In fact I was going to go on a second diatribe in my previous post about how my new dual-cpu computer seems more disk-bound than ever, but I don't have any good suggestions on how to fix that.
Back when supercomputers were a lot less powerfull then todays desktop pcs, someone made the comment that supercomputers are machines that turn compute bound problems into io bound problems. It should be little surprise that this applies to many a modern computer now..
but if you are going to have a full 20" display then make the dotpitch such that you can get a full 1080p picture out of it and support easily showing the 1080p on external HDTV (though that probably is doable with this rig as a 2nd monitor in some fashion).
First of all, I'd rather want a 1080p resolution display on such a machine as well.
Then, many video cards do not support the native resolution of a 1080p display but do support 1680x1050. Of course in case of this laptop, it would be possible to select video hardware that does support this resolution.
Only looking really good at their native resolution is one of the bigger drawbacks of lcd based technology such as tft. The consequence of scaling video to their native resolution is by far not as bad as when doing this for a computer display that has lots of text on it for example.
Hence, 1680x1050 is a lot less troublesome with regards to hardware and software support, and since such a display has only one native resolution, I'd think that this is why they opted for this 'weird' resolution instead of 1080p.
There are full 1080p displays in 15" and 17", why not this EXPENSIVE 20"?
And I'm sure there exist 20" displays that do 1080p, just not this one.
It's wide screen, but it isn't even 1080p? Its some weird in between 720p and 1080p res of 1680x1050. What I really want is a 10" at full 1080p.
1680x1050 is quite common for widescreen computer displays of that size. Having 1080p would be nice, but more annoying about those 1680x1050 displays is their 16/10 aspect ratio. No, I do not permanently want controls or the taskbar or such being displayed when watching a video, and having black bars above and below a widescreen program on a widescreen display is just silly.
I see, posting a correction to my previous post which got an interesting mod, is trolling? Don't know if I have to laugh about the idiocy of it, or feel sad for the obviously clueless moderator there..
Can't see why the poster is upset that someone has patentet something that is according to the law.
It being according to the law does not automatically make it 'right' Maybe the poster was upset that the law seems to allow for this to begin with..
A patent on something that is against the law would be pretty pointless wouldn't it? Patents should be inovative, how to fill in a tax form for your own greatest benefit isn't obvious to most people...not like making a website where you can buy stuff by clicking one time on them.
It not being obvious to many people is completely irrelevant, what matters is if it is obvious to those trained in the field of filling in tax forms.
At any rate, allowing the patenting of ways to deal with taxes is simply absurd and promotes the kind of inequality that the entirety of the US constitution and bill of rights try to prevent.
this series of actions will still be protected. The fact that no one will use it to reduce their tax burden is not important, since the goal is not patented -- just the actions.
Being a 'usefull invention' is a requirement for patenting. If an 'invention' is useless then the patent should become invalid because one of the basic requirements for being patented is no longer forfilled.
One of his main points was that with increased compiler effort, potentially many computational workloads can be made to run on the tiled architecture of simple processors, much in the way that the process of graphic rendering has been able to be shifted into the type of workload that can leverage the 'tiles of simple processors' found in a graphics card today, even though the nature of graphic rendering was originally better suited for execution in a typical CPU, where control dependent loads run efficiently. When the workload cannot be mapped to the 'tiles of simple processors' architecture, just slap a superscalar processor in the corner of your die (like nvidia seems to be doing) to take care of those small corner cases.
Where to start..
Intel has been saying this at least since they launched the i860 cpu over 15 years ago, yet any cpu platform actually counting on this happening has met with little success so far.
Counting on compilers to get parallelism and extremely complex instruction ordering right is unworkable for the simple reason that it depends on runtime conditions that are unpredictable. It is possible to do it for relatively simple and predictable situations however, but those happen to be rare corner cases.
For example, you cannot predict which data is going to be in cache at runtime. Because of not knowing this, you cannot predict how many cycles a memory access will take and consequentely you are unable to order instructions that access memory correctly. That is, unless you know exactly what code is going to run when, or when all the code and data that will be accessed fit in cache.
Just getting instruction ordering right for a relatively well defined case like the Ithanium seems pretty difficult already and this is contributing to the relative lack of popularity of that architecture I believe.
Interestingly, while it did not have video output capabilities or a framebuffer or such, the i860 cpu had a vector unit that has some similarity to todays GPUs... Seems Intel has been there before.
Why are the multiprocessor units suddenly so popular, relative to why e.g. the Voodoo graphics cards failed? I remember them being ridiculed and ending up in the performance backwaters through their 2-4-8(-16) multiprocessor cards, but it seems that there are engineering reasons why multiple processors are now suddenly coming into favour, or?
multiple processors (CPU, GPU or otherwise) are a way to add more 'cycles' based on current technology. This has the advantage of being able to get more out of your current designs and manufacturing technology, but comes at the cost of increased complexity in both the supporting hardware, and in software.
Getting a single core implementation faster is always the more efficient way to add processing capacity, but it is very impractical beyond a certain point due to power and heat considerations (where that point is exactly depends on the state of technology at any given moment but in the end is limited by the physical size of molecules, at least for as far as current technology goes)
So, multiple processors is not directly better from an engineering point of view, rather, it is a solution to overcome the speed limits of current technology, provided you can deal with the extra complexity (moving much of the hardware complexity into the chip itself like AMD and Intel are doing now removes the burden from systemboard designers, but the complexity itself is still there, esp. on the software side of the picture).
With regards to 3dfx, it seems to me that: 1. They failed to manage the additional complexity 2. As their competition showed, limits of technology at that time were much higher then what 3dfx managed, which indicates there were problems with either their design or manufacturing technology, or more likely, with both.
Space weaponry is an attack first weapon. Not a "defensive" weapon.
They can be both, depending on the actual weapons. The issue is that striving for them is seen as 'pro-active' by its proponents, and agressive by almost everyone else.
Everyone understands this except the American public. Not unlike many other topics.
Lets get something straight here.
The USA is at the moment the most powerfull nation on the planet. Every nation in that position has ended their own rule once they fell into arrogance, thinking they can do what they want. This is in no way specifically American, just like seeing that as aggresion is not bound to any specific nation, rather, those are merely dictated by the situation and the very few who have some control over it. Names change, 'tools' change, but the game stays basicly the same.
Yes, generally spoken the 'public' is arrogant, and due to that can be manipulated. Its not that many people are not capable of thinking about what their 'leaders' do, its more a matter of not wanting to. This again is nothing specifically American.
I happen to come from the Netherlands, and many of you here probably heard about the killing of a politician here, Pim Fortuyn. Now, I am not going to debate his views on things, I merely want to point at that many people in my country were following him more for his personality and presentation then for many of his ideas.
I could point at many people following facist movements in the 30s, to the idea of 'give the people bread and games' from Roman times, its all the same thing. People don't care about many things untill they start affecting their life directly.
That is, untill someone presents it in a way that raises emotions among people.
That all doesn't change that it is good to point out the wrongs of things that happen in part due to policies of the USA, but don't blame Joe Sixpack for behaving basicly in the same way as most humans throughout history have done.
We should be proactive and dominate in space as to secure it for how we want to use it.
As long as that does not mean telling everyone else what they can and can't do..
You make it sound like it is something it is not. We are going to have a dominate presence, like our Navy has in space. Other Navys can exist, but like the sea or air, controlling it or more importantly the ability to control it, is vital. When shit hits the fan, I want to be the top dog controlling what we and what others are able to do either for or against us.
Just keep in mind that being the top dog also makes that you will ALWAYS be under attack.
The world is not a socialist utopia
That has nothing to do with this at all.
Trying to 'play nice' with everyone else who also tries to play nice is what is important. (please read that line VERY carefully and don't jump to conclusions about anyone not playing nice because that was not what I was talking about there)
and plans should be made for all situations, including space. We live in a world that fucked seven ways from Sunday and you must be ignorant to that fact?
I think you are being a bit ignorant yourself, and are feeling attacked beforehand. You are definitely right that plans need to be made for all situations, but it would be an extremely wise idea to get a lot more focus and publicity on things that are actually positive, instead of all this doom and gloom kind of thinking that the current US administration advocates.
I say we dominate space so we can secure that our lack of dominance wont be used against us.
I say you fell (again?) in the 'doom is everywhere, you MUST give us the power to do everything we need to fight this!!!!!!!!!!!' idiocy of the current USA administration.
You sound very sure of yourself, but you seem to be wrong.. Just a few posts above yours there is mention of a solution that makes people keep the functionality for which they bothered with the nvidia binary driver to begin with.
I have a 9200SE, using Fedora core 5 with the 'open source' radeon driver.
I can run enemy territory, but somehow starting google earth and going to a location just hangs the X server with no way to kill it (doesn't respond to any signals and consumes almost 100% cpu)
It would seem to me that this is some kind of bug.. in an open source driver no less!
Was pondering getting me a low-end nvidia card, but I'm first going to look at the availability of that Matrox g550 someone mentioned earlier on..
An interesting difference here between for example US law and German law: In US law, you don't need to agree. The GPL is there a license that gives you permission to modify the software for your own use without anything you have to do in return.
Are you suggesting that in the USA the GPL applies even if you did explicitly not agree to it (regardless of how silly it is to not agree)? I find that hard to believe.
In practice, there is no difference though. The GPL explicitly states that you don't need to sign anything, so in a court case you could always claim that you accepted the GPL, and nobody could prove the opposite.
That is definitely true. As I explained elsewhere, this all is only relevant because allowing this kind of 'use' is what brought us the GPL to begin with. It is extremely unlikely to ever turn into a legal issue.
You made a reference to a carte blanche statement about human nature
I made a statement about why generally people follow laws (or rules) in reply to a claim about the deterent of laws being the threat of punnishment.
what does that have to do with the US specifically? Nothing.
Not specifically, but the concept embodied in that statement seems to be present in laws in the USA (as well as many other modern democracies). I won't call those imaginary societies. Also, one can argue that many cases where large groups of people fail to comply with the law are often cases where the actual law is the problem, not the punnishment it puts on violations.
If you want an easy to grasp variation: People tend to not follow a rule when they don't see the point of the rule
It doesn't matter who said it.
Not objectively, but it is worth considering that the person who said it is considered to be a rather wise person before dismissing it out of hand. It seems that doing this helps many people understanding (read carefully, understanding is NOT the same as agreeing with!!!!!) statements that they'd otherwise have dismissed inmediately because of disagreeing.
Anyway.. why did I respond at all? because there is way too much focus on punnishment nowadays, and way too little focus on if things make sense to begin with.
You don't drink McD's coffee expecting "premium taste",
Nope, but maintaining the right temperature alone is not enough for that. It does help however in preventing it from tasting like shit.
shithead.
Good arguing there..
That coffee was being served way too hot, McD's knew it and did nothing about it.
Not according to my standards, not according to the iso norm for this (silly that one exists but thats beside the point), and not according to about anyone who knows something about coffee for that matter.
For the record, bad is worse then 'acceptable' is worse then 'decent' is worse then 'premium taste'. I never even got as far as talking about premium taste.
I love these "expert witnesses". As a physician myself, I would be a lot more comfortable if the expert was a plastic/reconstructive surgeon and not a vascular surgeon. Plastics are the ones who usually see burns. They don't just do boobs after all. Plus it's real hard to get 3rd degree full thickness burns from scalding liquids, as you're sort of limited to 100 degrees C as a maximum temperature. Steam, ok. Fire, ok. Electrical, ok. But coffee? Hmmm.
Well, they obviously didn't manage to get someone knowledgable about coffee either, so no surprise there...
I haven't seen the patient, or the pics, but something is unusual here, as any medical text will tell you. But in medicine there are always exceptions.
I think part of the issue here was the hot coffee getting soaked up by her pants and those then sticking to her skin, exposing her to the hot coffee for quite a bit of time.
Almost all ISPs I've had had some clause allowing them to cancel service at their sole discretion (and it didn't even rely on you being a spammer or anything). My advice would be to get a lawyer familiar with such matters to draft better contracts than whatever you're using:) Sounds like you don't have a lawyer familiar with your business if you're having to go around breaking contracts with people. Good contracts are supposed to spell out exactly what happens in any forseeable circumstance, so that you don't end up suing each other over it.
And maybe I live in a place where there are much stricter limits on which clauses of such contracts will be upheld by courts, esp. when it happens to be with a 'consumer'. Generally contracts do contain such a clause, but also generally that clause is declared invalid by courts when it comes to it, at least where I live. This may be different of course in places that lack such consumer protection for example...
When looking at large business as customer, I dare you to find one that will accept an 'at our sole discretion' clause in such a contract.
So.. before jumping to a conclusion again, maybe also think for a bit...
As someone else already mentioned, it helps to know what you are talking about, and in this case, hot coffee most likely does not refer to the mcdonnalds case.
However, since you brought it up, let me point out some issues with the text you linked to:
Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled into her lap.
Coffee is hot, don't place it between your knees, something I learned as a small kid actually. McDonnalds cannot be blamed for stupidity of their customers there.
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin.
That is bad luck, and the main reason why she actually got such bad burns. Sure, if the coffee had not been that hot, those burns would not have been there, but by the same token, if she would have thought about coffee being hot, they wouldn't have been there either.
A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
You can argue that McDonnalds made a mistake here by not settling the case, but really, why were they to blame to begin with?
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
Oh my god! coffee is hot!
Uh.. anything new here?
McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultants advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to maintain optimum taste.
For me as European that would be 85 degrees celcius, which is indeed the optimum temperature for brewing and storing coffee (there is even an ISO standard saying so btw). Producers of decent coffee machines put in quite a lot of efford to get it at exactly that temperature for a reason..
He admitted that he had not evaluated the safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is generally 135 to 140 degrees.
Yes, and other then a few Italian coffee corners, I have yet to find any place serving a decent cup of coffee in the USA. At least while I was living there such a thing simply did not exist. McDonnalds coffee is not as bad as most and Starbucks has somewhat acceptable coffee, but none come anywhere near decent.
So, she was unlucky due to the clothes she was wearing sticking to her skin after absorbing the hot coffee, and for the rest, all that your text explains is that there are people who have no clue about making decent coffee and the temperature required for that, and there are people who are too stupid to be carefull with something which they can quite well expect to be hot. Your coffee at home might be around 135-140 degrees, but only if you have a very lousy coffee machine (which from what I observed is the case in your typical household in the USA indeed)
Slashdot Mirror
In fact I was going to go on a second diatribe in my previous post about how my new dual-cpu computer seems more disk-bound than ever, but I don't have any good suggestions on how to fix that.
Back when supercomputers were a lot less powerfull then todays desktop pcs, someone made the comment that supercomputers are machines that turn compute bound problems into io bound problems. It should be little surprise that this applies to many a modern computer now..
but if you are going to have a full 20" display then make the dotpitch such that you can get a full 1080p picture out of it and support easily showing the 1080p on external HDTV (though that probably is doable with this rig as a 2nd monitor in some fashion).
First of all, I'd rather want a 1080p resolution display on such a machine as well.
Then, many video cards do not support the native resolution of a 1080p display but do support 1680x1050. Of course in case of this laptop, it would be possible to select video hardware that does support this resolution.
Only looking really good at their native resolution is one of the bigger drawbacks of lcd based technology such as tft. The consequence of scaling video to their native resolution is by far not as bad as when doing this for a computer display that has lots of text on it for example.
Hence, 1680x1050 is a lot less troublesome with regards to hardware and software support, and since such a display has only one native resolution, I'd think that this is why they opted for this 'weird' resolution instead of 1080p.
There are full 1080p displays in 15" and 17", why not this EXPENSIVE 20"?
And I'm sure there exist 20" displays that do 1080p, just not this one.
It's wide screen, but it isn't even 1080p? Its some weird in between 720p and 1080p res of 1680x1050.
What I really want is a 10" at full 1080p.
1680x1050 is quite common for widescreen computer displays of that size. Having 1080p would be nice, but more annoying about those 1680x1050 displays is their 16/10 aspect ratio. No, I do not permanently want controls or the taskbar or such being displayed when watching a video, and having black bars above and below a widescreen program on a widescreen display is just silly.
I see, posting a correction to my previous post which got an interesting mod, is trolling? Don't know if I have to laugh about the idiocy of it, or feel sad for the obviously clueless moderator there..
Tax shelters, and other creative interpretations of the tax code, are the bane of the IRS's existence.
Not really, they provide a very good argument for increased headcount and budgets for the IRS.
Can't see why the poster is upset that someone has patentet something that is according to the law.
It being according to the law does not automatically make it 'right'
Maybe the poster was upset that the law seems to allow for this to begin with..
A patent on something that is against the law would be pretty pointless wouldn't it? Patents should be inovative, how to fill in a tax form for your own greatest benefit isn't obvious to most people...not like making a website where you can buy stuff by clicking one time on them.
It not being obvious to many people is completely irrelevant, what matters is if it is obvious to those trained in the field of filling in tax forms.
At any rate, allowing the patenting of ways to deal with taxes is simply absurd and promotes the kind of inequality that the entirety of the US constitution and bill of rights try to prevent.
this series of actions will still be protected. The fact that no one will use it to reduce their tax burden is not important, since the goal is not patented -- just the actions.
Being a 'usefull invention' is a requirement for patenting. If an 'invention' is useless then the patent should become invalid because one of the basic requirements for being patented is no longer forfilled.
One of his main points was that with increased compiler effort, potentially many computational workloads can be made to run on the tiled architecture of simple processors, much in the way that the process of graphic rendering has been able to be shifted into the type of workload that can leverage the 'tiles of simple processors' found in a graphics card today, even though the nature of graphic rendering was originally better suited for execution in a typical CPU, where control dependent loads run efficiently. When the workload cannot be mapped to the 'tiles of simple processors' architecture, just slap a superscalar processor in the corner of your die (like nvidia seems to be doing) to take care of those small corner cases.
Where to start..
Intel has been saying this at least since they launched the i860 cpu over 15 years ago, yet any cpu platform actually counting on this happening has met with little success so far.
Counting on compilers to get parallelism and extremely complex instruction ordering right is unworkable for the simple reason that it depends on runtime conditions that are unpredictable. It is possible to do it for relatively simple and predictable situations however, but those happen to be rare corner cases.
For example, you cannot predict which data is going to be in cache at runtime. Because of not knowing this, you cannot predict how many cycles a memory access will take and consequentely you are unable to order instructions that access memory correctly. That is, unless you know exactly what code is going to run when, or when all the code and data that will be accessed fit in cache.
Just getting instruction ordering right for a relatively well defined case like the Ithanium seems pretty difficult already and this is contributing to the relative lack of popularity of that architecture I believe.
Interestingly, while it did not have video output capabilities or a framebuffer or such, the i860 cpu had a vector unit that has some similarity to todays GPUs... Seems Intel has been there before.
Why are the multiprocessor units suddenly so popular, relative to why e.g. the Voodoo graphics cards failed? I remember them being ridiculed and ending up in the performance backwaters through their 2-4-8(-16) multiprocessor cards, but it seems that there are engineering reasons why multiple processors are now suddenly coming into favour, or?
multiple processors (CPU, GPU or otherwise) are a way to add more 'cycles' based on current technology. This has the advantage of being able to get more out of your current designs and manufacturing technology, but comes at the cost of increased complexity in both the supporting hardware, and in software.
Getting a single core implementation faster is always the more efficient way to add processing capacity, but it is very impractical beyond a certain point due to power and heat considerations (where that point is exactly depends on the state of technology at any given moment but in the end is limited by the physical size of molecules, at least for as far as current technology goes)
So, multiple processors is not directly better from an engineering point of view, rather, it is a solution to overcome the speed limits of current technology, provided you can deal with the extra complexity (moving much of the hardware complexity into the chip itself like AMD and Intel are doing now removes the burden from systemboard designers, but the complexity itself is still there, esp. on the software side of the picture).
With regards to 3dfx, it seems to me that:
1. They failed to manage the additional complexity
2. As their competition showed, limits of technology at that time were much higher then what 3dfx managed, which indicates there were problems with either their design or manufacturing technology, or more likely, with both.
So in World War 2 the US should have remained neutral? And that's a moral stance?
In a military sense, that is what they did untill they got attacked
Yes, generally spoken the 'public' is arrogant, and due to that can be manipulated
s/arrogant/ignorant
Space weaponry is an attack first weapon. Not a "defensive" weapon.
They can be both, depending on the actual weapons. The issue is that striving for them is seen as 'pro-active' by its proponents, and agressive by almost everyone else.
Everyone understands this except the American public. Not unlike many other topics.
Lets get something straight here.
The USA is at the moment the most powerfull nation on the planet. Every nation in that position has ended their own rule once they fell into arrogance, thinking they can do what they want. This is in no way specifically American, just like seeing that as aggresion is not bound to any specific nation, rather, those are merely dictated by the situation and the very few who have some control over it. Names change, 'tools' change, but the game stays basicly the same.
Yes, generally spoken the 'public' is arrogant, and due to that can be manipulated. Its not that many people are not capable of thinking about what their 'leaders' do, its more a matter of not wanting to. This again is nothing specifically American.
I happen to come from the Netherlands, and many of you here probably heard about the killing of a politician here, Pim Fortuyn. Now, I am not going to debate his views on things, I merely want to point at that many people in my country were following him more for his personality and presentation then for many of his ideas.
I could point at many people following facist movements in the 30s, to the idea of 'give the people bread and games' from Roman times, its all the same thing. People don't care about many things untill they start affecting their life directly.
That is, untill someone presents it in a way that raises emotions among people.
That all doesn't change that it is good to point out the wrongs of things that happen in part due to policies of the USA, but don't blame Joe Sixpack for behaving basicly in the same way as most humans throughout history have done.
We should be proactive and dominate in space as to secure it for how we want to use it.
As long as that does not mean telling everyone else what they can and can't do..
You make it sound like it is something it is not. We are going to have a dominate presence, like our Navy has in space. Other Navys can exist, but like the sea or air, controlling it or more importantly the ability to control it, is vital. When shit hits the fan, I want to be the top dog controlling what we and what others are able to do either for or against us.
Just keep in mind that being the top dog also makes that you will ALWAYS be under attack.
The world is not a socialist utopia
That has nothing to do with this at all.
Trying to 'play nice' with everyone else who also tries to play nice is what is important. (please read that line VERY carefully and don't jump to conclusions about anyone not playing nice because that was not what I was talking about there)
and plans should be made for all situations, including space. We live in a world that fucked seven ways from Sunday and you must be ignorant to that fact?
I think you are being a bit ignorant yourself, and are feeling attacked beforehand. You are definitely right that plans need to be made for all situations, but it would be an extremely wise idea to get a lot more focus and publicity on things that are actually positive, instead of all this doom and gloom kind of thinking that the current US administration advocates.
I say we dominate space so we can secure that our lack of dominance wont be used against us.
I say you fell (again?) in the 'doom is everywhere, you MUST give us the power to do everything we need to fight this!!!!!!!!!!!' idiocy of the current USA administration.
Can't say if the ati would let you program your flat panel for 1600x1200, because I don't have a flat panel to try it on, though.
It does fine for the 1680x1050 that my widescreen flatpanel wants.
There really are no other options.
You sound very sure of yourself, but you seem to be wrong.. Just a few posts above yours there is mention of a solution that makes people keep the functionality for which they bothered with the nvidia binary driver to begin with.
I have a 9200SE, using Fedora core 5 with the 'open source' radeon driver.
I can run enemy territory, but somehow starting google earth and going to a location just hangs the X server with no way to kill it (doesn't respond to any signals and consumes almost 100% cpu)
It would seem to me that this is some kind of bug.. in an open source driver no less!
Was pondering getting me a low-end nvidia card, but I'm first going to look at the availability of that Matrox g550 someone mentioned earlier on..
An interesting difference here between for example US law and German law: In US law, you don't need to agree. The GPL is there a license that gives you permission to modify the software for your own use without anything you have to do in return.
Are you suggesting that in the USA the GPL applies even if you did explicitly not agree to it (regardless of how silly it is to not agree)? I find that hard to believe.
In practice, there is no difference though. The GPL explicitly states that you don't need to sign anything, so in a court case you could always claim that you accepted the GPL, and nobody could prove the opposite.
That is definitely true. As I explained elsewhere, this all is only relevant because allowing this kind of 'use' is what brought us the GPL to begin with. It is extremely unlikely to ever turn into a legal issue.
You made a reference to a carte blanche statement about human nature
I made a statement about why generally people follow laws (or rules) in reply to a claim about the deterent of laws being the threat of punnishment.
what does that have to do with the US specifically? Nothing.
Not specifically, but the concept embodied in that statement seems to be present in laws in the USA (as well as many other modern democracies). I won't call those imaginary societies. Also, one can argue that many cases where large groups of people fail to comply with the law are often cases where the actual law is the problem, not the punnishment it puts on violations.
If you want an easy to grasp variation: People tend to not follow a rule when they don't see the point of the rule
It doesn't matter who said it.
Not objectively, but it is worth considering that the person who said it is considered to be a rather wise person before dismissing it out of hand. It seems that doing this helps many people understanding (read carefully, understanding is NOT the same as agreeing with!!!!!) statements that they'd otherwise have dismissed inmediately because of disagreeing.
Anyway.. why did I respond at all? because there is way too much focus on punnishment nowadays, and way too little focus on if things make sense to begin with.
I believe it was Lucius Annaeus Seneca, http://www.egs.edu/resources/seneca.html
You don't drink McD's coffee expecting "premium taste",
Nope, but maintaining the right temperature alone is not enough for that. It does help however in preventing it from tasting like shit.
shithead.
Good arguing there..
That coffee was being served way too hot, McD's knew it and did nothing about it.
Not according to my standards, not according to the iso norm for this (silly that one exists but thats beside the point), and not according to about anyone who knows something about coffee for that matter.
For the record, bad is worse then 'acceptable' is worse then 'decent' is worse then 'premium taste'. I never even got as far as talking about premium taste.
I love these "expert witnesses". As a physician myself, I would be a lot more comfortable if the expert was a plastic/reconstructive surgeon and not a vascular surgeon. Plastics are the ones who usually see burns. They don't just do boobs after all. Plus it's real hard to get 3rd degree full thickness burns from scalding liquids, as you're sort of limited to 100 degrees C as a maximum temperature. Steam, ok. Fire, ok. Electrical, ok. But coffee? Hmmm.
Well, they obviously didn't manage to get someone knowledgable about coffee either, so no surprise there...
I haven't seen the patient, or the pics, but something is unusual here, as any medical text will tell you. But in medicine there are always exceptions.
I think part of the issue here was the hot coffee getting soaked up by her pants and those then sticking to her skin, exposing her to the hot coffee for quite a bit of time.
Almost all ISPs I've had had some clause allowing them to cancel service at their sole discretion (and it didn't even rely on you being a spammer or anything). My advice would be to get a lawyer familiar with such matters to draft better contracts than whatever you're using :) Sounds like you don't have a lawyer familiar with your business if you're having to go around breaking contracts with people. Good contracts are supposed to spell out exactly what happens in any forseeable circumstance, so that you don't end up suing each other over it.
And maybe I live in a place where there are much stricter limits on which clauses of such contracts will be upheld by courts, esp. when it happens to be with a 'consumer'. Generally contracts do contain such a clause, but also generally that clause is declared invalid by courts when it comes to it, at least where I live. This may be different of course in places that lack such consumer protection for example...
When looking at large business as customer, I dare you to find one that will accept an 'at our sole discretion' clause in such a contract.
So.. before jumping to a conclusion again, maybe also think for a bit...
I'm tired of hearing people assert things that are purely the product of some imagined, desirable social framework. Take your truthiness and shove it.
So the USA is some imagined desirable social framework?
Maybe you should look up who said the thing I merely repeated.
As someone else already mentioned, it helps to know what you are talking about, and in this case, hot coffee most likely does not refer to the mcdonnalds case.
However, since you brought it up, let me point out some issues with the text you linked to:
Liebeck placed
the cup between her knees and attempted to remove the plastic lid from
the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire contents of the cup spilled
into her lap.
Coffee is hot, don't place it between your knees, something I learned as a small kid actually. McDonnalds cannot be blamed for stupidity of their customers there.
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next
to her skin.
That is bad luck, and the main reason why she actually got such bad burns. Sure, if the coffee had not been that hot, those burns would not have been there, but by the same token, if she would have thought about coffee being hot, they wouldn't have been there either.
A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full
thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body,
including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin
areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she
underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement
treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds
refused.
You can argue that McDonnalds made a mistake here by not settling the case, but really, why were they to blame to begin with?
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700
claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims
involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This
history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of
this hazard.
Oh my god! coffee is hot!
Uh.. anything new here?
McDonalds also said during discovery that, based on a consultants
advice, it held its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees fahrenheit to
maintain optimum taste.
For me as European that would be 85 degrees celcius, which is indeed the optimum temperature for brewing and storing coffee (there is even an ISO standard saying so btw). Producers of decent coffee machines put in quite a lot of efford to get it at exactly that temperature for a reason..
He admitted that he had not evaluated the
safety ramifications at this temperature. Other establishments sell
coffee at substantially lower temperatures, and coffee served at home is
generally 135 to 140 degrees.
Yes, and other then a few Italian coffee corners, I have yet to find any place serving a decent cup of coffee in the USA. At least while I was living there such a thing simply did not exist. McDonnalds coffee is not as bad as most and Starbucks has somewhat acceptable coffee, but none come anywhere near decent.
So, she was unlucky due to the clothes she was wearing sticking to her skin after absorbing the hot coffee, and for the rest, all that your text explains is that there are people who have no clue about making decent coffee and the temperature required for that, and there are people who are too stupid to be carefull with something which they can quite well expect to be hot. Your coffee at home might be around 135-140 degrees, but only if you have a very lousy coffee machine (which from what I observed is the case in your typical household in the USA indeed)
Your point was?
The deterant effect of a law is the threat of punishment.
Laws don't convince because they threaten...