You're either being sarcastic, or you've never heard of the countless craptacular freelancing sites all over the net, mostly dominated by inexpensive 3rd world programmers, if we can even call them such. Script kiddies with a language barrier, really.
The biggest problem I see with such sites is they encourage sending work to the lowest (or 2nd lowest) bidder, with no regard for quality or consistency. You get stuck in a loop where the product isn't complete (or of acceptable quality), then have to haggle back and forth with the guy to get it in a usable condition. You're faced with a chunk of cash already wasted on a non-working product, where it can be difficult to cut your losses and start over elsewhere. It doesn't matter how concise your specs are, or if you provide them with ready-made test suites, they won't bother and when the tests fail, you're treated to a stream of excuses. I'm not saying they're all like that, but of the dozen or so I've tried in the past few years, no good has come out of the experience, and I've usually had to finish or redo a significant portion of the work myself. Now the good news is I'm a programmer, but the bad news is I was subcontracting because I was too busy to do it myself in the first place, whether it was a one-off job for an app platform I didn't care to learn, or a small half-week job trumped by a high-priority client. So I got doubly screwed.
I guess if someone has sufficiently low standards and/or technical knowledge, these freelance boards could be tolerable. Better than no programmers at all, I guess. But then I look at the shitstorm of "I want a Facebook clone" followed by "I'll do it for $500" posts, and it's hard to resist the urge to set my cable modem on fire.
Or maybe the submitted hacked into an Apache server, put up this navel-gazing article and submitted via a non-default port to Timothy's queue.
o_O
Or maybe Slashdot is turning into a keyword spam infested link dump, like Digg and Reddit and the rest of the goddamned web. I miss the days when we featured cool nerdy projects, and Ask Slashdot required an IQ of at least 120 to even understand the question. This place has gone to the dogs.
I think anyone who is taking a serious interest in a government career SHOULD be perusing Wikileaks, and any other important governmental matters. We need more smart, well-informed people working for the people, to replace the navel-gazing two-faced cowards that are so ingloriously featured in these leaked cables. These hypocrites are the true enemies of democracy, and their successors should learn from past mistakes, lest we repeat them.
If Light Peak is everything it's cracked out to be, I want to see it replace idiotic Infiniband and FC on HBAs, stat! We've been stuck on these outdated interfaces for far too long.
Disney didn't make your TV so the subsidiary doesn't care that Kill Bill is out on DVD. Contrast this with the Wii, where it matters not who made the game, it is known to its users as a "Wii Game", and thus has a direct association with Nintendo's brand and image. You play it on a Wii, it says "Nintendo" on the packaging... you get my drift.
Nintendo's kid-friendly image is a huge part of their business strategy, they automatically win all the overprotective parents who are terrified of the Xbox and its filth-laden Live service, where everyone and everything is a "nigger" and/or "faggot" according to its prominent users. I can't speak of the PS3 since I don't have one, but I would speculate that the it is not much different, due to being marketed to the same adult / hardcore crowd as the Xbox. Hell, there was a (shitty) game on the old Xbox where victory resulted in a "Girls-Gone-Wild" style clip being presented as your reward. You'll never see vodka-doused tits on a Nintendo console, that's for sure!
Nope, your eyes are fine. I also have a Wii, it's been sitting in a bag for at least a year. I don't even bother hooking it up anymore. The only game that I would care to play is Metroid, but I'm too lazy and the motion gimmick wore off very quickly. I used to lend it to friends and family, they'd play the bowling game or Raving Rabbids for a month, then give it back.
I even had it modded when I got it, but I can't even justify the minimal effort of downloading and burning a game. The few I did try were such garbage that it turned me off the console entirely. Crappy party games, crappy pixel-hunting games, crappy platformers. The platform started to feel like a flash game site, for 8-year olds, by 8-year olds. Meanwhile the X360 and trusty old PS2 get played at least weekly, along with the regularly scheduled WoW raiding and PC racing sims. Hell, I think I've played more Starcraft 2 in two months than Wii in four years. The platform just doesn't have any staying power, and few if any killer titles. Even the marios are ho-hum.
I'm not trying to troll, but before someone less noble says it: why are you running Ubuntu on a server in the first place ? I'd like to know why you would choose Ubuntu over something like CentOS.
I'll be perfectly transparent here, I'm just as bad: I run Gentoo on my servers. So don't be shy to profess your love for the easy-to-use distro, I'm not here to judge:) I use Gentoo because I have zero patience for binary package "management" and the dependency hell / obsolete libraries that come along with it. Yes, Gentoo takes ages to set up, but I love its creature comforts and Portage, for all its pains, is a godsend when you want to apply your own patches. And well, the elitist in me loves the fact that the Gentoo forums are mostly populated by like-minded coders and sysadmins, with a relatively low ratio of attention-whoring noobs. Sorry, but when I'm hunting down a pesky segfault I'd rather not have to read through 20 pages of unrelated comments and "me too" bugs just to find the pastebin link to a fix.
So now, enough about Gentoo... tell me why you like Ubuntu and why I should too:)
Social or not, a game is selling entertainment. How do you put a price on fun ? Sure, you can try to compare one source of fun with another, like say a $20 game vs a $60 game, but ultimately it all boils down to what you feel like doing at that point in time.
Myself, I still play WoW, very lightly. I pretty much show up for the guild's two weekly raid nights and that's all. I'm not collecting achievements or farming trade goods, I just get in, spend a few hours with a handful of people I've gotten to know over the years, and get out. If those people were to quit, I'd quit too.
The fact that a dinky little Flash game can rake in cash, well that's just common sense, in the sense that a great majority of people are suckers. The recent flood of "pay 2 win" style games is proof that there are still plenty of suckers in this market. Sure, it's unethical, but you'll find the same greedy antics in the real world, where all but the most righteous businessfolk seek to prey on people's selfish urges.
I don't know what kind of redneck mecca you live in, where farmers cut cables often enough to affect your bottom line. I can count exactly one backhoe incident in 6 years at my datacenter, and they routed around it within an hour - epic fail for the network admin who didn't test the failover, but I ain't cutting myself over one measly hour of downtime. Shit happens, and clients are usually quite understanding of such unforeseen events. If they're not, you either need to charge more for the liability, or just plain fire them and let them find some other sucker to put up with their whining.
I get that many NGOs are ignorant little cash cows with minimal oversight, but if you are dealing with only 20 users, you probably don't need that much infrastructure, unless the NGO is expecting ludicrous growth over the next 2-3 years. The issue with in-house servers is you need someone to manage them, and that is an ongoing expense that may be hard to justify when cloud services can do it better, faster and cheaper. The nice thing about hosted services is someone else has already figured out all the scaling issues, all you have to do is pay your small monthly dues and use the damned thing. That web server ? Forget it! For the cost of a fiber line to the office, you could lease five managed servers in a respectable datacenter. You only need one, or maybe even a VPS would suffice.
The best way to approach a small network is to treat it like a small network. You can probably get by with one modest server with a terabyte of mirrored storage, running your domain controller and file/print shares. If and when they outgrow this "SoHo server", meaning when it starts slowing down their work, then you'll know it's time to reevaluate their needs. Start small and try to keep the big picture in mind, the best way to plan these things is to look at how quickly an investment will pay for itself in increased productivity.
I don't know where you're seeing "DRM up the ass", since the DRM on Xbox360 is a part of the console itself (firmware + OS), not the individual game discs.
Cheaters ? The only "cheat" I regularly encounter is when the host intentionally screws with their internet connection, resulting in excessive lag to all other players. Overdo it, and the game will eventually choose a more reliable host, but some people seem to have figured out how to ride it very effectively.
Beyond that, once in a blue moon I'll stumble upon a hacked lobby, but since that requires a JTAGged console those little pricks get banned rather quickly. I can honestly say that in over 500 hours of MW2, I've only witnessed one or two hacked lobbies. Yes, more hours than my 5-year old WoW account...
If you want something to bitch about, try MW2 on the PC. Now that thing is practically unplayable online, everyone cheats. TF2-style vote-kick and admin tools would have helped it tons, but we all know that's never going to happen. Thank you Activision, and thank you Bobby Kotick. May they both die in a fire!
I have a very hard time trusting a company that religiously edits its own Wikipedia articles to remove various facts deemed unsavory. They actually did it so much, they were banned from Wikipedia!
Sure, the spec itself is retarded, but cookies have been around long enough that we, the developers, have learned their quirks and know how to avoid them. For starters, no sane coder would actually stuff several cookies full of 4096-byte data chunks. They are mostly used for storing a relatively small session ID, with the big data blobs stored server-side, where they are actually used anyway.
The cross-domain issue is indeed annoying for sites that do mass vhosts like "username.somedomain.com". I frankly have never used cross-domain cookies, when it is easier at both ends to pass the ID in a URL. I'm not saying they should completely disable this feature, but maybe turn it into an opt-in kind of thing, to be decided by the user. I consider it far more secure for such sites to use cross-domain JS includes (pull), rather than someone else's cookies (push).
I have: XFCE. I still use Kate and kio though. A few times a day, I have to run a few killalls to reap zombie kio processes, but at least the WM doesn't get in my way anymore.
The quad-core PC, fancy GPU and gigs of RAM allow you to run your PC game at a much higher resolution and graphic quality than any current-gen console. If all you want is 1280x720 with no antialiasing, you can probably get away with a dinky $50 graphics card.
Personally, I like playing flashy games on 3 WQHD monitors with all the sliders maxed out. That's 12 times more dots than a standard HDTV, and a bit more rendering detail due to AA/AF postprocessing, so it's understandable that such ridiculous graphics would require expensive high-end hardware. It's not required to just play the thing if you have more reasonable expectations than I.
He's talking about 60 fps because he's proud to have achieved this level of performance on what is widely perceived to be a piece of shit platform for 3D graphics.
It's the same pride that keeps the demoscene alive to this day, spurring coders to cram dazzling animations and music in 4096 bytes of mind-twisting code. That drive to bring out a computer's fullest potential through tireless tweaking, profiling and creative thought.
It is far too easy to be lazy with today's fast PCs and GPUs. There is so much power in these chips that even the sloppiest code can run at acceptable speeds. It takes true dedication and a bit of masochism to buck that trend and push this generous hardware to its limits, and that is what Carmack does best.
If he could make Rage run at 100 fps on the iPhone, he would - he knows full well that it would be impractical, but from an engineering perspective, it would be more efficient, meaning you could take the 100 fps engine and lock it to 60 fps (or even 30), and benefit from lower power consumption or more CPU available for other tasks.
I suggest you google Paul Wooten and make up your own impression of this man.
Myself, I get the impression he's got his hands in the cookie jar, but I'm merely basing this on uncorroborated facts on the interweb and my own prejudice that the practice of law is merely another form of navel-gazing theater.
I hereby nominate Wal-Mart as a key witness, being the supplier of the My Little Pony brand bicycle-mounted gun racks found on the defendants' vehicles.
There are some of us who believe the mere act of becoming a lawyer is at least partial proof of antisocial behaviour. The belief is that lawyers create the problem for which they are selling a solution, when the preferable solution would be to simplify the existing legal system back down to something manageable and understandable by the average citizen. Then instead of wasting millions of man-hours on the obfuscation, circumvention, reinterpretation and discrediting of written law, maybe we could spend those resources on actual societal progress. It doesn't matter whether you're dealing with criminal, corporate, real estate or copyright law. They all share that fundamental drive to mislead the second party and either severely limit their freedoms or cheat them outright.
Case in point: I just updated a trivial app on my phone, and had to agree to a 59-page EULA. If I ever meet the guy who wrote that EULA, I will be strongly tempted to drop-kick him in the teeth. I am not a lawyer, I don't speak legalese, and I sure as hell can't be reasonably expected to read 59 pages of said legalese just to decide whether or not I want to use my phone as a crappy flashlight. I consider such extreme perversion of reason an act of aggression. It is grossly counter-productive, and in the case of TFA, explicitly destructive and hate-fueled.
The problem is that kids will be kids. The kids were not misbehaving, as far as we know, they were just learning to ride a bike. That an elderly woman fell, got injured (as tends to happen all-too easily once you reach that age), and died (as also tends to happen at that age), is just the way life goes.
Had they bumped into a non-sickly person, like me for example, I might have stumbled a bit, or even fallen over depending on where and how fast they hit me, but I would have gotten back up, dusted off and spooked the two little snots away. I certainly would not be suing them over my lightly bruised knee.
There was no tort here. If anything, the "victim" failed to secure appropriate medical coverage for herself. Or maybe it was just their time to die. One thing is certain: the kids didn't kill her. A well-lived life did. Chances are, even if she had been living in Canada, with our socialized health insurance taking care of her, she would have reached the same fate. The difference here is the family would not be facing exorbitant medical bills, and thus would not have a monetary excuse to move forward with their selfish, self-hating, self-incriminating litigious vendetta.
That Judge should be disbarred and repeatedly run over by fat kids on tricycles.
Slashdot Mirror
You're either being sarcastic, or you've never heard of the countless craptacular freelancing sites all over the net, mostly dominated by inexpensive 3rd world programmers, if we can even call them such. Script kiddies with a language barrier, really.
The biggest problem I see with such sites is they encourage sending work to the lowest (or 2nd lowest) bidder, with no regard for quality or consistency. You get stuck in a loop where the product isn't complete (or of acceptable quality), then have to haggle back and forth with the guy to get it in a usable condition. You're faced with a chunk of cash already wasted on a non-working product, where it can be difficult to cut your losses and start over elsewhere. It doesn't matter how concise your specs are, or if you provide them with ready-made test suites, they won't bother and when the tests fail, you're treated to a stream of excuses. I'm not saying they're all like that, but of the dozen or so I've tried in the past few years, no good has come out of the experience, and I've usually had to finish or redo a significant portion of the work myself. Now the good news is I'm a programmer, but the bad news is I was subcontracting because I was too busy to do it myself in the first place, whether it was a one-off job for an app platform I didn't care to learn, or a small half-week job trumped by a high-priority client. So I got doubly screwed.
I guess if someone has sufficiently low standards and/or technical knowledge, these freelance boards could be tolerable. Better than no programmers at all, I guess. But then I look at the shitstorm of "I want a Facebook clone" followed by "I'll do it for $500" posts, and it's hard to resist the urge to set my cable modem on fire.
Those ideas need to be plucked from a ginormous haystack of repetitive stupidity.
Ideas are cheap. Brilliant ideas are worth a mint!
Or maybe the submitted hacked into an Apache server, put up this navel-gazing article and submitted via a non-default port to Timothy's queue.
o_O
Or maybe Slashdot is turning into a keyword spam infested link dump, like Digg and Reddit and the rest of the goddamned web. I miss the days when we featured cool nerdy projects, and Ask Slashdot required an IQ of at least 120 to even understand the question. This place has gone to the dogs.
I think anyone who is taking a serious interest in a government career SHOULD be perusing Wikileaks, and any other important governmental matters. We need more smart, well-informed people working for the people, to replace the navel-gazing two-faced cowards that are so ingloriously featured in these leaked cables. These hypocrites are the true enemies of democracy, and their successors should learn from past mistakes, lest we repeat them.
If Light Peak is everything it's cracked out to be, I want to see it replace idiotic Infiniband and FC on HBAs, stat! We've been stuck on these outdated interfaces for far too long.
Disney didn't make your TV so the subsidiary doesn't care that Kill Bill is out on DVD. Contrast this with the Wii, where it matters not who made the game, it is known to its users as a "Wii Game", and thus has a direct association with Nintendo's brand and image. You play it on a Wii, it says "Nintendo" on the packaging... you get my drift.
Nintendo's kid-friendly image is a huge part of their business strategy, they automatically win all the overprotective parents who are terrified of the Xbox and its filth-laden Live service, where everyone and everything is a "nigger" and/or "faggot" according to its prominent users. I can't speak of the PS3 since I don't have one, but I would speculate that the it is not much different, due to being marketed to the same adult / hardcore crowd as the Xbox. Hell, there was a (shitty) game on the old Xbox where victory resulted in a "Girls-Gone-Wild" style clip being presented as your reward. You'll never see vodka-doused tits on a Nintendo console, that's for sure!
Nope, your eyes are fine. I also have a Wii, it's been sitting in a bag for at least a year. I don't even bother hooking it up anymore. The only game that I would care to play is Metroid, but I'm too lazy and the motion gimmick wore off very quickly. I used to lend it to friends and family, they'd play the bowling game or Raving Rabbids for a month, then give it back.
I even had it modded when I got it, but I can't even justify the minimal effort of downloading and burning a game. The few I did try were such garbage that it turned me off the console entirely. Crappy party games, crappy pixel-hunting games, crappy platformers. The platform started to feel like a flash game site, for 8-year olds, by 8-year olds. Meanwhile the X360 and trusty old PS2 get played at least weekly, along with the regularly scheduled WoW raiding and PC racing sims. Hell, I think I've played more Starcraft 2 in two months than Wii in four years. The platform just doesn't have any staying power, and few if any killer titles. Even the marios are ho-hum.
This virus can't scratch me, I run everything with Administrator privs... oh snap!
I'm not trying to troll, but before someone less noble says it: why are you running Ubuntu on a server in the first place ? I'd like to know why you would choose Ubuntu over something like CentOS.
I'll be perfectly transparent here, I'm just as bad: I run Gentoo on my servers. So don't be shy to profess your love for the easy-to-use distro, I'm not here to judge :) I use Gentoo because I have zero patience for binary package "management" and the dependency hell / obsolete libraries that come along with it. Yes, Gentoo takes ages to set up, but I love its creature comforts and Portage, for all its pains, is a godsend when you want to apply your own patches. And well, the elitist in me loves the fact that the Gentoo forums are mostly populated by like-minded coders and sysadmins, with a relatively low ratio of attention-whoring noobs. Sorry, but when I'm hunting down a pesky segfault I'd rather not have to read through 20 pages of unrelated comments and "me too" bugs just to find the pastebin link to a fix.
So now, enough about Gentoo... tell me why you like Ubuntu and why I should too :)
Curse you.... now I have to go back and finish Gemcraft 0 too ;) That game is pure evil genius!
Social or not, a game is selling entertainment. How do you put a price on fun ? Sure, you can try to compare one source of fun with another, like say a $20 game vs a $60 game, but ultimately it all boils down to what you feel like doing at that point in time.
Myself, I still play WoW, very lightly. I pretty much show up for the guild's two weekly raid nights and that's all. I'm not collecting achievements or farming trade goods, I just get in, spend a few hours with a handful of people I've gotten to know over the years, and get out. If those people were to quit, I'd quit too.
The fact that a dinky little Flash game can rake in cash, well that's just common sense, in the sense that a great majority of people are suckers. The recent flood of "pay 2 win" style games is proof that there are still plenty of suckers in this market. Sure, it's unethical, but you'll find the same greedy antics in the real world, where all but the most righteous businessfolk seek to prey on people's selfish urges.
I don't know what kind of redneck mecca you live in, where farmers cut cables often enough to affect your bottom line. I can count exactly one backhoe incident in 6 years at my datacenter, and they routed around it within an hour - epic fail for the network admin who didn't test the failover, but I ain't cutting myself over one measly hour of downtime. Shit happens, and clients are usually quite understanding of such unforeseen events. If they're not, you either need to charge more for the liability, or just plain fire them and let them find some other sucker to put up with their whining.
I get that many NGOs are ignorant little cash cows with minimal oversight, but if you are dealing with only 20 users, you probably don't need that much infrastructure, unless the NGO is expecting ludicrous growth over the next 2-3 years. The issue with in-house servers is you need someone to manage them, and that is an ongoing expense that may be hard to justify when cloud services can do it better, faster and cheaper. The nice thing about hosted services is someone else has already figured out all the scaling issues, all you have to do is pay your small monthly dues and use the damned thing. That web server ? Forget it! For the cost of a fiber line to the office, you could lease five managed servers in a respectable datacenter. You only need one, or maybe even a VPS would suffice.
The best way to approach a small network is to treat it like a small network. You can probably get by with one modest server with a terabyte of mirrored storage, running your domain controller and file/print shares. If and when they outgrow this "SoHo server", meaning when it starts slowing down their work, then you'll know it's time to reevaluate their needs. Start small and try to keep the big picture in mind, the best way to plan these things is to look at how quickly an investment will pay for itself in increased productivity.
I don't know where you're seeing "DRM up the ass", since the DRM on Xbox360 is a part of the console itself (firmware + OS), not the individual game discs.
Cheaters ? The only "cheat" I regularly encounter is when the host intentionally screws with their internet connection, resulting in excessive lag to all other players. Overdo it, and the game will eventually choose a more reliable host, but some people seem to have figured out how to ride it very effectively.
Beyond that, once in a blue moon I'll stumble upon a hacked lobby, but since that requires a JTAGged console those little pricks get banned rather quickly. I can honestly say that in over 500 hours of MW2, I've only witnessed one or two hacked lobbies. Yes, more hours than my 5-year old WoW account...
If you want something to bitch about, try MW2 on the PC. Now that thing is practically unplayable online, everyone cheats. TF2-style vote-kick and admin tools would have helped it tons, but we all know that's never going to happen. Thank you Activision, and thank you Bobby Kotick. May they both die in a fire!
I have a very hard time trusting a company that religiously edits its own Wikipedia articles to remove various facts deemed unsavory. They actually did it so much, they were banned from Wikipedia!
In the end, the Streisand effect always wins.
Sure, the spec itself is retarded, but cookies have been around long enough that we, the developers, have learned their quirks and know how to avoid them. For starters, no sane coder would actually stuff several cookies full of 4096-byte data chunks. They are mostly used for storing a relatively small session ID, with the big data blobs stored server-side, where they are actually used anyway.
The cross-domain issue is indeed annoying for sites that do mass vhosts like "username.somedomain.com". I frankly have never used cross-domain cookies, when it is easier at both ends to pass the ID in a URL. I'm not saying they should completely disable this feature, but maybe turn it into an opt-in kind of thing, to be decided by the user. I consider it far more secure for such sites to use cross-domain JS includes (pull), rather than someone else's cookies (push).
I have: XFCE. I still use Kate and kio though. A few times a day, I have to run a few killalls to reap zombie kio processes, but at least the WM doesn't get in my way anymore.
The quad-core PC, fancy GPU and gigs of RAM allow you to run your PC game at a much higher resolution and graphic quality than any current-gen console. If all you want is 1280x720 with no antialiasing, you can probably get away with a dinky $50 graphics card.
Personally, I like playing flashy games on 3 WQHD monitors with all the sliders maxed out. That's 12 times more dots than a standard HDTV, and a bit more rendering detail due to AA/AF postprocessing, so it's understandable that such ridiculous graphics would require expensive high-end hardware. It's not required to just play the thing if you have more reasonable expectations than I.
He's talking about 60 fps because he's proud to have achieved this level of performance on what is widely perceived to be a piece of shit platform for 3D graphics.
It's the same pride that keeps the demoscene alive to this day, spurring coders to cram dazzling animations and music in 4096 bytes of mind-twisting code. That drive to bring out a computer's fullest potential through tireless tweaking, profiling and creative thought.
It is far too easy to be lazy with today's fast PCs and GPUs. There is so much power in these chips that even the sloppiest code can run at acceptable speeds. It takes true dedication and a bit of masochism to buck that trend and push this generous hardware to its limits, and that is what Carmack does best.
If he could make Rage run at 100 fps on the iPhone, he would - he knows full well that it would be impractical, but from an engineering perspective, it would be more efficient, meaning you could take the 100 fps engine and lock it to 60 fps (or even 30), and benefit from lower power consumption or more CPU available for other tasks.
Challenge the law ?
Nevermind the fact he's a judge, it is the duty of all intelligent people to challenge laws they find unreasonable.
I've tried spraying them with RAID, the little tie-wearing buggers keep on squirming!
I suggest you google Paul Wooten and make up your own impression of this man.
Myself, I get the impression he's got his hands in the cookie jar, but I'm merely basing this on uncorroborated facts on the interweb and my own prejudice that the practice of law is merely another form of navel-gazing theater.
I hereby nominate Wal-Mart as a key witness, being the supplier of the My Little Pony brand bicycle-mounted gun racks found on the defendants' vehicles.
There are some of us who believe the mere act of becoming a lawyer is at least partial proof of antisocial behaviour. The belief is that lawyers create the problem for which they are selling a solution, when the preferable solution would be to simplify the existing legal system back down to something manageable and understandable by the average citizen. Then instead of wasting millions of man-hours on the obfuscation, circumvention, reinterpretation and discrediting of written law, maybe we could spend those resources on actual societal progress. It doesn't matter whether you're dealing with criminal, corporate, real estate or copyright law. They all share that fundamental drive to mislead the second party and either severely limit their freedoms or cheat them outright.
Case in point: I just updated a trivial app on my phone, and had to agree to a 59-page EULA. If I ever meet the guy who wrote that EULA, I will be strongly tempted to drop-kick him in the teeth. I am not a lawyer, I don't speak legalese, and I sure as hell can't be reasonably expected to read 59 pages of said legalese just to decide whether or not I want to use my phone as a crappy flashlight. I consider such extreme perversion of reason an act of aggression. It is grossly counter-productive, and in the case of TFA, explicitly destructive and hate-fueled.
The problem is that kids will be kids. The kids were not misbehaving, as far as we know, they were just learning to ride a bike. That an elderly woman fell, got injured (as tends to happen all-too easily once you reach that age), and died (as also tends to happen at that age), is just the way life goes.
Had they bumped into a non-sickly person, like me for example, I might have stumbled a bit, or even fallen over depending on where and how fast they hit me, but I would have gotten back up, dusted off and spooked the two little snots away. I certainly would not be suing them over my lightly bruised knee.
There was no tort here. If anything, the "victim" failed to secure appropriate medical coverage for herself. Or maybe it was just their time to die. One thing is certain: the kids didn't kill her. A well-lived life did. Chances are, even if she had been living in Canada, with our socialized health insurance taking care of her, she would have reached the same fate. The difference here is the family would not be facing exorbitant medical bills, and thus would not have a monetary excuse to move forward with their selfish, self-hating, self-incriminating litigious vendetta.
That Judge should be disbarred and repeatedly run over by fat kids on tricycles.