. There would be a storm of "ZOMG my five-dollar coffee isn't fresh!!1!" complaints if they didn't.

So I'd like to know the definition of "other restaurants" that plaintiff claims are serving cooler coffee. It is very telling that they do not cite any coffee- or restaurant-industry standard for coffee serve temperature.

For added enlightenment, next time you brew a pot of coffee, let it sit in the carafe for a while with the coffeemaker still on to keep it warm, and then check the temperature with a cooking thermometer. Then come back and tell us whether plaintiff was justified in claiming that McDonalds' procedure was somehow out-of-the-ordinary.

Re:Greed is Good

[Duradin]

No one ever mentions the fact she was holding the cup of coffee between her knees.

Hot coffee + flimsy cup + holding with your legs = bad idea.

Re:Greed is Good

[SolarCanine]

Normally, when purchasing coffee "to go" from a restaurant, I'm actually looking to drink it 20-30 minutes later. Boiling hot coffee remains drinkably hot a half-hour later, which suits me just fine. And I don't care if you're a testosterone-lacking intellectual who thinks a nanny state is required to protect its members from something as simple as "hot things can burn." Smart people learn this at a pretty young age, and Darwin can and should take care of reinforcing the lesson as necessary.

Re:Greed is Good

[SolarCanine]

If that's the only way they'll learn what a three-year-old can learn otherwise, then yes, that's what I'm seriously saying. Hot coffee is hot. This shouldn't be something that requires any further explanation, disclaimers, cautionary tales, or legal proceedings. Not in any sane situation, anyway. But it seems that my post was flamebait, so whatever. I guess I'm just a cranky bastard that thinks that common sense is a valuable commodity that happens to be scarce lately.

Re:Greed is Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit! If it is too fucking hot for my leg, it's going to burn the shit out of my mouth!

Also, the facts of the McDonald's Hot Coffee case are that McDonald's required their franchisees to keep their coffee at 180F-190F. In addition, the coffee manufacturer has stated that such a high temperature is not ideal for the coffee's taste. It was simply a matter of time before someone got seriously injured.

Of course they did...

[rodrigoandrade]

A lawyer will take any case he can make a buck on.

What utter fucktards...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not saying I'm surprised; because idiocy is hardly surprising; but this move shows both legal asshattery and truly incredible ignorance of the technically mediated mores that exist on the internet.

With an email address, everybody knows that the local-part (before the @) is arbitrary and the domain corresponds, of course, to a domain. Using the local-part as an organizational identifier, except in flaky ad-hoc setups for small sub organizations(student_club@school.edu style), just isn't done. The domain is always where you look for organizational information.

This seems to be a case where somebody(who should know better, since he is part of their tech department) is treating all parts of the email address as being equally salient. If somebody had grabbed santarosa.com or santarosacollege.com (as opposed to the school's santarosa.edu) and was using email addresses in that domain for misleading purposes, I could sympathize with the case. Trying to dictate the form of email address local-parts from other domains is just bullshit, though.

Number of comments?!

[x78]

Is it me or has the number of comments of an article been taken off the beta index?!
I for one am not happy with this!
Going back to the original, hmph.
To keep on topic, yeah it's a little silly :)