The jury said that Stella was 20% responsible for her injuries. Your insistence on a black-and-white definition of fault is logically indistinguishable from a claim that the 2001 terrorist attack on New York was 100% the fault of the people who built the World Trade Center.
As to your definition of a frivolous lawsuit, saying that "the basis for the defendant's liability is hard to believe" is about as subjective a definition as I can imagine. It's only slightly better than "because I say so," in that you at least give a general description of which of your subjective beliefs are the basis for your conclusion.
My "straw-man attack" remains valid. Your proof of the case being frivolous goes as follows: (1) It is hard for me to believe that McDonald's could be at all responsible for third-degree burns resulting from a spill involving their coffee. (2) A frivolous lawsuit is one where it is hard for me to believe that the defendant is liable for the damages at issue. (3) Therefore, this was a frivolous case.
The only "specific[] of the case" to which you refer is that Stella spilled the coffee. If the McDonald's employee had dumped it on her, she would still be partially at fault for having been seated in the car. Deciding how much each party is to blame is for the jury to do, not for people who were not present to hear the evidence of each party in the case such as yourself (and myself; I just happen to give deference to the jury's findings of fact, because that was their job and they were present to do it).
Well, I need an iPod.:P I just installed a new stereo in my truck with XM built into the head unit, and threw on a $120 iPod interface to control an iPod from the head unit (much safer than using a click wheel while weaving through traffic). So now I need one, if only to test out the iPod hookup in my truck to make sure it's not defective.;-D
I was going to buy a PowerMac in three weeks. It would replace my PC and bring me to a 100%-Mac setup (I replaced my laptop with a PowerBook in March). I need to buy an iPod before mid-August. I was going to take advantage of the student discounts (hooray for continuing education!;) that they have right now, with $179 off the iPod if I buy it on the same invoice as a PowerMac.
Should I just buy the iPod and wait on the PowerMac, or should I buy the PowerMac now? Thank you.
Right. Basically, the only things that make it into the news about the legal system are things that piss people off. Nobody cares when the system works, they only care when it seems to be broken. Just like the story of the law students who supposedly failed a bar exam because they helped a 50-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while taking the exam with them, people devour and pass around news that pisses them off; but they entirely ignore the happy endings to those stories (in the bar exam case, the students' scores were adjusted almost immediately by the State Bar of California; source).
The same applies to all areas of the media and popular culture. The nightly news doesn't report on the Iraqis who are glad to be rid of Saddam, or those who went to vote earlier this year despite threats that they would be killed if they did; it focuses on the suicide bombings and setbacks, instead.
And, just like spam, it's our own collective fault that it is this way. There are enough of us who buy the crap to keep those who provide and filter it in business.
Do this for me, please. Define "frivolous lawsuit." Evidently, we are using different definitions for the term, since you use conclusory language to assert that this one was frivolous without apparently knowing much about it at all and certainly without providing any logic to connect your use of the term with any of the facts of the case. It's impossible to have a rational argument when one person bases all of his logic on his conclusion, instead of the other way around.
If I were a pedant, I'd point out that you don't "eat" coffee. But instead I'll just point out that those of us who do go into the "dirty 'restaurant' with yelling kids" know enough from glimpses of the drive-through window to know that the coffee you're getting is no better than what we got inside.
Your inability to read or write English makes this a difficult discussion to continue, but ignoring that and trying to discern some meaning from your comment, I'll point out that, of the two of us, I'm the one who is thinking at all logically. I know the facts and I base my conclusions on those facts. You, on the other hand, do not know the facts and present what might pass as your conclusions with no logical connection to the case whatsoever. Can you define "troll" in a way that includes me and excludes yourself, and then present that definition here in your native language so that I can have someone fluent in English translate it for me? Thanks.
The source for that general rule is attorneys that I know who have tried cases involving people who got burned up. And no, it's not any more linear than it is absolute, but "far enough below 100 to not be at all concerned" does make sense. If you're 70 years old and burn 20% of your body (total = 90), people should be very concerned. If you're 90 and burn 10%, they should also be concerned. But if you're 25 and burn 5%, they should not be quite so concerned (although it'd still suck to burn that much sub-dermal tissue).
Wrong. McDonald's did change the temperature of their coffee after that case.
Post-verdict investigation found that the temperature of coffee at the local Albuquerque McDonald's had dropped to 158 degrees Fahrenheit.
I'm not trying to fuck up America. America was built in large part on a sane legal system that survives to this day. Fucking up America would be allowing big business to get away with injuring people because it's cheaper to not care.
You're right, she did spill the coffee on herself. That's why the verdict was reduced - the jury found that she was 20% at fault for her injuries, and the verdict was therefore reduced by 20% from what the jury awarded her. Of course, you would know that if you knew enough of the facts of this case to even begin to have a rational discussion about it rather than just saying it was frivolous.
If you want to find frivolous lawsuits, look for those of the form Corporation A v. Corporation B. Corporations file more frivolous lawsuits (*cough*SCO*cough*) than individual plaintiffs could ever hope to. Tort reform does nothing but protect corporations from individual plaintiffs that they've injured - any lawsuit reform that you see suggested is curiously free of anything preventing frivolous lawsuits filed by corporations.
Third. Degree. Burns. Do you know what third-degree burns are? Probably not, so hereare some links to help. This is not normal from spilled coffee, especially over 6% of your body.
Moreover, McDonald's served the coffee at that temperature at their drive-throughs. They claimed in court that they expected people to take the coffee home and drink it. What kind of BS is that? You buy coffee in a drive-through because you don't have time to take it home to drink it, and McDonald's knew that perfectly well.
Here's how I try to explain the McDonald's lawsuit to people. Take a random cup of coffee and pour it on your crotch, through your pants. You would expect discomfort, maybe pain, and at the most a small blister or two. That's your average cup of coffee. But pouring a cup of McDonald's coffee on your crotch would cause third-degree burns through your pants. Ms. Liebeck received third-degree burns to more than 6% of her body - it wasn't just a blister. She didn't sue McDonald's for spilling her coffee - she sued McDonald's because spilling coffee isn't supposed to be a life-threatening event (the general rule is you take your age plus the percent of your body that got burned, and if it's over 100, you won't live; and Stella was not young - I can't find her exact age at the time, but add 6 onto your grandmother's age and tell me if it's far enough below 100 to not be at all concerned).
McDonald's could have helped their case quite a bit by showing some compassion, too - on the stand, they claimed that serving coffee that hot made it taste better, and they were at times downright belligerent to Ms. Liebeck.
The McDonald's coffee case is not proof that we need tort reform - it's proof that the system we have works. A major corporation was held accountable for injuries that its indifference to its customers caused.
The reason you have a bad impression of the legal system is because it never generates news when any of the following happens:
A legitimate victim is compensated for his loss
A frivolous claim is dismissed and the lawyer who filed it sanctioned (read: fined and disciplined) by the court
A major lawsuit makes sense if only they'd tell you one more key fact
A sibling to this comment links to an article which its own child comment points out is very helpful in understanding that not all lawsuits are bad. In fact, very few lawsuits are frivolous, and most of the frivolous lawsuits you have heard about are either debunked by snopes or quietly dismissed.
Since I normally don't buy into conspiracy theories, and because I agree with some of his policies, I won't call it anything more than a coincidence that President Bush is pro-tort-reform and there is a widespread occurrence of annoying forwarded e-mails telling lies that, if believed, would convince anyone that tort reform is necessary.
Tort reform is nothing more than big business trying to save money. Watch Fight Club and understand the business logic behind product recalls. If the legal system is "reformed" in the way that big business (and its supporters in the Republican Party; too bad I hate the Democrats more - they're hypocritical and bad, while the Republicans aren't as hypocritical but are just plain bad) wants it to be reformed, the lawsuit side of the inequality "L > R" (where L is the cost of lawsuits and R is the cost of a recall to make the product safe and avoid those lawsuits; and where L > R represents the condition where a recall will be performed to make the product safe) will always be zero, and 0 > R is never true. It just makes business sense.
Don't buy into legal reform. 99% of the time, the legal system works just fine. It just isn't news when that happens.
Inkjet printers already are disposable. You buy a printer for $25 after rebates and it comes with an ink cartridge. When you run out of ink, you see that ink cartridges are $50 and a new printer can be had for $25, so you buy the printer instead and throw the "old" one away.
Is InfoPath the design program, and you use some other program on the client side to fill in the forms? "Online" could mean anything, here, but assuming you mean "with a web browser," what server-side is required? And where does the data go?
In short: how is this different from PHP/MySQL with a WYSYWIG design component?
Besides the blurb being simply a quote from the beginning of the article, it doesn't provide any of the background information that we need. There are many of us who are curious enough about the story to justify it being on the front page of Slashdot but who don't know enough about the buzzwords and products named in the blurb to figure out how it affects us.
The precedent recently set is that you cannot distribute a tool with the intent that it be used to infringe copyrights. Grokster distributed software and said "Go illegally download songs to which you have no license!" Opera is saying "Go and download really big files!" Including Bittorrent is no different than including HTTP in their web browser, since either can be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes. What would make Opera a target is if their new release were advertised (at all!... hahaha, I kill me) with the tagline "Opera 8.5 with Bittorrent: the world of pre-release movies is at your fingertips."
I can handle the disappointment of a light saber not working despite badly I wanted it to. That doesn't even faze me. However, "buyer's remorse" doesn't quite cover what you'd feel after spending some $25,000 (just my rough estimate, although you could end up shelling out $200,000 or more) on a repainted flashlight that doesn't even work as a flashlight.
Condoms which are topologically equivalent to a sphere are also problematic. Of course, if topology were all that mattered, then condoms would just be a flat sheet of latex. Fortunately for us, topologists do not rule the Earth.
I beg to differ. On one of the DVDs, the first couple episodes had just an instrumental bluegrass theme, and then the theme song as we all know it happened in one episode without lyrics, and the next episode it was sung with lyrics as the theme song. If your statement were true, that would not have been possible all on one DVD.
I got the first two DVDs of Beverly Hillbillies for $1 each at the grocery store a while back. I had never seen episodes that early, before, and they were all hilarious. We're talking several episodes before they even wrote the lyrics to the theme song. Good stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The jury said that Stella was 20% responsible for her injuries. Your insistence on a black-and-white definition of fault is logically indistinguishable from a claim that the 2001 terrorist attack on New York was 100% the fault of the people who built the World Trade Center.
As to your definition of a frivolous lawsuit, saying that "the basis for the defendant's liability is hard to believe" is about as subjective a definition as I can imagine. It's only slightly better than "because I say so," in that you at least give a general description of which of your subjective beliefs are the basis for your conclusion.
My "straw-man attack" remains valid. Your proof of the case being frivolous goes as follows: (1) It is hard for me to believe that McDonald's could be at all responsible for third-degree burns resulting from a spill involving their coffee. (2) A frivolous lawsuit is one where it is hard for me to believe that the defendant is liable for the damages at issue. (3) Therefore, this was a frivolous case.
The only "specific[] of the case" to which you refer is that Stella spilled the coffee. If the McDonald's employee had dumped it on her, she would still be partially at fault for having been seated in the car. Deciding how much each party is to blame is for the jury to do, not for people who were not present to hear the evidence of each party in the case such as yourself (and myself; I just happen to give deference to the jury's findings of fact, because that was their job and they were present to do it).
You're close enough to win the $300 Tricky Dick Fun Bill. :P
... and search them for paper," to which Kif responds with a sigh, "Why?"
It's "Ride them to the brig
Well, I need an iPod. :P I just installed a new stereo in my truck with XM built into the head unit, and threw on a $120 iPod interface to control an iPod from the head unit (much safer than using a click wheel while weaving through traffic). So now I need one, if only to test out the iPod hookup in my truck to make sure it's not defective. ;-D
I was going to buy a PowerMac in three weeks. It would replace my PC and bring me to a 100%-Mac setup (I replaced my laptop with a PowerBook in March). I need to buy an iPod before mid-August. I was going to take advantage of the student discounts (hooray for continuing education! ;) that they have right now, with $179 off the iPod if I buy it on the same invoice as a PowerMac.
Should I just buy the iPod and wait on the PowerMac, or should I buy the PowerMac now? Thank you.
Right. Basically, the only things that make it into the news about the legal system are things that piss people off. Nobody cares when the system works, they only care when it seems to be broken. Just like the story of the law students who supposedly failed a bar exam because they helped a 50-year-old man who suffered a heart attack while taking the exam with them, people devour and pass around news that pisses them off; but they entirely ignore the happy endings to those stories (in the bar exam case, the students' scores were adjusted almost immediately by the State Bar of California; source).
The same applies to all areas of the media and popular culture. The nightly news doesn't report on the Iraqis who are glad to be rid of Saddam, or those who went to vote earlier this year despite threats that they would be killed if they did; it focuses on the suicide bombings and setbacks, instead.
And, just like spam, it's our own collective fault that it is this way. There are enough of us who buy the crap to keep those who provide and filter it in business.
Do this for me, please. Define "frivolous lawsuit." Evidently, we are using different definitions for the term, since you use conclusory language to assert that this one was frivolous without apparently knowing much about it at all and certainly without providing any logic to connect your use of the term with any of the facts of the case. It's impossible to have a rational argument when one person bases all of his logic on his conclusion, instead of the other way around.
If I were a pedant, I'd point out that you don't "eat" coffee. But instead I'll just point out that those of us who do go into the "dirty 'restaurant' with yelling kids" know enough from glimpses of the drive-through window to know that the coffee you're getting is no better than what we got inside.
Your inability to read or write English makes this a difficult discussion to continue, but ignoring that and trying to discern some meaning from your comment, I'll point out that, of the two of us, I'm the one who is thinking at all logically. I know the facts and I base my conclusions on those facts. You, on the other hand, do not know the facts and present what might pass as your conclusions with no logical connection to the case whatsoever. Can you define "troll" in a way that includes me and excludes yourself, and then present that definition here in your native language so that I can have someone fluent in English translate it for me? Thanks.
The source for that general rule is attorneys that I know who have tried cases involving people who got burned up. And no, it's not any more linear than it is absolute, but "far enough below 100 to not be at all concerned" does make sense. If you're 70 years old and burn 20% of your body (total = 90), people should be very concerned. If you're 90 and burn 10%, they should also be concerned. But if you're 25 and burn 5%, they should not be quite so concerned (although it'd still suck to burn that much sub-dermal tissue).
I'm not trying to fuck up America. America was built in large part on a sane legal system that survives to this day. Fucking up America would be allowing big business to get away with injuring people because it's cheaper to not care.
You're right, she did spill the coffee on herself. That's why the verdict was reduced - the jury found that she was 20% at fault for her injuries, and the verdict was therefore reduced by 20% from what the jury awarded her. Of course, you would know that if you knew enough of the facts of this case to even begin to have a rational discussion about it rather than just saying it was frivolous.
If you want to find frivolous lawsuits, look for those of the form Corporation A v. Corporation B. Corporations file more frivolous lawsuits (*cough*SCO*cough*) than individual plaintiffs could ever hope to. Tort reform does nothing but protect corporations from individual plaintiffs that they've injured - any lawsuit reform that you see suggested is curiously free of anything preventing frivolous lawsuits filed by corporations.
Third. Degree. Burns. Do you know what third-degree burns are? Probably not, so here are some links to help. This is not normal from spilled coffee, especially over 6% of your body.
Moreover, McDonald's served the coffee at that temperature at their drive-throughs. They claimed in court that they expected people to take the coffee home and drink it. What kind of BS is that? You buy coffee in a drive-through because you don't have time to take it home to drink it, and McDonald's knew that perfectly well.
Here's how I try to explain the McDonald's lawsuit to people. Take a random cup of coffee and pour it on your crotch, through your pants. You would expect discomfort, maybe pain, and at the most a small blister or two. That's your average cup of coffee. But pouring a cup of McDonald's coffee on your crotch would cause third-degree burns through your pants. Ms. Liebeck received third-degree burns to more than 6% of her body - it wasn't just a blister. She didn't sue McDonald's for spilling her coffee - she sued McDonald's because spilling coffee isn't supposed to be a life-threatening event (the general rule is you take your age plus the percent of your body that got burned, and if it's over 100, you won't live; and Stella was not young - I can't find her exact age at the time, but add 6 onto your grandmother's age and tell me if it's far enough below 100 to not be at all concerned).
McDonald's could have helped their case quite a bit by showing some compassion, too - on the stand, they claimed that serving coffee that hot made it taste better, and they were at times downright belligerent to Ms. Liebeck.
The McDonald's coffee case is not proof that we need tort reform - it's proof that the system we have works. A major corporation was held accountable for injuries that its indifference to its customers caused.
A sibling to this comment links to an article which its own child comment points out is very helpful in understanding that not all lawsuits are bad. In fact, very few lawsuits are frivolous, and most of the frivolous lawsuits you have heard about are either debunked by snopes or quietly dismissed.
Since I normally don't buy into conspiracy theories, and because I agree with some of his policies, I won't call it anything more than a coincidence that President Bush is pro-tort-reform and there is a widespread occurrence of annoying forwarded e-mails telling lies that, if believed, would convince anyone that tort reform is necessary.
Tort reform is nothing more than big business trying to save money. Watch Fight Club and understand the business logic behind product recalls. If the legal system is "reformed" in the way that big business (and its supporters in the Republican Party; too bad I hate the Democrats more - they're hypocritical and bad, while the Republicans aren't as hypocritical but are just plain bad) wants it to be reformed, the lawsuit side of the inequality "L > R" (where L is the cost of lawsuits and R is the cost of a recall to make the product safe and avoid those lawsuits; and where L > R represents the condition where a recall will be performed to make the product safe) will always be zero, and 0 > R is never true. It just makes business sense.
Don't buy into legal reform. 99% of the time, the legal system works just fine. It just isn't news when that happens.
Inkjet printers already are disposable. You buy a printer for $25 after rebates and it comes with an ink cartridge. When you run out of ink, you see that ink cartridges are $50 and a new printer can be had for $25, so you buy the printer instead and throw the "old" one away.
Is InfoPath the design program, and you use some other program on the client side to fill in the forms? "Online" could mean anything, here, but assuming you mean "with a web browser," what server-side is required? And where does the data go?
In short: how is this different from PHP/MySQL with a WYSYWIG design component?
Besides the blurb being simply a quote from the beginning of the article, it doesn't provide any of the background information that we need. There are many of us who are curious enough about the story to justify it being on the front page of Slashdot but who don't know enough about the buzzwords and products named in the blurb to figure out how it affects us.
Which is the best flamefest?
BSD License vs. GPL
Linux vs. FreeBSD
Emacs vs. vi
C++ vs. Java
Python vs. Perl
PHP vs. Ruby on Rails
Microsoft vs. SCO
iTunes Music Store also sells audiobooks, but sadly not for 99-cents per "song." I wonder if the gift cards are good for audiobooks.
Okay, so some people wouldn't be as disappointed as I would be. :P
The precedent recently set is that you cannot distribute a tool with the intent that it be used to infringe copyrights. Grokster distributed software and said "Go illegally download songs to which you have no license!" Opera is saying "Go and download really big files!" Including Bittorrent is no different than including HTTP in their web browser, since either can be used for both lawful and unlawful purposes. What would make Opera a target is if their new release were advertised (at all! ... hahaha, I kill me) with the tagline "Opera 8.5 with Bittorrent: the world of pre-release movies is at your fingertips."
I can handle the disappointment of a light saber not working despite badly I wanted it to. That doesn't even faze me. However, "buyer's remorse" doesn't quite cover what you'd feel after spending some $25,000 (just my rough estimate, although you could end up shelling out $200,000 or more) on a repainted flashlight that doesn't even work as a flashlight.
Condoms which are topologically equivalent to a sphere are also problematic. Of course, if topology were all that mattered, then condoms would just be a flat sheet of latex. Fortunately for us, topologists do not rule the Earth.
I beg to differ. On one of the DVDs, the first couple episodes had just an instrumental bluegrass theme, and then the theme song as we all know it happened in one episode without lyrics, and the next episode it was sung with lyrics as the theme song. If your statement were true, that would not have been possible all on one DVD.
I got the first two DVDs of Beverly Hillbillies for $1 each at the grocery store a while back. I had never seen episodes that early, before, and they were all hilarious. We're talking several episodes before they even wrote the lyrics to the theme song. Good stuff.