Did she need two hands to take the cap off the cup?
I suspect she needed two hands on the cup due to being 79 years old.
With punitive damages... does she actually get the bulk of that money? I don't quite understand how that works...
Yeah, me neither... Apparently the damages were reduced from $2.4 million to $480,000 and the final amount was settled privately, so the final number isn't really publically known.
I'll grant you though it's not quite as clear cut as people make it out to be.
I think the thing you're missing here is that the coffee was considerably hotter than the temperature coffee is normally served at. It was certainly too hot to drink.
During the investigation the hottest other coffee they could find served by McDonald's competitors was 20 degrees colder.
People are used to handling hot liquids, but there's Hot and then there's Damn Hot.
People expect coffee to be hot and you'd expect it to hurt if you spilt it over yourself. However the extra twenty degrees that the McDonalds coffee had made the difference between "Yow, that's hot" and "Oh shit I no longer have any skin left".
McDonalds had ample evidence that their coffee was considerably hotter than people could reasonably expect it to be (700 claims over the previous 10 years) and yet did nothing.
That's interesting - the hottest coffee the investigators at the case could find from McDonald's competitors was around 160 degrees farenheight (about 70 degrees celcius) - some way off boiling. Certainly even with the toughest mouth in the world drinking coffee at almost boiling would burn you badly.
Also, the vehicle wasn't moving - she was in the passenger's seat and it was stationary. The cup was between her legs to grip it while she took the cap off it.
She wasn't driving. Her grandson was driving and the car was stationary. She put the cup between her legs to hold it while she took the top off. There's a very interesting post on it here:
Liquids at 180 degrees farenheight will burn the skin within two seconds and is far too hot to drink. In the previous ten years to the case McDonalds had had 700 claims filed against it by people who had been burnt by its coffee, and had done nothing about it.
Originally she aksed for $20,000 compensation, but the court awarded her $200,000 which was then reduced to $160,000 because it was deemed 20% her fault. The rest of the damages were punative.
There seems to be loads of ads on the TV now - "have you had an accident recently that wasn't your fault? Mrs Briggs of Smothersby broke her hip when a circus elephant went on the rampage, and she was awarded 57p!"
Apparently he was unable to change it to direct it to his website for several months after registering it.
I suspect that register.com may have shot themselves in the foot by claiming that the contract did not explicitly give Mr Zurakov exclusive control over the site. The judge did not agree, saying that if if it wasn't explicit in the contract 'to register' a site should give you more than just a listing in whois.
Register.com should have just admitted that something went wrong with their DNS assignment system and settled out of court. They probably could have gotten away with $5000 or so.
The McDonalds lawsuit wasn't that frivolous - they were selling coffee at a much higher temperature than it is possible to drink it at to people in moving vehicles. They had also consistently ignored the reports of people being seriously hurt by their coffee.
Sure, if you spill coffee on your lap you don't expect it to be pleasant, but you don't expect to get third degree burns requiring skin grafts either. McDonalds knew people were being hurt by coffee that was much hotter than would reasonably be expected and had done nothing about it.
Reading the DARPA site, the route will be up to 300 miles long, and has to be completed in under 10 hours - that's an average speed of 30mph, cross-country.
No wonder they don't expect any contestants to finish on the first race - I think you're going to have to have a fair amount of luck just to not break the vehicle at any point.
Did you have a look at Mars last week? I did, but only through this tiny collapsable telescope a friend gave me. It was very difficult to find Mars in the first place as fully extending the telescope focuses it at somewhere past infinity so the deal was:
a) try and find something in the distance to focus on (not easy at nighttime - luckily the sillhouette of the trees against the bright yellow London night sky sufficed) b) try for ages to get the damn thing pointing in the right direction c) Try not to look too suspicious as you're doing it - standing in the street at night looking around with a telescope pointed at a 30degree angle looks rather pervy to the casual observer...
In the end, I got a look at Mars, it looked like this:
.
except it was pink.
In other words, It was big enough to just about tell it was circular in shape, but that was about it. I wished I'd had my Dad's telescope with me, it wasn't the greatest thing on earth, but it had 60x magnification, rather than the 15x - odd that my little telescope has...
I saw it last time it came close - I must have been 12 or 13. If I can make it to 89 without my eyesight failing too much, I hope to see it again, and by that time I hope I'll
a) Have a decent-sized telescope b) Not live in London where you can't see a damn thing in the night sky
It's actually not that bad. I spent a few months sharing a 56k connection with a housemate once - we had an old (and rather noisy) PC with Linux as a gateway. Okay, it wasn't blazingly fast, but we did quite successfully manage to both play Unreal Tournament online at the same time, which I was quite impressed by.
Currently I have a broadband router connected to my cable modem - it has a serial port at the back which I keep connected to my old modem - it's useless most of the time, but damnned handy when something goes wrong with the cable connection (which happens about three times a year)...
I think the point is that it is easy to connect two computers to the modem via the ethernet ports if you don't want to have to set up internet connection sharing on one of your computers.
May I reccommend Ella Minnow Pea, a beautiful little book by Mark Dunn that can easily be read in a couple of hours. I've never ready anything that delighted in the joy of language as much - all without sacrificing its broad accessibility.
If you have a look on his page, you'll find the answers. His engines work by reacting hyrogen peroxide over platinum-plated meshes. These meshes are pretty expensive, and most of the engines have many layers of them to achieve full catylsation. Also remember that (IIRC) they have either four or five engines, as the engines are used for attitude control.
I bought a Bluetooth USB dongle for something like 14 recently ($22), which includes VAT @ 17.5%. The cost of bluetooth parts was meant to be (IIRC) less than $5, so it seems to me that they must have pretty much hit that target.
...that's more than the head rate of the winchester
Ahhh - the Winchester... it takes me back to when we first got an RM Nimbus network in school (around 1986, I suppose) - we had a network with a 20 Megabyte Winchester. I thought it was awesome. 20 Megabytes!
No, it's NOT. And it's especially not when the thing you want needs to be simple, easy to set up and you don't want to spend many hours having to learn all sorts of things you really aren't interested in just to get that thing to work.
One of the things that annoys me is when people accuse those who don't want to have to learn all the ins and outs of a Linux system of being lazy. I'm not lazy - I just don't have a great deal of time and have far more interesting things that I'd like to be doing with it.
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Did she need two hands to take the cap off the cup?
I suspect she needed two hands on the cup due to being 79 years old.
With punitive damages... does she actually get the bulk of that money? I don't quite understand how that works...
Yeah, me neither... Apparently the damages were reduced from $2.4 million to $480,000 and the final amount was settled privately, so the final number isn't really publically known.
I'll grant you though it's not quite as clear cut as people make it out to be.
True.
It's taken from http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm, which attributes it from:
excerpted from ATLA fact sheet. (C)1995, 1996 by Consumer Attorneys of California
I think the thing you're missing here is that the coffee was considerably hotter than the temperature coffee is normally served at. It was certainly too hot to drink.
During the investigation the hottest other coffee they could find served by McDonald's competitors was 20 degrees colder.
People are used to handling hot liquids, but there's Hot and then there's Damn Hot.
People expect coffee to be hot and you'd expect it to hurt if you spilt it over yourself. However the extra twenty degrees that the McDonalds coffee had made the difference between "Yow, that's hot" and "Oh shit I no longer have any skin left".
McDonalds had ample evidence that their coffee was considerably hotter than people could reasonably expect it to be (700 claims over the previous 10 years) and yet did nothing.
That's interesting - the hottest coffee the investigators at the case could find from McDonald's competitors was around 160 degrees farenheight (about 70 degrees celcius) - some way off boiling. Certainly even with the toughest mouth in the world drinking coffee at almost boiling would burn you badly.
Link to the whole business: http://tinyurl.com/muws
Also, the vehicle wasn't moving - she was in the passenger's seat and it was stationary. The cup was between her legs to grip it while she took the cap off it.
She wasn't driving. Her grandson was driving and the car was stationary. She put the cup between her legs to hold it while she took the top off. There's a very interesting post on it here:
http://tinyurl.com/muws
Liquids at 180 degrees farenheight will burn the skin within two seconds and is far too hot to drink. In the previous ten years to the case McDonalds had had 700 claims filed against it by people who had been burnt by its coffee, and had done nothing about it.
Originally she aksed for $20,000 compensation, but the court awarded her $200,000 which was then reduced to $160,000 because it was deemed 20% her fault. The rest of the damages were punative.
Like that never happens in the UK?
There seems to be loads of ads on the TV now - "have you had an accident recently that wasn't your fault? Mrs Briggs of Smothersby broke her hip when a circus elephant went on the rampage, and she was awarded 57p!"
There's a small article at law.com about it:
2 6
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=10510282390
Apparently he was unable to change it to direct it to his website for several months after registering it.
I suspect that register.com may have shot themselves in the foot by claiming that the contract did not explicitly give Mr Zurakov
exclusive control over the site. The judge did not agree, saying that if if it wasn't explicit in the contract 'to register' a site should give you more than just a listing in whois.
Register.com should have just admitted that something went wrong with their DNS assignment system and settled out of court. They probably could have gotten away with $5000 or so.
The McDonalds lawsuit wasn't that frivolous - they were selling coffee at a much higher temperature than it is possible to drink it at to people in moving vehicles. They had also consistently ignored the reports of people being seriously hurt by their coffee.
Sure, if you spill coffee on your lap you don't expect it to be pleasant, but you don't expect to get third degree burns requiring skin grafts either. McDonalds knew people were being hurt by coffee that was much hotter than would reasonably be expected and had done nothing about it.
Reading the DARPA site, the route will be up to 300 miles long, and has to be completed in under 10 hours - that's an average speed of 30mph, cross-country.
No wonder they don't expect any contestants to finish on the first race - I think you're going to have to have a fair amount of luck just to not break the vehicle at any point.
Nevertheless, I can't wait to see it...
I can even see the canals! This computer trickery is amazing!
I've got all the fancy dress I need already, thanks.
Did you have a look at Mars last week? I did, but only through this tiny collapsable telescope a friend gave me. It was very difficult to find Mars in the first place as fully extending the telescope focuses it at somewhere past infinity so the deal was:
a) try and find something in the distance to focus on (not easy at nighttime - luckily the sillhouette of the trees against the bright yellow London night sky sufficed)
b) try for ages to get the damn thing pointing in the right direction
c) Try not to look too suspicious as you're doing it - standing in the street at night looking around with a telescope pointed at a 30degree angle looks rather pervy to the casual observer...
In the end, I got a look at Mars, it looked like this:
.
except it was pink.
In other words, It was big enough to just about tell it was circular in shape, but that was about it. I wished I'd had my Dad's telescope with me, it wasn't the greatest thing on earth, but it had 60x magnification, rather than the 15x - odd that my little telescope has...
I saw it last time it came close - I must have been 12 or 13. If I can make it to 89 without my eyesight failing too much, I hope to see it again, and by that time I hope I'll
a) Have a decent-sized telescope
b) Not live in London where you can't see a damn thing in the night sky
It's actually not that bad. I spent a few months sharing a 56k connection with a housemate once - we had an old (and rather noisy) PC with Linux as a gateway. Okay, it wasn't blazingly fast, but we did quite successfully manage to both play Unreal Tournament online at the same time, which I was quite impressed by.
Currently I have a broadband router connected to my cable modem - it has a serial port at the back which I keep connected to my old modem - it's useless most of the time, but damnned handy when something goes wrong with the cable connection (which happens about three times a year)...
I think the point is that it is easy to connect two computers to the modem via the ethernet ports if you don't want to have to set up internet connection sharing on one of your computers.
May I reccommend Ella Minnow Pea, a beautiful little book by Mark Dunn that can easily be read in a couple of hours. I've never ready anything that delighted in the joy of language as much - all without sacrificing its broad accessibility.
If you have a look on his page, you'll find the answers. His engines work by reacting hyrogen peroxide over platinum-plated meshes. These meshes are pretty expensive, and most of the engines have many layers of them to achieve full catylsation. Also remember that (IIRC) they have either four or five engines, as the engines are used for attitude control.
And platinum ain't cheap.
At the kind of price it'll be going for, I think the number is probably closer to a few thousand...
I bought a Bluetooth USB dongle for something like 14 recently ($22), which includes VAT @ 17.5%. The cost of bluetooth parts was meant to be (IIRC) less than $5, so it seems to me that they must have pretty much hit that target.
...that's more than the head rate of the winchester
Ahhh - the Winchester... it takes me back to when we first got an RM Nimbus network in school (around 1986, I suppose) - we had a network with a 20 Megabyte Winchester. I thought it was awesome. 20 Megabytes!
I'm just on a cable broadband connection, but my router logs are currently full of hits to port 135. I'm getting a hit every 10-20 seconds.
No, it's NOT. And it's especially not when the thing you want needs to be simple, easy to set up and you don't want to spend many hours having to learn all sorts of things you really aren't interested in just to get that thing to work.
One of the things that annoys me is when people accuse those who don't want to have to learn all the ins and outs of a Linux system of being lazy. I'm not lazy - I just don't have a great deal of time and have far more interesting things that I'd like to be doing with it.
Dependency Hell is a thing (almost...) of the past.
Please tell me you didn't type that with a straight face!
Odd - I'm still getting 191KB/second - Come on, Slashdotters, you can do better than that!
> > seems pretty expensive
> That's nowhere near 'expensive'. You can't find *any* other IP phone for less than $200.
Well, it is expensive when you compare it to a bog-standard normal phone, which you can get for about 10 pounds.
(Say, home come you can't use the symbol for pounds sterling in Slashdot comments any more?)