If Nokia had been able to abandon it's own failed software and adopt android I have no doubt the company would be in much better shape than it is today.
Wasn't Nokia already in massive decline, long before any hint of Windows came on the scene? They were selling feature phones, which are low profit-per-unit, and releasing dud after dud in the smartphone space while Apple & Android exploded.
They could have gone with Android, but then they would have been "just another Android maker," fighting tooth and claw with Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and the rest over the small portion of industry *profits* being earned by Android smartphones. (Remember, 50-75% of the *profits* are being earned by Apple in this space).
Instead, they decided to go with a third alternative - WP7, and bet that they could duplicate the iPhone model, with a different OS than anybody else is offering running on their hardware. It's a massive bet, but Microsoft and Nokia might have the marketing & financial clout to pull it off - but that very much remains to be seen. If they're able to push WP7 as a viable third alternative, they could be in a similar position as Apple: a hardware AND software package that are differentiated from the competition in some way other than "it's a different color."
You might have heard about the recent crash of a Navy jet (F-18D, IIRC) just a week ago in "free-at-that-time" Virginia Beach.
You see, the military does this thing called "training," even during peacetime. And when you're flying training missions, even in peacetime, accidents and equipment failure happen.
Even with JDAM bombs, you're better off dropping them one at a time with a laser designator for targeting. A small fighter/bomber like an F-18 fills that role better.
Large-scale bombing (see: "Shock and Awe") is not best accomplished via F-18's dropping a couple JDAM's at a time. B-52's can carry quite a few JDAM's or cruise missiles per mission, hit numerous targets during one mission, and can ALSO carpet bomb. There's very little use for long-range / large-scale bombing after the initial days/weeks of hostilities, so the tempo of operations slows down. But you don't just decommission all of your high capacity bombers because you're done with large scale bombing for "this current war."
Narcotic is mostly useless as a medical term, anyway. It originally described sedatives - e.g., "drugs that put you to sleep," hence the 'narc' in the name. It was also used to describe opioids - e.g., heroin, morphine - most of which DO have a sedative effect, but not all sedatives are opioids. Toss in the legal system overloading the term to mean "anything illegal," and you're pretty much left with relying on context to determine what's meant.
DEA is a legal entity, arrests were made; it's reasonable to assume 'narcotic' is being used in the legal sense, rather than the medical/pharmacological meaning.
I doubt they even had to "crack encryption" on any of these services. Place an order, or two or three, and see where they originate. Chances are, you can locate the origin point pretty quickly. Then you just put some surveillance on the place(s) the shipments are originating from, and place some more orders, and find the people who are inexplicably rich while not leaving the house all day except to go to the post office. Put THEM under surveillance and chances are you just busted your Tor-using drug shop, congratulations Agent!
As soon as you're shipping physical products through a public shipping network, you're going to be relying solely on "blending in with the crowd" to maintain your anonymity.
Depends on how the term is used - in legal terms, a "narcotic" describes any prohibited / illegal drug. LSD and Ecstasy both count as narcotics in the legal sense. Considering we're reading a report about a legal action, it's entirely appropriate for them to use the term that way.
The statement was that "using the term 'brogrammer' is as insulting as sexism." I pointed out that it is not some "made up term" that this article invented - there are people out there using the word, in earnest. So if you're all getting this insulted by the term 'brogrammer,' used by a small number of people in the population, imagine how many times more insulted women can be made to feel.
And all of the people saying, "I personally know a handful of girl programmers who are excellent at what they do!" -- that's not the point. If you read the article, he talks specifically about the dominance of "young, male" culture at small companies and startups, and the fact that it's driving away women, as well as OLDER MEN, who also don't fit in with the whole "brogrammer" ethos. But again, you'd have to have actually read TFA to understand these points, and I know this is Slashdot.
If you can find a community of more than a few thousand that doesn't have a group of idiot bigots making up 0.5% of it, then please let me know...
I see, so you're saying that the presence of bigotry is something that's acceptable - as long as it's at low levels? I'm realistic enough to know you will never "eradicate" bigoted behavior, but that doesn't mean a good public shaming isn't in order for the small number of idiotic fools who happen to live in your community.
TFA identifies at least one person whose actual job title is "resident brogrammer." It also refers to a community on facebook that's 21,000 strong dedicated to the subject.
It's not a word being made up by an evil media trying to hurt your little feelings, it's an actual term at least SOME programmers are using.
Frankly, if somebody tried to call me that, or asked that I call them that, I'd punch them in the mouth just on principle. But that doesn't change the fact that some idiots out there are actually using the term in earnest.
Yes, we get it. You're amazingly calm in every crisis, and could probably have landed the Apollo 13 mission by yourself, blindfolded, in rainy weather, with no corrective measures needed. You have no idea what the condition of the car was, but you seem determined to ignore the facts I laid out.
The point is this: you were not in the vehicle. You have NO idea what he tried to do, didn't try to do, failed to do, or what he did that simply did not work. You have no idea what his state of mind was, when the breakage occurred (all we know is that it happened more than 53 seconds (the length of the 911 call) before they crashed - 53 seconds is NOT a lot of time and distance (~1.75 miles at 120 mph) to try all of the stuff you say you would have done. Did they have 75 seconds? 120 seconds? Were systems malfunctioning, as it seems incredibly likely that they were? You simply have no idea.
It is not reasonable to assume that the guy was a clueless moron who didn't know how to handle a vehicle, when as a CHP officer, he would most certainly have had more emergency / high speed driving training than you or I have ever had. Rendering a blanket statement that he was either stupid or incompetent flies in the face of the report given to police seconds before the crash on the 911 call: "No brakes, no brakes." Since you agree that a brake override is a good thing, and it's possible that such a system would have prevented (or greatly reduced the damage from) this crash, all your armchair quarterbacking serves to do is stroke your own ego.
If you're not thinking at all, and just in panic mode, it's actually pretty hard to think to do anything.
Consider the actual scenario, as it transpired: -- Wife, daughter, and brother in law in car with you; -- Unfamiliar vehicle given to you as a loaner this morning; -- Traveling up to 120 mph along a highway with other people on it - would have had to weave to avoid colliding with someone from behind, almost certainly; -- Vehicle that crashed was reported a week or so previously by another customer it had been loaned to for the exact "stuck accelerator" problem that presumably caused the crash; -- Approaching this intersection - SR 125 at Mission Gorge Road - on SR 125, a T intersection, where SR125 *ends*.
Now consider the stuff we don't know: -- Actual operating condition of the brakes on the vehicle - were they just shy of needing maintenance? -- How long were they moving at this high rate of speed before the passenger called the police? We know it was about 1 minute from the time he called into 911 to the time when they crashed, but we don't know how long before that - could have only been 2, 3 minutes from start to finish, maybe longer, but they were traveling from their home in Chula Vista to a soccer practice in Santee - a distance of 15-20 miles, 10 miles of which would have probably been on SR125 - so figure, 7-10 mins, max, from the time they got on SR 125 to the time they crashed.
So, yeah - panic: wife, brother in law, daughter all screaming, shouting, offering "helpful advice" while you're trying to figure out what to do. You also have to weave your car in and out of a fair bit of traffic at that speed; Did he pump the brakes, and end up burning something out? Possibly. Did the braking system actually fail? That's also possible - if the electronics went nuts, it's entirely possible that the braking system controls weren't responding properly. On the actual 911 call, just at the end, you can hear a man's voice say something about "no brakes, no brakes, better pray..."
It's very easy to be a backseat driver after the fact, and opine about how "stupid" he was, and how we're much more qualified to handle these situations, and how we would have easily mastered the vehicle and brought it to a safe stop, but the fact remains this: he was a CHP officer, and it's likely that he has WAY more training in high speed driving and driving emergencies than anybody else here, and something still went horribly, horribly wrong.
If this safety system will make it less likely for things to go horribly horribly wrong like that, then anybody arguing against them is an idiot. It's a couple lines of code in the control module of your vehicle, it's not some invasive magical killswitch that the police will be able to trigger, and it's not going to dramatically increase the cost of vehicles, because this system has already been implemented in the entire fleet of numerous manufacturers - Toyota and Chrysler, at least, perhaps others.
Retired from the air force - probably with a pension, since he was in for 20 years, according to this article. He then went on to get a full time job with the CHP, so he was drawing a military pension, and a CHP salary; his wife had a degree in Biochem, so it's likely she had a decent-paying job, as well, and they had a single child.
Yeah, you're right, how could they possibly afford the 2006 Lexus they brought into the shop which is how they got the 2009 Lexus loaner they died in? Police officers should be driving used Geo Metros, and serving their families nothing but cold bread soup and week old cuts of meat, unless they're corrupt and accepting bribes - and they should hurry up and die so we can also make twattish jokes about their integrity from the comfortable semi-anonymous safety of our mommy's basement!
so dumb that we literally need a law to force auto manufacturers to provide assistance at great cost to others
What "great cost to others" is being incurred here? This is adding a new safety system to the car's computer which will detect a condition where the accelerator is depressed, and the brake is then also depressed without any removal of pressure on the accelerator. When the computer detects this, it can use various methods to slow the vehicle - reducing the throttle (in essence, overriding the message the accelerator is giving it), limiting fuel flow into the engine, and perhaps other steps that will accomplish the goal of slowing or stopping the engine.
Airbags, seat belts, and other safety systems are also mandatory - I fail to see how a bit of computer code and some sensors is going to greatly limit your freedoms, or increase costs greatly - especially considering several major manufacturers have already built these systems into their vehicles as standard features.
You will never create a world where everybody is clear-eyed and rational in the face of a crisis. It simply will not happen. So what you do instead is you build safety systems that work WITH their crisis-mode impulses. This is why, incidentally, emergency exits typically open *outwards,* to work *with* the impulse of a panicky group of people, which is to keep running away from the source of the emergency. People who want to stop a car will step on the brake, even when they're panicking. Less assured is their calm rational side saying, "Well, I just need to depress and hold down the ignition button for a long 3-count to kill the engine, what could be more natural?" or "Well, I guess I'll just toss the shifter into neutral." These are rational solutions offered with a great deal of hindsight and second-guessing. When you've got 3 panicked passengers shouting at you in a car you don't know and you're facing the very real prospect of death if you crash at the speed you're moving at, that window for rational thought gets awful small.
This specific accident was also the CHP officer in a loaner vehicle that he had presumably not driven before. Driving habits do take a bit of attention to override. I usually drive a Volvo with a manual transmission; I recently rented a vehicle while traveling that had an automatic transmission.
We stopped very quickly (from about 20 mph in the parking lot) - and with tires screeching - when I stepped down on my brake pedal like it was the clutch pedal. In a new vehicle, it's entirely possible that the officer panicked because he wasn't familiar with the controls, or that he simply did things that would normally have fixed the problem in his own vehicle, but did nothing (or exacerbated the problem) in this other vehicle.
Which is why all the smarties shouting about "hurr durr, just put it in neutral, there's no need for this sort of safety equipment in vehicles," are missing the point. It's simply not practical to say "you should practice crashing cars until you're good enough not to crash them," or "you need to be prepared for any evantuality ever, behind the wheel, that could possibly happen, ever." These things happen rarely, and no matter how much you "think" about what you'd do, if it's not hard-wired as a reflexive action, it's very likely that you'll panic and screw it up. Having an override system in the car that detects that you've depressed the accelerator, and then the brake, without easing back on the accelerator, and interprets that to mean that something's wrong, and helps you bring the car to a stop by adjusting throttle, fuel intake, and other systems to stop the engine from revving, is a good thing.
All you fuckers will have to live with the mental image of me not bouncing on the concrete. It will scar you all for live, fuckwads
So... in your concern for how much damage the person threatening suicide will do to onlookers, you... encourage him to jump, and scar all the onlookers?
I don't think you've thought through the logic on that one, friend.
Maybe a little less internet tough guy, and a little more rational thinking, is in order?
I'm afraid it really is that simple. You keep saying that "emotional distress" can only be claimed as part of some larger case; that's factually not the case.
From your very own links, these are the elements of IIED: -- Defendant acted intentionally or recklessly; and
Hard to claim that "typing up a comment and submitting it to reddit, in which I encouraged somebody to kill himself" is not intentional, and reckless;
-- Defendant’s conduct was extreme and outrageous; and
Hard to claim that telling someone "kill yourself," is not "extreme" and "outrageous;" that's the very point of this sort of "humor" - to be extreme and outrageous.
-- Defendant’s act is the cause of the distress; and
Well, that act was arguably contributory to the person killing themselves; certainly can make an argument that the act is at least a partial cause of the distress;
-- Plaintiff suffers severe emotional distress as a result of defendant’s conduct.
Again, a diagnosis or other documentation that there is some sort of actual mental trauma is all that's required here.
You are cherry-picking the elements of "NEGLIGENT" infliction of emotional distress that suit your argument, while trying to pretend that courts do not regularly consider "mental distress" as an element when figuring damages in civil cases. Whether this is attributable to willful ignorance, or simply not understanding the law, I'm not sure - but you are dead wrong. All of your assertions are true in only a very narrow subset of the law, specifically where jurisdictions have *specifically* rejected the idea that someone can be held liable for "negligent" infliction of damages. Telling somebody "Go kill yourself" is pretty deliberate, and as such, this sort of a statement would almost certainly NOT fall under the definition of negligent inflection of damages to begin with.
Given that it's then paired with a wrongful death suit, and I'm fairly certain you'd find the court willing to consider awarding damages for mental distress if the people were found to be liable for their contributions to the man's suicide.
If you can show evidence that would support your claim of mental anguish and emotional distress (e.g., a PTSD diagnosis, engagement of the services of a counselor or therapist, hospitalization for mental or physical issues related to the pain and suffering) then you may easily be awarded damages for mental anguish and emotional distress as part of your wrongful death suit.
Or were you *trying* to forget that this was all in the context of a wrongful death suit? Because it seems like you forgot about that part for a second or two there, what with the "secondary effects attached to something more substantial," as if there's nothing more substantial being claimed here than "mental anguish."
Mental pain cannot be punished because it's not verifiable
Except that's completely wrong. Civil suits commonly include damages for "pain and suffering," which is actual, quanitifiable punishment for "mental pain," far beyond the "I was out of work for 2 weeks." It is, specifically, a way of assigning a dollar value as a punishment for causing "mental pain."
You may not be able to go to jail for "mental pain," (well, unless it's a hate crime, or domestic abuse, or...) but the law very much makes allowances for it to be used as a consideration when determining damages.
The idea is that adults are responsible for their own actions.
And aren't the people egging him on also adults, and shouldn't they be responsible for their actions? What if their actions include inflicting additional pain on an already-mentally-disturbed individual, perhaps even so much pain that it pushes him across the line from "only suicidal ideation" to "immediate action on those ideas?"
I suspect this issue of "personal responsibility" in this matter is not as cut & dried as you'd like to pretend it is.
Really? You can't see any way somebody shouting, "I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna kill myself," while perched on a 10th floor ledge actually jumping to their death could be, in any way, related to a crowd of fuckwads on the ground laughing, pointing, and shouting, "Jump! Jump you faggot!"? The presence of a crowd of people who are not only not concerned, but are actively encouraging the person to kill themselves - and you don't think that might have a negative influence on their receptiveness to a counselor trying to talk them off the ledge? You see no way it could actually confirm the feelings that have led them to that situation in the first place?
With cars you do not need to swap out major systems with new versions, generally you can get original parts or parts that work the same as originals at least. If your carburetor has a defect you do not need to get more tires because the replacement unit requires a new type of engine.
I'm not sure I see the relevance. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade your computer, nobody's forcing you to buy new hard drives and video cards because you decided to upgrade your OS.
A 6 year old computer is going to require maintenance and upgrade work, it's really that simple. Components will burn out; software will need to be upgraded; And yes, that means you may have to spend some money on upgrading your operating system from XP to Win7 in order to continue operating your computer with all the "latest and greatest" security updates.
Nobody's forcing you to replace your computer, and if you're okay with no security upgrade support, you can continue using XP for as long as your existing hardware will keep running.
So what you're saying is that old vehicles require a substantial amount of repair, upgrades, and maintenance work to keep them running for a long time? Wow, just like computers - you have to upgrade your operating system and do some repair and maintenance work to the computer over its lifetime.
XP is an 11 year old operating system, and will be end-of-support at the age of 13. Windows 7 has been out for about 2.5 years at this point, and Vista for about 5.5 years. Most systems sold in the last 5 years probably are running Vista or Win7, and by the time XP is EoS, those systems sold since XP was sold as a pre-bundled option will be at least 7 years old.
It's likely that the vast majority of people still running XP are corporate customers, and if they can't manage an upgrade to Win7 over the next 2 years, they should probably hire some better IT staff.
Because stand your ground specifically says you must not be involved in unlawful activity.
Drug dealing is typically held to be unlawful. You'd be hard-pressed to say, "Your honor, yes, I was dealing crack, when that guy ran up and tried to beat me down and take my stash. So I shot him in the face, because, you know, gotta protect what's mine."
Such a case would be ineligible for a stand your ground defense.
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Wasn't Nokia already in massive decline, long before any hint of Windows came on the scene? They were selling feature phones, which are low profit-per-unit, and releasing dud after dud in the smartphone space while Apple & Android exploded.
They could have gone with Android, but then they would have been "just another Android maker," fighting tooth and claw with Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and the rest over the small portion of industry *profits* being earned by Android smartphones. (Remember, 50-75% of the *profits* are being earned by Apple in this space).
Instead, they decided to go with a third alternative - WP7, and bet that they could duplicate the iPhone model, with a different OS than anybody else is offering running on their hardware. It's a massive bet, but Microsoft and Nokia might have the marketing & financial clout to pull it off - but that very much remains to be seen. If they're able to push WP7 as a viable third alternative, they could be in a similar position as Apple: a hardware AND software package that are differentiated from the competition in some way other than "it's a different color."
You might have heard about the recent crash of a Navy jet (F-18D, IIRC) just a week ago in "free-at-that-time" Virginia Beach.
You see, the military does this thing called "training," even during peacetime. And when you're flying training missions, even in peacetime, accidents and equipment failure happen.
Large-scale bombing (see: "Shock and Awe") is not best accomplished via F-18's dropping a couple JDAM's at a time. B-52's can carry quite a few JDAM's or cruise missiles per mission, hit numerous targets during one mission, and can ALSO carpet bomb. There's very little use for long-range / large-scale bombing after the initial days/weeks of hostilities, so the tempo of operations slows down. But you don't just decommission all of your high capacity bombers because you're done with large scale bombing for "this current war."
Narcotic is mostly useless as a medical term, anyway. It originally described sedatives - e.g., "drugs that put you to sleep," hence the 'narc' in the name. It was also used to describe opioids - e.g., heroin, morphine - most of which DO have a sedative effect, but not all sedatives are opioids. Toss in the legal system overloading the term to mean "anything illegal," and you're pretty much left with relying on context to determine what's meant.
DEA is a legal entity, arrests were made; it's reasonable to assume 'narcotic' is being used in the legal sense, rather than the medical/pharmacological meaning.
I doubt they even had to "crack encryption" on any of these services. Place an order, or two or three, and see where they originate. Chances are, you can locate the origin point pretty quickly. Then you just put some surveillance on the place(s) the shipments are originating from, and place some more orders, and find the people who are inexplicably rich while not leaving the house all day except to go to the post office. Put THEM under surveillance and chances are you just busted your Tor-using drug shop, congratulations Agent!
As soon as you're shipping physical products through a public shipping network, you're going to be relying solely on "blending in with the crowd" to maintain your anonymity.
Depends on how the term is used - in legal terms, a "narcotic" describes any prohibited / illegal drug. LSD and Ecstasy both count as narcotics in the legal sense. Considering we're reading a report about a legal action, it's entirely appropriate for them to use the term that way.
The statement was that "using the term 'brogrammer' is as insulting as sexism." I pointed out that it is not some "made up term" that this article invented - there are people out there using the word, in earnest. So if you're all getting this insulted by the term 'brogrammer,' used by a small number of people in the population, imagine how many times more insulted women can be made to feel.
And all of the people saying, "I personally know a handful of girl programmers who are excellent at what they do!" -- that's not the point. If you read the article, he talks specifically about the dominance of "young, male" culture at small companies and startups, and the fact that it's driving away women, as well as OLDER MEN, who also don't fit in with the whole "brogrammer" ethos. But again, you'd have to have actually read TFA to understand these points, and I know this is Slashdot.
I see, so you're saying that the presence of bigotry is something that's acceptable - as long as it's at low levels? I'm realistic enough to know you will never "eradicate" bigoted behavior, but that doesn't mean a good public shaming isn't in order for the small number of idiotic fools who happen to live in your community.
TFA identifies at least one person whose actual job title is "resident brogrammer." It also refers to a community on facebook that's 21,000 strong dedicated to the subject.
It's not a word being made up by an evil media trying to hurt your little feelings, it's an actual term at least SOME programmers are using.
Frankly, if somebody tried to call me that, or asked that I call them that, I'd punch them in the mouth just on principle. But that doesn't change the fact that some idiots out there are actually using the term in earnest.
So the developers calling themselves "brogrammers," they're actually mocking themselves, and being sexist, towards themselves?
Or let me guess... you didn't read TFA?
Yes, we get it. You're amazingly calm in every crisis, and could probably have landed the Apollo 13 mission by yourself, blindfolded, in rainy weather, with no corrective measures needed. You have no idea what the condition of the car was, but you seem determined to ignore the facts I laid out.
The point is this: you were not in the vehicle. You have NO idea what he tried to do, didn't try to do, failed to do, or what he did that simply did not work. You have no idea what his state of mind was, when the breakage occurred (all we know is that it happened more than 53 seconds (the length of the 911 call) before they crashed - 53 seconds is NOT a lot of time and distance (~1.75 miles at 120 mph) to try all of the stuff you say you would have done. Did they have 75 seconds? 120 seconds? Were systems malfunctioning, as it seems incredibly likely that they were? You simply have no idea.
It is not reasonable to assume that the guy was a clueless moron who didn't know how to handle a vehicle, when as a CHP officer, he would most certainly have had more emergency / high speed driving training than you or I have ever had. Rendering a blanket statement that he was either stupid or incompetent flies in the face of the report given to police seconds before the crash on the 911 call: "No brakes, no brakes." Since you agree that a brake override is a good thing, and it's possible that such a system would have prevented (or greatly reduced the damage from) this crash, all your armchair quarterbacking serves to do is stroke your own ego.
If you're not thinking at all, and just in panic mode, it's actually pretty hard to think to do anything.
Consider the actual scenario, as it transpired:
-- Wife, daughter, and brother in law in car with you;
-- Unfamiliar vehicle given to you as a loaner this morning;
-- Traveling up to 120 mph along a highway with other people on it - would have had to weave to avoid colliding with someone from behind, almost certainly;
-- Vehicle that crashed was reported a week or so previously by another customer it had been loaned to for the exact "stuck accelerator" problem that presumably caused the crash;
-- Approaching this intersection - SR 125 at Mission Gorge Road - on SR 125, a T intersection, where SR125 *ends*.
Now consider the stuff we don't know:
-- Actual operating condition of the brakes on the vehicle - were they just shy of needing maintenance?
-- How long were they moving at this high rate of speed before the passenger called the police? We know it was about 1 minute from the time he called into 911 to the time when they crashed, but we don't know how long before that - could have only been 2, 3 minutes from start to finish, maybe longer, but they were traveling from their home in Chula Vista to a soccer practice in Santee - a distance of 15-20 miles, 10 miles of which would have probably been on SR125 - so figure, 7-10 mins, max, from the time they got on SR 125 to the time they crashed.
So, yeah - panic: wife, brother in law, daughter all screaming, shouting, offering "helpful advice" while you're trying to figure out what to do. You also have to weave your car in and out of a fair bit of traffic at that speed; Did he pump the brakes, and end up burning something out? Possibly. Did the braking system actually fail? That's also possible - if the electronics went nuts, it's entirely possible that the braking system controls weren't responding properly. On the actual 911 call, just at the end, you can hear a man's voice say something about "no brakes, no brakes, better pray..."
It's very easy to be a backseat driver after the fact, and opine about how "stupid" he was, and how we're much more qualified to handle these situations, and how we would have easily mastered the vehicle and brought it to a safe stop, but the fact remains this: he was a CHP officer, and it's likely that he has WAY more training in high speed driving and driving emergencies than anybody else here, and something still went horribly, horribly wrong.
If this safety system will make it less likely for things to go horribly horribly wrong like that, then anybody arguing against them is an idiot. It's a couple lines of code in the control module of your vehicle, it's not some invasive magical killswitch that the police will be able to trigger, and it's not going to dramatically increase the cost of vehicles, because this system has already been implemented in the entire fleet of numerous manufacturers - Toyota and Chrysler, at least, perhaps others.
Retired from the air force - probably with a pension, since he was in for 20 years, according to this article. He then went on to get a full time job with the CHP, so he was drawing a military pension, and a CHP salary; his wife had a degree in Biochem, so it's likely she had a decent-paying job, as well, and they had a single child.
Yeah, you're right, how could they possibly afford the 2006 Lexus they brought into the shop which is how they got the 2009 Lexus loaner they died in? Police officers should be driving used Geo Metros, and serving their families nothing but cold bread soup and week old cuts of meat, unless they're corrupt and accepting bribes - and they should hurry up and die so we can also make twattish jokes about their integrity from the comfortable semi-anonymous safety of our mommy's basement!
What "great cost to others" is being incurred here? This is adding a new safety system to the car's computer which will detect a condition where the accelerator is depressed, and the brake is then also depressed without any removal of pressure on the accelerator. When the computer detects this, it can use various methods to slow the vehicle - reducing the throttle (in essence, overriding the message the accelerator is giving it), limiting fuel flow into the engine, and perhaps other steps that will accomplish the goal of slowing or stopping the engine.
Airbags, seat belts, and other safety systems are also mandatory - I fail to see how a bit of computer code and some sensors is going to greatly limit your freedoms, or increase costs greatly - especially considering several major manufacturers have already built these systems into their vehicles as standard features.
You will never create a world where everybody is clear-eyed and rational in the face of a crisis. It simply will not happen. So what you do instead is you build safety systems that work WITH their crisis-mode impulses. This is why, incidentally, emergency exits typically open *outwards,* to work *with* the impulse of a panicky group of people, which is to keep running away from the source of the emergency. People who want to stop a car will step on the brake, even when they're panicking. Less assured is their calm rational side saying, "Well, I just need to depress and hold down the ignition button for a long 3-count to kill the engine, what could be more natural?" or "Well, I guess I'll just toss the shifter into neutral." These are rational solutions offered with a great deal of hindsight and second-guessing. When you've got 3 panicked passengers shouting at you in a car you don't know and you're facing the very real prospect of death if you crash at the speed you're moving at, that window for rational thought gets awful small.
This specific accident was also the CHP officer in a loaner vehicle that he had presumably not driven before. Driving habits do take a bit of attention to override. I usually drive a Volvo with a manual transmission; I recently rented a vehicle while traveling that had an automatic transmission.
We stopped very quickly (from about 20 mph in the parking lot) - and with tires screeching - when I stepped down on my brake pedal like it was the clutch pedal. In a new vehicle, it's entirely possible that the officer panicked because he wasn't familiar with the controls, or that he simply did things that would normally have fixed the problem in his own vehicle, but did nothing (or exacerbated the problem) in this other vehicle.
Which is why all the smarties shouting about "hurr durr, just put it in neutral, there's no need for this sort of safety equipment in vehicles," are missing the point. It's simply not practical to say "you should practice crashing cars until you're good enough not to crash them," or "you need to be prepared for any evantuality ever, behind the wheel, that could possibly happen, ever." These things happen rarely, and no matter how much you "think" about what you'd do, if it's not hard-wired as a reflexive action, it's very likely that you'll panic and screw it up. Having an override system in the car that detects that you've depressed the accelerator, and then the brake, without easing back on the accelerator, and interprets that to mean that something's wrong, and helps you bring the car to a stop by adjusting throttle, fuel intake, and other systems to stop the engine from revving, is a good thing.
So... in your concern for how much damage the person threatening suicide will do to onlookers, you... encourage him to jump, and scar all the onlookers?
I don't think you've thought through the logic on that one, friend.
Maybe a little less internet tough guy, and a little more rational thinking, is in order?
I'm afraid it really is that simple. You keep saying that "emotional distress" can only be claimed as part of some larger case; that's factually not the case.
From your very own links, these are the elements of IIED:
-- Defendant acted intentionally or recklessly; and
Hard to claim that "typing up a comment and submitting it to reddit, in which I encouraged somebody to kill himself" is not intentional, and reckless;
-- Defendant’s conduct was extreme and outrageous; and
Hard to claim that telling someone "kill yourself," is not "extreme" and "outrageous;" that's the very point of this sort of "humor" - to be extreme and outrageous.
-- Defendant’s act is the cause of the distress; and
Well, that act was arguably contributory to the person killing themselves; certainly can make an argument that the act is at least a partial cause of the distress;
-- Plaintiff suffers severe emotional distress as a result of defendant’s conduct.
Again, a diagnosis or other documentation that there is some sort of actual mental trauma is all that's required here.
You are cherry-picking the elements of "NEGLIGENT" infliction of emotional distress that suit your argument, while trying to pretend that courts do not regularly consider "mental distress" as an element when figuring damages in civil cases. Whether this is attributable to willful ignorance, or simply not understanding the law, I'm not sure - but you are dead wrong. All of your assertions are true in only a very narrow subset of the law, specifically where jurisdictions have *specifically* rejected the idea that someone can be held liable for "negligent" infliction of damages. Telling somebody "Go kill yourself" is pretty deliberate, and as such, this sort of a statement would almost certainly NOT fall under the definition of negligent inflection of damages to begin with.
Given that it's then paired with a wrongful death suit, and I'm fairly certain you'd find the court willing to consider awarding damages for mental distress if the people were found to be liable for their contributions to the man's suicide.
If you can show evidence that would support your claim of mental anguish and emotional distress (e.g., a PTSD diagnosis, engagement of the services of a counselor or therapist, hospitalization for mental or physical issues related to the pain and suffering) then you may easily be awarded damages for mental anguish and emotional distress as part of your wrongful death suit.
Or were you *trying* to forget that this was all in the context of a wrongful death suit? Because it seems like you forgot about that part for a second or two there, what with the "secondary effects attached to something more substantial," as if there's nothing more substantial being claimed here than "mental anguish."
Except that's completely wrong. Civil suits commonly include damages for "pain and suffering," which is actual, quanitifiable punishment for "mental pain," far beyond the "I was out of work for 2 weeks." It is, specifically, a way of assigning a dollar value as a punishment for causing "mental pain."
You may not be able to go to jail for "mental pain," (well, unless it's a hate crime, or domestic abuse, or...) but the law very much makes allowances for it to be used as a consideration when determining damages.
And aren't the people egging him on also adults, and shouldn't they be responsible for their actions? What if their actions include inflicting additional pain on an already-mentally-disturbed individual, perhaps even so much pain that it pushes him across the line from "only suicidal ideation" to "immediate action on those ideas?"
I suspect this issue of "personal responsibility" in this matter is not as cut & dried as you'd like to pretend it is.
Really? You can't see any way somebody shouting, "I'm gonna kill myself, I'm gonna kill myself," while perched on a 10th floor ledge actually jumping to their death could be, in any way, related to a crowd of fuckwads on the ground laughing, pointing, and shouting, "Jump! Jump you faggot!"? The presence of a crowd of people who are not only not concerned, but are actively encouraging the person to kill themselves - and you don't think that might have a negative influence on their receptiveness to a counselor trying to talk them off the ledge? You see no way it could actually confirm the feelings that have led them to that situation in the first place?
I guess the GIFT has more supporting evidence.
Depends on the jurisdiction - some places *do* make it illegal to encourage someone to commit suicide.
He grammaticalled gooder than you, you dumb.
I'm not sure I see the relevance. Nobody's forcing you to upgrade your computer, nobody's forcing you to buy new hard drives and video cards because you decided to upgrade your OS.
A 6 year old computer is going to require maintenance and upgrade work, it's really that simple. Components will burn out; software will need to be upgraded; And yes, that means you may have to spend some money on upgrading your operating system from XP to Win7 in order to continue operating your computer with all the "latest and greatest" security updates.
Nobody's forcing you to replace your computer, and if you're okay with no security upgrade support, you can continue using XP for as long as your existing hardware will keep running.
So what you're saying is that old vehicles require a substantial amount of repair, upgrades, and maintenance work to keep them running for a long time? Wow, just like computers - you have to upgrade your operating system and do some repair and maintenance work to the computer over its lifetime.
XP is an 11 year old operating system, and will be end-of-support at the age of 13. Windows 7 has been out for about 2.5 years at this point, and Vista for about 5.5 years. Most systems sold in the last 5 years probably are running Vista or Win7, and by the time XP is EoS, those systems sold since XP was sold as a pre-bundled option will be at least 7 years old.
It's likely that the vast majority of people still running XP are corporate customers, and if they can't manage an upgrade to Win7 over the next 2 years, they should probably hire some better IT staff.
Because stand your ground specifically says you must not be involved in unlawful activity.
Drug dealing is typically held to be unlawful. You'd be hard-pressed to say, "Your honor, yes, I was dealing crack, when that guy ran up and tried to beat me down and take my stash. So I shot him in the face, because, you know, gotta protect what's mine."
Such a case would be ineligible for a stand your ground defense.