> She didn't pour it on herself, she spilled it. She should have been aware of the dangers of hot liquids, and taken the appropriate care. (From elsewhere in the thread, I've learned that she was in a car, with the coffee in her lap. Now, call me crazy, but that isn't the first place I'd think of to put coffee) > And it was too hot to be safe. I've had lots of hot coffee in my life (If I'm in a hurry, I'll often make instant by boiling a kettle. If the kettle's just boiled, the coffee is going to be very close to 100 deg. C. - Just how hot was the McDonald's coffee?)
> Thank God it was on her crotch, and not her grandson's face. Yes, you're right - but the level of responsibility she's shown indicates to me that she shouldn't have been looking after children.
> IMO, anyone who is too lazy to brew coffee deserves what they get So you think she deserved the burns? Why flame me then? But it isn't always about being lazy, is it? For some odd reason, I don't take a coffee pot with me to the mall. Do you?
> No one is holding a gun to your head, telling you to drink McDonald's coffee, are they? No and there are several places where I'd rather get coffee. But now they're all going think twice about server beverages at a drinkable level on the offchance that somebody else spills the drink and burns themself.
The woman in question has my sympaty for her pain, but no sympathy over the cause. If she'd (for example) slipped on a wet floor at McDonalds, and that had caused the spill and subsequent burns, then sure, sue them. But she didn't.
SHE selected a hot beverage, SHE was in control of that beverage at the time the incident happened, and SHE was, as far as I'm concered, responsible for the consequences of that spill.
> However, companies have an obligation to make products that are safe. Every day, millions of people around the world buy hot beverages. I can't remember another case of one suing the vendor because it was too hot. So hot coffee is a pretty safe product - provided it's used responsibly.
> 1. Weapons are usually quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT end and a WRONG end of a weapon, the danger is when you happen to be on the WRONG side. Coffee (where this started), is usuall quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT way to use it and a WRONG way to use it. Ther danger is when you happen to use it in the WRONG way.
> 2. Fossil fuels are not a corporate product (a). If we follows this argument to the extreme, NOTHING is a corporate product. But corportations refine fossil fuels into the petrol that I (and, I suspect, you) put in my car. There's a process involved which the corporation adds a cost for.
> 3. That license thing you get before you get in a car, that's kinda meant to show you have the minimum level of skill/ability to drive a car safely Emphasis on the minimum. I've never seen a driving test (I was a motorcycle instructor for a while when I was at university) that's actually any test of driving ability, they're more like a hoop you have to jump through. > You'll note that you can't drive a car without the license thingy. Really? Do you want to think about that for a minute? How do you get a license? You take a test. What do you do on that test? You drive a car. But you haven't got a license yet. How do you prepare for that test? You drive a car - usually marked to indicate the driver is unqualified - but you don't have a license. Even if you ignore the test element, you can still drive without a license. You might well be breaking the laws in your jurisdiction to do so, but not holding a license does not prevent you from driving a car. Perhaps McDonald's should insist on a "how to drink coffee" test for all its customers, and that the possess a valid coffee drinking licence before they be served? > 4. Knives - See 1. Coffee - see 1.
> It's only because MSIE *still* hasn't gotten alpha channel / transparency right in their PNG support. No. Even if MSIE supported PNG properly, it *still* isn't an viable alternative to JPEG for high-resolution photographic images. If you don't believe me, go find your favourite high-resolution image and save it as both a JPEG and a PNG. Look at the resultant filesizes. Filesizes are important if storage is limited (e.g. digital cameras, palm-like devices) and when bandwith it limited (most people still don't have high-speed low-cost internet connections). PNG is a great replacement for GIF, but not for JPEG.
> What the hell is wrong with the US patent office? You REALLY want an answer to that? Personally, I'll remain outside the US and find myself able to legitimatly able to continue to use the format.
I wrote: > partyl due to the better compression Sorry. That should read "partly due to the better compression than GIF". And of course, I can't post the corrections to my comment for another two minutes, and can't use Emacs for editing them. Gotta love the user-friendly interface at slashdot:-(
> I, and many other websites (including but not limited to the MAME website) have switched over to PNG long ago I switched to PNG long ago, partly due to the Unisys/Compu$serve patent claim, partyl due to the better compression but mostly due to what seems to be better support in browsers for interleaved rendering (I'm aware that not everyone who wants to view my pages has a fast connection). But, for some reason, Slashdot seems to have resisted PNG and stayed with GIF. Ironic that, don't you think?
> Only stone-age browsers cannot view them Lynx isn't "stone-age" but (last time I looked) couldn't view PNGs:-)
> there is a plugin available for those ancient things Of course, not all those "ancient things" actually have any support for plugins.
But apart from all this, PNG and JPEG address different needs. JPEG uses a "lossy" compression technique, which basically throws away some information before using more traditional compression techniques. PNG, on the other hand, is lossless - like (e.g.) compress of zip. Which means that the filesizes (and hence storage requirements/transmission times) of PNG compressed images are likely to be considerably higher than JPEG.
> The woman who had it spilled onto her groin had third degree burns over the majority of her groin. And because of her stupidity (Remind me - did McDonalds put a gun to her head and tell her to pour it over herself? I thought not.), everyone who gets coffee from McDonalds gets cold coffee (or at least, coffee which becomes undrinkably cold much faster).
> Like all great sci-fi, 1984 isn't (and wasn't) about the future 1984 isn't sci-fi. It's political fiction. The fact that it was set in the future doesn't make it sci-fi.
> Nazi Germany gave us advances in physics (via rocketry) and mathematics (encryption). I think more advances in mathematics were due to decryption (the field in which a little know guy by the name of Alan Turing really made his mark on the war). But I guess you could argue quite reasonably that it was a consequence of encryption. Oh, and don't forget the advances in weapons of mass destruction.
> I've found that the polis respond reasonably quickly to a 'I think there's some joyriders a stolen car' call in bristol Try it in Fishponds - they'll say "Probably" and hang up:-(
> but they dont care about people driving with firearms in their vehicle, something that would definately get a reaction in the UK That's because Americans have the right to shoot everybody, and we don't.
> In the UK the govt are trialling elapsed distance speed traps... They are no longer trialling them. They're in use (see the links I posted earlier)
>...and I think they changed the law a while back to make such traps legal. They didn't need to change the law, since they were already legal. (The fact that they violate the ECHR isn't important, since UK law seems to remove any human rights you have as soon as you operate a motorised vehicle)
> I dont know if you need good OCR, just pattern matching to detect the speeding, then human intervention to get the#. The idea is that the whole process is automated - hence the recent (Spetember last year, IIRC) change in the regulations regarding registration plates. (see the links I posted earlier)
> Youd need to sustain the wheelie for some distance to get out of that, I don't see how sustaining the wheelie would "get you out of anything"? If you wanted to wheelie past all the cameras, you'd wheelie past all the cameras (it's pretty easy to get an R1 to reach for the sky "on demand"). Or maybe you'd do it every other camera. Or every third. Or just one. Unless you're under the mistaken impression that the wheelie is to hide/obscure the plate?.
The rider I saw wheelied past a front-facing (Truvelo) camera. The SPECS cameras are also front facing. He was on a bike. In the UK, bikes don't carry front number plates. Ergo, front facing cameras can't be used to identify motorcycles. And of course, UK law requires motorcyclists to wear a crash helmet, which obscures the face - so you can't identify him that way. You don't need to wheelie to hide your rear number plate from a front-facing camera, you just ride past the camera. Whilst I don't know the rider in question's motives, I know why I wish I'd done it. I'd do it to make the point to the Orwellian government "Hey, your camera won't help you nick me for speeding - go fsck up some car driver's life. And just to add insult to injury, I'm going to wheelie AS WELL." The wheelie is a 'bonus offence':-)
> or make sure your average speed is below the limit, even if you go to 130+ on occasions. In a car, you're screwed. You have to keep your speed down it you're in a SPECS area (currently this means parts of Nottingham). On a bike, though, you could have a field day. The same also currently applies to the A14. Front facing cameras can't take pictures of rear facing plates.
> And what's wrong with a 19 inch rack? Nothing. You wouldn't ask me that if you'd seen my spare bedroom:-) My point was that as long as the widget fits in a 19" rack, it doesn't matter if the widget is 12cm or 12". > The bigger the rack, the better. Only up to a point, but as a general rule, yes!
> Sorry, that's centimeters, not inches, which is of course even better;) Scarcely matters if it's in a 19 inch rackmount, does it? I mean the technology is neat but a 19inch rack is a 19inch rack - doesn't matter how small the contents are (unless they don't fit in a 19inch rack at all...)
> I think I pay around 10 Kroner, for 98 octane So we're in the same ballpark (I use 98 octane because my reasonably new car prefers it:)
> I still think that car owners should pay the costs What about people who buy goods that are sold in stores? (food, clothing - luxuries like that). Those goods have to get to the stores somehow - and guess what, it's usually by road. Especially in the UK, where it's much more economical to ship things by road than by train - the same reason that railway rolling stock is often delivered by road (rather than rail) in the UK. And - as succesive UK governments seem to overlook (or ignore) - increasing the price of transportation increases the price of everything in the economy. Of course, increasing the price of goods is in the treasury's interest, since higher prices means even more revenue from VAT. Which means more and bigger Jags for fatty Prescott.
> but then what they pay should be used to cover those costs, and not something else. I think we're in full agreement on that!
> depending on the price the gas company takes (the tax is a fixed amount pr litre not a % of the cost) I filled up yesterday, at about UK£0.79 a litre (which, according to xe.com is about 9.08 Kroner). How does that compare with Norway?
> if the taxes had been used as originally intended we could have had nice roads and good public transportation You're quite right. But that's quite a turnaround from your previous position of "Building roads cost money, and I don't think it's fair that people that choose not to use a car should pay for them through their taxes".
Slashdot Mirror
> She didn't pour it on herself, she spilled it.
She should have been aware of the dangers of hot liquids, and taken the appropriate care. (From elsewhere in the thread, I've learned that she was in a car, with the coffee in her lap. Now, call me crazy, but that isn't the first place I'd think of to put coffee)
> And it was too hot to be safe.
I've had lots of hot coffee in my life (If I'm in a hurry, I'll often make instant by boiling a kettle. If the kettle's just boiled, the coffee is going to be very close to 100 deg. C. - Just how hot was the McDonald's coffee?)
> Thank God it was on her crotch, and not her grandson's face.
Yes, you're right - but the level of responsibility she's shown indicates to me that she shouldn't have been looking after children.
> IMO, anyone who is too lazy to brew coffee deserves what they get
So you think she deserved the burns? Why flame me then?
But it isn't always about being lazy, is it? For some odd reason, I don't take a coffee pot with me to the mall. Do you?
> No one is holding a gun to your head, telling you to drink McDonald's coffee, are they?
No and there are several places where I'd rather get coffee. But now they're all going think twice about server beverages at a drinkable level on the offchance that somebody else spills the drink and burns themself.
The woman in question has my sympaty for her pain, but no sympathy over the cause. If she'd (for example) slipped on a wet floor at McDonalds, and that had caused the spill and subsequent burns, then sure, sue them. But she didn't.
SHE selected a hot beverage, SHE was in control of that beverage at the time the incident happened, and SHE was, as far as I'm concered, responsible for the consequences of that spill.
> However, companies have an obligation to make products that are safe.
Every day, millions of people around the world buy hot beverages. I can't remember another case of one suing the vendor because it was too hot. So hot coffee is a pretty safe product - provided it's used responsibly.
> 1. Weapons are usually quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT end and a WRONG end of a weapon, the danger is when you happen to be on the WRONG side.
Coffee (where this started), is usuall quite harmless to the user. There tends to be a RIGHT way to use it and a WRONG way to use it. Ther danger is when you happen to use it in the WRONG way.
> 2. Fossil fuels are not a corporate product (a).
If we follows this argument to the extreme, NOTHING is a corporate product. But corportations refine fossil fuels into the petrol that I (and, I suspect, you) put in my car. There's a process involved which the corporation adds a cost for.
> 3. That license thing you get before you get in a car, that's kinda meant to show you have the minimum level of skill/ability to drive a car safely
Emphasis on the minimum. I've never seen a driving test (I was a motorcycle instructor for a while when I was at university) that's actually any test of driving ability, they're more like a hoop you have to jump through.
> You'll note that you can't drive a car without the license thingy.
Really? Do you want to think about that for a minute? How do you get a license? You take a test. What do you do on that test? You drive a car. But you haven't got a license yet. How do you prepare for that test? You drive a car - usually marked to indicate the driver is unqualified - but you don't have a license.
Even if you ignore the test element, you can still drive without a license. You might well be breaking the laws in your jurisdiction to do so, but not holding a license does not prevent you from driving a car. Perhaps McDonald's should insist on a "how to drink coffee" test for all its customers, and that the possess a valid coffee drinking licence before they be served?
> 4. Knives - See 1.
Coffee - see 1.
> It's only because MSIE *still* hasn't gotten alpha channel / transparency right in their PNG support.
No. Even if MSIE supported PNG properly, it *still* isn't an viable alternative to JPEG for high-resolution photographic images. If you don't believe me, go find your favourite high-resolution image and save it as both a JPEG and a PNG. Look at the resultant filesizes. Filesizes are important if storage is limited (e.g. digital cameras, palm-like devices) and when bandwith it limited (most people still don't have high-speed low-cost internet connections). PNG is a great replacement for GIF, but not for JPEG.
> Maybe the lawyers are confused? :D
Lawyers are, almost by definition, confused
> What the hell is wrong with the US patent office?
You REALLY want an answer to that?
Personally, I'll remain outside the US and find myself able to legitimatly able to continue to use the format.
I wrote: :-(
> partyl due to the better compression
Sorry. That should read "partly due to the better compression than GIF".
And of course, I can't post the corrections to my comment for another two minutes, and can't use Emacs for editing them. Gotta love the user-friendly interface at slashdot
> I, and many other websites (including but not limited to the MAME website) have switched over to PNG long ago
:-)
I switched to PNG long ago, partly due to the Unisys/Compu$serve patent claim, partyl due to the better compression but mostly due to what seems to be better support in browsers for interleaved rendering (I'm aware that not everyone who wants to view my pages has a fast connection). But, for some reason, Slashdot seems to have resisted PNG and stayed with GIF. Ironic that, don't you think?
> Only stone-age browsers cannot view them
Lynx isn't "stone-age" but (last time I looked) couldn't view PNGs
> there is a plugin available for those ancient things
Of course, not all those "ancient things" actually have any support for plugins.
But apart from all this, PNG and JPEG address different needs. JPEG uses a "lossy" compression technique, which basically throws away some information before using more traditional compression techniques. PNG, on the other hand, is lossless - like (e.g.) compress of zip. Which means that the filesizes (and hence storage requirements/transmission times) of PNG compressed images are likely to be considerably higher than JPEG.
> The woman who had it spilled onto her groin had third degree burns over the majority of her groin.
And because of her stupidity (Remind me - did McDonalds put a gun to her head and tell her to pour it over herself? I thought not.), everyone who gets coffee from McDonalds gets cold coffee (or at least, coffee which becomes undrinkably cold much faster).
Who cares - you'd still have your own Enterprise :)
No - the ultimate device would be your own NCC-1701.
> . I would probaly call him the shrubbery.
Sir is more appropriate for a knight. Especially a Knight that says "Ni".
> Give me back my karma numbers, damnit.
Amen to that. (Yes, I know it's "Excellent" - but how Excellent?)
> if we don't have trees, we don't live, and we're dead, and that's bad
<joke>But at least there'd be no more spam...</joke>
> Like all great sci-fi, 1984 isn't (and wasn't) about the future
1984 isn't sci-fi. It's political fiction. The fact that it was set in the future doesn't make it sci-fi.
> Nazi Germany gave us advances in physics (via rocketry) and mathematics (encryption).
I think more advances in mathematics were due to decryption (the field in which a little know guy by the name of Alan Turing really made his mark on the war). But I guess you could argue quite reasonably that it was a consequence of encryption.
Oh, and don't forget the advances in weapons of mass destruction.
> I can't think of any other book which has had such impact on freedom and human rights in this century
Mein Kampf, perhaps? Maybe not the effects of the book itself, but the effects of the horrors arising from its "teachings" have had a huge impact.
(And what's the betting that somebody mods this down because they didn't read that scentence correctly?)
> I've found that the polis respond reasonably quickly to a 'I think there's some joyriders a stolen car' call in bristol :-(
...and I think they changed the law a while back to make such traps legal.
:-)
Try it in Fishponds - they'll say "Probably" and hang up
> but they dont care about people driving with firearms in their vehicle, something that would definately get a reaction in the UK
That's because Americans have the right to shoot everybody, and we don't.
> In the UK the govt are trialling elapsed distance speed traps...
They are no longer trialling them. They're in use (see the links I posted earlier)
>
They didn't need to change the law, since they were already legal. (The fact that they violate the ECHR isn't important, since UK law seems to remove any human rights you have as soon as you operate a motorised vehicle)
> I dont know if you need good OCR, just pattern matching to detect the speeding, then human intervention to get the#.
The idea is that the whole process is automated - hence the recent (Spetember last year, IIRC) change in the regulations regarding registration plates. (see the links I posted earlier)
> Youd need to sustain the wheelie for some distance to get out of that,
I don't see how sustaining the wheelie would "get you out of anything"? If you wanted to wheelie past all the cameras, you'd wheelie past all the cameras (it's pretty easy to get an R1 to reach for the sky "on demand"). Or maybe you'd do it every other camera. Or every third. Or just one.
Unless you're under the mistaken impression that the wheelie is to hide/obscure the plate?.
The rider I saw wheelied past a front-facing (Truvelo) camera. The SPECS cameras are also front facing. He was on a bike. In the UK, bikes don't carry front number plates. Ergo, front facing cameras can't be used to identify motorcycles. And of course, UK law requires motorcyclists to wear a crash helmet, which obscures the face - so you can't identify him that way. You don't need to wheelie to hide your rear number plate from a front-facing camera, you just ride past the camera. Whilst I don't know the rider in question's motives, I know why I wish I'd done it. I'd do it to make the point to the Orwellian government "Hey, your camera won't help you nick me for speeding - go fsck up some car driver's life. And just to add insult to injury, I'm going to wheelie AS WELL." The wheelie is a 'bonus offence'
> or make sure your average speed is below the limit, even if you go to 130+ on occasions.
In a car, you're screwed. You have to keep your speed down it you're in a SPECS area (currently this means parts of Nottingham). On a bike, though, you could have a field day. The same also currently applies to the A14. Front facing cameras can't take pictures of rear facing plates.
> And what's wrong with a 19 inch rack? :-)
Nothing. You wouldn't ask me that if you'd seen my spare bedroom
My point was that as long as the widget fits in a 19" rack, it doesn't matter if the widget is 12cm or 12".
> The bigger the rack, the better.
Only up to a point, but as a general rule, yes!
> Sorry, that's centimeters, not inches, which is of course even better ;)
Scarcely matters if it's in a 19 inch rackmount, does it? I mean the technology is neat but a 19inch rack is a 19inch rack - doesn't matter how small the contents are (unless they don't fit in a 19inch rack at all...)
And would you mod it down as Flamebait (since two other people have), or did you get the joke? (I forgot to use the mod-proof tags today)
s/and/any/. Sorry
Seems to be the name of the game these days. Still, and publicity is good publicity - isn't it?
> I think I pay around 10 Kroner, for 98 octane :)
So we're in the same ballpark (I use 98 octane because my reasonably new car prefers it
> I still think that car owners should pay the costs
What about people who buy goods that are sold in stores? (food, clothing - luxuries like that). Those goods have to get to the stores somehow - and guess what, it's usually by road. Especially in the UK, where it's much more economical to ship things by road than by train - the same reason that railway rolling stock is often delivered by road (rather than rail) in the UK.
And - as succesive UK governments seem to overlook (or ignore) - increasing the price of transportation increases the price of everything in the economy. Of course, increasing the price of goods is in the treasury's interest, since higher prices means even more revenue from VAT. Which means more and bigger Jags for fatty Prescott.
> but then what they pay should be used to cover those costs, and not something else.
I think we're in full agreement on that!
> the germans who have a pump company called Schwing?
That's nothing - there's an Italian cooker manufacturere called Smeg. And to make things even better, their domain names is Smeg It.
> I prefer sentient females
Isn't "sentient females" an oxymoron?
> depending on the price the gas company takes (the tax is a fixed amount pr litre not a % of the cost)
I filled up yesterday, at about UK£0.79 a litre (which, according to xe.com is about 9.08 Kroner). How does that compare with Norway?
> if the taxes had been used as originally intended we could have had nice roads and good public transportation
You're quite right. But that's quite a turnaround from your previous position of "Building roads cost money, and I don't think it's fair that people that choose not to use a car should pay for them through their taxes".