You still misunderstand. The vast majority of crop patents held by Monsanto are on crops that they didn't breed, modify, grow, change, etc.
They patented them because they could and because no one had.
Can you be more specific? What pre-existing crop variety has been patented by Monsanto without any form of modification by genetic engineering, selective breeding, or hybridization? A link would be helpful.
Considering we spend a billion dollars twice a week on Iraq, I don't see how the current people in charge would get worked up about spending that amount over several years of development.
If biomedical research were regarded as a priority equivalent to the military, then the NIH budget wouldn't be less than 1/16th of the military budget.
The government, exactly the same as they do today. Those things cost money, but the government pays for them (via grants and the welfare state). It is a myth that private industry is pouring money into these things. It isn't.
Wrong. And I say this as an academic pharmacologist and recipient of NIH grants. For the government to fund the clinical studies required to bring drugs to the clinic would be massive expansion of government expenditures on biomedical research (or a drastic diversion of funds from basic research)
The problem is that 20 years, or 17 years, or even 10 years, is simply too long in the modern scientific world. It may have taken 20 years back in the 1950s or the 1970s for these sorts of things to (A) turn a profit while (B) not stagnating the scientific community, but that balance does not work well today.
In the pharmaceutical industry, it very commonly takes 10 years to bring a drug from the point of patentability to the point at which it can be marketed, at which time the patent has only a few years left, so the notion that patent periods are too long is incorrect. This has led to an excessive focus on drugs that can be brought to market rapidly after patent--i.e. minor variations on existing drugs or reformulations.
And this scientific process has to be a for profit corporate enterprise why?
Because nobody has so far come up with any other successful way of doing it. The cost of doing it is so high that only a large corporation or a government has the resources to do it. Moreover, the sums of money are so great that it is hard to imagine any government managing such large investments based on scientific need without corruption or pork barrel politics. Which is why I find Stiglitz's proposal of publicly funded prizes intriguing. It seems to me that it is worth a try. Moreover, Stiglitz's proposal has the advantage is that it does not require abandoning our current system--which despite being unsatisfactory in a number of respects--is actually working, in favor of a new, untried system. There is no reason a prize system could not work in parallel with conventional commercial development. A prize could be set up in an area that is being underserved by the current system. My suggestion would be new antibiotics. Antibiotics are not an area of strong industrial development because the profit potential is limited. Nobody wants to pay big bucks for a new antibiotic while the old generics are still working. The problem is that when there is an outbreak of a major resistant strain, it is too late to start development.
There are already very effective generic anti-parasitic drugs, such as Praziquantel [wikipedia.org], available at reasonable prices. There may be human conditions which are not well treated because they are uncommon, but parasites are probably not the best example. In many cases, better access to clean water and increased use of certain pesticides like DDT would be much cheaper and more effective than continued use of drugs.
This is comparing apples and oranges. Public health measures are a preventative, not a treatment. Or to put it another way, when somebody shows up in a clinic with a parasitic disease, you can't give them a glass of water and a shot of DDT and send them home. This is not to diminish the importance of preventatives, but a) they require a level of social organization and stability that is not always present, and b) they rarely completely eliminate disease, so you still need effective treatments.
As the saying goes, once you are up to your neck in alligators, it too late to talk about draining the swamp.
However, it is also important to remember that many of the so called blockbuster drugs developed and patented are targeted at non-life threatening problems which are concentrated in the first world nations of Europe, Japan, the United States and others.
This is true, but it is also part of the problem. There is far less private investment into serious medical problems of the third world (parasitic diseases, for example), because the profit potential for such drugs is so limited, even though the potential for relief of human misery may be very great.
While I am no expert, nor am I really FOR these kinds of patents there is a valid reasoning TO have them. Primarily, it is reasoned that patents, including intellectual, drive innovation as people can actually make a profit on their discoveries as opposed to just being copy-catted.
Actually, the rationale for patent is to encourage inventors to make their inventions and discoveries public and to allow them to pass into the public domain after a period of time, rather than being held indefinitely as trade secrets. For example, pharmaceutical companies typically do not publish their basic research until they have patented the drugs that have come out of that research. But that basic research, once published, may serve as the basis for other discoveries. Without patents, the smart move would be to withhold those results indefinitely.
If there's one area where I think Eminent Domain applies, it is to this sort of "property." If the pharmaceutacals "own" a cancer drug, an AIDS drug, a heart valve palsy drug, then fucking TAKE it from them and give it to the world.
And do you really think that pharmaceutical companies are going to invest in development of drugs for cancer, AIDS, or heart valve palsy if there is a serious risk that it will just be taken from them without reasonable compensation? It would make more sense to invest in developing new "penis pills"
Ask Monsanto. They have patents on over 11,000 crops, only about 10% of which are genetically modified. The rest are natural varieties, just as God / Nature created them.
Are any major crops really "just as God/Nature created them?" Almost all are genetically modified, either by modern methods of molecular genetics, or by older methods of selective breeding.
In Australia there is CSIRO and some Universities and some of the research is world class. I know other countries spend a small percentage (1 to 5% of GDP) on government research and in many cases there is a world wide cooperation. Where everything becomes skewed is when the basic research is transferred to private industry who seem to want a goose that lays the golden eggs but are not willing to put up any money.
The basic research is relatively cheap compared to the extensive animal and clinical trials needed to bring a drug to the clinic. Private industry ends up putting up the bulk of the money.
There are very few private companies that actually do serious research and for those that do many of them do rely on Government funding
I don't know where you get this idea. Most of the major pharmaceutical companies do serious research, and they get little government funding. I've seen some really top-quality research coming out of industrial labs. Most government funding goes for basic research that is so far from clinical application that it would be hard to get private investors to put up the funding.
Actually you have that backwards - open researchalways spurs innovation. Notice how most new pharma drugs aren't cures for anything but along the lines of Viagra? You really don't see the type of innovation in pharma that you do in the tech world.
I've seen some extremely innovative research coming out of pharma. Genuine cures are inherently hard to find, and it doesn't matter who is doing the development. You don't see many cures coming out of academic research, either. Perhaps gene therapy or stem cell therapy will end up leading to cures, but the technology isn't there yet. And there is a lot of work on both of these technologies coming out of both industrial and academic labs.
Well these blind ends are part of science and discovery. And typically no one "takes the blame" at a pharma when a drug fails in Phase 3 clinical trials. Thems the breaks. By federally funding basic science and drug innovation, you can then have multiple suppliers for the same drug based on the federal formulary. This in turn leads to lower priced drugs.
So if the government spent, say, a billion dollars developing a new drug, and the drug they produced ended up doing more harm to be good and had to be abandoned, you think the public and the press would simply say "Them's the breaks?" No congressional investigations, no 20:20 hindsight political scandal over whether Congressman so-and-so supported the project because the lab was in his district? None of the sort of stuff that routinely happens if the government invests a billion dollars into building a fighter plane that doesn't fly?
I'm really curious where all that money is going. Maybe stuff is expensive -due- to patents to begin with?
No, clinical trials are inherently expensive. You need large numbers of patients to reach reliable conclusions, and the trials need to be supervised by medical personnel, frequently conducted using hospital facilities, followed with numerous expensive clinical tests, etc. Just the salaries of conducting such a study drives costs very high. And for a new drug, the cost of producing it in sufficient quantity for studies can be substantial (costs per dose tend to drop when it is scaled up for mass production). Even preclinical animal work can be quite costly, maintaining the animals, which may need to be specially trained or bre,d adds up to a lot of money. The patent cost is chicken feed by comparison.
Complaints about the patent system in drug development typically founder on one sticking point. Without patents, who is going to come up with the immense sums required to bring a drug from investigational status to clinical reality? One alternative, of course, is a national drug discovery enterprise, funded by tax money. The problem with that, however, is that the funds required are immense, and the risks are high. Who is going to take the blame if the product of a billion-dollar drug discovery effort fails in Phase III trials, something that happens rather frequently to pharmaceutical companies? Not to mention the risks that such an effort would turn into another pork boondoggle, with money being expended in response to political rather than medical needs.
Stiglitz's proposal offers an intriguing compromise--a system of federally funded prizes for private development of "open source" pharmaceuticals. Moreover, it could potentially coexist with the current patent system, perhaps initially focusing on areas that are underserved by the pharmaceutical industry, such as development of new antibiotics. Of course, the prizes would have to be very large to attract private development, given that the open source requirement would greatly limit the profit potential of the drugs discovered. However, the prizes could reasonably be staged--so much for successfully passing Phase I, so much for successfully passing Phase II, etc. etc.
I currently have a Chinese-made upconverting DVD player. Chinese made because the US and Japanese manufacturers have knuckled under to the demands of the entertainment industry that no DVD player will output HD content over component video cables. (Now think for a moment just how mind-numbingly stupid this restriction is. Upconverting DVD players don't actually output video in true HD, because the movie isn't on the DVD in HD in the first place, and no process can add more information that was there to begin with. All an upconverting DVD player does is interpolate. An upconverted signal is the absolute last thing that any pirate could want, because it massively increases the amount of data required to copy the signal, without adding any information. So the entertainment industry, out of sheer ignorance has added a completely useless restriction that imposes considerable inconvenience on the consumer. Many older HD TV's only have component inputs, and even newer ones typically have only one HDMI or DVI input. And HDMI/DVI switchboxes are much more expensive than component ones. So consumers end up switching cables, shelling out extra money for switchboxes--or doing what I did, and buying a Chinese DVD player that is oriented toward the consumer instead of sucking up to the content industry.
Really? When someone warns you that something is hot, what do you think they're trying to say?
The problem was not that a customer might be unaware that coffee is hot and can scald; what the customer might well not know is that styrofoam becomes very soft when the contents are that hot, and that the sides of a styrofoam cup may suddenly collapse when the lid is removed, spilling its contents into your lap.
It's not obvious to you that the cups are pretty flimsy, and you ought to be pretty careful when handling them? Anyway, I'm not sure what your basing the "catastrophic cup collapse" on, according to the Wikipedia description of the case "She placed the coffee cup between her knees and pulled the far side of the lid toward her to remove it. In the process, she spilled the entire cup of coffee on her lap." No mention of a "catastrophic cup collapse," just someone being not particularly bright.
Yes, the cup spilled. The question is why it spilled, which is not addressed in the Wikipedia entry. But to anybody who has actually handled a styrofoam cup filled with very hot liquid, the source of the accident is quite obvious. The styrofoam becomes very soft, but it is not apparent because the top stabilizes it. The situation described, with light pressure on both sides of the cup, is exactly that which causes the cup to collapse, and the collapse occurs suddenly upon removal of the stabilizing lid. The liquid squirts out at right angles to the pressure (so it is not surprising that the hot coffee between her knees ended up in her lap). It is not easy to anticipate unless you have experienced it or specifically been warned against it. Basically, styrofoam cups are not really suitable for dispensing very hot liquids, especially with a cover. (It's not so dangerous when the cup is uncovered; it cools more rapidly, and you can more readily feel how soft the cup is when you pick it up, so you are less likely to accidentally apply enough pressure to cause it to collapse and spill). Cardboard cups are much, much safer.
Actually, the case descriptions say this very thing. From Wikipedia and the Overlawyered link: "Liebeck was wearing cotton sweatpants; they absorbed the coffee and held it against her skin as she sat in the puddle of hot liquid for over 90 seconds, scalding her."
And once again, if you understand how hot liquids behave, you realize immediately that it was not the puddle, but the liquid absorbed into her clothing that did the damage.
Yes, as the link says, she was wearing cotton sweat pants, which absorb and hold liquid very well. This is unfortunate, but it is hardly McDonald's fault.
I don't think that it is surprising that the jury concluded that a reasonable person ought to be able to anticipate that a spill of scalding hot liquid in the confines of an automobile is likely to do damage, not necessarily in every instance, but often enough to be worth taking reasonable precautions to prevent--such as reducing the temperature of the coffee or using a stronger cup. Particularly since this was not the first time somebody had been hurt in this way.
It is fairly obvious that the cup is soft and that the lid is helping to keep it rigid, a warning to that effect really shouldn't be necessary.
Actually, it is not that obvious until your first experience of a catastrophic cup collapse
AFAIK, cardboard cups suffer from the same problem, they are also not very rigid without the lid.
They are, however, much more rigid that a styrofoam cup filled with very hot liquid, and they do not dramatically become less rigid when the contents are hot, so the customer is less likely to get an unpleasant and scalding surprise.
However, most people are bright enough to not open a container containing hot liquid directly over their genitals. I don't know about you, but I usually lean forward and hold the cup over the vehicle floor, or the center console, or anywhere else that is not directly over my body. Furthermore, most people won't sit in the hot liquid for 90 seconds while it is burning them.
If you've ever had a styrofoam cup collapse on you, you know that the sudden collapse of the cup can cause the liquid to squirt out several inches. And I don't think anybody suggested that the woman in question was sitting in a hot puddle for 90 seconds (in fact, liquid in a puddle cools rapidly by evaporation and is not dangerously hot after a few seconds). As I understand it, however, the hot liquid soaked into her clothes and undergarments. So how fast can you strip off all of your clothes, starting out belted in an automobile?
My gut is telling me these charming lawsuits are coming from a group of people (Homo Sapiens Moronicus) who think they're actually supposed to throw the Wiimote as a baseball or bowling ball, and the strap is supposed to keep it from getting away from you.
Class action suits are not filed by stupid people who accidentally threw their remotes. They are filed by smart, unethical lawyers who realize that Nintendo will give them a settlement to make them go away and avoid the bad publicity of a trial. The numerous individual members of the class (everybody who bought a Wii) individually receive a pittance--probably a discount coupon good for $5 off on their next Wii game--but the lawyer gets a percentage of the huge total, and goes home much richer for almost no work.
Although a lot of people have argued that the ruling was faulty based on the fact that the temperature was not extraordinarily hot for coffee (which it wasn't) and that many people like coffee this hot (which is true), the court clearly considered not just the temperature of the coffee, but all of the circumstances under which it was served. So while the temperature of the coffee might be perfectly appropriate for coffee served at a table in a ceramic cup, MacDonalds was serving it at that temperature in a styrofoam cup that softens under heat. The cup is stabilized by the rigid lid, and is fine as long as the lid is firmly in place, but it has a tendency to suddenly collapse with even fairly gentle pressure on the sides if the lid is removed. And they were serving it this way to people in automobiles, with separate sugar that required the buyer to remove the lid. A "contents are hot" warning hardly alleviates the hazard, because that does not really convey the nature of the hazard. Perhaps a warning more along the lines of "Warning, cup may suddenly collapse and spill hot contents if lid is removed" would have given MacDonald's more protection from liability. Serving the coffee cooler would have been one option, but hardly the only one; they could also have chose to use a rigid cardboard cup that is not prone to softening and collapse. Even then, the court only found MacDonalds to be partially at fault.
The drop shelf in PathFinder is in the upper left corner of the PathFinder window, and works quite well. My only complaint with that program (which I use exclusively in place of Finder) is that the shelf is local to that window; I think that the shelf should be global to all Finder windows.
You can do a timeout on the cutting function. If the file isn't pasted within 5 minutes, or another file is cut before the first is pasted, then the cut function is cancelled, and the file stays where it first was.
Then you have a situation in which "cut" means one thing in some applications and another thing in others--sometimes it really means "cut" but other times it means "mark as source for move (if you are fast enough)"
Finder's Hobbled Cut Command: Cutting files is stupid. How about a Shelf
I agree; cutting is a bad solution to the problem. What if something goes wrong, and you never complete the paste, or you forget and copy something else and end up deleting a file you only wanted to move? I use Path Finder's shelf, and also find that to be a superior solution.
I hate multiple buttons on notebooks, and consider the single-button notebook design one of the great virtues of the Powerbooks. On mice, fine--I use the right "button" of my Mighty Mouse all the time. But there is no way I want to twist my wrist into awkward RSI inducing configurations to reliably access a right notebook button. And I hate getting a right click when I wanted a left click because my hand happens to be on the right side of the pad. I think the two-finger-plus-click solution works quite well, and does so without destroying my wrist.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you be more specific? What pre-existing crop variety has been patented by Monsanto without any form of modification by genetic engineering, selective breeding, or hybridization? A link would be helpful.
If biomedical research were regarded as a priority equivalent to the military, then the NIH budget wouldn't be less than 1/16th of the military budget.
Wrong. And I say this as an academic pharmacologist and recipient of NIH grants. For the government to fund the clinical studies required to bring drugs to the clinic would be massive expansion of government expenditures on biomedical research (or a drastic diversion of funds from basic research)
Not all TVs do such a good job.
In the pharmaceutical industry, it very commonly takes 10 years to bring a drug from the point of patentability to the point at which it can be marketed, at which time the patent has only a few years left, so the notion that patent periods are too long is incorrect. This has led to an excessive focus on drugs that can be brought to market rapidly after patent--i.e. minor variations on existing drugs or reformulations.
Because nobody has so far come up with any other successful way of doing it. The cost of doing it is so high that only a large corporation or a government has the resources to do it. Moreover, the sums of money are so great that it is hard to imagine any government managing such large investments based on scientific need without corruption or pork barrel politics. Which is why I find Stiglitz's proposal of publicly funded prizes intriguing. It seems to me that it is worth a try. Moreover, Stiglitz's proposal has the advantage is that it does not require abandoning our current system--which despite being unsatisfactory in a number of respects--is actually working, in favor of a new, untried system. There is no reason a prize system could not work in parallel with conventional commercial development. A prize could be set up in an area that is being underserved by the current system. My suggestion would be new antibiotics. Antibiotics are not an area of strong industrial development because the profit potential is limited. Nobody wants to pay big bucks for a new antibiotic while the old generics are still working. The problem is that when there is an outbreak of a major resistant strain, it is too late to start development.
This is comparing apples and oranges. Public health measures are a preventative, not a treatment. Or to put it another way, when somebody shows up in a clinic with a parasitic disease, you can't give them a glass of water and a shot of DDT and send them home. This is not to diminish the importance of preventatives, but a) they require a level of social organization and stability that is not always present, and b) they rarely completely eliminate disease, so you still need effective treatments.
As the saying goes, once you are up to your neck in alligators, it too late to talk about draining the swamp.
This is true, but it is also part of the problem. There is far less private investment into serious medical problems of the third world (parasitic diseases, for example), because the profit potential for such drugs is so limited, even though the potential for relief of human misery may be very great.
Actually, the rationale for patent is to encourage inventors to make their inventions and discoveries public and to allow them to pass into the public domain after a period of time, rather than being held indefinitely as trade secrets. For example, pharmaceutical companies typically do not publish their basic research until they have patented the drugs that have come out of that research. But that basic research, once published, may serve as the basis for other discoveries. Without patents, the smart move would be to withhold those results indefinitely.
And do you really think that pharmaceutical companies are going to invest in development of drugs for cancer, AIDS, or heart valve palsy if there is a serious risk that it will just be taken from them without reasonable compensation? It would make more sense to invest in developing new "penis pills"
Are any major crops really "just as God/Nature created them?" Almost all are genetically modified, either by modern methods of molecular genetics, or by older methods of selective breeding.
The basic research is relatively cheap compared to the extensive animal and clinical trials needed to bring a drug to the clinic. Private industry ends up putting up the bulk of the money.
I don't know where you get this idea. Most of the major pharmaceutical companies do serious research, and they get little government funding. I've seen some really top-quality research coming out of industrial labs. Most government funding goes for basic research that is so far from clinical application that it would be hard to get private investors to put up the funding.
I've seen some extremely innovative research coming out of pharma. Genuine cures are inherently hard to find, and it doesn't matter who is doing the development. You don't see many cures coming out of academic research, either. Perhaps gene therapy or stem cell therapy will end up leading to cures, but the technology isn't there yet. And there is a lot of work on both of these technologies coming out of both industrial and academic labs.
So if the government spent, say, a billion dollars developing a new drug, and the drug they produced ended up doing more harm to be good and had to be abandoned, you think the public and the press would simply say "Them's the breaks?" No congressional investigations, no 20:20 hindsight political scandal over whether Congressman so-and-so supported the project because the lab was in his district? None of the sort of stuff that routinely happens if the government invests a billion dollars into building a fighter plane that doesn't fly?
No, clinical trials are inherently expensive. You need large numbers of patients to reach reliable conclusions, and the trials need to be supervised by medical personnel, frequently conducted using hospital facilities, followed with numerous expensive clinical tests, etc. Just the salaries of conducting such a study drives costs very high. And for a new drug, the cost of producing it in sufficient quantity for studies can be substantial (costs per dose tend to drop when it is scaled up for mass production). Even preclinical animal work can be quite costly, maintaining the animals, which may need to be specially trained or bre,d adds up to a lot of money. The patent cost is chicken feed by comparison.
Complaints about the patent system in drug development typically founder on one sticking point. Without patents, who is going to come up with the immense sums required to bring a drug from investigational status to clinical reality? One alternative, of course, is a national drug discovery enterprise, funded by tax money. The problem with that, however, is that the funds required are immense, and the risks are high. Who is going to take the blame if the product of a billion-dollar drug discovery effort fails in Phase III trials, something that happens rather frequently to pharmaceutical companies? Not to mention the risks that such an effort would turn into another pork boondoggle, with money being expended in response to political rather than medical needs.
Stiglitz's proposal offers an intriguing compromise--a system of federally funded prizes for private development of "open source" pharmaceuticals. Moreover, it could potentially coexist with the current patent system, perhaps initially focusing on areas that are underserved by the pharmaceutical industry, such as development of new antibiotics. Of course, the prizes would have to be very large to attract private development, given that the open source requirement would greatly limit the profit potential of the drugs discovered. However, the prizes could reasonably be staged--so much for successfully passing Phase I, so much for successfully passing Phase II, etc. etc.
I currently have a Chinese-made upconverting DVD player. Chinese made because the US and Japanese manufacturers have knuckled under to the demands of the entertainment industry that no DVD player will output HD content over component video cables. (Now think for a moment just how mind-numbingly stupid this restriction is. Upconverting DVD players don't actually output video in true HD, because the movie isn't on the DVD in HD in the first place, and no process can add more information that was there to begin with. All an upconverting DVD player does is interpolate. An upconverted signal is the absolute last thing that any pirate could want, because it massively increases the amount of data required to copy the signal, without adding any information. So the entertainment industry, out of sheer ignorance has added a completely useless restriction that imposes considerable inconvenience on the consumer. Many older HD TV's only have component inputs, and even newer ones typically have only one HDMI or DVI input. And HDMI/DVI switchboxes are much more expensive than component ones. So consumers end up switching cables, shelling out extra money for switchboxes--or doing what I did, and buying a Chinese DVD player that is oriented toward the consumer instead of sucking up to the content industry.
Really? When someone warns you that something is hot, what do you think they're trying to say?
The problem was not that a customer might be unaware that coffee is hot and can scald; what the customer might well not know is that styrofoam becomes very soft when the contents are that hot, and that the sides of a styrofoam cup may suddenly collapse when the lid is removed, spilling its contents into your lap.
Yes, the cup spilled. The question is why it spilled, which is not addressed in the Wikipedia entry. But to anybody who has actually handled a styrofoam cup filled with very hot liquid, the source of the accident is quite obvious. The styrofoam becomes very soft, but it is not apparent because the top stabilizes it. The situation described, with light pressure on both sides of the cup, is exactly that which causes the cup to collapse, and the collapse occurs suddenly upon removal of the stabilizing lid. The liquid squirts out at right angles to the pressure (so it is not surprising that the hot coffee between her knees ended up in her lap). It is not easy to anticipate unless you have experienced it or specifically been warned against it. Basically, styrofoam cups are not really suitable for dispensing very hot liquids, especially with a cover. (It's not so dangerous when the cup is uncovered; it cools more rapidly, and you can more readily feel how soft the cup is when you pick it up, so you are less likely to accidentally apply enough pressure to cause it to collapse and spill). Cardboard cups are much, much safer.
And once again, if you understand how hot liquids behave, you realize immediately that it was not the puddle, but the liquid absorbed into her clothing that did the damage.
I don't think that it is surprising that the jury concluded that a reasonable person ought to be able to anticipate that a spill of scalding hot liquid in the confines of an automobile is likely to do damage, not necessarily in every instance, but often enough to be worth taking reasonable precautions to prevent--such as reducing the temperature of the coffee or using a stronger cup. Particularly since this was not the first time somebody had been hurt in this way.
Actually, it is not that obvious until your first experience of a catastrophic cup collapse
They are, however, much more rigid that a styrofoam cup filled with very hot liquid, and they do not dramatically become less rigid when the contents are hot, so the customer is less likely to get an unpleasant and scalding surprise.
If you've ever had a styrofoam cup collapse on you, you know that the sudden collapse of the cup can cause the liquid to squirt out several inches. And I don't think anybody suggested that the woman in question was sitting in a hot puddle for 90 seconds (in fact, liquid in a puddle cools rapidly by evaporation and is not dangerously hot after a few seconds). As I understand it, however, the hot liquid soaked into her clothes and undergarments. So how fast can you strip off all of your clothes, starting out belted in an automobile?
Class action suits are not filed by stupid people who accidentally threw their remotes. They are filed by smart, unethical lawyers who realize that Nintendo will give them a settlement to make them go away and avoid the bad publicity of a trial. The numerous individual members of the class (everybody who bought a Wii) individually receive a pittance--probably a discount coupon good for $5 off on their next Wii game--but the lawyer gets a percentage of the huge total, and goes home much richer for almost no work.
Although a lot of people have argued that the ruling was faulty based on the fact that the temperature was not extraordinarily hot for coffee (which it wasn't) and that many people like coffee this hot (which is true), the court clearly considered not just the temperature of the coffee, but all of the circumstances under which it was served. So while the temperature of the coffee might be perfectly appropriate for coffee served at a table in a ceramic cup, MacDonalds was serving it at that temperature in a styrofoam cup that softens under heat. The cup is stabilized by the rigid lid, and is fine as long as the lid is firmly in place, but it has a tendency to suddenly collapse with even fairly gentle pressure on the sides if the lid is removed. And they were serving it this way to people in automobiles, with separate sugar that required the buyer to remove the lid. A "contents are hot" warning hardly alleviates the hazard, because that does not really convey the nature of the hazard. Perhaps a warning more along the lines of "Warning, cup may suddenly collapse and spill hot contents if lid is removed" would have given MacDonald's more protection from liability. Serving the coffee cooler would have been one option, but hardly the only one; they could also have chose to use a rigid cardboard cup that is not prone to softening and collapse. Even then, the court only found MacDonalds to be partially at fault.
The drop shelf in PathFinder is in the upper left corner of the PathFinder window, and works quite well. My only complaint with that program (which I use exclusively in place of Finder) is that the shelf is local to that window; I think that the shelf should be global to all Finder windows.
Then you have a situation in which "cut" means one thing in some applications and another thing in others--sometimes it really means "cut" but other times it means "mark as source for move (if you are fast enough)"
Finder's Hobbled Cut Command: Cutting files is stupid. How about a Shelf
I agree; cutting is a bad solution to the problem. What if something goes wrong, and you never complete the paste, or you forget and copy something else and end up deleting a file you only wanted to move? I use Path Finder's shelf, and also find that to be a superior solution.
I hate multiple buttons on notebooks, and consider the single-button notebook design one of the great virtues of the Powerbooks. On mice, fine--I use the right "button" of my Mighty Mouse all the time. But there is no way I want to twist my wrist into awkward RSI inducing configurations to reliably access a right notebook button. And I hate getting a right click when I wanted a left click because my hand happens to be on the right side of the pad. I think the two-finger-plus-click solution works quite well, and does so without destroying my wrist.