Good point, Mr. Catsup. Google is far and away the predominant tool used to seek out such copyrighted material, and even to seek out tools to download copyrighted material, or to seek out "how-to" articles.
Could be worse: this guy could have linked to Google:)
"Do this for me, please. Define "frivolous lawsuit."
There are indeed many definitions. I'm operating off of something similar to George McGovern: "There is no easy definition for the phrase 'frivolous lawsuit,' but I imagine any claim for damages where the injuries are minimal or where the basis for the defendant's liability is hard to believe, might qualify as frivolous."
"since you use conclusory language to assert that this one was frivolous without apparently knowing much about it at all "
This is not true at all. I am making the "frivolous" claim after looking at the facts of the case, which I have been referring to.
"....certainly without providing any logic to connect your use of the term with any of the facts of the case"
I have been referring to the specifics of the case.
"It's impossible to have a rational argument when one person bases all of his logic on his conclusion, instead of the other way around."
That is a straw-man attack, as I have proven that the case is frivolous by pointing out the facts (who is really at fault, the coffee is safe and at the recommended temperature, etc.)
"any lawsuit reform that you see suggested is curiously free of anything preventing frivolous lawsuits filed by corporations."
What ends up happening is too many frivolous lawsuits from pratfalling stumbling oafs, and the city ends up being rather resistant to having sidewalks at all. They balk at requiring them in construction and new work due to the hassle.
This has gotten rid of a lot of public pools; people would rather sue than take responsibility for their own swimming behavior or watch their children.
There are 700 burn incidents out of 12 billion cups sold. This is pretty much zero, a very safe product by any reasonable standard (reasonable unless you are Liebeck's attorney and plan to tell lies in the courtroom in order to get rich). However, you can hurt yourself if you do something wrong with it.
I would not be surprised if there is a similar but low number of choking incidents from breathing while drinking the coffee.
I suppose, then, McDonald's is criminally liable for selling liquid coffee.
"consumers were not aware the coffee was so hot that there was a risk of serious burns "
Not true. The consumers were able to consume the coffee safely. Surely they were aware of the temperature: they were drinking it!
" more than 700 people were burned by McDonald's coffee with varying degrees of severity. "
During this same time, there were many billions of cups sold. This works out to one burn incident per 24,000,000 cups sold. That is a rather safe product. The burn incidents did not happen because the product was defective. They happened because someone did something stupid with it.
"McDonald's did not intend to reduce the heat of its coffee"
Why? This is the recommended serving temperature, and it is how the customers preferred it.
"McDonald's did not warn customers of this risk "
Yes they did. They always advertised it as hot coffee.
Frivolous lawsuit? Yes. It is hard to come up with a better example of one.
"Here's how I try to explain the McDonald's lawsuit to people. Take a random cup of coffee..."
Hmmm. That is what the woman who filed the frivolous lawsuit did. This is a very important fact: she spilled the coffee herself.
"on the stand, they claimed that serving coffee that hot made it taste better, and they were at times downright belligerent to Ms. Liebeck"
Well, it is true. Complaints about the coffee being too cold and not tasting as good have increased. Belligerant? Well, she was abusing the court system in order to try to plunder large amounts of money from them: she was belligerent first.
"The McDonald's coffee case is not proof that we need tort reform."
It is. We need tort reform so such cases are immediately thrown out.
"A major corporation was held accountable for injuries that its indifference to its customers caused."
The injury was caused by the woman's action. Therefore, a blameless party was made to give up money needlessly.
"Cool, now it is legal to copy software freeley, make it available on the net and so on. Why?"
You responded to "This company dumped the pages out on the public Internet, with no robots.txt. Surely they know what that means.". You are referring to software made publicly available for free on the Net, such as freeware and shareware, right? As far as I know, it is legal to copy, distribute, and archive this type of software software.
If you are referring to closed commercial software, then your analogy is WAY off.
"Well. I know this company that sells computer software with no copy prevention mechanism"
Are pages archives at archive.org pages that are sold? Of course not. They are given away. Did you think this through first? The "given away" vs "sold" difference rips your analogy to shreds.
I wonder if the "alternative weekly" publishers would mind one but if others were actually duplicating the papers intact and distributing these copies?
Thanks. It looks like they have a bad thing going on Chud, if they think "dark green on black" text is fun to read. They even have dark grey on black. IMHO, if you need to highlight the text and/or past it into a text editor to read the web content, they've already failed it. However, I don't think that having checkboxes and option buttons on the page (rendered in the typical colors) would spoil whatever effect they are aiming for. I did not see what you meant with the searchboxes.
"However, I do think that if you make them look too non-standard it could lead to user confusion."
The sample page actually does include round checkboxes which look more like option buttons than checkboxes. Yes, thanks to this breakthrough, we can make checkboxes that look like option buttons, and vice-versa!
"What will they report next? Seeing the back of your head finally possible thanks to an ingenious mirror system. Sheeesh."
It's about time! Once my son wrote "Insert Brain Here" on the back of my bald head. I was laying on the floor, spinning around for hours trying to read it before someone finally told me what it said.
"The ability to change it to fit any page style is the major benefit. Sure it's nice to see the standard checkbox, but if it completely messes up an otherwise "clean" or different looking interface why not change it?"
Do you have an example of a page where the "Style" is such that usual controls would not be a good idea? Is there a possibility that the fancy page is really overdone if standard controls will be "out of place" in it, even if the colors are changed?
"The main focus however should be making sites that follow standards so they are viewable on every type of browser and platform."
Not just that; there are usability standards. Checkboxes and radio/option buttons are supposed to look and act a certain way. It makes using them that much easier. Disguising them as something that looks like Lucky Charms marshmallows really fudges matters. The sample even had checkboxes made to look like option buttons (round).
Is it a good thing to have controls that deviate from the standard so much that they aren't even recognizable anyore, like the green/grey round toggle button that replaces the checkbox on the sample page? Why disguise standard controls so the user will have to spend some time trying to find out what the standard controls are "hidden as"?
"Um, not a good comparison. Libraries pay for the physical copy of the newspapers..."
What if it is one of those free "alternative weeklies" that no-one has to pay for? This a much more apt analogy, and it changes the rest of your statement. The papers are free, the web pages in question are free.
"I had basically switched to zip drives by that time anyway, and CD burners were not uncommon on higher end systems. Floppies were unreliable, relatively expensive, and easy to lose."
Zip disks have their reliability problems, too, and CD's are very slow compared to floppies for moving small files.
"The floppy's been dying for about 7 years now. It's death will continue to be slow and agonizing"
It has only been dead for 2-3 or so years now (much less than 7) thanks to the rise of the thumb drive. Before that, there was no alternative for moving small files between a couple of non-networked machines. You'd likely have the file copied to disk from machine A, and then copied from disk onto machine B in the time it would take you just to format a CD on the first machine if you chose the CD option.
"You mean like Time Magazine's Man of the Year 1938?"
As Time Magazine frequently points out the "man (etc) of the year" is chosen because they are influential and important, not because they are good and worthy of laud. Why would Time Magazine be embarassed about this cover?
The end of the floppy had nothing to do with Apple's mistake of not including a floppy disk drive in the first iMacs (something done too early, as shown by the sales of dongle-drive floppy units to iMac users), and everything to do with the rise of the cheap USB "thumb drive" a few years later.
" The libraries had permission to buy the papers and allow access to them in the first place. Internet Archive had no such agreement with this company."
This company dumped the pages out on the public Internet, with no robots.txt. Surely they know what that means.
Looking forward to newspapers filing similar frivolous lawsuits against libraries for maintaining old copies of the papers in their collections; copies that newspaper company might be embarassed about now.
Slashdot Mirror
Could be worse: this guy could have linked to Google :)
There are indeed many definitions. I'm operating off of something similar to George McGovern: "There is no easy definition for the phrase 'frivolous lawsuit,' but I imagine any claim for damages where the injuries are minimal or where the basis for the defendant's liability is hard to believe, might qualify as frivolous."
"since you use conclusory language to assert that this one was frivolous without apparently knowing much about it at all " This is not true at all. I am making the "frivolous" claim after looking at the facts of the case, which I have been referring to.
"....certainly without providing any logic to connect your use of the term with any of the facts of the case"
I have been referring to the specifics of the case.
"It's impossible to have a rational argument when one person bases all of his logic on his conclusion, instead of the other way around."
That is a straw-man attack, as I have proven that the case is frivolous by pointing out the facts (who is really at fault, the coffee is safe and at the recommended temperature, etc.)
Yeah wouldn't you love it to have to toss 30 envelopes from popup companies in the trash as you look through your mail for that one letter.
What ends up happening is too many frivolous lawsuits from pratfalling stumbling oafs, and the city ends up being rather resistant to having sidewalks at all. They balk at requiring them in construction and new work due to the hassle.
This has gotten rid of a lot of public pools; people would rather sue than take responsibility for their own swimming behavior or watch their children.
Why even bring up the amount awarded at all? The case was frivolous. A payment to her of one cent or 5 billion makes no sense. Makes no difference.
"If you want to find frivolous lawsuits"
We are discussing an excellent example right now.
"Tort reform does nothing but protect corporations from individual plaintiffs that they've injured"
Actually, it should protects people from frivilous lawsuits from plaintiffs they have not injured, such as this case.
It was certainly not normal for coffee of the temperature they were serving there. She had to work real hard to get that result!
"Moreover, McDonald's served the coffee at that temperature at their drive-throughs" So? It is the coffee industry's recommended serving temperature.
"They claimed in court that they expected people to take the coffee home and drink it. What kind of BS is that?"
Not BS at all. If you look at the burn incidents vs # of cups sold, you will see that no-one really even had a problem with how to drink the coffee..
"You buy coffee in a drive-through because you don't have time to take it home to drink it, and McDonald's knew that perfectly well."
"Knew perfectly well" what?
You need to dig into the court transcripts. Hannibal is still in prison because he ate the bailiff.
I would not be surprised if there is a similar but low number of choking incidents from breathing while drinking the coffee.
I suppose, then, McDonald's is criminally liable for selling liquid coffee.
Not true. The consumers were able to consume the coffee safely. Surely they were aware of the temperature: they were drinking it!
" more than 700 people were burned by McDonald's coffee with varying degrees of severity. "
During this same time, there were many billions of cups sold. This works out to one burn incident per 24,000,000 cups sold. That is a rather safe product. The burn incidents did not happen because the product was defective. They happened because someone did something stupid with it.
"McDonald's did not intend to reduce the heat of its coffee"
Why? This is the recommended serving temperature, and it is how the customers preferred it.
"McDonald's did not warn customers of this risk "
Yes they did. They always advertised it as hot coffee.
Frivolous lawsuit? Yes. It is hard to come up with a better example of one.
Hmmm. That is what the woman who filed the frivolous lawsuit did. This is a very important fact: she spilled the coffee herself.
"on the stand, they claimed that serving coffee that hot made it taste better, and they were at times downright belligerent to Ms. Liebeck"
Well, it is true. Complaints about the coffee being too cold and not tasting as good have increased. Belligerant? Well, she was abusing the court system in order to try to plunder large amounts of money from them: she was belligerent first.
"The McDonald's coffee case is not proof that we need tort reform."
It is. We need tort reform so such cases are immediately thrown out.
"A major corporation was held accountable for injuries that its indifference to its customers caused."
The injury was caused by the woman's action. Therefore, a blameless party was made to give up money needlessly.
You responded to "This company dumped the pages out on the public Internet, with no robots.txt. Surely they know what that means.". You are referring to software made publicly available for free on the Net, such as freeware and shareware, right? As far as I know, it is legal to copy, distribute, and archive this type of software software.
If you are referring to closed commercial software, then your analogy is WAY off.
"Well. I know this company that sells computer software with no copy prevention mechanism"
Are pages archives at archive.org pages that are sold? Of course not. They are given away. Did you think this through first? The "given away" vs "sold" difference rips your analogy to shreds.
I wonder if the "alternative weekly" publishers would mind one but if others were actually duplicating the papers intact and distributing these copies?
Thanks. It looks like they have a bad thing going on Chud, if they think "dark green on black" text is fun to read. They even have dark grey on black. IMHO, if you need to highlight the text and/or past it into a text editor to read the web content, they've already failed it. However, I don't think that having checkboxes and option buttons on the page (rendered in the typical colors) would spoil whatever effect they are aiming for. I did not see what you meant with the searchboxes.
The sample page actually does include round checkboxes which look more like option buttons than checkboxes. Yes, thanks to this breakthrough, we can make checkboxes that look like option buttons, and vice-versa!
It's about time! Once my son wrote "Insert Brain Here" on the back of my bald head. I was laying on the floor, spinning around for hours trying to read it before someone finally told me what it said.
Do you have an example of a page where the "Style" is such that usual controls would not be a good idea? Is there a possibility that the fancy page is really overdone if standard controls will be "out of place" in it, even if the colors are changed?
Not just that; there are usability standards. Checkboxes and radio/option buttons are supposed to look and act a certain way. It makes using them that much easier. Disguising them as something that looks like Lucky Charms marshmallows really fudges matters. The sample even had checkboxes made to look like option buttons (round).
Is it a good thing to have controls that deviate from the standard so much that they aren't even recognizable anyore, like the green/grey round toggle button that replaces the checkbox on the sample page? Why disguise standard controls so the user will have to spend some time trying to find out what the standard controls are "hidden as"?
What if it is one of those free "alternative weeklies" that no-one has to pay for? This a much more apt analogy, and it changes the rest of your statement. The papers are free, the web pages in question are free.
Zip disks have their reliability problems, too, and CD's are very slow compared to floppies for moving small files.
It has only been dead for 2-3 or so years now (much less than 7) thanks to the rise of the thumb drive. Before that, there was no alternative for moving small files between a couple of non-networked machines. You'd likely have the file copied to disk from machine A, and then copied from disk onto machine B in the time it would take you just to format a CD on the first machine if you chose the CD option.
As Time Magazine frequently points out the "man (etc) of the year" is chosen because they are influential and important, not because they are good and worthy of laud. Why would Time Magazine be embarassed about this cover?
The end of the floppy had nothing to do with Apple's mistake of not including a floppy disk drive in the first iMacs (something done too early, as shown by the sales of dongle-drive floppy units to iMac users), and everything to do with the rise of the cheap USB "thumb drive" a few years later.
This company dumped the pages out on the public Internet, with no robots.txt. Surely they know what that means.
Looking forward to newspapers filing similar frivolous lawsuits against libraries for maintaining old copies of the papers in their collections; copies that newspaper company might be embarassed about now.