You say that it was "over some business thing" -- was she sued or was the business sued? In my jurisdiction, a corporation cannot be represented "pro se" because the corporation itself cannot appear in court -- only people representing the corporation can appear on its behalf. Anyone who appears on behalf of a corporation must be a lawyer, because only licensed lawyers are allowed to represent other people in court. There is an exception for small claims court.
"Scientists Unable to Explain Flourishing Democracies" -- Lack of a scientific theory or model to explain observations does not refute the observations. There are plenty of flourishing democracies in the world; we're just not smart enough to know why they work and others don't. Apparently, scientists are also unable to recognize their own limitations.
If I pay a home security company $200/month to secure my house with a piccaso in it, I expect a chunk of that money to go toward them being bonded and insured against incompetency, and if my house IS robbed and they are shown to have been negligent, I will be expecting full compensation for my loss as a result.
This is exactly the issue: expectations versus explicit contract provisions. If there is no written contract, the law will usually try to imagine the reasonable expectations of the parties involved. However, if there is a written contract, the law will almost never modify its provisions after the fact. This is why every vendor contract has an explicit limitation of liability in it. Unfortunately, your "expectation" of receiving insurance coverage in addition to home security will mean nothing if you signed a contract that explicitly says the opposite.
However, you're exactly correct when you say that there are many businesses that are required to be insured and/or licensed, for the very reason that certain firms were taking advantage of consumers' "reasonable expectations." In many cases, it is more efficient for the service provider to get the insurance. However, I disagree that hosts such as Linode should be regulated in this way, for one basic reason. If Linode doesn't know what you're storing in your rented space, their liability is literally unlimited, and there is no way to insure for completely unknown and unlimited liability. In order for Linode to efficiently insure your content, you would have to tell them what it is and what its value is. I'm sure that nobody wants to give that data to their host -- especially if the content really is extremely valuable. Such a situation would result in 1) people with valueless data (my poetry for example) having to pay for extremely expensive insurance that they don't need, 2) people with very valuable data (trade secrets for example) getting a comparatively cheap insurance policy, subsidized by poets, and 3) Linode knowing everything about all of their data.
The bottom line is that contracts matter, and if you really care about something like insurance you should read the contract. If you are paying your home security company $200/month and they say to you, "By the way, we are not going to cover any damage if our security fails, even if it's our own fault," then you would probably look for another company. This is exactly what Linode said to these users, but they didn't look for another company. They said, "Okay, I agree."
Now, there are also situations where the law guarantees certain rights which cannot be altered by contract, but these are very few. For example, many states don't allow residential tenants to give up their right to heat in the winter. This is because we recognize that most people don't read contracts, and there is often unequal bargaining power between poor tenants and their landlords. In cases such as these, I don't mind paying a little bit extra in rent, taxes, etc. to ensure that I get treated fairly and that my neighbors won't freeze to death. However, I don't want to have to pay an additional $15 per month for my Minecraft server so that your unencrypted Bitcoins are protected from theft.
Finally, make sure that you read the next paragraph extremely carefully, since it applies directly to what we're talking about.
DISCLAIMER: The foregoing is provided for informational purposes only, and does not constitute legal advice. It is not a substitute for legal or professional advice. Any legal advice should be tailored to specific clients and their specific needs. No attorney-client relationship is created by any use of this website. You should not act on the information contained in any of the materials on this website without first consulting a competent attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.
Landlords will usually limit their liability even in cases of negligence, and this is also enforceable (at least in my jurisdiction, in commercial transactions). The principle is the same: get insurance for anything valuable, because the landlord is not an insurance company. In this case, they would be able to get back "some of the loss" to the tune of one month's service charge: "Subscriber further acknowledges that Linode.com's liability for its own negligence may not in any event exceed an amount equivalent to charges payable by subscriber for services during the period damages occurred."
Here's a fun hypothetical for you if you like thinking about liability for damages: You are an executive at a chemical company. You go away on vacation and I agree to feed your cat in your absence. One day, I accidentally leave the back door unlocked. A thief enters the house through the unlocked door and steals $100 in cash, an original Picasso worth $18 million, and your laptop, which has unencrypted information about your business's trade secrets on it. The thief leaves the door open, and your cat escapes, never to be found. The thief sells the trade secrets on the laptop to a competing business. As a result, you lose your job, your employer loses millions of dollars, and Mrs. Jones, who lives down the block, also loses $450 as a result of your company's stock price going down. Am I liable for:
the $100 in cash? the $18 million Picasso? your cat? your laptop? your lost wages? your company's lost millions? Mrs. Jones's lost $450?
If you find this interesting, you might want to go to law school.
Estimated value of entire bitcoin market: $39.6 Million Estimated value of lost productivity due to Bitcoin news stories and comment threads: $41.8 Million
Remember the plot of Goldfinger? He wanted to irradiate all of the gold in Fort Knox so that his own gold supply's value would skyrocket. I can imagine a "Bitfinger" destroying all of the bitcoins at Mt. Gox for a similar reason. Let's hope Sean Connery knows how to code.
...that means if they are incompetent retards and let your hosted server get hacked through their back door to your hosted machine they won't be liable for anything beyond the monthly fees you paid them while being hacked?
Yes, that's what it means, and it is perfectly valid and enforceable. If you rent a space where you can put anything you want, then you yourself must insure whatever you put there. The provider is not your insurance company.
Like any vendor, Linode has included language in their contract which limits their liability. This is standard language, and it operates according to the following principal, which originated in landlord/tenant law: Linode has no control over the value or sensitivity of the property that you store on its site, so you must get insurance against the loss of this property yourself. No landlord/host wants to act as an insurance company, and they are in no position to do so. I can put anything I want in a rented space; it could be a $5,000,000.00 supercomputer, or a $30,000,000.00 Van Gogh. If there is a leak in my landlord's roof and a drop of water destroys the supercomputer, I must look to my own insurance policy, because I am the one why owns this property. If I want to store $15,000 in cash, I am not going to rent a storage unit and leave it lying all over the floor (the equivalent of what these Linode users did). I am going to put it in a BANK, which is a business specifically designed to store one type of thing, and which provides insurance against its loss.
THIS POST DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE OR CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. ANY LEGAL ADVICE MUST BE TAILORED TO YOUR INDIVIDUAL NEEDS BY AN ATTORNEY LICENSED IN YOUR JURISDICTION.
I'm wearing a wrist brace right now because I held my Nook Color one-handed for too long over the course of a couple of weeks. Obviously I can't say for sure that this was the cause of my pain, but it gets worse when when I hold it in one hand only, and better when I use both hands or support it some other way. I wish I had thought of this before I started using the Nook. Yeah it's not a problem of national concern, and the article uses absurdly alarmist rhetoric, but these are real sources of pain and it's always good to have tips on how to avoid pain.
So-called "lateral thinking" puzzles have nothing to do with cleverness or intelligence. I'm thinking of questions such as the one from the article, "A man pushed his car into a hotel and lost his fortune -- what happened?" These questions are purportedly about cleverness and "thinking outside the box." But the problem is, that there are a practically infinite series of possible answers that fit those facts, and you have to simply guess which one the questioner is thinking of. Rather than thinking outside the box, you are supposed to guess the questioner's box, as it were. I would answer the above question by saying, "You just told me what happened: a man pushed his car into a hotel and lost his fortune. They were two unrelated events. Next question please." It's a guessing game, like 20 questions or "I'm thinking of a person", nothing more.
Gibbon is enjoyable on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, and the entire work. You don't even really have to pay attention, because even the smallest chunks of information are interesting and entertaining. And it will take you a long, long time to finish.
I like the idea of a dummy laptop, but you will still end up with a broken window. I had a friend who once got his car stereo stolen in Newark. The broken window cost more than the stereo, so from then on he always left his windows rolled down when he parked in Newark.
Come on Slashdot, I expected the comments to be full of ingenious booby trap ideas. I like "metal laptop wired to battery," but how about some other ideas? The main problem I've run into is that any booby traps also need to be safe for the driver and passengers in the event of a crash -- this rules out explosives, cyanide gas, and acid. Here's five to start us off:
1) Use some conductive glass to rig a circuit that will fill your whole car with spray foam insulation when a window is broken. 2) Put a really obvious fake laptop next to a rolled-down window. Sharpen that window to a razor-sharp edge. Rig a laser detection circuit so that if anything passes through the window opening, it will roll up quickly and sever the offender's hand. Make sure that this is disabled automatically when friendlies are in the vehicle. 3) Rig a circuit to spray pepper spray out of any windows that are shattered. 4) Hide a GPS tracking device in all of your valuables which will automatically alert you if they start moving when they should be still. Carry a long-range, scoped rifle and sit near the window. 5) Give your car a robust air-tight seal. Each time your car is parked, pressurize the inside so that if anyone breaks a window, the bits of glass will fly out into their face, disabling them and hopefully knocking them back several feet into oncoming traffic.
The original article regarding the Russian reactors is talking about engineered lifespan, whereas your article is talking about license to operate. This is like the difference between renewing your car's inspection sticker and replacing your tires. One is a legal requirement and the other is a physical requirement. Neither article talks about this distinction, and I'm not sure that they're making it. The Russian plants were licensed for 30 years, and according to the article, their physical lifespan is also 30 years. The USA plants were licensed for 40 years, but that article doesn't make any mention about their engineered lifespans, and I don't know enough to say what the engineered lifespan of a USA vs. Russian plant is. It's certainly possible to keep machines working properly for many decades as long as they are designed that way. If the Russian reactors really do have irreplaceable physical parts that are expected to fail after 30 years, it would be madness to operate them after that time. However, this may not be the case with other reactors which have received license extensions.
I haven't taken a math course since high school, 12 years ago. But I got the first 5 questions right without any trouble, then skipped to question 44 in case the hard ones were at the end, got it right instantly, and then quit. I agree with the board member that "something is seriously wrong," but it's not the fact that this test is too hard, or that the problems test useless skills. I use this level of math in my daily life, from time to time -- it really amounts to basic problem-solving skills.
But anyone who's been out of school for a year knows that making money is only very rarely related to skilled competence. Since money does not grow on trees, in order to get some you must find someone who has money and convince them to give it to you. Basically, financial success is dependent on the ability to make friends with rich people. This is a skill that is not taught in school, and it has no relationship to math ability.
I remember feeling so demeaned and inadequate when I first saw that butch space marine shooting demons below the Doom logo -- and things have only gotten worse since then. When will gaming companies stop creating computer models of unrealistically muscular and coordinated men? We need more of this.
It is obvious that writing and speaking are each appropriate in some situations and inappropriate in others. As an attorney, I deal with the written word at least as much as the spoken word. Email is obviously an excellent way to transmit written words. It is a terrible medium for having a conversation, and everyone should realize that. For two-way information exchange involving small bits of information, voice is obviously best. For one-way information transmission or large blocks of information, text is obviously best. If I need to have a conversation in which I am asking more than two questions, I will use the phone. If I want to tell somebody some information, or request some information, I will use email. This is never more clear than when you are on the phone with someone for 5 minutes transcribing a list which could be transmitted in 5 seconds via email. If I want to send a contract to Mr. Breton for review, what am I supposed to do? Skype him and narrate the whole thing while he writes it out on a legal pad? Send him a snail-mail envelope?
The example of employees asking for an email summarizing the content of meetings implies, to me, that the meetings were unnecessary (at least for some of the attendees) and could have been handled better by simply sending an email to convey information. The article is also somewhat confusing in what it's claiming about email in the workplace: on the one hand, it's saying that there is so much email that nobody can keep up with it, and on the other, it's saying that email is being abandoned. If it is being naturally abandoned, then there is no reason to forcefully ban it. If there is too much junk going around, then you need to organize your company. If there's simply too much information for your employees to process, then you need more employees. Maybe Mr. Breton was saying something reasonable, but it wasn't transcribed very well in the article.
Because of its wide adoption and simple nature, email is still the best way to send a large or medium amount of text to someone.
Ah, but the problem itself is that it is impossible to avoid making mistakes. If your solution to this problem is to never make a mistake, then we are operating on different premises. I am very skeptical of your premise that it is possible to avoid making mistakes. Checking one's typing and avoiding root will prevent some mistakes, but there are always other mistakes to be made. I'm sure you can think of some mistakes that you yourself have made which involved neither typos nor unnecessary root access.
My super-cool Linux box at home, which I work on all the time, is much less reliable than my work desktop running XP, which I never touch except to do my job. The most reliable, of course, is the headless Linux server that sits under my desk at home and never gets touched. In fact, I have this separate server precisely because I know that I will mess up my desktop by trying to fix/maintain it all the time, and I intend never to touch the server unless something goes wrong.
In law school (2005-2008), I eventually ditched my laptop and used paper and pen. It was easier, lighter, and I paid attention more for a two main reasons: 1) I didn't have the entire internet distracting me every second, 2) I didn't transcribe everything the professor said, so I was actually able to listen and think about it. My contracts professor actually banned laptops from his lectures -- not because of the internet issue, but because he wanted people to listen and think instead of typing.
I only use windows at the office, and all the computers there use it (even the server!). We have two industry-specific programs that only run on windows, and of course we use MS Office in order to inter-operate with everyone else. Now, you might say that I could run all of these under Wine, and that may or may not be true. But honestly, MS software is not that bad anymore. I've been running XP for years at the office, and I can't remember it crashing or freezing on me once. Basically, I would rather use something that works rather than something that doesn't work, and for my office that means MS. This is actually extraordinarily obvious. The one area where I really miss Linux is in backups -- but I would rather use a wrapper for rsync than for every single mission-critical application that we run daily.
Of course, I run Linux on everything at home and it's much better than MS.
Slashdot Mirror
...the Commodore brand name was acquired by Dutch computer maker Tulip Computers NV...
Well that explains the price: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
You say that it was "over some business thing" -- was she sued or was the business sued? In my jurisdiction, a corporation cannot be represented "pro se" because the corporation itself cannot appear in court -- only people representing the corporation can appear on its behalf. Anyone who appears on behalf of a corporation must be a lawyer, because only licensed lawyers are allowed to represent other people in court. There is an exception for small claims court.
"Scientists Unable to Explain Flourishing Democracies" -- Lack of a scientific theory or model to explain observations does not refute the observations. There are plenty of flourishing democracies in the world; we're just not smart enough to know why they work and others don't. Apparently, scientists are also unable to recognize their own limitations.
If I pay a home security company $200/month to secure my house with a piccaso in it, I expect a chunk of that money to go toward them being bonded and insured against incompetency, and if my house IS robbed and they are shown to have been negligent, I will be expecting full compensation for my loss as a result.
This is exactly the issue: expectations versus explicit contract provisions. If there is no written contract, the law will usually try to imagine the reasonable expectations of the parties involved. However, if there is a written contract, the law will almost never modify its provisions after the fact. This is why every vendor contract has an explicit limitation of liability in it. Unfortunately, your "expectation" of receiving insurance coverage in addition to home security will mean nothing if you signed a contract that explicitly says the opposite.
However, you're exactly correct when you say that there are many businesses that are required to be insured and/or licensed, for the very reason that certain firms were taking advantage of consumers' "reasonable expectations." In many cases, it is more efficient for the service provider to get the insurance. However, I disagree that hosts such as Linode should be regulated in this way, for one basic reason. If Linode doesn't know what you're storing in your rented space, their liability is literally unlimited, and there is no way to insure for completely unknown and unlimited liability. In order for Linode to efficiently insure your content, you would have to tell them what it is and what its value is. I'm sure that nobody wants to give that data to their host -- especially if the content really is extremely valuable. Such a situation would result in 1) people with valueless data (my poetry for example) having to pay for extremely expensive insurance that they don't need, 2) people with very valuable data (trade secrets for example) getting a comparatively cheap insurance policy, subsidized by poets, and 3) Linode knowing everything about all of their data.
The bottom line is that contracts matter, and if you really care about something like insurance you should read the contract. If you are paying your home security company $200/month and they say to you, "By the way, we are not going to cover any damage if our security fails, even if it's our own fault," then you would probably look for another company. This is exactly what Linode said to these users, but they didn't look for another company. They said, "Okay, I agree."
Now, there are also situations where the law guarantees certain rights which cannot be altered by contract, but these are very few. For example, many states don't allow residential tenants to give up their right to heat in the winter. This is because we recognize that most people don't read contracts, and there is often unequal bargaining power between poor tenants and their landlords. In cases such as these, I don't mind paying a little bit extra in rent, taxes, etc. to ensure that I get treated fairly and that my neighbors won't freeze to death. However, I don't want to have to pay an additional $15 per month for my Minecraft server so that your unencrypted Bitcoins are protected from theft.
Finally, make sure that you read the next paragraph extremely carefully, since it applies directly to what we're talking about.
DISCLAIMER: The foregoing is provided for informational purposes only, and does not constitute legal advice. It is not a substitute for legal or professional advice. Any legal advice should be tailored to specific clients and their specific needs. No attorney-client relationship is created by any use of this website. You should not act on the information contained in any of the materials on this website without first consulting a competent attorney licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.
Landlords will usually limit their liability even in cases of negligence, and this is also enforceable (at least in my jurisdiction, in commercial transactions). The principle is the same: get insurance for anything valuable, because the landlord is not an insurance company. In this case, they would be able to get back "some of the loss" to the tune of one month's service charge: "Subscriber further acknowledges that Linode.com's liability for its own negligence may not in any event exceed an amount equivalent to charges payable by subscriber for services during the period damages occurred."
Here's a fun hypothetical for you if you like thinking about liability for damages: You are an executive at a chemical company. You go away on vacation and I agree to feed your cat in your absence. One day, I accidentally leave the back door unlocked. A thief enters the house through the unlocked door and steals $100 in cash, an original Picasso worth $18 million, and your laptop, which has unencrypted information about your business's trade secrets on it. The thief leaves the door open, and your cat escapes, never to be found. The thief sells the trade secrets on the laptop to a competing business. As a result, you lose your job, your employer loses millions of dollars, and Mrs. Jones, who lives down the block, also loses $450 as a result of your company's stock price going down. Am I liable for:
the $100 in cash?
the $18 million Picasso?
your cat?
your laptop?
your lost wages?
your company's lost millions?
Mrs. Jones's lost $450?
If you find this interesting, you might want to go to law school.
Estimated value of entire bitcoin market: $39.6 Million
Estimated value of lost productivity due to Bitcoin news stories and comment threads: $41.8 Million
Remember the plot of Goldfinger? He wanted to irradiate all of the gold in Fort Knox so that his own gold supply's value would skyrocket. I can imagine a "Bitfinger" destroying all of the bitcoins at Mt. Gox for a similar reason. Let's hope Sean Connery knows how to code.
...that means if they are incompetent retards and let your hosted server get hacked through their back door to your hosted machine they won't be liable for anything beyond the monthly fees you paid them while being hacked?
Yes, that's what it means, and it is perfectly valid and enforceable. If you rent a space where you can put anything you want, then you yourself must insure whatever you put there. The provider is not your insurance company.
Like any vendor, Linode has included language in their contract which limits their liability. This is standard language, and it operates according to the following principal, which originated in landlord/tenant law: Linode has no control over the value or sensitivity of the property that you store on its site, so you must get insurance against the loss of this property yourself. No landlord/host wants to act as an insurance company, and they are in no position to do so. I can put anything I want in a rented space; it could be a $5,000,000.00 supercomputer, or a $30,000,000.00 Van Gogh. If there is a leak in my landlord's roof and a drop of water destroys the supercomputer, I must look to my own insurance policy, because I am the one why owns this property. If I want to store $15,000 in cash, I am not going to rent a storage unit and leave it lying all over the floor (the equivalent of what these Linode users did). I am going to put it in a BANK, which is a business specifically designed to store one type of thing, and which provides insurance against its loss.
Here's a link to the TOS: http://www.linode.com/tos.cfm
THIS POST DOES NOT CONSTITUTE LEGAL ADVICE OR CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. ANY LEGAL ADVICE MUST BE TAILORED TO YOUR INDIVIDUAL NEEDS BY AN ATTORNEY LICENSED IN YOUR JURISDICTION.
I'm wearing a wrist brace right now because I held my Nook Color one-handed for too long over the course of a couple of weeks. Obviously I can't say for sure that this was the cause of my pain, but it gets worse when when I hold it in one hand only, and better when I use both hands or support it some other way. I wish I had thought of this before I started using the Nook. Yeah it's not a problem of national concern, and the article uses absurdly alarmist rhetoric, but these are real sources of pain and it's always good to have tips on how to avoid pain.
So-called "lateral thinking" puzzles have nothing to do with cleverness or intelligence. I'm thinking of questions such as the one from the article, "A man pushed his car into a hotel and lost his fortune -- what happened?" These questions are purportedly about cleverness and "thinking outside the box." But the problem is, that there are a practically infinite series of possible answers that fit those facts, and you have to simply guess which one the questioner is thinking of. Rather than thinking outside the box, you are supposed to guess the questioner's box, as it were. I would answer the above question by saying, "You just told me what happened: a man pushed his car into a hotel and lost his fortune. They were two unrelated events. Next question please." It's a guessing game, like 20 questions or "I'm thinking of a person", nothing more.
Politicians are even more ignorant about banking, so we better not regulate that either!
They are hoping that nobody will be willing to split the baby.
Gibbon is enjoyable on the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, and the entire work. You don't even really have to pay attention, because even the smallest chunks of information are interesting and entertaining. And it will take you a long, long time to finish.
I like the idea of a dummy laptop, but you will still end up with a broken window. I had a friend who once got his car stereo stolen in Newark. The broken window cost more than the stereo, so from then on he always left his windows rolled down when he parked in Newark.
Come on Slashdot, I expected the comments to be full of ingenious booby trap ideas. I like "metal laptop wired to battery," but how about some other ideas? The main problem I've run into is that any booby traps also need to be safe for the driver and passengers in the event of a crash -- this rules out explosives, cyanide gas, and acid. Here's five to start us off:
1) Use some conductive glass to rig a circuit that will fill your whole car with spray foam insulation when a window is broken.
2) Put a really obvious fake laptop next to a rolled-down window. Sharpen that window to a razor-sharp edge. Rig a laser detection circuit so that if anything passes through the window opening, it will roll up quickly and sever the offender's hand. Make sure that this is disabled automatically when friendlies are in the vehicle.
3) Rig a circuit to spray pepper spray out of any windows that are shattered.
4) Hide a GPS tracking device in all of your valuables which will automatically alert you if they start moving when they should be still. Carry a long-range, scoped rifle and sit near the window.
5) Give your car a robust air-tight seal. Each time your car is parked, pressurize the inside so that if anyone breaks a window, the bits of glass will fly out into their face, disabling them and hopefully knocking them back several feet into oncoming traffic.
Any other ideas?
The original article regarding the Russian reactors is talking about engineered lifespan, whereas your article is talking about license to operate. This is like the difference between renewing your car's inspection sticker and replacing your tires. One is a legal requirement and the other is a physical requirement. Neither article talks about this distinction, and I'm not sure that they're making it. The Russian plants were licensed for 30 years, and according to the article, their physical lifespan is also 30 years. The USA plants were licensed for 40 years, but that article doesn't make any mention about their engineered lifespans, and I don't know enough to say what the engineered lifespan of a USA vs. Russian plant is. It's certainly possible to keep machines working properly for many decades as long as they are designed that way. If the Russian reactors really do have irreplaceable physical parts that are expected to fail after 30 years, it would be madness to operate them after that time. However, this may not be the case with other reactors which have received license extensions.
I haven't taken a math course since high school, 12 years ago. But I got the first 5 questions right without any trouble, then skipped to question 44 in case the hard ones were at the end, got it right instantly, and then quit. I agree with the board member that "something is seriously wrong," but it's not the fact that this test is too hard, or that the problems test useless skills. I use this level of math in my daily life, from time to time -- it really amounts to basic problem-solving skills.
But anyone who's been out of school for a year knows that making money is only very rarely related to skilled competence. Since money does not grow on trees, in order to get some you must find someone who has money and convince them to give it to you. Basically, financial success is dependent on the ability to make friends with rich people. This is a skill that is not taught in school, and it has no relationship to math ability.
I remember feeling so demeaned and inadequate when I first saw that butch space marine shooting demons below the Doom logo -- and things have only gotten worse since then. When will gaming companies stop creating computer models of unrealistically muscular and coordinated men? We need more of this.
It is obvious that writing and speaking are each appropriate in some situations and inappropriate in others. As an attorney, I deal with the written word at least as much as the spoken word. Email is obviously an excellent way to transmit written words. It is a terrible medium for having a conversation, and everyone should realize that. For two-way information exchange involving small bits of information, voice is obviously best. For one-way information transmission or large blocks of information, text is obviously best. If I need to have a conversation in which I am asking more than two questions, I will use the phone. If I want to tell somebody some information, or request some information, I will use email. This is never more clear than when you are on the phone with someone for 5 minutes transcribing a list which could be transmitted in 5 seconds via email. If I want to send a contract to Mr. Breton for review, what am I supposed to do? Skype him and narrate the whole thing while he writes it out on a legal pad? Send him a snail-mail envelope?
The example of employees asking for an email summarizing the content of meetings implies, to me, that the meetings were unnecessary (at least for some of the attendees) and could have been handled better by simply sending an email to convey information. The article is also somewhat confusing in what it's claiming about email in the workplace: on the one hand, it's saying that there is so much email that nobody can keep up with it, and on the other, it's saying that email is being abandoned. If it is being naturally abandoned, then there is no reason to forcefully ban it. If there is too much junk going around, then you need to organize your company. If there's simply too much information for your employees to process, then you need more employees. Maybe Mr. Breton was saying something reasonable, but it wasn't transcribed very well in the article.
Because of its wide adoption and simple nature, email is still the best way to send a large or medium amount of text to someone.
Ah, but the problem itself is that it is impossible to avoid making mistakes. If your solution to this problem is to never make a mistake, then we are operating on different premises. I am very skeptical of your premise that it is possible to avoid making mistakes. Checking one's typing and avoiding root will prevent some mistakes, but there are always other mistakes to be made. I'm sure you can think of some mistakes that you yourself have made which involved neither typos nor unnecessary root access.
My super-cool Linux box at home, which I work on all the time, is much less reliable than my work desktop running XP, which I never touch except to do my job. The most reliable, of course, is the headless Linux server that sits under my desk at home and never gets touched. In fact, I have this separate server precisely because I know that I will mess up my desktop by trying to fix/maintain it all the time, and I intend never to touch the server unless something goes wrong.
In law school (2005-2008), I eventually ditched my laptop and used paper and pen. It was easier, lighter, and I paid attention more for a two main reasons: 1) I didn't have the entire internet distracting me every second, 2) I didn't transcribe everything the professor said, so I was actually able to listen and think about it. My contracts professor actually banned laptops from his lectures -- not because of the internet issue, but because he wanted people to listen and think instead of typing.
There's an example in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06hallinan.html It stretches the analogy perhaps too far, but the part about the music is pretty interesting.
I only use windows at the office, and all the computers there use it (even the server!). We have two industry-specific programs that only run on windows, and of course we use MS Office in order to inter-operate with everyone else. Now, you might say that I could run all of these under Wine, and that may or may not be true. But honestly, MS software is not that bad anymore. I've been running XP for years at the office, and I can't remember it crashing or freezing on me once. Basically, I would rather use something that works rather than something that doesn't work, and for my office that means MS. This is actually extraordinarily obvious. The one area where I really miss Linux is in backups -- but I would rather use a wrapper for rsync than for every single mission-critical application that we run daily.
Of course, I run Linux on everything at home and it's much better than MS.