Could you clarify that about treatment for stomach ulcers? I thought that omeprazole was already off patent (we have 11 brands available here in the Czech Republic).
Ah, maybe that's the difference then. Yes it's off patent, and no it isn't advertised here in the states, and by the way much of the advertising is done directly to doctors. So between the advertising targeting patients and free samples and such given to doctors, nobody is asking for it. My father has an ulcer, and between ten different doctors only one brought up the antibiotic, but wouldn't prescribe it for what seemed to me spurious reasons -- since the helicobacter can be spread via saliva, his wife would have had to take it too, and it kills much of your digestive tract bacteria so basically you have the never-ending shits for a few days. Um, okay, a few days of the runs so that your spouse can be free of ulcer pain for the rest of their life? Sounds okay to me. Granted this is all from memory years ago, I'm not sure omeprazole is the same drug.
The cost of treatment for omeprazole is about $0.33 to $1 a day here. It is usually given for 6 weeks, so the total cost is something up to $40. And it actually compeletely cures the ulcers! Wow! Amazing.
Right, and yet few people even know it exists over here, antacids still reign as treatment. Which was exactly the GP's point.
To show an example to illustrate this (picked purely at random, and may not be typical in the industry, but I suspect it is):
Actually you picked the worst offender. Pfizer is the largest pharma in the world by a good margin. They were already the largest in the world before they bought Pharmacia-Upjohn, which at the time was the 4th largest in the world.
Pfizer also has the largest marketing/R&D budget ratio in the industry, at least the last time I checked which was before they bought Pharmacia. They had a marketing budget four times larger than their R&D budget. Pharmacia-Upjohn had a rather low ratio for the industry at a mere 1.5x, and yes that's a touch of sarcasm you detect. These R&D budgets, by the way, include the necessary FDA testing and approval process.
Pharmaceuticals tell us that they have to charge so much for drugs and have rigorously defend their patents because of their massive R&D costs. It is expensive to develop a new drug and get it approved, to be sure. But that is irrelevent because they are spending vastly more than that on marketing. So they need to charge so much for drugs to pay for their marketing expenses. When you're talking about how you need to earn so much money to pay the bills, do you say you're doing it to pay for your cable or for your home mortgage? Usually one considers the biggest cost first. Oh, and if you are making enough money that you're still putting 25% of your paycheck directly in the bank every month, then usually you don't bitch about your bills at all.
The truth is that pharmaceuticals need to charge so much and have patent protection for only one reason: To defend ludicrously high profits. Of course some will counter with "don't they have a right to profit?" as if it is a binary profit/no profit question. They are making insanely high profits. Having merely great profits will not cave in the industry; if their profits were immediately cut by 75%, they would still be the envy of businesses the world over. Being able to maintain 20%+ profit margins in a recession is just insane.
There's a lot of healthy debate to be had about patents and patent reform. The pharmas, though, are greedy beyond comprehension and their input on the debate should be understood entirely from that standpoint.
The only species officially allowed to travel in space are those that have been modified so that their growth rate is artificially controlled. This is why some UFO renegades have exhibited an obsessive interest in human reproduction. They are seeking to restore their own reproductive potential. They hope to create alien-human hybrids with natural growth rates, bypassing alien modifications that prevent unauthorized reproduction. This is the ultimate form of hacking!
Well their plan is never going to work as long as they keep sticking their "probes" up peoples' asses!
However under the regulatory scheme, it is impossible to classify a planet hostile unless the dominant form of life knows of intelligent life on other planets. The bureaucratic mentality is the one constant in the universe! In order to avoid this classification, leading earth governments have secretly agreed to consistently deny UFOs and extraterestial intelligent life and all evidence for the same.
At least the intergalactic bureacracy acknowledges that earth politicians are not human so its okay for them to know about aliens.
Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 2, Funny
But honestly, if YOU were an alien, with this fantastic technology to fly hundreds of light years to visit another planet with life on it, would you just fly by some stuff then go home?
Hell yes! I'd do nothing but do flybys of primitive worlds like ours, then laugh my ass off at the cacophony of "It's an alien!" "No, it's a weather balloon combined with swamp gas you cook!" "Quiet heathen, it's obviously Space Jesus come to save us!" "Space Jesus is a government conspiracy caused by hallucinogens in the water!"
The only reason I don't do this now is that there isn't anywhere I can go where I'm so technologically advanced that I can't have my ass kicked for making fun of the locals.
Which begs the question, is Coke really in the big-bad-bin? This is the first I've heard of it. I mean, I've heard murmurs about unfair practices but nothing really big.
The only bad thing about Coke I've heard is their tendency to move into markets with existing local products that taste much better than Coke and are thus much more popular despite Coke's marketing blitzes, buy said local product's manufacturer, change its formula (replacing any real sugar with high fructose corn syrup for example) so that it tastes just as if not more crappy than Coke while also being just as cheap to produce, and laugh all the way to the bank since you're paying them if you buy the "local" stuff or Coke.
That's just normal capitalism-will-eat-your-culture badness though, not the kind exploitation and abuse that truly makes me consider a corporation to be evil, like Nike for example.
I think my main complaint about starbucks is the fact that they don't seem to know how to *not* burn their coffee beans.
Of course they know how not to, they simply chose to burn them as a matter of course. The reason? It's the only way to get a truly uniform coffee "flavor" across their entire chain. You can walk into a Starbucks anywhere and know what the coffee will taste like. In my opinion it tastes like shit, like all burned coffee does, but that isn't the point. The funny part is that for people for whom coffee == starbucks, they will come to think that burned crap is how coffee is supposed to taste, and may end up disliking other coffee.
Same here, and I have an old NES that still works great too... except for the stupid fscking connectors, which is why it requires a ridiculous amount of fidling to get games to work. Though for this case, a game genie works just fine, assuming you can find one.
Still, I'd pay for some of the best-of-the-best games like SMB3 and LoZ:LttP just to not have to swap consoles around when the mood hits me.
God, I wish they'd cut the price in half. I'd buy three times as many games if they did.
They had a few at EB around here. Only a few, a sad number to be sure, but they were there. If I didn't think it was cheesey as hell to buy yourself something when Christmas shopping for friends and family, I would have picked one up. I figured I wouldn't deprive any kids of their present under the tree, and I won't have time to play much anyway until after the xmas season when there will hopefully be sufficient supply.
Well it was 18 when my parents were growing up, so they didn't care that I drank when I was 18, and I'm not going to care if my kids drink at 18. Of course after teaching them responsibility, which is the point. We have youth drinking problems in this country because we teach our kids nothing about actual responsible drinking as part of some crazy abstinance policy, then throw them into the wild when they go to college. This applies to other aspects of parenting as well.
Are both almost always code phrases for "What I just said would be utterly retarded to takes as a tautology which you will realise if you think about it for three seconds, but I would much rather you just skipped the thinking part and took my word for it. Pretty please."
"Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives..."
Fuck off.
Yeah, nothing pisses a dude off like telling them they suck at their job.
Well, first, the movie rating system in America is voluntary, as is its enforcement. This is why nobody gets in trouble when someone sells a 16 year old a ticket to an R-rated movie without an adult present. Personally I'm all for voluntary rating systems like the ESRB.
Second, these laws are always worded in ways that make sales of the games in general difficult. Because these are laws with real penalties for their violation, practicality says that these games won't be on store shelves at all.
If you want a more thorough and nuanced opinion on why these laws are bad, maybe you should try reading one of the decisions by the courts that have ruled that these laws are unconstitutional.
Actually each SPE has its own 256k memory, which is not like a usual cache in that it has to be explicitly managed. Data loaded into these local stores will not be copied into the 512k cache also, so assuming the powerpc and SPEs are working on different data the limiting factor will be the FSB DMA bandwidth. It does have a pretty damn large amount of bandwidth, about 200GB/s in actual, though carefully tuned, practice.
Not that I'm doubting your ability to saturate it with seismic data. I mean, there's no such thing as too much power for the scientific computing world, God bless your souls for keeping me employed.:)
To be somewhat fair, with cart systems such as the Super NES, a significant amount of the technology actually came from within the cartridge itself. Super NES carts arent just binary game data, like a Playstation disc. There were circuit boards, and chips, and a LOT could be done with a cartridge that cant be done with a cd-derivative.
The most obvious, successfull, and awesome example, at least Stateside, being Star Fox.
Probably the most famous cartridge-based enhancement is the battery backup in the Legend of Zelda which let you *gasp* save your game!
While that is a nice feature of cartridges, it really isn't something that is sustainable. For example the Super FX chip that gave Star Fox was only used in a few other games, Yoshi's Island being the only one that had any real success. Developing a chip is an expensive endeavor, and only using it for a few games is a bad business proposition. Especially as the generations get smaller, it doesn't make sense anymore to develop game-specific hardware. I mean, imagine Sony developed Cell just to use in Resistance. Not to mention that the much larger storage capacity of optical media is a better tradeoff in general.
But to be more serious: Yes, you can easily strip off a pair of SWEAT PANTS (which is what she was wearing) pretty quickly.
Maybe when you're in you're seventies and in searing pain you might find it more difficult. And I was using the high end of the two to five second threshold at which liquid at that temperature causes 3rd degree burns.
The McDonald's Corporation are evil fucks, but they're clearly in the right here.
Why? Because the lady was too slow, even though she would have still suffered third degree burns from coffee servered dangerously hot?
Almost EXACTLY the same thing happed to me as happened to this woman (I was in the passenger seat too) and I did get slightly burned
SLIGHTLY burned means the coffee was served at the temperature any normal, reasonable human expects -- hot enough to burn you, but not hot enough to hospitalize you if you don't have cat-like reflexes. If the coffee had been at 180 degrees like the McDonald's coffee, then you would have probably been SEVERELY burned, maybe not enough to require skin grafts but definitely enough to have huge painfull blisters all over the affected area -- a mere second degree burn, which would have occured almost instantly.
That's the whole point. People make mistakes, but a dangerous product is one where the consequence of common mistakes like the exact same one you made yourself are not ridiculously out of proportion with what one would expect.
See -- you made the exact same mistake, and because the coffee was normal temperature, you were okay. Reaction time plays into it, but clearly McDonald's is in the wrong for serving coffee that hot! You'd be another one of the hundreds of complainants if you'd had coffee that hot! I can't imagine how you can side with McDonald's here, since you can't even call here uniquely clumsy!
Someone else mentioned those "hot plates" you sometimes get it resturants, like the skittles you get in Mexican resqurants with hot fajitas or whatever. Should the resturants stop doing this because some idiot might try to handle the hit plate or skillet?
That was me, and if the plate was so hot that it turned your fingers into blackened charcoal in seconds then FUCK YES the restaurant should stop serving plates that hot!
There are gradiations of "hot", and more importantly there are expectations of "hot". A sizzling fajita plate is expected to be very hot. A normal ceramic enchilada plate should be hot enough to cause a 1st degree burn if you held your hand against it, and if it was any hotter this would again be a case of the restaurant serving a dangerously hot item. Coffee, same thing. You expect it to be hot enough to cause minor burns, not severe burns. Serving it hotter than that is negligent regardless of whether or not the person handling the coffee screwed up.
It's like excusing the Ford Pinto because, well, you just shouldn't get in an accident!
Does anybody really think the notion of an intelligent computer is realistic any more? I mean, it's believable that a computer won't cooperate with you, but having a mind of its own and actually getting things done? It seems that the popularity of Windows OS has pretty much made such a concept pretty unbelievable among average people these days.
Naw, it's just nobody believes that normal, every-day PCs or even their high-end business equivalents can be intelligent.
Throw in a bunch of buzzwords, like "quantum computer neural network" ala Stealth and it's as believable as anything. Just state it's cutting-edge highly-secret government technology that nobody else knows about yet, and you're good to go. That's basically what the first Wargames did.
Though I agree that this movie will most likely fall flat.
If I imagine holding an open kettle with bubbling water in it, that is the absolute maximum temperature anything made up of mostly water will get. I would treat it in a similar way as a cup of hot coffee.
Most sane humans would wait until the liquid stopped boiling before even attempting to carry the pot.
And if you did have to carry a pot of boiling water, you would not treat it in a similar way to a cup of coffee. You would walk slowly and carefully, taking the utmost care to be sure not to spill because you would know the consequences would, unlike with a normal cup of coffee, be disastrous. If you treat it casually like most people do a cup of cofeee, then you are a fool who is liable to get badly burned. Or if you have a cup of coffee that, unlike most cups of coffee, poses a significant threat of severe burns in which case you'd be caught offguard.
It's because of the womans lack of reaction that she suffered the injuries she did.
Yes she suffered extremely severe injuries because of a lack of reaction, but at the temperature the coffee was served it would have caused third degree burns in five seconds. Can you strip off your pants in five seconds from a seated position in a car? Maybe. Care to find out? I doubt it.
Thus the idea of "negligence" comes in for them not telling you "Hey don't spill that, it will burn you so bad it'll kill your nerve endings (third-degree burn)" when the expectation is at the very most served coffee will give you a first-degree burn if that.
I strongly suspect that not a single person complaining about this lawsuit knows what a third-degree burn is, because I have never seen anyone treat a cup of coffee like it was capable of giving those kinds of burns. Most people are fairly non-chalant about it, because in the event they screw up and spill it on themselves they'll get a minor burn.
For all of you out there who are a bit slow, coffee is served HOT.
People always say this like it is obvious, but they must be slow because they don't realize there are gradiations of HOT. Brewing temperature and serving temperature are not the same thing.
I have never, ever seen anyone treat a cup of coffee as though it were capable of causing third-degree burns. They treat it like something which if spilled on them will cause a painful burn but one they can easily recover from without medical attention. Thus, caution, but not overly cautious. Nobody thinks coffee is so hot that if they spill it on themselves it will take skin grafts to repair. If they did, they'd think you were insane if you were walking around with a cup of coffee with no lid.
Just like when you go to a Mexican restaurant, and the server warns you that your plate is HOT. Okay, you've been duly warned. Everyone knows that, right? Now then you touch it, just for a second to move it to a more convenient location, and your fingers turn almost instantly into blackened, charred husks that may one day recover their sense of feeling after a couple years of treatment. So, are you dumb for having touched the plate after being warned? Yeah sure, but you sure as hell didn't expect the result, now did you?
Nobody expects coffee that hot. Nobody who knows what a third degree burn treats coffee like it can cause them. Nobody exercises caution commensurate with the amount of damage this temperature of liquid can cause.
Like with the Wii remote. Is it dumb to let go? Yes. If the controller fucking exploded when it hit the wall and killed your whole family, would that be Nintendo's fault? Yes. It's not just about the stupidity of the user, it's about the expectation of what will be the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you clarify that about treatment for stomach ulcers? I thought that omeprazole was already off patent (we have 11 brands available here in the Czech Republic).
Ah, maybe that's the difference then. Yes it's off patent, and no it isn't advertised here in the states, and by the way much of the advertising is done directly to doctors. So between the advertising targeting patients and free samples and such given to doctors, nobody is asking for it. My father has an ulcer, and between ten different doctors only one brought up the antibiotic, but wouldn't prescribe it for what seemed to me spurious reasons -- since the helicobacter can be spread via saliva, his wife would have had to take it too, and it kills much of your digestive tract bacteria so basically you have the never-ending shits for a few days. Um, okay, a few days of the runs so that your spouse can be free of ulcer pain for the rest of their life? Sounds okay to me. Granted this is all from memory years ago, I'm not sure omeprazole is the same drug.
The cost of treatment for omeprazole is about $0.33 to $1 a day here. It is usually given for 6 weeks, so the total cost is something up to $40. And it actually compeletely cures the ulcers! Wow! Amazing.
Right, and yet few people even know it exists over here, antacids still reign as treatment. Which was exactly the GP's point.
To show an example to illustrate this (picked purely at random, and may not be typical in the industry, but I suspect it is):
Actually you picked the worst offender. Pfizer is the largest pharma in the world by a good margin. They were already the largest in the world before they bought Pharmacia-Upjohn, which at the time was the 4th largest in the world.
Pfizer also has the largest marketing/R&D budget ratio in the industry, at least the last time I checked which was before they bought Pharmacia. They had a marketing budget four times larger than their R&D budget. Pharmacia-Upjohn had a rather low ratio for the industry at a mere 1.5x, and yes that's a touch of sarcasm you detect. These R&D budgets, by the way, include the necessary FDA testing and approval process.
Pharmaceuticals tell us that they have to charge so much for drugs and have rigorously defend their patents because of their massive R&D costs. It is expensive to develop a new drug and get it approved, to be sure. But that is irrelevent because they are spending vastly more than that on marketing. So they need to charge so much for drugs to pay for their marketing expenses. When you're talking about how you need to earn so much money to pay the bills, do you say you're doing it to pay for your cable or for your home mortgage? Usually one considers the biggest cost first. Oh, and if you are making enough money that you're still putting 25% of your paycheck directly in the bank every month, then usually you don't bitch about your bills at all.
The truth is that pharmaceuticals need to charge so much and have patent protection for only one reason: To defend ludicrously high profits. Of course some will counter with "don't they have a right to profit?" as if it is a binary profit/no profit question. They are making insanely high profits. Having merely great profits will not cave in the industry; if their profits were immediately cut by 75%, they would still be the envy of businesses the world over. Being able to maintain 20%+ profit margins in a recession is just insane.
There's a lot of healthy debate to be had about patents and patent reform. The pharmas, though, are greedy beyond comprehension and their input on the debate should be understood entirely from that standpoint.
And you've apparently never been subjected to the Frenchie B.O. attack. There's no technology that can defend against it.
The only species officially allowed to travel in space are those that have been modified so that their growth rate is artificially controlled. This is why some UFO renegades have exhibited an obsessive interest in human reproduction. They are seeking to restore their own reproductive potential. They hope to create alien-human hybrids with natural growth rates, bypassing alien modifications that prevent unauthorized reproduction. This is the ultimate form of hacking!
Well their plan is never going to work as long as they keep sticking their "probes" up peoples' asses!
However under the regulatory scheme, it is impossible to classify a planet hostile unless the dominant form of life knows of intelligent life on other planets. The bureaucratic mentality is the one constant in the universe! In order to avoid this classification, leading earth governments have secretly agreed to consistently deny UFOs and extraterestial intelligent life and all evidence for the same.
At least the intergalactic bureacracy acknowledges that earth politicians are not human so its okay for them to know about aliens.
But honestly, if YOU were an alien, with this fantastic technology to fly hundreds of light years to visit another planet with life on it, would you just fly by some stuff then go home?
Hell yes! I'd do nothing but do flybys of primitive worlds like ours, then laugh my ass off at the cacophony of "It's an alien!" "No, it's a weather balloon combined with swamp gas you cook!" "Quiet heathen, it's obviously Space Jesus come to save us!" "Space Jesus is a government conspiracy caused by hallucinogens in the water!"
The only reason I don't do this now is that there isn't anywhere I can go where I'm so technologically advanced that I can't have my ass kicked for making fun of the locals.
Which begs the question, is Coke really in the big-bad-bin? This is the first I've heard of it. I mean, I've heard murmurs about unfair practices but nothing really big.
The only bad thing about Coke I've heard is their tendency to move into markets with existing local products that taste much better than Coke and are thus much more popular despite Coke's marketing blitzes, buy said local product's manufacturer, change its formula (replacing any real sugar with high fructose corn syrup for example) so that it tastes just as if not more crappy than Coke while also being just as cheap to produce, and laugh all the way to the bank since you're paying them if you buy the "local" stuff or Coke.
That's just normal capitalism-will-eat-your-culture badness though, not the kind exploitation and abuse that truly makes me consider a corporation to be evil, like Nike for example.
I think my main complaint about starbucks is the fact that they don't seem to know how to *not* burn their coffee beans.
Of course they know how not to, they simply chose to burn them as a matter of course. The reason? It's the only way to get a truly uniform coffee "flavor" across their entire chain. You can walk into a Starbucks anywhere and know what the coffee will taste like. In my opinion it tastes like shit, like all burned coffee does, but that isn't the point. The funny part is that for people for whom coffee == starbucks, they will come to think that burned crap is how coffee is supposed to taste, and may end up disliking other coffee.
Please, for the love of god. Give us some fresh meat.
Of course I'd like that, though I'll never besmirch Nintendo for giving me an excellent Mario or Metroid game.
Personally I'd love to see a Wii Pikmin game.
Or anything that comes out of Miyamoto's head.
I have an old SNES that still works great.
Same here, and I have an old NES that still works great too... except for the stupid fscking connectors, which is why it requires a ridiculous amount of fidling to get games to work. Though for this case, a game genie works just fine, assuming you can find one.
Still, I'd pay for some of the best-of-the-best games like SMB3 and LoZ:LttP just to not have to swap consoles around when the mood hits me.
God, I wish they'd cut the price in half. I'd buy three times as many games if they did.
They had a few at EB around here. Only a few, a sad number to be sure, but they were there. If I didn't think it was cheesey as hell to buy yourself something when Christmas shopping for friends and family, I would have picked one up. I figured I wouldn't deprive any kids of their present under the tree, and I won't have time to play much anyway until after the xmas season when there will hopefully be sufficient supply.
Your inner manly-man is a pansy; a real inner manly-man would be punching through walls.
My outer manly-man is punching through walls. My inner manly-man is crying because my hands hurt like hell. I think broke something.
Well it was 18 when my parents were growing up, so they didn't care that I drank when I was 18, and I'm not going to care if my kids drink at 18. Of course after teaching them responsibility, which is the point. We have youth drinking problems in this country because we teach our kids nothing about actual responsible drinking as part of some crazy abstinance policy, then throw them into the wild when they go to college. This applies to other aspects of parenting as well.
"period, full stop."
Are both almost always code phrases for "What I just said would be utterly retarded to takes as a tautology which you will realise if you think about it for three seconds, but I would much rather you just skipped the thinking part and took my word for it. Pretty please."
This is just another example.
"Unlike the fellow above, I actually hope Sony is not paying you, because I would hope they'd get more for their money than a list of "Untitled" exclusives..."
Fuck off.
Yeah, nothing pisses a dude off like telling them they suck at their job.
Who said they're getting smaller?
Hmm, good point. Maybe I should stop accelerating to near c while playing on my Gamecube.
Well, first, the movie rating system in America is voluntary, as is its enforcement. This is why nobody gets in trouble when someone sells a 16 year old a ticket to an R-rated movie without an adult present. Personally I'm all for voluntary rating systems like the ESRB.
Second, these laws are always worded in ways that make sales of the games in general difficult. Because these are laws with real penalties for their violation, practicality says that these games won't be on store shelves at all.
If you want a more thorough and nuanced opinion on why these laws are bad, maybe you should try reading one of the decisions by the courts that have ruled that these laws are unconstitutional.
Looks like Mario and Luigi may have to pay this gentleman a friendly visit.
Actually each SPE has its own 256k memory, which is not like a usual cache in that it has to be explicitly managed. Data loaded into these local stores will not be copied into the 512k cache also, so assuming the powerpc and SPEs are working on different data the limiting factor will be the FSB DMA bandwidth. It does have a pretty damn large amount of bandwidth, about 200GB/s in actual, though carefully tuned, practice.
:)
Not that I'm doubting your ability to saturate it with seismic data. I mean, there's no such thing as too much power for the scientific computing world, God bless your souls for keeping me employed.
To be somewhat fair, with cart systems such as the Super NES, a significant amount of the technology actually came from within the cartridge itself. Super NES carts arent just binary game data, like a Playstation disc. There were circuit boards, and chips, and a LOT could be done with a cartridge that cant be done with a cd-derivative.
The most obvious, successfull, and awesome example, at least Stateside, being Star Fox.
Probably the most famous cartridge-based enhancement is the battery backup in the Legend of Zelda which let you *gasp* save your game!
While that is a nice feature of cartridges, it really isn't something that is sustainable. For example the Super FX chip that gave Star Fox was only used in a few other games, Yoshi's Island being the only one that had any real success. Developing a chip is an expensive endeavor, and only using it for a few games is a bad business proposition. Especially as the generations get smaller, it doesn't make sense anymore to develop game-specific hardware. I mean, imagine Sony developed Cell just to use in Resistance. Not to mention that the much larger storage capacity of optical media is a better tradeoff in general.
Still, it was a nice era.
But to be more serious: Yes, you can easily strip off a pair of SWEAT PANTS (which is what she was wearing) pretty quickly.
Maybe when you're in you're seventies and in searing pain you might find it more difficult. And I was using the high end of the two to five second threshold at which liquid at that temperature causes 3rd degree burns.
The McDonald's Corporation are evil fucks, but they're clearly in the right here.
Why? Because the lady was too slow, even though she would have still suffered third degree burns from coffee servered dangerously hot?
Almost EXACTLY the same thing happed to me as happened to this woman (I was in the passenger seat too) and I did get slightly burned
SLIGHTLY burned means the coffee was served at the temperature any normal, reasonable human expects -- hot enough to burn you, but not hot enough to hospitalize you if you don't have cat-like reflexes. If the coffee had been at 180 degrees like the McDonald's coffee, then you would have probably been SEVERELY burned, maybe not enough to require skin grafts but definitely enough to have huge painfull blisters all over the affected area -- a mere second degree burn, which would have occured almost instantly.
That's the whole point. People make mistakes, but a dangerous product is one where the consequence of common mistakes like the exact same one you made yourself are not ridiculously out of proportion with what one would expect.
See -- you made the exact same mistake, and because the coffee was normal temperature, you were okay. Reaction time plays into it, but clearly McDonald's is in the wrong for serving coffee that hot! You'd be another one of the hundreds of complainants if you'd had coffee that hot! I can't imagine how you can side with McDonald's here, since you can't even call here uniquely clumsy!
Someone else mentioned those "hot plates" you sometimes get it resturants, like the skittles you get in Mexican resqurants with hot fajitas or whatever. Should the resturants stop doing this because some idiot might try to handle the hit plate or skillet?
That was me, and if the plate was so hot that it turned your fingers into blackened charcoal in seconds then FUCK YES the restaurant should stop serving plates that hot!
There are gradiations of "hot", and more importantly there are expectations of "hot". A sizzling fajita plate is expected to be very hot. A normal ceramic enchilada plate should be hot enough to cause a 1st degree burn if you held your hand against it, and if it was any hotter this would again be a case of the restaurant serving a dangerously hot item. Coffee, same thing. You expect it to be hot enough to cause minor burns, not severe burns. Serving it hotter than that is negligent regardless of whether or not the person handling the coffee screwed up.
It's like excusing the Ford Pinto because, well, you just shouldn't get in an accident!
Does anybody really think the notion of an intelligent computer is realistic any more? I mean, it's believable that a computer won't cooperate with you, but having a mind of its own and actually getting things done? It seems that the popularity of Windows OS has pretty much made such a concept pretty unbelievable among average people these days.
Naw, it's just nobody believes that normal, every-day PCs or even their high-end business equivalents can be intelligent.
Throw in a bunch of buzzwords, like "quantum computer neural network" ala Stealth and it's as believable as anything. Just state it's cutting-edge highly-secret government technology that nobody else knows about yet, and you're good to go. That's basically what the first Wargames did.
Though I agree that this movie will most likely fall flat.
If I imagine holding an open kettle with bubbling water in it, that is the absolute maximum temperature anything made up of mostly water will get. I would treat it in a similar way as a cup of hot coffee.
Most sane humans would wait until the liquid stopped boiling before even attempting to carry the pot.
And if you did have to carry a pot of boiling water, you would not treat it in a similar way to a cup of coffee. You would walk slowly and carefully, taking the utmost care to be sure not to spill because you would know the consequences would, unlike with a normal cup of coffee, be disastrous. If you treat it casually like most people do a cup of cofeee, then you are a fool who is liable to get badly burned. Or if you have a cup of coffee that, unlike most cups of coffee, poses a significant threat of severe burns in which case you'd be caught offguard.
It's because of the womans lack of reaction that she suffered the injuries she did.
Yes she suffered extremely severe injuries because of a lack of reaction, but at the temperature the coffee was served it would have caused third degree burns in five seconds. Can you strip off your pants in five seconds from a seated position in a car? Maybe. Care to find out? I doubt it.
Thus the idea of "negligence" comes in for them not telling you "Hey don't spill that, it will burn you so bad it'll kill your nerve endings (third-degree burn)" when the expectation is at the very most served coffee will give you a first-degree burn if that.
I strongly suspect that not a single person complaining about this lawsuit knows what a third-degree burn is, because I have never seen anyone treat a cup of coffee like it was capable of giving those kinds of burns. Most people are fairly non-chalant about it, because in the event they screw up and spill it on themselves they'll get a minor burn.
For all of you out there who are a bit slow, coffee is served HOT.
People always say this like it is obvious, but they must be slow because they don't realize there are gradiations of HOT. Brewing temperature and serving temperature are not the same thing.
I have never, ever seen anyone treat a cup of coffee as though it were capable of causing third-degree burns. They treat it like something which if spilled on them will cause a painful burn but one they can easily recover from without medical attention. Thus, caution, but not overly cautious. Nobody thinks coffee is so hot that if they spill it on themselves it will take skin grafts to repair. If they did, they'd think you were insane if you were walking around with a cup of coffee with no lid.
Just like when you go to a Mexican restaurant, and the server warns you that your plate is HOT. Okay, you've been duly warned. Everyone knows that, right? Now then you touch it, just for a second to move it to a more convenient location, and your fingers turn almost instantly into blackened, charred husks that may one day recover their sense of feeling after a couple years of treatment. So, are you dumb for having touched the plate after being warned? Yeah sure, but you sure as hell didn't expect the result, now did you?
Nobody expects coffee that hot. Nobody who knows what a third degree burn treats coffee like it can cause them. Nobody exercises caution commensurate with the amount of damage this temperature of liquid can cause.
Like with the Wii remote. Is it dumb to let go? Yes. If the controller fucking exploded when it hit the wall and killed your whole family, would that be Nintendo's fault? Yes. It's not just about the stupidity of the user, it's about the expectation of what will be the consequences.
Heh, yeah, I suppose I should have realized my mistake in not being specific and saying weather forecast.
:)
Touche, [French word for pedant].