It sounds like you're the kind of guy this would be perfect for. Send it in, find out you've got some disease that's going to kill you when you're 45... well fuck that healthy lifestyle! Time to smoke, eat trans-fats, lots of red meat, hookers, high risk activities... all the good stuff!
Ha, you don't need a fancy DNA test to do that! A little self-fulfilling prophecy is all you need.
I partake of all the smoke, fats, meats, and hookers I want since I know I'm going to die by age 45 due to all the smoke, fats, meats, and hookers...
but what I want to see is the LAST one hundred.com domains.
As in, the last EVER? That would be a pretty interesting list!
The last as in most recent? That's easy: [insert output of script for generating 100 random permutations of "ch34pv14gra.com" here]
Actually, now that I think about it, there's a good chance that the former will be the same as the latter as the deluge of viagra spam finally causes the net to collapse...
Well, in their defense, that's because in one second he's talking about a revolutionary new business model for music distribution, and in the next he's talking about some Nuclear-Powered Pansexual Roto-Plooker.
Zappa was brilliant, but also very weird, and they probably had a hard time distinguishing when he was being which.
Besides, they never got their prototype roto-plooker working.
I dunno, I thought the morality system in Ultima 4 was deep especially for the time. There were a variety of virtues that you could build up and you had to choose -which- virtue to express at any given time, not simply become more "good" or more "evil" in general. Though it was pretty ironic to be building up your "humility" for the express purpose of becoming the Avatar of Virtue who would save the world and be famous across all of Britannia...
Though honestly I preferred the virtue system in Ultima 6 and 7, which was: 1) Steal anything that isn't nailed down. 2) Occasionally have a party member become incensed at your larcenous ways and leave, until you nicely ask them to come back after promising to never do it again. 3) Goto 1.
That's pretty much my virtue system in real life, except in real life I have a claw hammer for those pesky nails.
Censorship is something that is big in corporate america these days it seems. Being Republican myself, I do not like censorship, which I guess is an oddity perhaps?
Not to harp on you too much on you being Republican, but which party (or really, administration allegedly affiliated with a party) has been trying to convince us that conflict of interest is no big deal and certainly not something that will affect the objectivity of decisions? That, say, the Vice President holding stock options in the oil and contracting company he was formerly CEO of has no impact whatsoever on the policies decided upon in his secret energy meetings, or no impact on the large no-bid contracts said company was granted in Iraq?
This is just another example of conflict of interest -- a publication reviewing a product that is also advertised in said publication. The very fact that a negative review was written and published is probably unusual, and more a fact of who the writer in question was. By daring to actually be objective and ignore the conflicted interest, he lost his job.
Conflicts of interest are bad, mmkay? You should always be suspicious of anyone who says something is good and is also receiving money or gifts from the company that makes the something. And it's not always advertising dollars. Most review sites receive advance copies of games or hardware in order to review them in time for the launch, and a negative review has the potential to end that relationship.
This is why ultimately the best reviews are done by those who aren't advertising for the products they review and who go out and buy the games themselves. You'll find people to be a hell of a lot more blunt about a game's lack of quality when they paid $60 for it. Well, unless they're the kind of person who hates to admit they got screwed, but at least for the kinds of sites I'm thinking of (Old Man Murray, RIP) that's not a problem.
I sort of doubt it, I think it's more of a cargo cult type of thing. Magical meat in a can that never goes bad had to have impressed the heck out of tropical islanders when it first arrived.
Oh I agree it was probably impressive as hell. Not to mention spam's amazing ability to taste almost, but not entirely, unlike meat.
consumers of the Spam product would never confuse the food with junk email.
And yet Slashdot still has a spam (note lowercase 's') icon which looks like a piggy with a brick of presumably Spam as part of its body, where formerly the icon was indeed a can of Spam.
Yeah, it's called a "pun". That doesn't mean people actually confuse the various meaning of words as being the same (otherwise you must feel really awkward when someone offers you a weiner).
The old icon did use the Spam(tm) trademark, though, which is a different ball of wax.
It's not that hot because people drink it that hot. It's that hot because after the four creams and three sugars, people for some reason still expect a hot beverage instead of a lukewarm beverage. Dunkin Donuts pre-creams your coffee for you to your specifications.
You know, that's a really good point. I really hadn't thought about it since I always take my coffee black (and thus will do just about anything to avoid garbage coffee from McDonalds to Starbucks, though the latters espresso drinks are fine).
Everyone was incredibly stupid in that McDonald's case. From the restaurant, for serving coffee that's just inside the vapor dome, to the woman for using her crotch as a cup holder for a beverage she's frequently ordered, and which is consistently way too hot, to the other customers for demanding a beverage which has to be dangerously heated to still be enjoyable after they mangle it with condiments.
I've never argued that it wasn't a dumb-ass move on her part to spill the coffee, only that the resulting damage was beyond what any reasonable person's assessment of the risk would be.
Was McDonald's stupidity worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Circuit Court of Appeals seams to think not.
Yeah, the jury went a bit crazy awarding punitive damages. Apparently they were really incensed by McDonald's flippant attitude towards a known safety problem. Yet the court still agreed in principle that McDonald's was liable, and merely reduced the amount of damages to something more reasonable.
1) "Lightly bubbling" water is not 'almost boiling', it IS boiling.
No Einstein, that means that some parts of the water nearest the heating element have just reached the boiling point, and the water at the top that would be touching your lips is a few degrees cooler. Yet apparently you still recognize, perhaps through some primal instinct, that it would be idiotic to drink that water. Even though intellectually you think 4 degrees is the difference between scalding your throat and a-ok. Chalk one up for instinct I guess.
2) I would, and have, drunk "almost boiling" water. Usually as part of tea or hot cocoa. (I don't drink coffee.) I have a cup/mug with the tea/cocoa in it, I boil water, and pour it into the mug. I then sip the liquid. This is how most people do it. How do you do it?
You have to let the tea leaves steep in the water in order to make tea. You have to stir the hot water with the cocoa mix to make hot cocoa. You don't drink the water "almost boiling" because if you did you'd be drinking "scalding water with a tea bag in it" not "tea".
3) I have yet to dump it in my crotch and burn myself. And if I did, I sure wouldn't sue anyone.
Congratulations on your lack of clumsiness, may you do so well at age 80. Have you avoided car crashes, too? Well guess what, if a car manufacturer makes a car that they know will cause unusually excessive injuries in a crash because of design flaws (*cough* pinto *cough*), it doesn't matter if it's your fault for getting in an accident, they're still liable for making an unsafe car. Most companies understand this and respond when there's a problem; McDonalds didn't and that's why there was an injury.
I guess if you dropped a hammer on your foot (in an uncharacteristically clutzy moment) that for some inexplicable reason was made of knock-off IBM laptop batteries and it exploded taking off your foot, you wouldn't feel that the hammer manufacturer was in any way responsible since, after all, it was your fault for dropping the hammer.
I think she cause her own injuries through carelessness, and therefore was not owed any money.
No, injury of any kind was caused by her carelessness, the extent of the injuries was caused by the unreasonably -- as in more than anyone, including you, actually believe most coffee to be served at -- hot temperatures. McDonald's was well aware of the danger their excessively hot coffee posed, which is why they were in fact found liable.
immediately -adverb 1. without lapse of time; without delay; instantly; at once
How do YOU define "immediately"?
Oh, okay. Prove it. Go ahead and drink some scalding water at 96 degrees Celcius for all I care, genius. You realize that's almost boiling, right? Are you seriously freaking kidding me that if you saw water in a pot on a stove that was lightly bubbling that you'd freaking pick up the pot and drink from it? And I take it you think it's coffee lady who's a moron who deserves what she got?
Not if the definition of "hot" that everyone assumes is nothing like how hot the liquid actually was. "Hot" is not binary.
You give hot liquids your full, undivided attention or you should NOT be handling them. If this means pulling the damn car over and walking in to get your caffiene fix DO IT!
I don't know anyone who actually treats coffee like that. Nobody treats coffee with their "full undivided attention", they walk around with un-covered cups all the time chatting with co-workers and what not and basically try not to run into anyone -- but even then they don't cautiously peer around every corner to make sure no one is coming. But based on what you are saying, the (pulling a number out of thin air) hundreds of thousands of people who drink coffee every day while commuting are knowingly putting themselves at risk of third degree burns and painful skin grafts.
Or, perhaps more plausibly, nobody actually considers a normal cup of coffee to be that serious of a threat, and everyone's "coffee==hot" equation does not apply for such high values of "hot".
Do you seriously walk around holding your coffee cup in two hands, blowing off anyone who attempts to engage you in conversation or otherwise distract your full attention from the danger in front of you? Or do you treat it like you would, say, a hammer, that would hurt like the dickens if you dropped it on your foot but you would hardly expect to hospitalize you? If the former, kudos to your caution, but you're completely abnormal.
There's also the "spilled it into clothing which holds it against your skin and continues to burn you" hot too. It's not like you get a peltier effect by dropping hot coffee on yourself.
Yes, that made the burns worse. What's your point, that she shouldn't have been wearing clothes? She still would have received third degree burns almost immediately. Maybe she would have only had to be in the hospital for four days instead of a week if she'd been wearing jeans instead of sweat pants. Maybe her genitals would have merely been badly scarred instead of requiring skin grafts.
Just about every coffee drinker has spilled coffee on themselves at some point. I don't know any who have been scarred as a result even if they spilled it on their pants, and I don't know anyone who was surprised that they were not seriously injured. A perhaps second degree burn requiring some aloe vera cream is about what any normal person expects.
Thus, if McDonald's were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55-60 C (131-140 F). But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85-95 C (185-203 F).[10]
Emphasis changed to point out why this is not a contradiction.
And moreover, it seems to me that the coffee had the right temperature (more so, considering that it was served at a drive thru which means people will indeed drink the coffee while driving over long distances):
Long distances is a reason to put the coffee in an insulated cup, not a reason to serve at a temperature so hot that it would physically damage you to actually put it to your lips.
Home and commercial coffee makers often reach comparable temperatures.[14] The National Coffee Association instructs that coffee be brewed "between 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit [91-96 C] for optimal extraction" and consumed "immediately". If not consumed immediately, the coffee is to be "maintained at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit."
While I may be mistaken, I don't think "immediately" is meant to imply "straight from the brewer at 91-96 C" because that would cause 3rd degree burns to your esophagus. I would rather think it's meant to imply that if you aren't intending to drink any coffee at the time and are going to let it sit, that it should maintained at the high temperature to maintain the flavor, and still allowed to cool down before serving so it's possible to drink.
And I've seen people spill "hot" coffee on themselves before, and never have I seen them fall to the ground screaming where they had to be taken to the hospital to receive skin grafts, and I've never seen anyone treat their lidless cup of coffee as though that were a possibility.
I have always thought that such a suit is only possible in the happy suing USA.
Regardless of the merits of hot coffee, I just can't see this as an example of that, because "happy suing USA" to me has always meant "person sues for $CHA-CHING because of emotional distress or skinned knee", where this lady initially only tried to recover her medical expenses for an actual severe injury she received, and it was the jury who decided that McDonald's dismissive behavior warranted the large punitive damages.
There are many, many better examples as far as I'm concerned. Off the top of my head, a lady once sued her employer because she's racist and they made her work with black people and this caused her emotional distress.
they had theirs set so that 3rd degree burns would occur in 3 seconds.
And as I like to point out whenever this topic comes up because a lot of people don't seem to realize, "3rd degree burns" means burns like these which can only be treated with these.
Now imagine that was on your crotch.
There's always somebody who says something like "LOL what an idiot, everyone knows you have to be careful with coffee because it's HOT!" Well everyone I've ever met must be an idiot, because I've never seen anyone treat coffee like it could do that to you in seconds. It'd be like seeing someone casually set a lit acetylene torch in their cup holder as they drove around. There's oops-ouchie hot, and there's skin-grafts-on-the-crotch way too fucking hot.
No, he's right, zero is transcendent. Zero is not just a number, it's the concept of nothing, of not having something. For anything one or any other number can represent, zero represents its absence. Before there was any sentient, there was zero sentients, and you cannot begin to count anything as but you have begun with not having counted any. And it took sentience to realize that nothing was a concept unto itself as important and critical to understanding as any something, that absence is in fact a something itself. Zero is the most critical value for understanding anything, and in many ways it is only by comparing ourselves to zero that we know that we are one or more.
Negative numbers are just positive numbers in the opposite direction. Whether reversing the polarity or enumerating debt or the loss of sentients, it still begins with the concept of not having any of those. Zero is the beginning of everything.
Please provide numbers and a reference supporting your argument that the Wii's attach rate is lower than 360 and PS3. Thank you.
Well, I'm just going to accept for the sake of argument that the attach rate is lower for the Wii than the other consoles. It makes rational sense, even without empirical data, that a lot of people are buying it for Wii Sports and that's about it.
However, attach rates only matter for console manufacturers that sell at a loss and make a per-game-sale royalty and thus need to have a certain amount of games sold per console in order to make a profit. For the game publishers, what matters is the total potential market, which is attach rate * total number of consoles, and with the Wii having the most consoles sold and still the highest growth rate, the attach rate doesn't need to be that high to be a very tempting target for the publishers.
Anyway, the GP was right on one thing -- it's good that Nintendo makes money on the Wii, for Nintendo at least, since it means they're raking in money hand over fist while the other two struggle to reduce their losses.
Production manager: We could retool another line that's not so busy.
Retool what line that's not so busy? The DS lines?
Production capacity doesn't just spring from nowhere. You can't just go v_factories.push_back(new c_WiiFactory()). They stated long ago that they underestimated the demand (even though they had very healthy estimates) and promised to increase production, and they've already made a substantial investment in production capacity to go from 1M/month to 1.8 M/month, an 80% increase. There's no way they could add a substantial increase on top of that before the holidays. By middle of next year, maybe, assuming the demand would still justify the increase.
And what good does this free publicity and hype do for Nintendo if when the Christmas season comes and everyone is frothing at the mouth for a Wii they still can't buy one?!
I got my Wii with a Walmart.com bundle that allowed you to pick which games and accessories you wanted. Since I didn't just want a console, I also wanted some games and an extra controller, this worked perfectly. The price was good, basically exactly what you would have payed for each of the units separately plus shipping and handling, and I got all the games that I wanted. Unfortunately it seems like they jacked up the price to be more than the total retail cost of the items, which sucks.
Bundles with pre-selected games suck because they -always- include some POS that they just want to get out of their warehouses. But bundles that just "force" me to buy all the things I was going to buy anyway are okay with me.
I agree with you that the PS3 commercials were well done ("slick" I thought the first time I saw one) and for their target markets probably effective. They're certainly vastly better than the launch commercials, which did little more than give me the impression that the PS3 was vaguely supernatural and possibly evil. What the GP failed to realize is that people like him who "like to be informed" aren't the target of these ads. Sony expects people like him to read gaming mags or websites to form opinions, not be swayed by TV spots. It's the impulsive people you mentioned who could see these ads, be impressed, and decide they want a PS3.
On the other hand, I disagree that the Wii adds are similarly uninformative. Showing families and friends waving the wiimote around like retards, rather than focusing on the on-screen action, is actually conveying the most important information about what the Wii is about to the target audience of non-gamers.
You're no more "educated" about this than the rest of us, so fuck off with that ridiculous elitist garbage.
No shit sherlock, that's why I'm going by what John Hopkins, their team experienced in conducting mortality surveys in warzones, and the peer-reviewed medical journal they published their results in say. That's not elitist, you idiot, that's recognizing that not knowing is not a sound basis for criticizing the study. If you don't know jack shit, and you do think this somehow qualifies you to discredit the study (like the numbnuts I replied to), then that makes you that particular form of elitist common to slashdot.
Yes, I'm sure your uneducated belief that the result is "ridiculous" and "magic" has the experts at the Lancet journal and John Hopkins staring shame-faced at their boots. They "ran" with 655,000 because that's the mid-point of the range, and the most likely outcome in a normal distribution. Just like any other survey which gives you the mean value and then a margin of error -- even if reporters choose to omit the later, it's all there in the study. The fact that the error range is large should give you more confidence in the results, not less, because it is an indication that in fact the science was done correctly and the results of the survey presented accurately.
Frankly given the level of violence in Iraq I think what is ridiculous is believing that there haven't been hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, a belief that is based solely on incredulity not any facts whatsoever. Well you know what? Not wanting to believe in the results of a study is as solid a foundation for discrediting it as not understanding how it was done -- i.e. not sound at all.
Sure, tagging and controlling data is important, but far from difficult, and with well-written programs a good suite of visualization tools is relatively easy. Give me some speed, dammit! Why should I have to wait for my slot on the cluster when I could have the power right here under my desk?
Not to mention that unless he's talking about more efficient data paths (i.e. more IPC instead of clock frequency, but still more overall execution speed), that kind of 'data tagging' is completely inappropriate for a general purpose CPU. That kind of complexity should be added in software, with hardware merely giving it the necessary 'oomph'. As soon as you start putting high-level data storage constructs into a CPU, it becomes an ASIC -- Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Which should imply "limited usefulness and lifespan" because as soon as you want to change how you tag your data, that hardware becomes useless. Sure, after coming up with a good software-based data storage scheme, if you calculate that the performance of the scheme is worth the large cost, then create an ASIC for it. But to admonish the CPU makers in general for not creating such a thing? That's just backwards.
Discriminating against cosmic ray neutrons is going to be painful for this technology, however, and furthermore the comment that another poster made that "this tech shows we don't need to give up our civil liberties to be safe because it proves we can catch stuff at the boarder" is to my mind utterly wrong-headed. It assumes the border can be made perfectly impermeable, and that is simply not the case, as a million kilos of grass or whatever it is a year proves. As long as there is a chance that one bad guy can slip something through, Americans have two choices: be willing to die for your freedom, or give up your freedom (and be willing to die anyway, because a police state will not protect you.)
Amen to that. I don't need to understand the physics to understand that for any tech for defense that there is an opposing tech for offense that can be developed. Or just to understand that there is no such thing as 'infallible'. Personally, I'd like to take my relative chances and stay free.
It looks like Nick might have found a way to do something very close to that after all...
Given the caveats and limitations you describe... What do you think of the comments that suggests that this whole "detect nukes in shipping containers" angle is really just a way to keep DARPA or other defense-related investment monies coming in? That certainly meshes with what I've seen of university and professional research, but what is your opinion?
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you're the kind of guy this would be perfect for. Send it in, find out you've got some disease that's going to kill you when you're 45... well fuck that healthy lifestyle! Time to smoke, eat trans-fats, lots of red meat, hookers, high risk activities... all the good stuff!
Ha, you don't need a fancy DNA test to do that! A little self-fulfilling prophecy is all you need.
I partake of all the smoke, fats, meats, and hookers I want since I know I'm going to die by age 45 due to all the smoke, fats, meats, and hookers...
but what I want to see is the LAST one hundred .com domains.
As in, the last EVER? That would be a pretty interesting list!
The last as in most recent? That's easy: [insert output of script for generating 100 random permutations of "ch34pv14gra.com" here]
Actually, now that I think about it, there's a good chance that the former will be the same as the latter as the deluge of viagra spam finally causes the net to collapse...
The RIAA keep buying the pot.
That must be why the Oregonians are angry!
They never did really listen to him.
Well, in their defense, that's because in one second he's talking about a revolutionary new business model for music distribution, and in the next he's talking about some Nuclear-Powered Pansexual Roto-Plooker.
Zappa was brilliant, but also very weird, and they probably had a hard time distinguishing when he was being which.
Besides, they never got their prototype roto-plooker working.
A bunch of granola eating, tree hugging, hairy legged druids. Well, not literally, but the spirit is definitely there.
Not literally druids, I assume you mean.
I dunno, I thought the morality system in Ultima 4 was deep especially for the time. There were a variety of virtues that you could build up and you had to choose -which- virtue to express at any given time, not simply become more "good" or more "evil" in general. Though it was pretty ironic to be building up your "humility" for the express purpose of becoming the Avatar of Virtue who would save the world and be famous across all of Britannia...
Though honestly I preferred the virtue system in Ultima 6 and 7, which was:
1) Steal anything that isn't nailed down.
2) Occasionally have a party member become incensed at your larcenous ways and leave, until you nicely ask them to come back after promising to never do it again.
3) Goto 1.
That's pretty much my virtue system in real life, except in real life I have a claw hammer for those pesky nails.
I dunno exactly, but I do know that a 1" square column of air from sea level to the upper atmosphere weights about 14 lbs.
Censorship is something that is big in corporate america these days it seems. Being Republican myself, I do not like censorship, which I guess is an oddity perhaps?
Not to harp on you too much on you being Republican, but which party (or really, administration allegedly affiliated with a party) has been trying to convince us that conflict of interest is no big deal and certainly not something that will affect the objectivity of decisions? That, say, the Vice President holding stock options in the oil and contracting company he was formerly CEO of has no impact whatsoever on the policies decided upon in his secret energy meetings, or no impact on the large no-bid contracts said company was granted in Iraq?
This is just another example of conflict of interest -- a publication reviewing a product that is also advertised in said publication. The very fact that a negative review was written and published is probably unusual, and more a fact of who the writer in question was. By daring to actually be objective and ignore the conflicted interest, he lost his job.
Conflicts of interest are bad, mmkay? You should always be suspicious of anyone who says something is good and is also receiving money or gifts from the company that makes the something. And it's not always advertising dollars. Most review sites receive advance copies of games or hardware in order to review them in time for the launch, and a negative review has the potential to end that relationship.
This is why ultimately the best reviews are done by those who aren't advertising for the products they review and who go out and buy the games themselves. You'll find people to be a hell of a lot more blunt about a game's lack of quality when they paid $60 for it. Well, unless they're the kind of person who hates to admit they got screwed, but at least for the kinds of sites I'm thinking of (Old Man Murray, RIP) that's not a problem.
I sort of doubt it, I think it's more of a cargo cult type of thing. Magical meat in a can that never goes bad had to have impressed the heck out of tropical islanders when it first arrived.
Oh I agree it was probably impressive as hell. Not to mention spam's amazing ability to taste almost, but not entirely, unlike meat.
And yet Slashdot still has a spam (note lowercase 's') icon which looks like a piggy with a brick of presumably Spam as part of its body, where formerly the icon was indeed a can of Spam.
Yeah, it's called a "pun". That doesn't mean people actually confuse the various meaning of words as being the same (otherwise you must feel really awkward when someone offers you a weiner).
The old icon did use the Spam(tm) trademark, though, which is a different ball of wax.
It's not that hot because people drink it that hot. It's that hot because after the four creams and three sugars, people for some reason still expect a hot beverage instead of a lukewarm beverage. Dunkin Donuts pre-creams your coffee for you to your specifications.
You know, that's a really good point. I really hadn't thought about it since I always take my coffee black (and thus will do just about anything to avoid garbage coffee from McDonalds to Starbucks, though the latters espresso drinks are fine).
Everyone was incredibly stupid in that McDonald's case. From the restaurant, for serving coffee that's just inside the vapor dome, to the woman for using her crotch as a cup holder for a beverage she's frequently ordered, and which is consistently way too hot, to the other customers for demanding a beverage which has to be dangerously heated to still be enjoyable after they mangle it with condiments.
I've never argued that it wasn't a dumb-ass move on her part to spill the coffee, only that the resulting damage was beyond what any reasonable person's assessment of the risk would be.
Was McDonald's stupidity worth hundreds of millions of dollars? The Circuit Court of Appeals seams to think not.
Yeah, the jury went a bit crazy awarding punitive damages. Apparently they were really incensed by McDonald's flippant attitude towards a known safety problem. Yet the court still agreed in principle that McDonald's was liable, and merely reduced the amount of damages to something more reasonable.
1) "Lightly bubbling" water is not 'almost boiling', it IS boiling.
No Einstein, that means that some parts of the water nearest the heating element have just reached the boiling point, and the water at the top that would be touching your lips is a few degrees cooler. Yet apparently you still recognize, perhaps through some primal instinct, that it would be idiotic to drink that water. Even though intellectually you think 4 degrees is the difference between scalding your throat and a-ok. Chalk one up for instinct I guess.
2) I would, and have, drunk "almost boiling" water. Usually as part of tea or hot cocoa. (I don't drink coffee.) I have a cup/mug with the tea/cocoa in it, I boil water, and pour it into the mug. I then sip the liquid. This is how most people do it. How do you do it?
You have to let the tea leaves steep in the water in order to make tea. You have to stir the hot water with the cocoa mix to make hot cocoa. You don't drink the water "almost boiling" because if you did you'd be drinking "scalding water with a tea bag in it" not "tea".
3) I have yet to dump it in my crotch and burn myself. And if I did, I sure wouldn't sue anyone.
Congratulations on your lack of clumsiness, may you do so well at age 80. Have you avoided car crashes, too? Well guess what, if a car manufacturer makes a car that they know will cause unusually excessive injuries in a crash because of design flaws (*cough* pinto *cough*), it doesn't matter if it's your fault for getting in an accident, they're still liable for making an unsafe car. Most companies understand this and respond when there's a problem; McDonalds didn't and that's why there was an injury.
I guess if you dropped a hammer on your foot (in an uncharacteristically clutzy moment) that for some inexplicable reason was made of knock-off IBM laptop batteries and it exploded taking off your foot, you wouldn't feel that the hammer manufacturer was in any way responsible since, after all, it was your fault for dropping the hammer.
I think she cause her own injuries through carelessness, and therefore was not owed any money.
No, injury of any kind was caused by her carelessness, the extent of the injuries was caused by the unreasonably -- as in more than anyone, including you, actually believe most coffee to be served at -- hot temperatures. McDonald's was well aware of the danger their excessively hot coffee posed, which is why they were in fact found liable.
immediately
-adverb 1. without lapse of time; without delay; instantly; at once
How do YOU define "immediately"?
Oh, okay. Prove it. Go ahead and drink some scalding water at 96 degrees Celcius for all I care, genius. You realize that's almost boiling, right? Are you seriously freaking kidding me that if you saw water in a pot on a stove that was lightly bubbling that you'd freaking pick up the pot and drink from it? And I take it you think it's coffee lady who's a moron who deserves what she got?
Unbelievable.
Sorry, the "coffee=hot" parable is still correct.
Not if the definition of "hot" that everyone assumes is nothing like how hot the liquid actually was. "Hot" is not binary.
You give hot liquids your full, undivided attention or you should NOT be handling them. If this means pulling the damn car over and walking in to get your caffiene fix DO IT!
I don't know anyone who actually treats coffee like that. Nobody treats coffee with their "full undivided attention", they walk around with un-covered cups all the time chatting with co-workers and what not and basically try not to run into anyone -- but even then they don't cautiously peer around every corner to make sure no one is coming. But based on what you are saying, the (pulling a number out of thin air) hundreds of thousands of people who drink coffee every day while commuting are knowingly putting themselves at risk of third degree burns and painful skin grafts.
Or, perhaps more plausibly, nobody actually considers a normal cup of coffee to be that serious of a threat, and everyone's "coffee==hot" equation does not apply for such high values of "hot".
Do you seriously walk around holding your coffee cup in two hands, blowing off anyone who attempts to engage you in conversation or otherwise distract your full attention from the danger in front of you? Or do you treat it like you would, say, a hammer, that would hurt like the dickens if you dropped it on your foot but you would hardly expect to hospitalize you? If the former, kudos to your caution, but you're completely abnormal.
There's also the "spilled it into clothing which holds it against your skin and continues to burn you" hot too. It's not like you get a peltier effect by dropping hot coffee on yourself.
Yes, that made the burns worse. What's your point, that she shouldn't have been wearing clothes? She still would have received third degree burns almost immediately. Maybe she would have only had to be in the hospital for four days instead of a week if she'd been wearing jeans instead of sweat pants. Maybe her genitals would have merely been badly scarred instead of requiring skin grafts.
Just about every coffee drinker has spilled coffee on themselves at some point. I don't know any who have been scarred as a result even if they spilled it on their pants, and I don't know anyone who was surprised that they were not seriously injured. A perhaps second degree burn requiring some aloe vera cream is about what any normal person expects.
Thus, if McDonald's were going to avoid the risk of injury by a deep thickness burn they would have had to have served tea and coffee at between 55-60 C (131-140 F). But tea ought to be brewed with boiling water if it is to give its best flavour and coffee ought to be brewed at between 85-95 C (185-203 F).[10]
Emphasis changed to point out why this is not a contradiction.
And moreover, it seems to me that the coffee had the right temperature (more so, considering that it was served at a drive thru which means people will indeed drink the coffee while driving over long distances):
Long distances is a reason to put the coffee in an insulated cup, not a reason to serve at a temperature so hot that it would physically damage you to actually put it to your lips.
Home and commercial coffee makers often reach comparable temperatures.[14] The National Coffee Association instructs that coffee be brewed "between 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit [91-96 C] for optimal extraction" and consumed "immediately". If not consumed immediately, the coffee is to be "maintained at 180-185 degrees Fahrenheit."
While I may be mistaken, I don't think "immediately" is meant to imply "straight from the brewer at 91-96 C" because that would cause 3rd degree burns to your esophagus. I would rather think it's meant to imply that if you aren't intending to drink any coffee at the time and are going to let it sit, that it should maintained at the high temperature to maintain the flavor, and still allowed to cool down before serving so it's possible to drink.
And I've seen people spill "hot" coffee on themselves before, and never have I seen them fall to the ground screaming where they had to be taken to the hospital to receive skin grafts, and I've never seen anyone treat their lidless cup of coffee as though that were a possibility.
I have always thought that such a suit is only possible in the happy suing USA.
Regardless of the merits of hot coffee, I just can't see this as an example of that, because "happy suing USA" to me has always meant "person sues for $CHA-CHING because of emotional distress or skinned knee", where this lady initially only tried to recover her medical expenses for an actual severe injury she received, and it was the jury who decided that McDonald's dismissive behavior warranted the large punitive damages.
There are many, many better examples as far as I'm concerned. Off the top of my head, a lady once sued her employer because she's racist and they made her work with black people and this caused her emotional distress.
they had theirs set so that 3rd degree burns would occur in 3 seconds.
And as I like to point out whenever this topic comes up because a lot of people don't seem to realize, "3rd degree burns" means burns like these which can only be treated with these.
Now imagine that was on your crotch.
There's always somebody who says something like "LOL what an idiot, everyone knows you have to be careful with coffee because it's HOT!" Well everyone I've ever met must be an idiot, because I've never seen anyone treat coffee like it could do that to you in seconds. It'd be like seeing someone casually set a lit acetylene torch in their cup holder as they drove around. There's oops-ouchie hot, and there's skin-grafts-on-the-crotch way too fucking hot.
No, he's right, zero is transcendent. Zero is not just a number, it's the concept of nothing, of not having something. For anything one or any other number can represent, zero represents its absence. Before there was any sentient, there was zero sentients, and you cannot begin to count anything as but you have begun with not having counted any. And it took sentience to realize that nothing was a concept unto itself as important and critical to understanding as any something, that absence is in fact a something itself. Zero is the most critical value for understanding anything, and in many ways it is only by comparing ourselves to zero that we know that we are one or more.
Negative numbers are just positive numbers in the opposite direction. Whether reversing the polarity or enumerating debt or the loss of sentients, it still begins with the concept of not having any of those. Zero is the beginning of everything.
Please provide numbers and a reference supporting your argument that the Wii's attach rate is lower than 360 and PS3. Thank you.
Well, I'm just going to accept for the sake of argument that the attach rate is lower for the Wii than the other consoles. It makes rational sense, even without empirical data, that a lot of people are buying it for Wii Sports and that's about it.
However, attach rates only matter for console manufacturers that sell at a loss and make a per-game-sale royalty and thus need to have a certain amount of games sold per console in order to make a profit. For the game publishers, what matters is the total potential market, which is attach rate * total number of consoles, and with the Wii having the most consoles sold and still the highest growth rate, the attach rate doesn't need to be that high to be a very tempting target for the publishers.
Anyway, the GP was right on one thing -- it's good that Nintendo makes money on the Wii, for Nintendo at least, since it means they're raking in money hand over fist while the other two struggle to reduce their losses.
Production manager: We could retool another line that's not so busy.
Retool what line that's not so busy? The DS lines?
Production capacity doesn't just spring from nowhere. You can't just go v_factories.push_back(new c_WiiFactory()). They stated long ago that they underestimated the demand (even though they had very healthy estimates) and promised to increase production, and they've already made a substantial investment in production capacity to go from 1M/month to 1.8 M/month, an 80% increase. There's no way they could add a substantial increase on top of that before the holidays. By middle of next year, maybe, assuming the demand would still justify the increase.
And what good does this free publicity and hype do for Nintendo if when the Christmas season comes and everyone is frothing at the mouth for a Wii they still can't buy one?!
I got my Wii with a Walmart.com bundle that allowed you to pick which games and accessories you wanted. Since I didn't just want a console, I also wanted some games and an extra controller, this worked perfectly. The price was good, basically exactly what you would have payed for each of the units separately plus shipping and handling, and I got all the games that I wanted. Unfortunately it seems like they jacked up the price to be more than the total retail cost of the items, which sucks.
Bundles with pre-selected games suck because they -always- include some POS that they just want to get out of their warehouses. But bundles that just "force" me to buy all the things I was going to buy anyway are okay with me.
I agree with you that the PS3 commercials were well done ("slick" I thought the first time I saw one) and for their target markets probably effective. They're certainly vastly better than the launch commercials, which did little more than give me the impression that the PS3 was vaguely supernatural and possibly evil. What the GP failed to realize is that people like him who "like to be informed" aren't the target of these ads. Sony expects people like him to read gaming mags or websites to form opinions, not be swayed by TV spots. It's the impulsive people you mentioned who could see these ads, be impressed, and decide they want a PS3.
On the other hand, I disagree that the Wii adds are similarly uninformative. Showing families and friends waving the wiimote around like retards, rather than focusing on the on-screen action, is actually conveying the most important information about what the Wii is about to the target audience of non-gamers.
You're no more "educated" about this than the rest of us, so fuck off with that ridiculous elitist garbage.
No shit sherlock, that's why I'm going by what John Hopkins, their team experienced in conducting mortality surveys in warzones, and the peer-reviewed medical journal they published their results in say. That's not elitist, you idiot, that's recognizing that not knowing is not a sound basis for criticizing the study. If you don't know jack shit, and you do think this somehow qualifies you to discredit the study (like the numbnuts I replied to), then that makes you that particular form of elitist common to slashdot.
Yes, I'm sure your uneducated belief that the result is "ridiculous" and "magic" has the experts at the Lancet journal and John Hopkins staring shame-faced at their boots. They "ran" with 655,000 because that's the mid-point of the range, and the most likely outcome in a normal distribution. Just like any other survey which gives you the mean value and then a margin of error -- even if reporters choose to omit the later, it's all there in the study. The fact that the error range is large should give you more confidence in the results, not less, because it is an indication that in fact the science was done correctly and the results of the survey presented accurately.
Frankly given the level of violence in Iraq I think what is ridiculous is believing that there haven't been hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, a belief that is based solely on incredulity not any facts whatsoever. Well you know what? Not wanting to believe in the results of a study is as solid a foundation for discrediting it as not understanding how it was done -- i.e. not sound at all.
Sure, tagging and controlling data is important, but far from difficult, and with well-written programs a good suite of visualization tools is relatively easy. Give me some speed, dammit! Why should I have to wait for my slot on the cluster when I could have the power right here under my desk?
Not to mention that unless he's talking about more efficient data paths (i.e. more IPC instead of clock frequency, but still more overall execution speed), that kind of 'data tagging' is completely inappropriate for a general purpose CPU. That kind of complexity should be added in software, with hardware merely giving it the necessary 'oomph'. As soon as you start putting high-level data storage constructs into a CPU, it becomes an ASIC -- Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Which should imply "limited usefulness and lifespan" because as soon as you want to change how you tag your data, that hardware becomes useless. Sure, after coming up with a good software-based data storage scheme, if you calculate that the performance of the scheme is worth the large cost, then create an ASIC for it. But to admonish the CPU makers in general for not creating such a thing? That's just backwards.
Discriminating against cosmic ray neutrons is going to be painful for this technology, however, and furthermore the comment that another poster made that "this tech shows we don't need to give up our civil liberties to be safe because it proves we can catch stuff at the boarder" is to my mind utterly wrong-headed. It assumes the border can be made perfectly impermeable, and that is simply not the case, as a million kilos of grass or whatever it is a year proves. As long as there is a chance that one bad guy can slip something through, Americans have two choices: be willing to die for your freedom, or give up your freedom (and be willing to die anyway, because a police state will not protect you.)
Amen to that. I don't need to understand the physics to understand that for any tech for defense that there is an opposing tech for offense that can be developed. Or just to understand that there is no such thing as 'infallible'. Personally, I'd like to take my relative chances and stay free.
It looks like Nick might have found a way to do something very close to that after all...
Given the caveats and limitations you describe... What do you think of the comments that suggests that this whole "detect nukes in shipping containers" angle is really just a way to keep DARPA or other defense-related investment monies coming in? That certainly meshes with what I've seen of university and professional research, but what is your opinion?