But your solution is just another "appeal to god" solution. The patent system is broke, so lets create an oversight board! How do select this oversight board? How do you make sure that the people put into this oversight board are not drug company lackeys? How do you make sure they are not bribed and corrupted? Are you going to make an oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee? And another oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee?
Saying "well, lets create an oversight committee" is a non-solution. It is like saying "the way to solve all problems is to find a person who is smart enough to solve all our problems and put them in charge". You haven't come up with a solution, you are just playing word games. You are looking for a big wise father figure to spank the bad kids and fix all our problems... but while that might be psychologically comforting to many people, it doesn't have anything to do with solving problems in real live.
Suggesting we put an authority figure in charge in order to solve problems is just a sort of neo-primitivist "Ask The Gods to Make It Rain on The Crops" solution. Government officials have now replaced Gods and Demons, but we are still looking for some benevolent outside force to solve our problems - that is not problem solving, that is superstision!
Right now, it costs billions to develop drugs because the insane level of regulation and liability that companies have to deal with. We are not talking some basic regulation to keep people safe, we are talking about layers and layers of rules and beurocracy, and insane levels of liability, that make the cost of compliance in the billions of dollars. So of course, when drug research is forced by the government to be such a capital-intensive process, and only those with billions in capital can afford to do drug research.
For getting rid of patents to be successful, you are also going to need to scale back most of the regulations on drug development (which don't exist to protect people, they are only there to make drug development more expensive and hence limit competition by keeping smaller companies out fo the market). Until people are as skeptical about so-called drug safety regulation (which doesn't keep people safe) as they are about patent and ip regulation, then you are still going to have the problem of only a handful of big players being able to develop drugs.
The invisible hand of the marketplace skews development toward drugs that must be taken forever, such as blood pressure medication, or cholesterol lowering medication, or anti-depressives and so forth.
No, the quite visible hand of the government skews the development towards drugs that must be taken forever. When it costs nearly a billion dollars to get a drug approved by the FDA, when the liability for approved drugs can stretch into the multiple billions, and when only huge pharma companies are the ones able to meet the astronomical costs imposed by government regulation and insane liability requirements, this kind of thing is inevitable. The barriers of entry to the market are held so artificially high by obscene regulation, that there is just no way anyone can make a profit on developing cheap drugs.
The free market had no problem producing low-profit drugs, such as vaccines and antibiotics, back when there were tens of thousands of independent research companies, and the barrier to the market was extremely small. (Antibiotics, to give an example, would NOT be approved as a class of drugs under todays regulatory scheme. They are grandfathered in.)
The FDA was created under the Pure Food and Drug Act... it's purpose was to make sure that the product that companies were selling were the product that they said they were selling. It was supposed to stop people from outright lying about the substances that put into drugs, it wasn't supposed to evaluate and micromanage every single detail of drug development. It was supposed to make sure when a company sold a bottle of aspirin, that it was in fact aspirin and not sugar pills... it wasn't supposed to evaluate the effectivness and safety of the aspirin - that was left to the medical community to evaluate and decide for themselves.
The FDA is no longer making us safe... its job now is to make drug development as expensive as possible so that only a handful of companies can afford to develop drugs. Big Pharma is the direct result of Big Government. If you create regulations that make drug development contigent on have vast pools of capital, then only those with vast pools of capital, and who can agressively secure more capital, can survive in the market place.
What with patented GM crops we see farmers being sued in the US for reusing GM seeds grown from their own crops. Something practiced for centuries.
As far as I know, no farmer in the U.S. has ever been sued for reusing GM seeds grown from their own crops. As far as I know, there has been no case like this in the world (there is one case in Canada where people say the farmer was sued for reusing GM seeds, but it turns out he was actually sued for signing a false contract and the Canadian courst explicitly said in their decision that it wasn't for reusing the GM seeds!). Please post a link to examples of people being sued over reusing GM seeds from a news site or impartial source, and I will happily and respectifuly concede your point... but this kind of thing is really fearmongering about biotechnology than anything else.
But besides the non-existant lawsuit that everyone mentions on why GM foods are bad, the patent law applying to GM foods, and the technology of GM foods, are entirely different things. It would be possible to completly abolish any patents on genetic modification, and still put genetic modifications to good use. Just because Microsoft abuses IP law, doesn't mean that operating systems are bad... likewise, even if a company abuses IP law to get a patent on DNA, doesn't mean the technology of modifying DNA is bad.
You aren't arguing my point, you are arguing a small detail that I explicitly mentioned COULD be wrong in my post.
If an irrelevant detail is so important to you, McDonalds percolates the coffee... A percolator is like a pressure cooker for coffee... so the coffee is being prepared at a temperature higher than the boiling point of water (that is the whole point of a percolator... otherwise you could just drip the coffee). Of course the coffee will not be that temperature at the time you drink it. Maybe the regulations cover the internal temperature of the percolator, or the max temperature includes liquid foods like oils or fats... or maybe I just completly mis-remembered the number.
But worse case scenario, I did not proofread my message enough, and so I made a silly mistake. That doesn't change the fact that 140 F is lukewarm coffee. Maybe I should sue Slashdot, for not explicitly warning me this type of mistake is possible.
How many PSIs do percolators operate at? Isn't the whole point of a percolator to heat coffee to a temperature higher than the boiling point? If not, why do they need the steam pressure chamber?
Somebody should pour some 140 degree F coffee in your lap and then some 180 degree F and you can let use know which you prefer. "During the case, Liebeck's attorney's discovered that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 degrees Fahrenheit (82-88 degrees Celsius). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds" 140F is nowhere near tepid, in fact it is quite hot, but at least you would have up to 20 seconds to avoid a third degree burn.
This discussion shows out truly devoid of common sense the legal system, and people defending it, are.
Now, I am not a big coffee drinker, but I make tea and I make it with boiling water. Water boils at 212 F. That is 22-32 degrees higher than the temperature they said the McDonalds coffee was at (which in itself was likely an exassuration for the sake of the law suit, but I am assuming it was at the temperate they say for the sake of arguement). I HAVE spilled hot tea on my leg. I can most certainly tell you that I did not recieve third degree burns in two to seven seconds. Other than it was a little sore for about a day, I was fine. Now, I do wear pants and underwear, and so the boiling water didn't go directly on my skin, however I am pretty certain ol' Stella was wearing pants and underwear herself. I did also try to wipe up the tea, I didn't wait 90 seconds to do anything, like ol' Stella admitted happened. But I have also spilled hot tea directly on my hand, and I most certainly didn't have any injury that didn't disapear in a couple days - and that was with liquid MUCH HOTTER that the inflated value given by the trial lawyer!
But now to the utterly insane idea that 140 F you would have 20 seconds to avoid a third degree burn... WHAT? Shit, in Death Valley the AIR TEMPERATURE can get 134 F (I think the hottest temperature was in Libya at 136 F). Air doesn't conduct heat as well as water, but still, if the temperature was as dangerous as you say you couldn't walk around death valley or the Libyan desert without a NASA space suit and not be fried to death. The hot water from my tap is set to around 140 F, and I most certainly do not get burns when I run my hands under the hot water when I wash them.
Seriously man, the english has been drinking hot tea for generations (recommended temperature for Earl Grey is 212 F, Green Tea is 170-180 F). If these temperatures are so recklessly dangerously hot, why isn't hot tea burns an empidemic in England? (Well, I know why it isn't an epidemic in England... cause their legal system isn't as retarded as ours).
Basicly, the figures you are giving for burns and liquid temperature are, at best, taken totally out of context... but most likely they are out and outright fabrications by the greedy trial lawyers in this case! The most basic common sense and first hand experience totally contradicts what you are saying.
I said I couldn't find the reference, and that I *THINK* it was that temperature. However, my oven in my kitchen goes up to 500 F (I bake bread at 375 F)... and the boiling point of water is 212 F. Perhaps you are mixing up celsius with farenheit if you are astounded by that temperature? (300 C would be very hot... 300 F, not nearly as hot).
McDonalds served the coffee at the temperature that coffee is supposed to be served at... 180-200 degrees F. And well below the legal limit for temperature (which I think was 300 or something like that, I can't find the exact reference, but it changes based on locality.). McDonalds served the coffee at a lower temperature than Starbucks currently serves their coffee.
There is no false dichotomy here... Yeah, there are temperatures between hot or tepid, but no one wants their coffee at luke warm, or medium warm, or slightly warm. Consumers want coffee hot! Which is why McDonalds served the coffee hot in the first place, and why McDonald's coffee sales plummeted when they made all their chains lower the temperature to what is safe for for the half retarded two year old responsibility level of Americans.
Fortunatly for McDonalds, their coffee wasn't particularly that good in the first place, so it didn't destroy their sales when they made their coffee retard safe. However, a place like Starbucks that is known exclusively for coffee must keep the temperature high... and so one of the reasons a Starbucks coffee is so expensive is that you are paying your retard tax on one of the hundreds of people who spill Starbucks coffee on themselves and sue Starbucks every year.
I think that lawsuits should be banned in the United States. I realize that a lot of innocent people actually do file legit lawsuits, ones they probably deserve to win. However, there is no fundamental right to sue other people, in the same way we have a right to freedom of speech or whatnot... because lawsuits are not a natural right inherent in human nature, but something we only get through the legal system.
Clearly the American people have abused that privledge, and so that privledge should be revoked. Some innocent victims might not be able to recover damages from a guilty party who deserves to pay, but that is just the price society has to pay if it can't learn to handle the privledge of lawsuits in a reasonable and responsible manner. We all pay for these lawsuits, because the cost of the lawsuits are hidden in the costs of our goods and services... and it is very clear, the number of innocent people being victimized by the legal system directly or indirectly are outnumbered by the people being helped.
It is not the quintessential frivolous lawsuit - That would be the racist woman who sued her employer claiming that her racism was a medical condition, and by the employer forcing her to work with black coworkers, that he was violating the Americans with Disabilities act. (She won several million dollars if I remember correctly.)
However, the act of drinking a hot beverage is something that everyone has done... so it resonates with all of us. It is so common place and basic, and everyone knows that coffee is hot and can fucking burn you. And people know that something fundamental has changed in our culture when someone else is held responsible when you spill coffee on yourself. It might not be the worse case of tort abuse, but it is the point in time when most of us realized just how stupid the legal system was getting, and just how much this stupidity was costing us as a society.
Actually, the McDonalds served coffee at well within industry standards for coffee, far below the legal allowed temperature for coffee, and somewhat less than the Starbucks chain servers their coffee. They also put a warning on the coffee cup. They also did not spill the coffee on her, she spilled it on herself after she was away from the drive through window.
The coffee is served hot, because people LIKE hot coffee. Tepid coffee, while being more idiot proof, is not something that people who drink coffee like.
Now, I realize, the U.S. government should ban hot beverages and ban the Nintendo Wii, because Americans are far too idiotic to be able to handle even the most basic levels of self responsibility it takes to drink a cup of coffee or play a video game. And McDonalds should be smart enough to know that Americans should be treated like slightly retarded two year olds when it comes to anything even remotely risky.
But both Nintendo, and McDonalds, are not guilty of anything but assuming that Americans are sensible rational adults.
Unfortunatly, it is happening everywhere in the Western world... It is just that the U.S. is at the bleeding edge of tort law stupidity. But insane law suits like this are becoming common everywhere that is wealthy enough to support an entire class of people who survive by suing other people.
I agree that the clothes dryer has the highest energy consumption in the house... but luckily I have a high efficiency dryer. It uses half the amount of energy that a normal drier uses! Here is the scoop on how the awesome technology works:
You have a knob that controls the timing for your dryer. The old energy inefficent dryers used to to have the knob labeled so that it had one normal cycle - Dry. But then they decided to relabel the knob to that there is TWO cycles painted above the knob: 50% of the arch is labeled "Dry", and 50% labeled "Super Dry". By relabeling the normal dry cycle to now be TWO cycles, the normal dry cycle now uses 50% as much energy! BRILLIANT!!!
Change the knob label, and I am sure the company got a big fat government subsidy or something for making the dryer "energy effiecient". Awesome!
Don't mod this funny, because unfortunatly I am not joking!
Russia, Azerbijan, Georgia, and Armenia... When crossing over the land borders, all information had to be typed by hand - as well as when I arrived in Moscow via air, although I think that might have been a computer problem.
I had visas issued in Canada on a U.S. passport, but I am certain that was not the issue as my U.S. travel partners who got their visas in the U.S. had the same problem.
I am getting off the topic though... Listen, I am as paranoid of the government as the next guy, probably even much more so. But an RFID in a passport isn't something that I am particularly worried about. The threat to my privacy or safety is minimal - especially considering that you have to leave your passport with a consolate if you want visas to so many countries (who knows what they do with them). I am much more disturbed by the fact that my life and indentity is stored in a peice of paper like a passport, than I am disturbed that someone (within 3 meters), might be able to read an RFID that I am from the U.S. (like it wasn't obvious already), my name (which they could get just by asking me), and that my passport was issued in Chicago.
Given that more Americans are stuck by lightning than murdered while traveling every year, and given that my government and the government of the place I am visiting already have full access to that information anyway, I will take immediate convience of a quick passport swipe over some rather neglible risk.
Having made a road trip through former Soviet Republics not too long ago, I can assure you that at every border crossing my passport information was most certainly hand typed into a computer! Actually, in Russia too they had to hand type my information.
At the U.S./Canada border, which I cross alot, they have an OCR that reads an ID code on the bottom of the front passport page - However, that doesn't contain all the information in the passport, that just links to a database which already contains your information if you are Canadian or U.S..
This is absolute bullshit. There has been absolutly no research to determine if an 18 year old who has sex with a 17 year old classmate, or a guy streaking as part of a college fraternity prank, or a guy who has consentual sex with other adult men in a public-park lavatory, or the couple who park up on "lovers lane" to have sex, or a married couple who has oral sex in Arkansas, or the 90% of "sex offenders" who never did anything that wouldn't be legal or a misdemeanor if they where only done in San Fransico or Amsterdam, are likely to do anything!
Only a tiny fraction of the people who are being branded second class citizens for life, and being subjected to a lifetime of harrasment and violence at the hands of vigilantes, did anything remotely like rape or molestation. Most commited only voluntary, consentual sex acts with people their own age.
Sex offender lists, and their sister paranoia law enforcement, Do Not Fly list, are part of our societies current irrational, paranoid, fear of boogie men - being afraid of sex offenders or terrorists depending on where you live and your political beliefs. Personally, I am far more disturbed by the people who believe their friends or neighbors are all devious sexual preditors lurking to rape their kids - If anything I would be far more worried about the guy who is constantly paranoid of sex offenders (ala Mark Foley), than I would the college football players who get arrested doing a panty raid on the girls sorority. Or I would be far more frightened of the people who think everyone named "Mohammed" may be a terrorist, than I would be of someone named "Mohammed" sitting next to me on a plane.
The information on the chip is just information that is already printed on the passport. Having an RFID chip, however, makes it easier to read into a computer. Normally a border guard has to manually type your passport information into a computer. If you have ever waited 20 minutes for a border guard who doesn't speak or write english, to type in your passport information (imagine if you were trying to type up someone's cyrillic passport) - A quick swipe of an RFID card would turn the process into a 2 second swipe.
Certainly not. But I find it curious that virtually all of your examples come from the left.
This is not because I believe that the right isn't authoritarian. It is because you already realize the right is authoritarian, so there is no point in discussing it with you. I could go on and on about the right - but if the right were the only people who were authoritarian, then there wouldn't be a problem, the left would be there to counter the influence. Also, in the long run, I think it will be easier to get the left to abandon authoritarianism than the right, therefor it is more worth my effort to point out how the left has become totalitarian.
I consider those to be decidedly non-intellectual positions. But then, maybe my intellect just isn't good enough. I am sure that the ACLU would agree with me, and certainly that is an "intellectual" organization, no?
The ACLU has been under extreme pressure to abandon their unconditional support for freedom of speech. A lot of the people on the left no longer donate money to or support the ACLU because they have fought to protect racist, sexist, and offensive speech. So far, the ACLU has held true to it's principles, but expect that to change in the next few years. Expect there to be a shakeup in the ACLU, and for them to support European style speech-codes very very soon.
But even at that, the ACLU is not against banning advertising commercials 30 days from an election, which is absolutly horrible for democracy, and a complete violation of free speech. While they still might be for protecting some dumb skinhead's right to say hateful things (and cudos for the ACLU for taking that extremly unpopular and controversial stance towards freedom of speech), they would not get involved when the federal government demanded that no advertisements for Faranheit 9/11 30 days before the election (as they support the election advertising ban).
Think I have a good idea who you're talking about here (liberals).
Yes... Is a form of authoritarianism any less bad because it is popular on the left?
WTF? Again, this is wild stuff. Please tell me who these people are?!?!?! Because they sound really really bad.
Smoking is being banned in several cities already (not public smoking, but smoking period), and the people vocal in the "consumer activist" community, health analysts at universities, in government, etc., are all supporting total smoking bans. New York, Chicago, all the supposedly "cosmopolitian" progressive cities in the U.S. have stated they eventually plan to ban all smoking. New York has just banned trans-fats, and there are calls from acedemia for a national trans-fat ban. If it is not pressure from intellectuals, then who is pushing these widely unpopular lifestyle oriented regulations?
I don't really see the problem with this. Broadcasters use a limited public resource (the airwaves), so it's the government's job to regulate them and make sure that they are using this limited resource for the public good. Making sure that the media is not concentrated in a few hands would actually help increase the flow of information and provide more diverse viewpoints. That's one kind of regulation that is good for freedom. But you apparently disagree. Fair enough.
Aside from the fact that "The Public Good" to a politician is "what helps me stay in power", and so laws promoting a vauge nebulous concept such as the "public good" are licence for politicians to control the buying and selling of media in a way to manipulate them... There are also "campaign finance" laws that ban ALL POLITICAL ADVERTISMENTS 30 DAYS FROM AN ELECTION (which of course, totally protects incumbants, who don't need to advertise because they are already public figures). There are laws that control what products may or may not be advertised on TV, and at what times.
Also, intellectuals overwelming support so-called "hate speech" laws, which while not the law yet in the U.S. (but the law virtually everywhere else), make it illegal to say anything that offends a politically powerful group. And they support laws that ban things like "pornography" that supposedly "exploits women". Look at the monsterous codes of political correctness - Like in Portland, where the people who run the public school system defined racism as including "promoting individualism as opposed to collectivism", and "having a forward time orientation".
By the way, who are these intellectuals???
People For Science In the Public Interest, Ralph Nadar, the Department of Health, virtually everyone in charge of Universities, virtually all the experts hired by the government as specialists in certain issues. I don't have time to list or reference every single group, because in the world of "consumer activism", or government health management, support for banning unhealthy foods, cigarrettes, advertisments for "exploitive" products, guns, offensive speeech, etc., is virtually universal.
So, I will ask the question in reverse: Name one mainstream intellectual who is against authoritarianism? Not a mainstream intellectual against Putin, or Bush, or a specific form of authoritarianism (I mean, Hitler and Stalin were bitter enemies - Being against a specifc authoritarian is not being against authoritarianism - it isn't a mutually exclusive thing.), but one who stands against all the popular forms of authoritarianism nowadays.
The trouble is that most intellectuals are hardcore authoritarians themselves. Many of the most extreme expansions of government power are coming from intellectuals. If you look who supports banning all non-government schools, who supports banning guns, who supports banning trans-fats and ciggarettes and micromanaging personal lifestyles, who supports regulations and restrictions on free speech, who wants to see the government regulate newspapers and broadcast media, etc., etc., those ideas are overwelmingly created and supported by today's intellectuals.
So there isn't really a conflict between authoritarianism and intellectuals... There is a conflict between populist authoritarianism, and intellectual authoritarianism. At least Putin style populist authoritarianism is vaugly more democratic, in that it is popular with a lot of people.
What you are saying is true... with one correction: XNA is for Xbox 360 AND Windows. What it is trying to target are shareware game companies like PopCap, to create an Xbox version as well as a Windows version for their casual games (and to sell it on Xbox Live, where Microsoft will of course take a 50% share).
Slashdot Mirror
But your solution is just another "appeal to god" solution. The patent system is broke, so lets create an oversight board! How do select this oversight board? How do you make sure that the people put into this oversight board are not drug company lackeys? How do you make sure they are not bribed and corrupted? Are you going to make an oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee? And another oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee to oversee the oversight committee?
Saying "well, lets create an oversight committee" is a non-solution. It is like saying "the way to solve all problems is to find a person who is smart enough to solve all our problems and put them in charge". You haven't come up with a solution, you are just playing word games. You are looking for a big wise father figure to spank the bad kids and fix all our problems... but while that might be psychologically comforting to many people, it doesn't have anything to do with solving problems in real live.
Suggesting we put an authority figure in charge in order to solve problems is just a sort of neo-primitivist "Ask The Gods to Make It Rain on The Crops" solution. Government officials have now replaced Gods and Demons, but we are still looking for some benevolent outside force to solve our problems - that is not problem solving, that is superstision!
Just getting rid of patents won't help:
Right now, it costs billions to develop drugs because the insane level of regulation and liability that companies have to deal with. We are not talking some basic regulation to keep people safe, we are talking about layers and layers of rules and beurocracy, and insane levels of liability, that make the cost of compliance in the billions of dollars. So of course, when drug research is forced by the government to be such a capital-intensive process, and only those with billions in capital can afford to do drug research.
For getting rid of patents to be successful, you are also going to need to scale back most of the regulations on drug development (which don't exist to protect people, they are only there to make drug development more expensive and hence limit competition by keeping smaller companies out fo the market). Until people are as skeptical about so-called drug safety regulation (which doesn't keep people safe) as they are about patent and ip regulation, then you are still going to have the problem of only a handful of big players being able to develop drugs.
The invisible hand of the marketplace skews development toward drugs that must be taken forever, such as blood pressure medication, or cholesterol lowering medication, or anti-depressives and so forth.
No, the quite visible hand of the government skews the development towards drugs that must be taken forever. When it costs nearly a billion dollars to get a drug approved by the FDA, when the liability for approved drugs can stretch into the multiple billions, and when only huge pharma companies are the ones able to meet the astronomical costs imposed by government regulation and insane liability requirements, this kind of thing is inevitable. The barriers of entry to the market are held so artificially high by obscene regulation, that there is just no way anyone can make a profit on developing cheap drugs.
The free market had no problem producing low-profit drugs, such as vaccines and antibiotics, back when there were tens of thousands of independent research companies, and the barrier to the market was extremely small. (Antibiotics, to give an example, would NOT be approved as a class of drugs under todays regulatory scheme. They are grandfathered in.)
The FDA was created under the Pure Food and Drug Act... it's purpose was to make sure that the product that companies were selling were the product that they said they were selling. It was supposed to stop people from outright lying about the substances that put into drugs, it wasn't supposed to evaluate and micromanage every single detail of drug development. It was supposed to make sure when a company sold a bottle of aspirin, that it was in fact aspirin and not sugar pills... it wasn't supposed to evaluate the effectivness and safety of the aspirin - that was left to the medical community to evaluate and decide for themselves.
The FDA is no longer making us safe... its job now is to make drug development as expensive as possible so that only a handful of companies can afford to develop drugs. Big Pharma is the direct result of Big Government. If you create regulations that make drug development contigent on have vast pools of capital, then only those with vast pools of capital, and who can agressively secure more capital, can survive in the market place.
What with patented GM crops we see farmers being sued in the US for reusing GM seeds grown from their own crops. Something practiced for centuries.
As far as I know, no farmer in the U.S. has ever been sued for reusing GM seeds grown from their own crops. As far as I know, there has been no case like this in the world (there is one case in Canada where people say the farmer was sued for reusing GM seeds, but it turns out he was actually sued for signing a false contract and the Canadian courst explicitly said in their decision that it wasn't for reusing the GM seeds!). Please post a link to examples of people being sued over reusing GM seeds from a news site or impartial source, and I will happily and respectifuly concede your point... but this kind of thing is really fearmongering about biotechnology than anything else.
But besides the non-existant lawsuit that everyone mentions on why GM foods are bad, the patent law applying to GM foods, and the technology of GM foods, are entirely different things. It would be possible to completly abolish any patents on genetic modification, and still put genetic modifications to good use. Just because Microsoft abuses IP law, doesn't mean that operating systems are bad... likewise, even if a company abuses IP law to get a patent on DNA, doesn't mean the technology of modifying DNA is bad.
Ah, the good old days when we could censor information when we felt it good for society!
I believe I read it in this book:
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http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDeta
You aren't arguing my point, you are arguing a small detail that I explicitly mentioned COULD be wrong in my post.
If an irrelevant detail is so important to you, McDonalds percolates the coffee... A percolator is like a pressure cooker for coffee... so the coffee is being prepared at a temperature higher than the boiling point of water (that is the whole point of a percolator... otherwise you could just drip the coffee). Of course the coffee will not be that temperature at the time you drink it. Maybe the regulations cover the internal temperature of the percolator, or the max temperature includes liquid foods like oils or fats... or maybe I just completly mis-remembered the number.
But worse case scenario, I did not proofread my message enough, and so I made a silly mistake. That doesn't change the fact that 140 F is lukewarm coffee. Maybe I should sue Slashdot, for not explicitly warning me this type of mistake is possible.
How many PSIs do percolators operate at? Isn't the whole point of a percolator to heat coffee to a temperature higher than the boiling point? If not, why do they need the steam pressure chamber?
Somebody should pour some 140 degree F coffee in your lap and then some 180 degree F and you can let use know which you prefer.
"During the case, Liebeck's attorney's discovered that McDonald's required franchises to serve coffee at 180-190 degrees Fahrenheit (82-88 degrees Celsius). At that temperature, the coffee would cause a third-degree burn in two to seven seconds"
140F is nowhere near tepid, in fact it is quite hot, but at least you would have up to 20 seconds to avoid a third degree burn.
This discussion shows out truly devoid of common sense the legal system, and people defending it, are.
Now, I am not a big coffee drinker, but I make tea and I make it with boiling water. Water boils at 212 F. That is 22-32 degrees higher than the temperature they said the McDonalds coffee was at (which in itself was likely an exassuration for the sake of the law suit, but I am assuming it was at the temperate they say for the sake of arguement). I HAVE spilled hot tea on my leg. I can most certainly tell you that I did not recieve third degree burns in two to seven seconds. Other than it was a little sore for about a day, I was fine. Now, I do wear pants and underwear, and so the boiling water didn't go directly on my skin, however I am pretty certain ol' Stella was wearing pants and underwear herself. I did also try to wipe up the tea, I didn't wait 90 seconds to do anything, like ol' Stella admitted happened. But I have also spilled hot tea directly on my hand, and I most certainly didn't have any injury that didn't disapear in a couple days - and that was with liquid MUCH HOTTER that the inflated value given by the trial lawyer!
But now to the utterly insane idea that 140 F you would have 20 seconds to avoid a third degree burn... WHAT? Shit, in Death Valley the AIR TEMPERATURE can get 134 F (I think the hottest temperature was in Libya at 136 F). Air doesn't conduct heat as well as water, but still, if the temperature was as dangerous as you say you couldn't walk around death valley or the Libyan desert without a NASA space suit and not be fried to death. The hot water from my tap is set to around 140 F, and I most certainly do not get burns when I run my hands under the hot water when I wash them.
Seriously man, the english has been drinking hot tea for generations (recommended temperature for Earl Grey is 212 F, Green Tea is 170-180 F). If these temperatures are so recklessly dangerously hot, why isn't hot tea burns an empidemic in England? (Well, I know why it isn't an epidemic in England... cause their legal system isn't as retarded as ours).
Basicly, the figures you are giving for burns and liquid temperature are, at best, taken totally out of context... but most likely they are out and outright fabrications by the greedy trial lawyers in this case! The most basic common sense and first hand experience totally contradicts what you are saying.
I said I couldn't find the reference, and that I *THINK* it was that temperature. However, my oven in my kitchen goes up to 500 F (I bake bread at 375 F)... and the boiling point of water is 212 F. Perhaps you are mixing up celsius with farenheit if you are astounded by that temperature? (300 C would be very hot... 300 F, not nearly as hot).
McDonalds served the coffee at the temperature that coffee is supposed to be served at... 180-200 degrees F. And well below the legal limit for temperature (which I think was 300 or something like that, I can't find the exact reference, but it changes based on locality.). McDonalds served the coffee at a lower temperature than Starbucks currently serves their coffee.
There is no false dichotomy here... Yeah, there are temperatures between hot or tepid, but no one wants their coffee at luke warm, or medium warm, or slightly warm. Consumers want coffee hot! Which is why McDonalds served the coffee hot in the first place, and why McDonald's coffee sales plummeted when they made all their chains lower the temperature to what is safe for for the half retarded two year old responsibility level of Americans.
Fortunatly for McDonalds, their coffee wasn't particularly that good in the first place, so it didn't destroy their sales when they made their coffee retard safe. However, a place like Starbucks that is known exclusively for coffee must keep the temperature high... and so one of the reasons a Starbucks coffee is so expensive is that you are paying your retard tax on one of the hundreds of people who spill Starbucks coffee on themselves and sue Starbucks every year.
I think that lawsuits should be banned in the United States. I realize that a lot of innocent people actually do file legit lawsuits, ones they probably deserve to win. However, there is no fundamental right to sue other people, in the same way we have a right to freedom of speech or whatnot... because lawsuits are not a natural right inherent in human nature, but something we only get through the legal system.
Clearly the American people have abused that privledge, and so that privledge should be revoked. Some innocent victims might not be able to recover damages from a guilty party who deserves to pay, but that is just the price society has to pay if it can't learn to handle the privledge of lawsuits in a reasonable and responsible manner. We all pay for these lawsuits, because the cost of the lawsuits are hidden in the costs of our goods and services... and it is very clear, the number of innocent people being victimized by the legal system directly or indirectly are outnumbered by the people being helped.
It is not the quintessential frivolous lawsuit - That would be the racist woman who sued her employer claiming that her racism was a medical condition, and by the employer forcing her to work with black coworkers, that he was violating the Americans with Disabilities act. (She won several million dollars if I remember correctly.)
However, the act of drinking a hot beverage is something that everyone has done... so it resonates with all of us. It is so common place and basic, and everyone knows that coffee is hot and can fucking burn you. And people know that something fundamental has changed in our culture when someone else is held responsible when you spill coffee on yourself. It might not be the worse case of tort abuse, but it is the point in time when most of us realized just how stupid the legal system was getting, and just how much this stupidity was costing us as a society.
Actually, the McDonalds served coffee at well within industry standards for coffee, far below the legal allowed temperature for coffee, and somewhat less than the Starbucks chain servers their coffee. They also put a warning on the coffee cup. They also did not spill the coffee on her, she spilled it on herself after she was away from the drive through window.
The coffee is served hot, because people LIKE hot coffee. Tepid coffee, while being more idiot proof, is not something that people who drink coffee like.
Now, I realize, the U.S. government should ban hot beverages and ban the Nintendo Wii, because Americans are far too idiotic to be able to handle even the most basic levels of self responsibility it takes to drink a cup of coffee or play a video game. And McDonalds should be smart enough to know that Americans should be treated like slightly retarded two year olds when it comes to anything even remotely risky.
But both Nintendo, and McDonalds, are not guilty of anything but assuming that Americans are sensible rational adults.
ONLY IN AMERICA
Unfortunatly, it is happening everywhere in the Western world... It is just that the U.S. is at the bleeding edge of tort law stupidity. But insane law suits like this are becoming common everywhere that is wealthy enough to support an entire class of people who survive by suing other people.
I agree that the clothes dryer has the highest energy consumption in the house... but luckily I have a high efficiency dryer. It uses half the amount of energy that a normal drier uses! Here is the scoop on how the awesome technology works:
You have a knob that controls the timing for your dryer. The old energy inefficent dryers used to to have the knob labeled so that it had one normal cycle - Dry. But then they decided to relabel the knob to that there is TWO cycles painted above the knob: 50% of the arch is labeled "Dry", and 50% labeled "Super Dry". By relabeling the normal dry cycle to now be TWO cycles, the normal dry cycle now uses 50% as much energy! BRILLIANT!!!
Change the knob label, and I am sure the company got a big fat government subsidy or something for making the dryer "energy effiecient". Awesome!
Don't mod this funny, because unfortunatly I am not joking!
Russia, Azerbijan, Georgia, and Armenia... When crossing over the land borders, all information had to be typed by hand - as well as when I arrived in Moscow via air, although I think that might have been a computer problem.
I had visas issued in Canada on a U.S. passport, but I am certain that was not the issue as my U.S. travel partners who got their visas in the U.S. had the same problem.
I am getting off the topic though... Listen, I am as paranoid of the government as the next guy, probably even much more so. But an RFID in a passport isn't something that I am particularly worried about. The threat to my privacy or safety is minimal - especially considering that you have to leave your passport with a consolate if you want visas to so many countries (who knows what they do with them). I am much more disturbed by the fact that my life and indentity is stored in a peice of paper like a passport, than I am disturbed that someone (within 3 meters), might be able to read an RFID that I am from the U.S. (like it wasn't obvious already), my name (which they could get just by asking me), and that my passport was issued in Chicago.
Given that more Americans are stuck by lightning than murdered while traveling every year, and given that my government and the government of the place I am visiting already have full access to that information anyway, I will take immediate convience of a quick passport swipe over some rather neglible risk.
Having made a road trip through former Soviet Republics not too long ago, I can assure you that at every border crossing my passport information was most certainly hand typed into a computer! Actually, in Russia too they had to hand type my information.
At the U.S./Canada border, which I cross alot, they have an OCR that reads an ID code on the bottom of the front passport page - However, that doesn't contain all the information in the passport, that just links to a database which already contains your information if you are Canadian or U.S..
This is absolute bullshit. There has been absolutly no research to determine if an 18 year old who has sex with a 17 year old classmate, or a guy streaking as part of a college fraternity prank, or a guy who has consentual sex with other adult men in a public-park lavatory, or the couple who park up on "lovers lane" to have sex, or a married couple who has oral sex in Arkansas, or the 90% of "sex offenders" who never did anything that wouldn't be legal or a misdemeanor if they where only done in San Fransico or Amsterdam, are likely to do anything!
Only a tiny fraction of the people who are being branded second class citizens for life, and being subjected to a lifetime of harrasment and violence at the hands of vigilantes, did anything remotely like rape or molestation. Most commited only voluntary, consentual sex acts with people their own age.
Sex offender lists, and their sister paranoia law enforcement, Do Not Fly list, are part of our societies current irrational, paranoid, fear of boogie men - being afraid of sex offenders or terrorists depending on where you live and your political beliefs. Personally, I am far more disturbed by the people who believe their friends or neighbors are all devious sexual preditors lurking to rape their kids - If anything I would be far more worried about the guy who is constantly paranoid of sex offenders (ala Mark Foley), than I would the college football players who get arrested doing a panty raid on the girls sorority. Or I would be far more frightened of the people who think everyone named "Mohammed" may be a terrorist, than I would be of someone named "Mohammed" sitting next to me on a plane.
Maybe read Author Miller's "The Crucible" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crucible ) to get a good idea of the sort of Moral Panic ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic ) our society is in today.
Or, you could just store your passport in a metal case or wrap it in aluminum foil... problem solved!
The information on the chip is just information that is already printed on the passport. Having an RFID chip, however, makes it easier to read into a computer. Normally a border guard has to manually type your passport information into a computer. If you have ever waited 20 minutes for a border guard who doesn't speak or write english, to type in your passport information (imagine if you were trying to type up someone's cyrillic passport) - A quick swipe of an RFID card would turn the process into a 2 second swipe.
Certainly not. But I find it curious that virtually all of your examples come from the left.
This is not because I believe that the right isn't authoritarian. It is because you already realize the right is authoritarian, so there is no point in discussing it with you. I could go on and on about the right - but if the right were the only people who were authoritarian, then there wouldn't be a problem, the left would be there to counter the influence. Also, in the long run, I think it will be easier to get the left to abandon authoritarianism than the right, therefor it is more worth my effort to point out how the left has become totalitarian.
I consider those to be decidedly non-intellectual positions. But then, maybe my intellect just isn't good enough. I am sure that the ACLU would agree with me, and certainly that is an "intellectual" organization, no?
The ACLU has been under extreme pressure to abandon their unconditional support for freedom of speech. A lot of the people on the left no longer donate money to or support the ACLU because they have fought to protect racist, sexist, and offensive speech. So far, the ACLU has held true to it's principles, but expect that to change in the next few years. Expect there to be a shakeup in the ACLU, and for them to support European style speech-codes very very soon.
But even at that, the ACLU is not against banning advertising commercials 30 days from an election, which is absolutly horrible for democracy, and a complete violation of free speech. While they still might be for protecting some dumb skinhead's right to say hateful things (and cudos for the ACLU for taking that extremly unpopular and controversial stance towards freedom of speech), they would not get involved when the federal government demanded that no advertisements for Faranheit 9/11 30 days before the election (as they support the election advertising ban).
WTF? Who is that???
Ralph Nader, teachers unions, etc.
Think I have a good idea who you're talking about here (liberals).
Yes... Is a form of authoritarianism any less bad because it is popular on the left?
WTF? Again, this is wild stuff. Please tell me who these people are?!?!?! Because they sound really really bad.
Smoking is being banned in several cities already (not public smoking, but smoking period), and the people vocal in the "consumer activist" community, health analysts at universities, in government, etc., are all supporting total smoking bans. New York, Chicago, all the supposedly "cosmopolitian" progressive cities in the U.S. have stated they eventually plan to ban all smoking. New York has just banned trans-fats, and there are calls from acedemia for a national trans-fat ban. If it is not pressure from intellectuals, then who is pushing these widely unpopular lifestyle oriented regulations?
I don't really see the problem with this. Broadcasters use a limited public resource (the airwaves), so it's the government's job to regulate them and make sure that they are using this limited resource for the public good. Making sure that the media is not concentrated in a few hands would actually help increase the flow of information and provide more diverse viewpoints. That's one kind of regulation that is good for freedom. But you apparently disagree. Fair enough.
Aside from the fact that "The Public Good" to a politician is "what helps me stay in power", and so laws promoting a vauge nebulous concept such as the "public good" are licence for politicians to control the buying and selling of media in a way to manipulate them... There are also "campaign finance" laws that ban ALL POLITICAL ADVERTISMENTS 30 DAYS FROM AN ELECTION (which of course, totally protects incumbants, who don't need to advertise because they are already public figures). There are laws that control what products may or may not be advertised on TV, and at what times.
Also, intellectuals overwelming support so-called "hate speech" laws, which while not the law yet in the U.S. (but the law virtually everywhere else), make it illegal to say anything that offends a politically powerful group. And they support laws that ban things like "pornography" that supposedly "exploits women". Look at the monsterous codes of political correctness - Like in Portland, where the people who run the public school system defined racism as including "promoting individualism as opposed to collectivism", and "having a forward time orientation".
By the way, who are these intellectuals???
People For Science In the Public Interest, Ralph Nadar, the Department of Health, virtually everyone in charge of Universities, virtually all the experts hired by the government as specialists in certain issues. I don't have time to list or reference every single group, because in the world of "consumer activism", or government health management, support for banning unhealthy foods, cigarrettes, advertisments for "exploitive" products, guns, offensive speeech, etc., is virtually universal.
So, I will ask the question in reverse: Name one mainstream intellectual who is against authoritarianism? Not a mainstream intellectual against Putin, or Bush, or a specific form of authoritarianism (I mean, Hitler and Stalin were bitter enemies - Being against a specifc authoritarian is not being against authoritarianism - it isn't a mutually exclusive thing.), but one who stands against all the popular forms of authoritarianism nowadays.
The trouble is that most intellectuals are hardcore authoritarians themselves. Many of the most extreme expansions of government power are coming from intellectuals. If you look who supports banning all non-government schools, who supports banning guns, who supports banning trans-fats and ciggarettes and micromanaging personal lifestyles, who supports regulations and restrictions on free speech, who wants to see the government regulate newspapers and broadcast media, etc., etc., those ideas are overwelmingly created and supported by today's intellectuals.
So there isn't really a conflict between authoritarianism and intellectuals... There is a conflict between populist authoritarianism, and intellectual authoritarianism. At least Putin style populist authoritarianism is vaugly more democratic, in that it is popular with a lot of people.
What you are saying is true... with one correction: XNA is for Xbox 360 AND Windows. What it is trying to target are shareware game companies like PopCap, to create an Xbox version as well as a Windows version for their casual games (and to sell it on Xbox Live, where Microsoft will of course take a 50% share).