Slashdot Mirror
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."
This is more than a bit surreal since SRJC has a long history of being on the net.
For example, Santa Rosa Junior College is one of the very few non-4-year colleges to have a .EDU domain name. In the early 90's they had two junior admins, Dane Jasper and Scott Doty, who went on to become the founders of a Mom-and-Pop Internet company that actually succeeded. It started as Sonoma Interconnect, but is now known as Sonic.net.
It's a shame to add this squirrely episode to that history.
SRJC Sam Robert Jacob Christinson? Can I sue the college for using my initals in their offical email? Someone may confuse me with them
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
"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."
For free, any number of internet denizens will propagate distortions and urban legends.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0122-11.htm
"Third Degree Burns
Here's what the talk show pundits and columnists neglected to mention about the McDonalds coffee burn case:
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. Doctors testified that it only takes 2-7 seconds to cause a third degree burn at 190 degrees. McDonalds knew its coffee was exceptionally hot but testified that they had never consulted with burn specialist. The Shriner Burn Institute had previously warned McDonalds not to serve coffee above 130 degrees. And so the jury came back with a decision- $160,000 for compensatory damages. But because McDonalds was guilty of "willful, reckless, malicious or wanton conduct" punitive damages were also applied. The jury set the award at $2.7 million. The judge then reduced the fine to less than half a million. Ms. Liebeck then settled with McDonalds for a sum reported to be much less than a half million dollars. McDonald's coffee is now sold at the same temperature as most other restaurants. "
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
Lawyers have an obligation to advise their clients of the good and bad of the client's case. In addition to duties under their respective governing society and regulations, the practical reason is rather simple: Where a lawyer is negligent in failing to properly advise their client of the risks in a litigation, that lawyer could be liable to their client in negligence.
Why don't you read about what happened before you guess about it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants seems to be a good summary of the case. Basically, a 79-year-old woman suffered third-degree burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent. She remained in the hospital for eight days while she underwent skin grafting. Two years of treatment followed. The issue was that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 F, which (it was claimed) is much hotter than coffee from other places.
Not that I can understand why anybody would want to drink McDonald's coffee anyway -- it's HORRIBLE! But that's just my opinion.
The two people mentioned in the article as being behind the policy are:
MK Rudolph - mrudolph@santarosa.edu and
K Fiori - kfiori@santarosa.edu
The latter created the policy (director of computing services) and the former has her weight behind it (VP Academic Affairs). Just figured it'd be useful information to have. I'm in no way suggesting that all of slashdot go out and register variants of hotGritzIn_SJRC@gmail.com and youSuck_SJRC@yahoo.com or anything like that. And using hundreds of those emails to spam the everliving bejeezus out of their mailboxes would be nearly as morally questionable as suing your own students for making similar addresses. So I'd never suggest that either.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/food/beverages/coffee-tea/coffee-taste-test-3-07/overview/0307_coffee_ov_1.htm Your are apparently in the minority. CR's taste test found McDonald's coffee was the best.
I trust Consumer Reports to rate food about as much as I trust Cook's Illustrated to rate chainsaws.
No problem dude, I'll just change my email to FU_KenFiori@gmail.com .
Florida University would like to have a word with you....
And she did not want to sue McDonalds for punitive damages, only to have them pay for the costs of her medical treatments. McD's refused to pay her medical bills (they offered $800), and so she was left with the choice of suing or being on the hook for the costs. Moreover, there were something like 700 previous cases of serious burns relating to McD's coffee, and McD's was aware of the safety issues. http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm http://library.findlaw.com/1999/Nov/1/129862.html
Woot! I grabbed JohnDoe_SRJC@yahoo.com!
1. Check slashdot
2. Grab example email address from news article
3. ???
4. Profit!
I'm sitting here watching the yahoo inbox, just waiting for the bucket loads of money to start pouring in...hahaha...SUCKERS!
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.
Except that you're in the minority. McDs own research showed that 1) the majority of thier customers wanted to drink the coffee immdediately and 2) the temp. they served it at would cause 3rd degree burns and 3) didn't care. That's why they lost the lawsuit.. that the woman shouldn't have had an open cup of coffee between her legs to begin with was why the award was halved.