Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren't joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"
The response was, "Oh, it's easy. You just have to root it."
"So you're saying I have to hack it. Same way I can do whatever I want with my iPhone, but I have to hack it first."
"No, no. It's totally different. Android is open."
"But you have to hack it in order to be able to do what you want?"
"Yes."
*sigh* "Ok, so how do I root an Incredible?"
"Oh, you can't. Someone will probably figure it out sooner or later, but for now you're just stuck with what you have."
"But I could jailbreak an iPhone now and do whatever I want with it. People already figured it out."
"Yeah, I guess."
"How is this more open again?"
"Because with Android, you can do whatever you want! It's Linux, after all."
Ok, let's blame Apple's PR and my closed-mindedness for you making bad arguments.
The issue isn't Apple's PR. Of course Apple's PR is going to say it's not that big of a problem. They're going to say that if it's a huge problem, and they're also going to say that if it's a very minor problem. The issue is that *I can't trust you* because you're out to blame Apple's PR.
And yes, I did notice that you didn't make any claims about the actual problems, and I suspect that it's because you don't know. My whole point was that it's hard to trust anyone's analysis of Apple's products because so many people have such a big bias when it comes to Apple. And your response? Basically, "Well yeah, that's because Apple's PR is evil and is manipulating us to hide the truth! Wake up, sheeple!"
Seriously, now, were you trying to prove my point?
Thank you for illustrating my point so clearly. Now how am I supposed to trust you to be unbiased about this particular antenna issue when you've just made it clear that your primary motivation is to convince me that Apple is an evil company?
Well there are more problems than those two. There's:
An apparent design flaw that makes the phone lose reception under certain circumstances
The fact that all cell phones can lose reception due to hand placement, which varies by design and how you hold the phone
The myriad of Apple haters who will jump on any possible angle to talk about how evil Apple is, how crappy Apple products are, how superior Apple's competitors are, how the only reason to buy Apple stuff is if you're a retarded hipster that drank the kool-aid.
The massive number of whiney-bitch Apple customers who get upset that their Apple device is capable of being scratched, does not have a battery with infinite capacity, does not grant super-powers, and does not have [insert illogical feature here].
The Apple faithful who would not say a single bad thing about their iPhone under any circumstances. If iPhones started exploding in people's hands, these people would say, "Well I'm actually glad it's doing that. It's saving me the trouble of having to cut my hand off later in preparation for the new Apple's new bionic iHand. I heard a rumor Apple would be releasing bionic prostheses next fall."
As someone sitting on the sidelines, I don't know how to sort it all out. How much of this problem is caused by the apparent design flaw? No point in answering that question-- I won't trust you.
Speaking as an American, I have no desire to defend Halliburton against anything.
But why does everyone insist on making news about some kind of meta-analysis of the news, how things are reported, and how people respond to them? I really don't care very much about whether it hurts your British feelings to blame BP. This is not a story about Great Britain vs. the USA and public sentiments. It's a story about environmental disaster, corporate incompetence and corruption, and regulatory incompetence and corruption.
Hell, I'd almost suspect that BP created obvious photoshops on purpose in order to turn the story into a retarded mire of paranoid nutjobs on all sides. Make everything insane enough, and it distracts from the real issues. People eventually realize how stupid and meaningless it all is and drop the story, but by that time everyone has forgotten that there were important issues in the first place.
Let's not take our eyes off the ball. We should be focused on questions like:
Who/what is really responsible for the actions/decisions that lead to this disaster?
What's being done to prevent this sort of thing from happening ever again?
What is being done to clean up the current situation?
Are the appropriate parties being held responsible (made to face legal/financial penalties)?
Let's not bother with "Are Americans generally being nice enough to British people about all this?" until we've hashed the rest of it out.
Also PBS and NPR don't really fit into "the news" as I'm complaining about it. I like the News Hour, but I'd guess it has a relatively minuscule viewership compared to FOX & Friends.
With Acrobat, Adobe has fallen into a particular bloat trap usually reserved for Microsoft and AV vendors. It goes like this:
You release a product, and it does one specific thing well. Lots of people buy it, and you have a success on your hands. You come up with a bunch of fixes and new features, and release version 2. Again, lots of people buy it. Same thing again with Version 3, maybe version 4... and so on. This is the normal ideal for-profit software development model.
However, at some point you start developing what will become... let's say version 5. You start working on it, and you can't think of any good features to add in. Version 4 already does everything you want that software to do, but you can't just stop there-- you wouldn't be able to sell any upgrade anymore. At the same time, you can't just release bug-fixes and improve performance, since you wouldn't be able to justify charging people for a new version that consisted only in bug fixes. You don't want to head in an entirely new direction because it might alienate current users. You don't want to invest in creating a new product instead, because new products are risky. You just want to find a way to continue milking your cash cow.
Eventually you come up with a bunch of flashy-sounding features that you can advertise even if almost no one uses them. You invest in marketing to make people feel like this new version will allow them to do lots of things that they'll probably never actually do. You reorganize the interface, shifting controls around for no reason other than to make things look "new". You discontinue support for older versions. You modify your file formats so that they'll be slightly incompatible with older versions, or at least you make sure your older versions throw up some kind of warning that says, "This document was made with a newer version. Upgrade now!"
You do a whole bunch of that stuff, and sure enough, people buy it. You set out to make version 6, and you find yourself in approximately the same bind. Some people are still happily using version 4 of your software, and you haven't been able to convince them to upgrade. So then you start throwing even more powerful-sounding but useless features at your customers. "This version has SecureBit technology, which will make all of your bits secure. Make sure you upgrade, or all your information will be eaten by hackers!" and "This version has the latest support for the latest AwesomeX technology. Make sure you upgrade, or you'll find out your friends can do cool things that you can't!" Little by little, you push customers to the latest version. This is now your business model.
With each version, you throw in more and more stuff. Maybe some of it's useful. Maybe there are even 2% of your customers that actually make good use of AwesomeX technology. Mostly, though, your software gets more and more bloated with stupid things so that you have an excuse to keep charging money.
Ultimatley PDF have been fine for making print documents for a long time. Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have improved in some ways, but even old versions were adequate for producing static PDFs. Adobe's only hope for continued growth is to push PDF to be used for more and more things that it is not well suited to handle. Adobe has made it so each PDF file can be kind of like its own stand-alone application by using javascript and Flash.
Usually comes from over management and/or over reliance on simplistic metrics.
Yeah, or in other words, foolishness and bad judgement. I understand that metrics can be important (you have to measure success somehow), but I think we as a society rely on them too heavily, and they're easy to misunderstand.
Well that's what Facebook gets for setting itself up to be a vital Internet service that people should rely on for social networking, photo-sharing, etc. Nobody forced them to do it, and I don't hear them complaining about being in that position.
It's worth noting that YouTube and Wikipedia are also free, but have high customer satisfaction. It's not *simply* that people are being whiners.
The state of journalism is really sad. So much focus on scandals, not enough on important stories. So much focus on whether politicians' rhetoric is being successful in moving the polls, not enough on whether the politicians' actions are helping people. So much focus on X number of people dying someplace-or-other, with very little description of anything good or productive going on anywhere. So much focus on all the things that will kill you, not enough focus on telling you how you can help others.
I've given up. I barely pay attention to news anymore.
People who argue that changing passwords frequently* is a waste of time has not had to deal with the security issue of people sharing their passwords on a regular basis.
I don't think that the claim is that "changing passwords frequently is a waste of time," at least not exactly. What's often misunderstood about security is people think that something is "secure" or it's not, and you can just sort of turn up the security level. That's not quite it. It's more about trade-offs.
Just as a hypothetical example, imagine you owned an apartment building, and you found out that the lock on the front door to the building was relatively easy to pick. You think, "I'll fix that," and you install some big crazy contraption that's supposed to be incredibly secure and impossible to pick. Unfortunately it takes 5 different keys to open, and each time someone goes in or our, it takes them 3 minutes to get through the door. You say, "I don't care, I want the most secure thing!"
A week later, you stop by the building to check on things. You find that, fed up with the annoying locks, the tenants have propped the front door open using a cinder block.
This is the sort of thing that makes security a complicated subject, and this is the sort of objection you get to making people have really strong passwords that need to change frequently. When I started out, I worked briefly for a company that would make everyone have a 12 character password with lower-case, caps, symbols, and numbers, rotated once a month (maybe it was once every couple of months) with a 2-week warning. So you would really only get a couple weeks before the thing started popping up again asking you for a new password. And it wouldn't let you reuse any of your last 7 passwords. People were writing down their passwords all the time. Then someone came up with the idea of having a common way of generating passwords: [month]!abc1234567. She shared the idea with some of her coworkers, and then the next thing you know, half the people in the company have the same exact password: DEC!abc12345. The next month they had "JAN!abc12345". It took a while to convince the manager that this arrangement was not very secure.
So really it's about finding balance. You have to find password policies that will encourage users to practice good habits, and the ideal policies may vary depending on the group of users.
Let me put it this way: of the 4 computers that I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 on, not a single one recognized all the hardware and functioned properly without fiddling. Now maybe each of those computers only represent a tiny percentage of possible configurations, but that's not really the issue, is it?
Yeah, I think they're broadcast on BBC US around Christmas too, but Doctor Who is also shown on SyFy (or at least used to be shown on the SciFi channel), and I believe they were just shown as the season premiere each year, or maybe not shown at all. I don't really remember.
We could argue about best/worst episodes, and no, I wasn't a big fan of "The Next Doctor". Still, I don't think those episodes are markably worse than some other "normal" episodes.
Yes, no doubt Ubuntu's hardware support is pretty good, and Linux generally doesn't make you install as many drivers. However, I've had a rocky road with wireless drivers, video cards, and even sound cards (even some problems as of Ubuntu 10.04).
Of course, a big chunk of the problem is hardware vendors refusing to open the source for their drivers.
I used to work for an advertising company which needed the full Adobe suite, and I know a lot of graphic designers. I also know a bunch of audio engineers who aren't happy with their Linux options for audio editing/processing.
I'm not saying that Photoshop is a good example of "Linux sucking" as though everyone needs Photoshop. It's just... you know... if you need Photoshop, then Linux might not be the OS that will serve your needs best.
All things being equal, if you know your hardware will be supported on both systems and... let's say you're mostly using Firefox and OpenOffice, I'd probably recommend Ubuntu over Win7 for most people. I'm just pointing out that it depends on what you need.
...but they're harder to fix when they do occur due to lack of direct manufacturer support.
I have no doubt that many of the hardware problems I've experienced have been related to this, but that doesn't necessarily help me. I had one problem with the latest release of Ubuntu that prevented me from installing it or even booting the LiveCD. Turned out it was some bug using NVIDEA cards with dual monitors.
So whoever we want to blame, it can still be a bit of a problem. However, I'll also note that I've had situations where Windows required that you download a driver from the manufacturer's site, but Linux just detected it on install. Hardware support isn't bad, but still I don't feel like you can just assume that your hardware will be supported. Of course, the situation is improved if Dell is selling you a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed.
If you already own such packages, most of them work well in Wine these days
WINE is great, but it's not to the point where you can take it for granted. You can just assume that it will run any program you throw at it, trouble-free. And I wouldn't bet money on my mom being able to figure out how to install WINE and install applications in WINE and troubleshoot whatever problems are likely to arise from that process.
Hell, if you are totally new to computers and have no interest in learning much of anything about how they work, I'd suggest getting a Mac. Then you need never worry yourself about the internals, it "just works," as they say.
Somehow I'm not surprised that Dell doesn't offer that advice.
Yeah, I think there are a couple Linux distributions that really are "ready" and will actually provide a better experience for normal stuff (e.g. web browsing, email, word processing). A bunch of free apps, kept up to date through a single updater, all free.
However, I've still had some problems with hardware support in a couple cases (each Ubuntu release seems to fix some problems and introduce others) and you're still missing some commercial packages that might be vital for a lot of users (e.g. Photoshop, where GIMP is pretty good but might still not be a viable alternative).
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for someone to try out, but I'd hesitate to claim, "this will do everything you want and you won't have any problems". But to be fair, I'd hesitate to claim that about OSX or Windows, either.
"Loser pays" sounds good when you imagine the "good guy" is getting sued and he racks up a bunch of legal bills winning against frivolous lawsuits, but what about when the whole thing is turned around?
Like lets say McDonald's was putting neurotoxins into Happy Meals and my child becomes permanently disabled because of it. I sue McDonald's, and they hire millions of dollars worth of lawyers who trounce my cheap lawyer. Now I'm on the hook for millions of dollars in legal fees?
Better solution: make better laws, appoint better judges.
I kind of hate when you get a problem that stems from people doing stupid things and everyone runs around trying to figure out how to rejigger the system to make stupid things impossible. There is no systematic way to stop stupid greedy corrupt people from wreaking havoc. You can come up with systems that will diminish the amount of damage any one stupid greedy corrupt person can do, but that's about it. If you let stupid greedy corrupt people stay in charge, they'll still wreak havoc.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, so if I'm a kernel programmer who doesn't actually want to install his altered kernel on a phone, then I'm golden.
I'm not sure I'd agree to call that "non-trivial".
Funniest thing is that people have said that to me, and they weren't joking. Part of the reason I got an HTC Incredible is that everyone kept talking about how open Android phones are. Then I was like, "Ok, now how do I get WiFi tethering on this bad-boy?"
The response was, "Oh, it's easy. You just have to root it."
"So you're saying I have to hack it. Same way I can do whatever I want with my iPhone, but I have to hack it first."
"No, no. It's totally different. Android is open."
"But you have to hack it in order to be able to do what you want?"
"Yes."
*sigh* "Ok, so how do I root an Incredible?"
"Oh, you can't. Someone will probably figure it out sooner or later, but for now you're just stuck with what you have."
"But I could jailbreak an iPhone now and do whatever I want with it. People already figured it out."
"Yeah, I guess."
"How is this more open again?"
"Because with Android, you can do whatever you want! It's Linux, after all."
Ok, let's blame Apple's PR and my closed-mindedness for you making bad arguments.
The issue isn't Apple's PR. Of course Apple's PR is going to say it's not that big of a problem. They're going to say that if it's a huge problem, and they're also going to say that if it's a very minor problem. The issue is that *I can't trust you* because you're out to blame Apple's PR.
And yes, I did notice that you didn't make any claims about the actual problems, and I suspect that it's because you don't know. My whole point was that it's hard to trust anyone's analysis of Apple's products because so many people have such a big bias when it comes to Apple. And your response? Basically, "Well yeah, that's because Apple's PR is evil and is manipulating us to hide the truth! Wake up, sheeple!"
Seriously, now, were you trying to prove my point?
Thank you for illustrating my point so clearly. Now how am I supposed to trust you to be unbiased about this particular antenna issue when you've just made it clear that your primary motivation is to convince me that Apple is an evil company?
Well there are more problems than those two. There's:
As someone sitting on the sidelines, I don't know how to sort it all out. How much of this problem is caused by the apparent design flaw? No point in answering that question-- I won't trust you.
Speaking as an American, I have no desire to defend Halliburton against anything.
But why does everyone insist on making news about some kind of meta-analysis of the news, how things are reported, and how people respond to them? I really don't care very much about whether it hurts your British feelings to blame BP. This is not a story about Great Britain vs. the USA and public sentiments. It's a story about environmental disaster, corporate incompetence and corruption, and regulatory incompetence and corruption.
Hell, I'd almost suspect that BP created obvious photoshops on purpose in order to turn the story into a retarded mire of paranoid nutjobs on all sides. Make everything insane enough, and it distracts from the real issues. People eventually realize how stupid and meaningless it all is and drop the story, but by that time everyone has forgotten that there were important issues in the first place.
Let's not take our eyes off the ball. We should be focused on questions like:
Let's not bother with "Are Americans generally being nice enough to British people about all this?" until we've hashed the rest of it out.
Also PBS and NPR don't really fit into "the news" as I'm complaining about it. I like the News Hour, but I'd guess it has a relatively minuscule viewership compared to FOX & Friends.
With Acrobat, Adobe has fallen into a particular bloat trap usually reserved for Microsoft and AV vendors. It goes like this:
You release a product, and it does one specific thing well. Lots of people buy it, and you have a success on your hands. You come up with a bunch of fixes and new features, and release version 2. Again, lots of people buy it. Same thing again with Version 3, maybe version 4... and so on. This is the normal ideal for-profit software development model.
However, at some point you start developing what will become... let's say version 5. You start working on it, and you can't think of any good features to add in. Version 4 already does everything you want that software to do, but you can't just stop there-- you wouldn't be able to sell any upgrade anymore. At the same time, you can't just release bug-fixes and improve performance, since you wouldn't be able to justify charging people for a new version that consisted only in bug fixes. You don't want to head in an entirely new direction because it might alienate current users. You don't want to invest in creating a new product instead, because new products are risky. You just want to find a way to continue milking your cash cow.
Eventually you come up with a bunch of flashy-sounding features that you can advertise even if almost no one uses them. You invest in marketing to make people feel like this new version will allow them to do lots of things that they'll probably never actually do. You reorganize the interface, shifting controls around for no reason other than to make things look "new". You discontinue support for older versions. You modify your file formats so that they'll be slightly incompatible with older versions, or at least you make sure your older versions throw up some kind of warning that says, "This document was made with a newer version. Upgrade now!"
You do a whole bunch of that stuff, and sure enough, people buy it. You set out to make version 6, and you find yourself in approximately the same bind. Some people are still happily using version 4 of your software, and you haven't been able to convince them to upgrade. So then you start throwing even more powerful-sounding but useless features at your customers. "This version has SecureBit technology, which will make all of your bits secure. Make sure you upgrade, or all your information will be eaten by hackers!" and "This version has the latest support for the latest AwesomeX technology. Make sure you upgrade, or you'll find out your friends can do cool things that you can't!" Little by little, you push customers to the latest version. This is now your business model.
With each version, you throw in more and more stuff. Maybe some of it's useful. Maybe there are even 2% of your customers that actually make good use of AwesomeX technology. Mostly, though, your software gets more and more bloated with stupid things so that you have an excuse to keep charging money.
Ultimatley PDF have been fine for making print documents for a long time. Acrobat and Acrobat Reader have improved in some ways, but even old versions were adequate for producing static PDFs. Adobe's only hope for continued growth is to push PDF to be used for more and more things that it is not well suited to handle. Adobe has made it so each PDF file can be kind of like its own stand-alone application by using javascript and Flash.
I'm probably missing something. Why is that ironic?
Usually comes from over management and/or over reliance on simplistic metrics.
Yeah, or in other words, foolishness and bad judgement. I understand that metrics can be important (you have to measure success somehow), but I think we as a society rely on them too heavily, and they're easy to misunderstand.
Well that's what Facebook gets for setting itself up to be a vital Internet service that people should rely on for social networking, photo-sharing, etc. Nobody forced them to do it, and I don't hear them complaining about being in that position.
It's worth noting that YouTube and Wikipedia are also free, but have high customer satisfaction. It's not *simply* that people are being whiners.
The state of journalism is really sad. So much focus on scandals, not enough on important stories. So much focus on whether politicians' rhetoric is being successful in moving the polls, not enough on whether the politicians' actions are helping people. So much focus on X number of people dying someplace-or-other, with very little description of anything good or productive going on anywhere. So much focus on all the things that will kill you, not enough focus on telling you how you can help others.
I've given up. I barely pay attention to news anymore.
People who argue that changing passwords frequently* is a waste of time has not had to deal with the security issue of people sharing their passwords on a regular basis.
I don't think that the claim is that "changing passwords frequently is a waste of time," at least not exactly. What's often misunderstood about security is people think that something is "secure" or it's not, and you can just sort of turn up the security level. That's not quite it. It's more about trade-offs.
Just as a hypothetical example, imagine you owned an apartment building, and you found out that the lock on the front door to the building was relatively easy to pick. You think, "I'll fix that," and you install some big crazy contraption that's supposed to be incredibly secure and impossible to pick. Unfortunately it takes 5 different keys to open, and each time someone goes in or our, it takes them 3 minutes to get through the door. You say, "I don't care, I want the most secure thing!"
A week later, you stop by the building to check on things. You find that, fed up with the annoying locks, the tenants have propped the front door open using a cinder block.
This is the sort of thing that makes security a complicated subject, and this is the sort of objection you get to making people have really strong passwords that need to change frequently. When I started out, I worked briefly for a company that would make everyone have a 12 character password with lower-case, caps, symbols, and numbers, rotated once a month (maybe it was once every couple of months) with a 2-week warning. So you would really only get a couple weeks before the thing started popping up again asking you for a new password. And it wouldn't let you reuse any of your last 7 passwords. People were writing down their passwords all the time. Then someone came up with the idea of having a common way of generating passwords: [month]!abc1234567. She shared the idea with some of her coworkers, and then the next thing you know, half the people in the company have the same exact password: DEC!abc12345. The next month they had "JAN!abc12345". It took a while to convince the manager that this arrangement was not very secure.
So really it's about finding balance. You have to find password policies that will encourage users to practice good habits, and the ideal policies may vary depending on the group of users.
Depends. Does running "setup.exe" and clicking "next" a bunch of times count as "fiddling"?
Let me put it this way: of the 4 computers that I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 on, not a single one recognized all the hardware and functioned properly without fiddling. Now maybe each of those computers only represent a tiny percentage of possible configurations, but that's not really the issue, is it?
Yeah, I think they're broadcast on BBC US around Christmas too, but Doctor Who is also shown on SyFy (or at least used to be shown on the SciFi channel), and I believe they were just shown as the season premiere each year, or maybe not shown at all. I don't really remember.
We could argue about best/worst episodes, and no, I wasn't a big fan of "The Next Doctor". Still, I don't think those episodes are markably worse than some other "normal" episodes.
Yes, no doubt Ubuntu's hardware support is pretty good, and Linux generally doesn't make you install as many drivers. However, I've had a rocky road with wireless drivers, video cards, and even sound cards (even some problems as of Ubuntu 10.04).
Of course, a big chunk of the problem is hardware vendors refusing to open the source for their drivers.
I used to work for an advertising company which needed the full Adobe suite, and I know a lot of graphic designers. I also know a bunch of audio engineers who aren't happy with their Linux options for audio editing/processing.
I'm not saying that Photoshop is a good example of "Linux sucking" as though everyone needs Photoshop. It's just... you know... if you need Photoshop, then Linux might not be the OS that will serve your needs best.
All things being equal, if you know your hardware will be supported on both systems and... let's say you're mostly using Firefox and OpenOffice, I'd probably recommend Ubuntu over Win7 for most people. I'm just pointing out that it depends on what you need.
...but they're harder to fix when they do occur due to lack of direct manufacturer support.
I have no doubt that many of the hardware problems I've experienced have been related to this, but that doesn't necessarily help me. I had one problem with the latest release of Ubuntu that prevented me from installing it or even booting the LiveCD. Turned out it was some bug using NVIDEA cards with dual monitors.
So whoever we want to blame, it can still be a bit of a problem. However, I'll also note that I've had situations where Windows required that you download a driver from the manufacturer's site, but Linux just detected it on install. Hardware support isn't bad, but still I don't feel like you can just assume that your hardware will be supported. Of course, the situation is improved if Dell is selling you a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed.
If you already own such packages, most of them work well in Wine these days
WINE is great, but it's not to the point where you can take it for granted. You can just assume that it will run any program you throw at it, trouble-free. And I wouldn't bet money on my mom being able to figure out how to install WINE and install applications in WINE and troubleshoot whatever problems are likely to arise from that process.
So it's not the laws and judges, but it's the "legal system"? Can you spell out that distinction better?
Hell, if you are totally new to computers and have no interest in learning much of anything about how they work, I'd suggest getting a Mac. Then you need never worry yourself about the internals, it "just works," as they say.
Somehow I'm not surprised that Dell doesn't offer that advice.
Yeah, I think there are a couple Linux distributions that really are "ready" and will actually provide a better experience for normal stuff (e.g. web browsing, email, word processing). A bunch of free apps, kept up to date through a single updater, all free.
However, I've still had some problems with hardware support in a couple cases (each Ubuntu release seems to fix some problems and introduce others) and you're still missing some commercial packages that might be vital for a lot of users (e.g. Photoshop, where GIMP is pretty good but might still not be a viable alternative).
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for someone to try out, but I'd hesitate to claim, "this will do everything you want and you won't have any problems". But to be fair, I'd hesitate to claim that about OSX or Windows, either.
"Loser pays" sounds good when you imagine the "good guy" is getting sued and he racks up a bunch of legal bills winning against frivolous lawsuits, but what about when the whole thing is turned around?
Like lets say McDonald's was putting neurotoxins into Happy Meals and my child becomes permanently disabled because of it. I sue McDonald's, and they hire millions of dollars worth of lawyers who trounce my cheap lawyer. Now I'm on the hook for millions of dollars in legal fees?
Or is that not how it works?
Better solution: make better laws, appoint better judges.
I kind of hate when you get a problem that stems from people doing stupid things and everyone runs around trying to figure out how to rejigger the system to make stupid things impossible. There is no systematic way to stop stupid greedy corrupt people from wreaking havoc. You can come up with systems that will diminish the amount of damage any one stupid greedy corrupt person can do, but that's about it. If you let stupid greedy corrupt people stay in charge, they'll still wreak havoc.