You have to think of ALL angles of the problem before you argue with me. Tort reform will make lawsuits single sided - favoring the large mega-companies over the small companies and individuals And I do. You didn't notice, but I structured my statements carefully. Done right, it would make it harder for corporations to sue too. I fully support the anti-SLAPP laws, for example.
I guess what I think needs to happen is that lawsuits need to be avoided where possible, while still making the process cost less in the court system. Like I said, any adjustments would be difficult. I've chosen to devout my time to other issues for the most part.
And as for passing the lawsuit buck, well, I'm sure that's happened before, and if it wasn't for the expense, it's not a bad idea.
As Republicans mean tort reform, it wasn't. It was a reform that protects the individual, not the company. That's the big difference. Republicans will try to minimize that, because that's part of the smokescreen.
Huh? I'm not a republican. When I say tort reform, what I mean is an acceptance that there are risks in the world, and that personal responsability should be a bigger part. Also, that a lawsuit should be somewhat harder to bring. It is a difficult process to tune.
And you mention google. I tried some google searches, and the first few pages all mention various suits and tort reform. Found a site that talked about how Texas's tort reform slashed liability costs 30%. Could you refer me to a few sites?
As for the average reward of $30,000, how did you get that figure? Did you also figure in another 60-70k for lawyer & court fees(both sides)? If the insurance companies are screwing us so much, why aren't the professionals forming their own insurance coops? Heck, I find the idea of insurance covering liability a bit disturbing, in the sense that it costs everybody, at fault and faultless, equally.
As I said before, there's a buttload of safety things available, and the safety industry is huge. Your scenario doesn't really counteract that reality.
And how many of them were developed after, say, the '80s? How many of them are simply refinements of existing technologies? We're not saying that safety isn't a large industry, that existing safety devices don't have a place, but we're saying that existing liability laws are an obstacle to new safety devices reaching market.
The mythology is that one evil (but stupid) guy (who can't operate equipment competently) sues a company (usually phrased as 'picks on') that is owned by a single (and in the mythology depicted as a 'noble entrepreneur) person or small group of people.
Like the case of the guy who was sued for not putting the warning on the cardboard car sunshade that you're not to drive with it in place. Like the guy who made a living in my hometown suing businesses that ran out of items on sale for "mental anguish", but would settle for a reasonable 5-10 thousand dollars. Like the police who sued Ford because Ford refused to sell them more vehicles because they were suing them
In reality, when the guy sues, he was wounded seriously by a product which can be demonstrated to have left the factory in a defective condition. And there's large quantities of similarly defective products out there. And the factory is owned by a company that measures profits in the billions of dollars a year. The guy that 'invented' the safety equipment makes 40K a year, and might be laid off any day now. The people who profit from the invention spend their days sipping tea, getting their poodles groomed, drinking martinis, and wondering which around-the-world cruise might be best to give the grandchildren for a "Lincoln's Birthday" present.
Doesn't sound like they're that big. And what about the parent with his device that would open a parachute if the parachuter didn't pull the cord within a certain altitude? It didn't protect against a partial opening of the chute. That's a situation that warrents a redesign. It can certainly be argued that the inventer had a worthy idea, but failed to cover all scenarios. Heck, it didn't protect in a situation it wasn't designed to handle. It was a simple IF (altitude x) AND chute NOT DEPLOYED THEN DEPLOY(chute).
Which was a form of tort reform. Seems to have worked, hasn't it? People aren't afraid to give CPR anymore.
By that I mean that every company should have sufficient liability insurance.
And how is the insurance company supposed to underwrite a new safety device without charging an arm and a leg for it? How can a small business, strained by just the R&D and initial construction afford it?
Everyone knows that even in the most sue-happy area, medicine, lawsuits aren't the source of doctors going out of business. The problem there is predatory insurance companies.
Actually, it's a combination of both. I've heard that in at least one area the monthly malpractice premium for an obstetricion is $100,000 a month. The only reason the Doctor was still in practice was that the tail-end premium(to cover any late lawsuits, a potential until the last delivery hits 18) was over a million!
Sounds almost like a checklist. Sure, you and your passengers supposed to be wearing your seatbelt, but lets assume you have passengers and an emergency occurs. Are you going to assume your passangers still have their belts on, are you going to spend time visually checking to see that their belts are one, or are you going to yell "seatbelts" just to remind them to make sure?
Seat belts were implemented before the predatory suing started.
In this example the inventer of this particular system of parachute created a system that costs about 10k that has a chance of returning a plane no longer capable of controlled flight to the ground in relative safety. A problem occurs, and suddenly the company is being sued for $26 million. That is the total cost of 2,600 of these systems. IE in order to cover this liability, they would have to double the cost of the system to $20,000, and still sell 2,600 parachutes.
Now, to make this right on-topic: if a safety device fails, and I die as a result, I'm going to sue. hmmm... Death must not be much of an obsticle to you.
On another note, lets say that you suffer a heart attack. I attempt to give you CPR, however that fails. Should I be sued by your estate for failing to save you? Say I use an automatic defibulater. Should I be liable, should the maker of the defibulater be liable? Do you think that maybe it's the liability that causes these machines to cost so much? Maybe having heard about these suits, I decide not to get involved, due to the risk of being sued. Now your chances drop rather greatly, because my liability for attempting to save you exceeds my gains for doing so(the good feeling of saving a life).
All I'm saying is that it's a shame that when the device works perfectly, you get a pat on the back. When it fails, you get slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
then safety wouldn't be the billions of dollars a year industry that it currently is.
Sure, for established safety devices. And for devices that are mandated federally. But new, experimental safety systems, like this parachute? Nope, you won't find much of an industry for them. You won't especially see small businesses taking the liability on.
This parachute system is a "better than nothing" system. I think that it'd be a shame that they're sued out of existance, preventing or delaying the deployment of this life-saving system for many years.
I've taken flying lessons and talked with the instructors. Planes are not easy to get anymore, and I've heard of planes that land hard, had wings broken, even landed in lakes being recovered and restored to flying status.
You figure, people are still taking WWII planes out of junkyards and restoring them.
Sounds like another point for the need for tort reform.
All devices fail, including safety ones. You just have to build them as best as you can.
Maybe a system where the manufacturer is only liable for "known conditions". IE they're only liable if they fail to correct the product when a defect becomes known. If the vulnerability is unfixable(IE we use seatbelts, even though they're not 100% effective), as long as you're safer with the product than without it, it's considered good.
The person who comes up with a better one makes alot of money.
The damage depends on many factors, such as what the weight and speed of the plane, as well as the landing surface.
The parachute is generally sized to drop the plane within the tolerance of the landing struts. Given a relativly soft & flat surface, the damage isn't bad. Of course, this depends on why you had to deploy the paracute in the first place.
Given how expensive a plane is, it is a major plus to save it. Of course, it is also much easier to deploy the plane-chute then to try to climb out of one of those planes. It requires less time & altitude to deploy properly.
I wasn't suggesting that we do it. I was just guessing on cost. And it likely would be in the hundreds of millions. After all, it costs tens of millions just to reach LEO.
seeing as how the jigs and tools for them have been destroyed.
I know it's been discontinued. Thus the tools remark. Just because something has been discontinued doesn't mean that we can't make it again. If we really wanted to, we can make all sorts of interesting things again. The computer in the article, a saturn-V, a sherman tank, civil war artillery, etc. It's just a question of cost and why.
Well, considering that I don't think that slashdot has had even a million registrations, and probably considerably fewer still active, we'd all have to pitch in ~$20 just to get the tens of millions to make it to the moon that you suggest.
For the "hundreds of millions" quoted, probably an off the cuff remark, it probably wouldn't be that far off to make an actual Saturn-V & landing craft, seeing as how the jigs and tools for them have been destroyed.
Good point. Another thing about these griefers are that they tend to be younger (<21) types, without a job. This means that they can spend far more time online than I can, who's lucky if he can spend an hour a night online.
Even if I was with a game from the beginning, I'm not going to be able to keep up.
On Starsider we had this crazy side-show, Ichben Einberlinner, an obese old bald man who danced in underwear and a stormtrooper helmet, at the Coronet starport, all freakin day, every day. It was kinda gross, and many felt it detracted from the game.
They didn't have a public decency law there?
On the other hand, have you ever seen a religious nut spouting his stuff in RL?
And this is why even if you have "good" alignments you still need to be able to attack. Sometimes self defense doesn't mean that they necessarily attacked first...
The good character just has to weigh the penalty...
This is exactly true. Why would I want a player that causes five new players to cancel their subscriptions per month, average?
If you want to PvP and be nasty and stuff, join the PvP guild, wear a chicken on your head and have fun trying to be the only remaining member of the PvP guild.
But that's not fun, is it, because they can fight back, huh?
All you'd have to do would have a "Knowledge" rating. If you don't tell them what the rating means and you dont' know the scale, it'd tough for the consumer to know what the rating actually means.
You have been assigned to the red assistance group. Me:WTF does that mean?
Problem with this is that they can simply log in and let the character sit. I had an idea where you'd have to do the equivalent of breaking so many rocks. Make it so that it's hard to script for, and you'd really annoy the miscreant.
I think this is a good idea. If you make a jail system where the player has to do a number of hard to script for actions in order to get out, the virtual equivalent of breaking rocks. The higher the sentence, the more actions needed to get out.
That way, just like in the real world, you can have anti-social types, but they're limited in the amount of damage they cause.
I've seen techniques like this used in the old MUDs.
1. Resurrected in a temple. The "Hand of God" enforced nice behavior here. You had to move some rooms before you left. Multiple exits, too. 2. You exited into town. There were NPC guards that would lay smackdown on anybody who misbehaved. And while they weren't the HoG, they were still tough, regenerated, weren't worth any XP, and would slap a wanted status on you, so every guard in the city would attempt to kill the miscreant. 3. Bounty system. Any player who dislikes another can place a bounty on that character. While most newbies can't muster much cash, well, it adds up.
Well, faster to get is relative. If you figure it takes 30 minutes to an hour to run to the store and buy a DVD, compared to five minutes on the computer to queue it for download. If you compare it as being downloadable three days before the theatrical release, much less the DVD release three to six months down the road.
On the other side, it's very easy and fast to grab a DVD at a store when you're there anyways. No real need to worry about corruption or getting the wrong thing.
And of course, the whole music thing was exasperated by the movie industry selling movies cheap. "What do you mean, I have to pay more for the movie soundtrack than I do the movie?". Prices have dropped, but I remember asking myself why they were trying to sell ~60 minutes of music for more than a two hour movie (with sound!).
Most places keep track of this now. They know when you've done an exchange, and won't take back the unopened box for a refund.
If you complain enough, the manager will generaly give you a refund.
Why doesn't the MPAA realize that they're just going to drive consumers to stealing their movies? (When the stolen movie is Cheaper, easier to use, faster to get...)
Slashdot Mirror
You have to think of ALL angles of the problem before you argue with me. Tort reform will make lawsuits single sided - favoring the large mega-companies over the small companies and individuals
And I do. You didn't notice, but I structured my statements carefully. Done right, it would make it harder for corporations to sue too. I fully support the anti-SLAPP laws, for example.
I guess what I think needs to happen is that lawsuits need to be avoided where possible, while still making the process cost less in the court system. Like I said, any adjustments would be difficult. I've chosen to devout my time to other issues for the most part.
And as for passing the lawsuit buck, well, I'm sure that's happened before, and if it wasn't for the expense, it's not a bad idea.
As Republicans mean tort reform, it wasn't. It was a reform that protects the individual, not the company. That's the big difference. Republicans will try to minimize that, because that's part of the smokescreen.
Huh? I'm not a republican. When I say tort reform, what I mean is an acceptance that there are risks in the world, and that personal responsability should be a bigger part. Also, that a lawsuit should be somewhat harder to bring. It is a difficult process to tune.
And you mention google. I tried some google searches, and the first few pages all mention various suits and tort reform. Found a site that talked about how Texas's tort reform slashed liability costs 30%. Could you refer me to a few sites?
As for the average reward of $30,000, how did you get that figure? Did you also figure in another 60-70k for lawyer & court fees(both sides)? If the insurance companies are screwing us so much, why aren't the professionals forming their own insurance coops? Heck, I find the idea of insurance covering liability a bit disturbing, in the sense that it costs everybody, at fault and faultless, equally.
And how many of them were developed after, say, the '80s? How many of them are simply refinements of existing technologies? We're not saying that safety isn't a large industry, that existing safety devices don't have a place, but we're saying that existing liability laws are an obstacle to new safety devices reaching market.
The mythology is that one evil (but stupid) guy (who can't operate equipment competently) sues a company (usually phrased as 'picks on') that is owned by a single (and in the mythology depicted as a 'noble entrepreneur) person or small group of people.
Like the case of the guy who was sued for not putting the warning on the cardboard car sunshade that you're not to drive with it in place. Like the guy who made a living in my hometown suing businesses that ran out of items on sale for "mental anguish", but would settle for a reasonable 5-10 thousand dollars. Like the police who sued Ford because Ford refused to sell them more vehicles because they were suing them
Oh, so Ballistic Recovery Systems is a billion dollar company?
BRS is a 24 year old $6.5 million Minnesota based manufacturer.
Doesn't sound like they're that big. And what about the parent with his device that would open a parachute if the parachuter didn't pull the cord within a certain altitude? It didn't protect against a partial opening of the chute. That's a situation that warrents a redesign. It can certainly be argued that the inventer had a worthy idea, but failed to cover all scenarios. Heck, it didn't protect in a situation it wasn't designed to handle. It was a simple IF (altitude x) AND chute NOT DEPLOYED THEN DEPLOY(chute).
CPR is covered by good samaritan laws
Which was a form of tort reform. Seems to have worked, hasn't it? People aren't afraid to give CPR anymore.
By that I mean that every company should have sufficient liability insurance.
And how is the insurance company supposed to underwrite a new safety device without charging an arm and a leg for it? How can a small business, strained by just the R&D and initial construction afford it?
Everyone knows that even in the most sue-happy area, medicine, lawsuits aren't the source of doctors going out of business. The problem there is predatory insurance companies.
Actually, it's a combination of both. I've heard that in at least one area the monthly malpractice premium for an obstetricion is $100,000 a month. The only reason the Doctor was still in practice was that the tail-end premium(to cover any late lawsuits, a potential until the last delivery hits 18) was over a million!
Sounds almost like a checklist. Sure, you and your passengers supposed to be wearing your seatbelt, but lets assume you have passengers and an emergency occurs.
Are you going to assume your passangers still have their belts on, are you going to spend time visually checking to see that their belts are one, or are you going to yell "seatbelts" just to remind them to make sure?
Seat belts were implemented before the predatory suing started.
In this example the inventer of this particular system of parachute created a system that costs about 10k that has a chance of returning a plane no longer capable of controlled flight to the ground in relative safety. A problem occurs, and suddenly the company is being sued for $26 million. That is the total cost of 2,600 of these systems. IE in order to cover this liability, they would have to double the cost of the system to $20,000, and still sell 2,600 parachutes.
Now, to make this right on-topic: if a safety device fails, and I die as a result, I'm going to sue.
hmmm... Death must not be much of an obsticle to you.
On another note, lets say that you suffer a heart attack. I attempt to give you CPR, however that fails. Should I be sued by your estate for failing to save you? Say I use an automatic defibulater. Should I be liable, should the maker of the defibulater be liable? Do you think that maybe it's the liability that causes these machines to cost so much? Maybe having heard about these suits, I decide not to get involved, due to the risk of being sued. Now your chances drop rather greatly, because my liability for attempting to save you exceeds my gains for doing so(the good feeling of saving a life).
All I'm saying is that it's a shame that when the device works perfectly, you get a pat on the back. When it fails, you get slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.
then safety wouldn't be the billions of dollars a year industry that it currently is.
Sure, for established safety devices. And for devices that are mandated federally. But new, experimental safety systems, like this parachute? Nope, you won't find much of an industry for them. You won't especially see small businesses taking the liability on.
This parachute system is a "better than nothing" system. I think that it'd be a shame that they're sued out of existance, preventing or delaying the deployment of this life-saving system for many years.
I've taken flying lessons and talked with the instructors. Planes are not easy to get anymore, and I've heard of planes that land hard, had wings broken, even landed in lakes being recovered and restored to flying status.
You figure, people are still taking WWII planes out of junkyards and restoring them.
Sounds like another point for the need for tort reform.
All devices fail, including safety ones. You just have to build them as best as you can.
Maybe a system where the manufacturer is only liable for "known conditions". IE they're only liable if they fail to correct the product when a defect becomes known. If the vulnerability is unfixable(IE we use seatbelts, even though they're not 100% effective), as long as you're safer with the product than without it, it's considered good.
The person who comes up with a better one makes alot of money.
The damage depends on many factors, such as what the weight and speed of the plane, as well as the landing surface.
The parachute is generally sized to drop the plane within the tolerance of the landing struts. Given a relativly soft & flat surface, the damage isn't bad. Of course, this depends on why you had to deploy the paracute in the first place.
Given how expensive a plane is, it is a major plus to save it. Of course, it is also much easier to deploy the plane-chute then to try to climb out of one of those planes. It requires less time & altitude to deploy properly.
I wasn't suggesting that we do it. I was just guessing on cost. And it likely would be in the hundreds of millions. After all, it costs tens of millions just to reach LEO.
seeing as how the jigs and tools for them have been destroyed.
I know it's been discontinued. Thus the tools remark. Just because something has been discontinued doesn't mean that we can't make it again. If we really wanted to, we can make all sorts of interesting things again. The computer in the article, a saturn-V, a sherman tank, civil war artillery, etc. It's just a question of cost and why.
Well, considering that I don't think that slashdot has had even a million registrations, and probably considerably fewer still active, we'd all have to pitch in ~$20 just to get the tens of millions to make it to the moon that you suggest.
For the "hundreds of millions" quoted, probably an off the cuff remark, it probably wouldn't be that far off to make an actual Saturn-V & landing craft, seeing as how the jigs and tools for them have been destroyed.
Good point. Another thing about these griefers are that they tend to be younger (<21) types, without a job. This means that they can spend far more time online than I can, who's lucky if he can spend an hour a night online.
Even if I was with a game from the beginning, I'm not going to be able to keep up.
On Starsider we had this crazy side-show, Ichben Einberlinner, an obese old bald man who danced in underwear and a stormtrooper helmet, at the Coronet starport, all freakin day, every day. It was kinda gross, and many felt it detracted from the game.
They didn't have a public decency law there?
On the other hand, have you ever seen a religious nut spouting his stuff in RL?
And this is why even if you have "good" alignments you still need to be able to attack. Sometimes self defense doesn't mean that they necessarily attacked first...
The good character just has to weigh the penalty...
This is exactly true. Why would I want a player that causes five new players to cancel their subscriptions per month, average?
If you want to PvP and be nasty and stuff, join the PvP guild, wear a chicken on your head and have fun trying to be the only remaining member of the PvP guild.
But that's not fun, is it, because they can fight back, huh?
Agree. Also, I'd go for higher level, longer term players for the more serious "crimes".
Also, use logging if possible. Maybe a sort of virtual "video footage".
All you'd have to do would have a "Knowledge" rating. If you don't tell them what the rating means and you dont' know the scale, it'd tough for the consumer to know what the rating actually means.
You have been assigned to the red assistance group.
Me:WTF does that mean?
Why else would he be giving them red shirts...
Problem with this is that they can simply log in and let the character sit. I had an idea where you'd have to do the equivalent of breaking so many rocks. Make it so that it's hard to script for, and you'd really annoy the miscreant.
I think this is a good idea. If you make a jail system where the player has to do a number of hard to script for actions in order to get out, the virtual equivalent of breaking rocks. The higher the sentence, the more actions needed to get out.
That way, just like in the real world, you can have anti-social types, but they're limited in the amount of damage they cause.
I've seen techniques like this used in the old MUDs.
1. Resurrected in a temple. The "Hand of God" enforced nice behavior here. You had to move some rooms before you left. Multiple exits, too.
2. You exited into town. There were NPC guards that would lay smackdown on anybody who misbehaved. And while they weren't the HoG, they were still tough, regenerated, weren't worth any XP, and would slap a wanted status on you, so every guard in the city would attempt to kill the miscreant.
3. Bounty system. Any player who dislikes another can place a bounty on that character. While most newbies can't muster much cash, well, it adds up.
Well, faster to get is relative. If you figure it takes 30 minutes to an hour to run to the store and buy a DVD, compared to five minutes on the computer to queue it for download. If you compare it as being downloadable three days before the theatrical release, much less the DVD release three to six months down the road.
On the other side, it's very easy and fast to grab a DVD at a store when you're there anyways. No real need to worry about corruption or getting the wrong thing.
And of course, the whole music thing was exasperated by the movie industry selling movies cheap. "What do you mean, I have to pay more for the movie soundtrack than I do the movie?". Prices have dropped, but I remember asking myself why they were trying to sell ~60 minutes of music for more than a two hour movie (with sound!).
Most places keep track of this now. They know when you've done an exchange, and won't take back the unopened box for a refund.
If you complain enough, the manager will generaly give you a refund.
Why doesn't the MPAA realize that they're just going to drive consumers to stealing their movies? (When the stolen movie is Cheaper, easier to use, faster to get...)
I installed SP2, and it totally screwed up my system. I've had to reinstall because of it.
It's a laptop. I lost hibernate functionality, the volume and power buttons don't work anymore, get constant errors in my log, etc...
It works. I've done it before.
Stupid company, test your pressing first...