The article fails to realise that in most of the anecdotes retold; today the state would intervene at the behest of a neighbour and "I read it in the New York Times" will not really prevent the investigation into why you allowed your child to play with knives, live for 3 days at the top of a slag heap of rubble or hold a loaded handgun.
Also - teenage mortality has reduced drastically[1]. It's hard to argue that could be a bad thing.
It is probably because we don't let them (wherever possible) carry out activities that might kill themselves.
I am a parent of 3; I will happily take my children mountain climbing, skiing, snowboarding, trekking, wild swimming. In a few years we plan to trek to Everest Base Camp and they are coming with me to the Andes.
We engage in controlled risk. If they break a limb skiing then they break a limb skiing. They pushed beyond their abilities in some way. I don't need to give them wrappers of cocaine from a criminal and a handgun to be a better parent.
There is also a very real risk of the "Tom Sawyer" bias. Each generation thinks their generation took greater risks and had more vivid adventures than the one previous. The cognitive dissonance curiously avoids the higher levels of child abuse, abduction, injury, poisoning, asphyxiation, malnutrition and disease. My father used to have great adventures playing as a child in asbestos riddled houses. You can talk to his friends about it sometimes...well the few that have not died before 60.
Oh look here is a group of kids that used lethal asbestos as chalk. [2] They really learned a valuable lesson about ad-hoc citizenry there.
Right, but the linked articles actually state that the main cause in reduced mortality was reduced traffic accidents. Almost all of the things in the NYT article would not have qualified as traffic accidents. On the face of it, this doesn't really surprise me: many things are "dangerous" yet it's not that easy to kill someone (or yourself) in an accident. Heavy machinery changes that equation, and virtually all heavy machinery we come in contact with are motor vehicles.
In other words: the data doesn't immediately suggest that increased caution has lead to reduced mortality outside of traffic. The NYT article is still plausible from this perspective.
This is probably why your children are much less prone to socially objectionable activities; they get it out of their system.
On the other hand, I think it is the easy access of information and videos on the Internet about everything that help younger people be less curious about what will happen if they do this and that. I don't think it is parents stopping their kids or the neighbours calling the police. Neighbours used to call the police in the past too. Those police were the parents themselves.
The question is - what is the right temperature for hot coffee to be called hot?
Coffee served by McD (180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit) will give a person third-degree burns in two to seven seconds, while home-coffee brewers normally serve coffee at much lower temperatures (130 two 140 degrees) which won't immediately burn you. Yes, Starbucks and other joints do serve coffee at the hotter temperatures -- because some customers prefer it -- but then again, they get sued for it also.
Also, she attempted to settle for $20,000 at one point, and McDonald's refused
You may have heard that she got millions of dollars, when the final award was $640,000. Then from that you take out the medical bills (hint: skin grafts aren't cheap).
But she has to take some responsibility, right? She may not have been driving, but she was trying to open the lid in her lap so she could add cream and sugar. That's kind of careless, isn't it? Why couldn't the jury see that?
Well, they did. That's why the compensatory damages portion ($200,000) was reduced by 20 percent, because they ruled it was 20 percent her fault.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume it was just 80% the seller's fault, however. Dealing with hot liquids can be dangerous, yes. But you need a good portion of bad luck to suffer burns serious enough to require surgery simply because there's just not that much coffee in a cup (indeed, its conceivable she would have healed without surgery, albeit with more scarring).
That's not to say the seller is faultless - but the verdict still strikes me as entirely disproportionate. Then again, that's the norm nowadays, isn't it?
As a person who used to drink coffee from McDonald's in that era, it was extremely hot, with italics. My surprise about the reaction to that case was that I assumed that the vast majority of the US had had a cup of coffee from McDonald's. I'd been burned by their coffee before; it was just one of the many risks of my morning commute.
I just think that we rationalized the risks to our safety because a company as large as McDonald's must have done a lot of studies on their coffee and figured out a temperature that was the perfect compromise between preventing disease and putting meltdown hot liquids in the hands of people driving cars. I thought that their goal in making the coffee that hot was to lower their net liability (and hence, the public's net danger) rather than what it really was - a way to serve coffee that got very old.
It was a business decision that had a money value for the company. They undertook it in order to make money. Paying for the externalities in court is a good place for McDonald's to learn how to recalibrate how much injury is worth, and see if their price calculation for raising the temperature of their coffee still makes sense.
At the time, the reactionary corporate rhetoric parodied the position of consumer advocates as requiring businesses to cover coffee cups with long elaborate disclaimers about how coffee could possibly be hot. Go buy a cup of coffee at McDonald's today - you'll see nothing of the sort. Turns out you don't need much if you just don't serve coffee as hot as lava to save money.
Without surgery there is a significant risk she would have died.
I understand people get stuck on the 'coffee' aspect, but many acids cause similar levels of tissue damage. There is a huge difference between water at 140f and 190f.
To put things in perspective an autoclave at 134 °C for three minutes is as effective as 121 °C for 15 minutes. Steam at 134 °C can achieve in three minutes the same sterility that hot air at 160 °C can take two hours to achieve. Granted, 249.8F = 121 C, but water can transfer a lot of heat vary quickly.
The amount of liquid in a coffee cup is, however, limited. Furthermore, steam is a lot more dangerous due to the heat freed in condensation. Furthermore, there's a pretty large difference between 134 °C and 90. Finally, I don't think the mechanics of destroying infectious agents is really a great analogy for the mechanics of skin burns: the speed of reactions indeed increases non-linearly, yet the energy increases linearly. The energy in a coffee cup isn't nearly enough to damage the entire body; therefore the amount of damage is likely linked to the amount of energy released. Not that I'm volunteering for an experiment, admittedly.
You mention the amount of time needed for serious burns to occur, yet that amount of time is huge compared to the time needed for water (or coffee) will flow away off or for people will to react. For her to remain exposed to the full load of coffee for around 12-15 seconds requires a pretty odd set of circumstances. For those burns to be large enough to be life-threatening normally requires a large surface area to be burnt, and that requires a large amount of coffee for a long time. (The 12-15 number is from wikipedia which says her lawyers produced evidence that this is the duration t 82 degrees celsius that "may produce third-degree burns").
Of course, there's the complicating factor here that she was quite old; at 79 she would not have been as resilient as younger person. And while that's a terrible shame, it's unreasonable to blame macdonalds for aging. Reading, she weighed just 47kg before her injury, which is low. I don't believe that a healthy person would have sustained her injuries.
It sounds implausible that she could have managed to sustain those kind of injuries given the circumstances - unless some other factors played a role (such as frailty due to aging). It's terrible she suffered as she did, but I still don't see how that could have been reasonably foreseen by macdonalds (and therefore the verdict seems unreasonable).
The point of the lawsuit isn't (just) about what happened to her, but critically also about the degree to which MacDonalds' was taking unreasonable risks. And as wikipedia points out, there have been many, many similar lawsuits, that apparently were not successful. (And note that coffee is still served at that temperature).
Are you trying to argue that 3rd degree burns over 5+% of your body is not somehow a serious medical issue? Or that being younger or heaver somehow adds protection to your skin?
As to water vs steam, steam has effectively a much higher heat capacity but far lower density. 90c water can cause 3rd degree burns in as little as 2 seconds but clothing generally extends the exposure duration significantly.
PS: In the end it was a low cost lawsuit which was settled for presumably less than 600k and well within the cost of doing business. They changed cup design not temperature, but that's about it. As far as their concerned the issue was not the actual cost but discouraging people from suing in the future as it's been 20 years without a repeat.
I'm saying quite the opposite: that the very seriousness of her injury was likely due to her age, not that she didn't have serious injuries. Her age would have made the accident more likely, would have slowed down her response to the accident (her own trial lawyers' evidence suggested she must have remained in the hot coffee for at least 12-15 seconds, not the 2 seconds you mention), and would have hampered her recovery (pretty much any injury is more serious in the elderly, and indeed wikipedia mentions it for burns too).
She didn't just have any old minor burn; hers was huge - she stayed for months in the hospital and lost 20% of her body mass; that's not your typical scalding accident.
Such lawsuits have been repeated, they just haven't been so successful. The fact that it's been 20 years merely underlines how unusual her circumstances were - and perhaps how bad that original cup design was.
McDonalds had been warned about servig their coffee so hot; they had previously settled suits from hot coffee; they were serving coffee hotter than their rivals.
Try making a coffee today and taking the temperature of that coffee ten minutes after making it. I doubt it'd be hot enough to cause full thickness burns.
Also, if you put a lid on coffee (which you'd do when you want it to stay warm as when it's not necessarily for immediate consumption), it can stay hot quite a while.
Personally, I don't believe most people would have gotten third degree burns in a similar situation. Unfortunately, she was old (79), light (therefore likely frail; 47kg), and wore cotton (absorbent) sweatpants, and she must have kept them on for at least 12 seconds according to the evidence her own lawyers presented. Frankly, that's just a bunch of bad luck piled up. Most people would have stood up when the coffee spilled toward them, not sat in it for that long, and most people would have taken off at least partially the hot pants, thereby distributing the heat better, some people probably would have their pants off entirely by that point. (Wikipedia claims scalding rarely results in third-degree burns, let alone third degree burns on 6% of your body's surface area with a lot more second degree burn area).
Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin. That's just not all that likely to happen; and when it does, being old and light make recovery slower and less likely. She simply had the worst circumstances on all fronts.
10 minutes is a pure guess at the time it takes to serve the coffee, pay for it, walk out of the restaurant, get in a car, be driven as a passenger, pull up some place and adjust the coffee.
> Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin.
2% of non-fatal household scald injuries in > 65 year olds needed tranfer to specialist hospitals for specialist treatment. If that's what you mean by rare then I guess we agree, but it's not what I'd call rare.
^^ This is exactly why you are supremely unqualified to understand or debate the issue. Honestly. Your comment was simply stupid.
The takedown request was not because the screenshots are copyrighted. That is not the infringement. If you don't understand that then you might want to read a bit more before becoming involved with the grown-ups.
Please don't launch into personal attacks (at least not as crude as these). If you have a point to make, reason through it, post your sources, and debate properly.
I'm sorry you saw it that way. I think the DMCA is flawed to the point where crude requests are complied with. I would be happy to respond if you tell me what you disagree with.
I absolutely love that the majority of this thread are claiming all sorts of legal protections for Popcorn Time - all the way from free speech to ludicrous comparisons with screenshotting screenshots.
So you guys love the law - right up until Crawford posted MGM vs Grokster as the binding ruling and now suddenly it's all...
"The law is wrong and archaic!"
Honestly. You sound like teenagers throwing a tantrum. Just grow up and admit you want to steal content you didn't pay for. I would have a lot more respect for you than you. When you try and justify it you sound like a moron.
One poster below even went so far as to insinuate theft is OK because the movie publishing houses have so much money. Is that the standard we apply is it? If a company is successful it becomes OK to pirate their stuff?
Moron. Downvote away, it doesn't make the attitude any less moronic.
I dont steal content I didn't pay for. I have never used popcorn time! yet I am upset that the DMCA is applied here against code.
Surely if they have a copyright claim to the code they can issue it, but issuing a copyright claim based on the actions of a software user is a BIG stretch to me. Has nothing to do with a sense of entitlement.
It has nothing to do with what the program is used for. It is the idea that simply hosting code that could be used to do something illegal with is itself illegal. This isn't a piracy or copyright debate, it's a freedom of speech debate.
I didn't say FoS was absolute. That's why it's an interesting debate. But the piracy part of it is fairly irrelevant when it comes to the question, "Is it illegal to host code that can be used for illegal purposes"?
Here is a little fact; you are not that clever and the rest of the world is not that stupid. Save your strawman arguments. If movies are released by content creators for free they will release them via channels you can access.
if you can't access them; tough. No one said you had a right to content.
Or, they could release them via BT, and then people using this service can watch them ala Netflix. This is, currently, a channel we can access--indeed, one perhaps preferable to one of the "official" mechanisms.
Then again, who would help the poor, embattled movie publishing houses? I hear they're barely getting by these days.
Sure. I dislike the company i work for, and would love to disseminate their proprietary software. I appreciate you wanting to be complicit in the crime we are about to commit. What email address should I send it to?
There's a difference between not sharing a secret and sharing a secret but requiring the person you shared it with to not share it. The first requires only self discipline, the second requires a club.
You are if the video player finds copyright DVDs and then delivers them to your door without the permission of the content creator. So yes. Stop being absurd.
Except we all know it is. Just like I theoretically could use a set of lockpicks for something other than picking locks. But we both know what they are for.
IT communities seem to think Judges are stupid or that the actions of general crowd are somehow excused by the niche applications of a technology. That is not the way society or common sense works.
In sane jurisdictions lockpicks are perfectly legal for everyone (not just licensed locksmiths) because, although people people may claim that "we all know what they are for", tools should not be illegal just because they can be used for something illegal.
Lockpicks typically only become illegal when illegal intent can be proved in that particular case. This is as it should be.
> I theoretically could use a set of lockpicks for something other than picking locks. But we both know what they are for.
We don't know whether they're for the purposes of robbery, professional locksmithing, sport, or education. So no, we don't both know that they're for illegitimate purposes, which is the relevant distinction (as opposed to "are they for picking locks or not" which is neither here nor there, although it's a piece of misdirection which would do a prosecuting attorney proud). Thankfully, neither legislators nor judges are that willfully obtuse. In all but 4 states of the US, lockpicks are not prima facie illegal for unlicensed citizens to carry.
By this very analogy popcorntime should be legal to create, legal to host, legal to download, legal to possess, and illegal to use for piracy. As it should be.
It's that "common sense" is more a function of good advertising than, you know, what actually makes sense.
It's "common sense" that pedestrians should stay out of streets--except that that was the result of careful lobbying by auto makers in the early 1900s.
It's "common sense" decades ago that cigarettes didn't cause harm to anyone --except that they do.
It's "common sense" that piracy is tantamount to theft--except that copying a file does not deprive the original owner of their information.
"Common sense" is a tired refrain used by people who are either too narrow-minded to actually think through policies or who are shilling for a larger player.
Maybe you should start thinking critically about why things are the way they are and whether or not that's actually necessary--after all, that's just common sense.
It is common sense that pedestrians should stay out of streets. And for many years in the UK the pedestrian had the right of way; right up until a Judge was smart enough to realise it is easier for a pedestrian not to step into high moving traffic than it is for a 2000 kilogram lump of metal hurtling along at 30-40MPH to accomodate such idiots.
So now, the law is balanced again. Pedestrians are given safe crossing points but the roads belong to vehicles.
It was never common sense that cigarettes didn't cause harm. It was a lack of medical research.
It is common sense that piracy is theft. You the deprivation argument is utter bullshit. Otherwise you won't mind if I make copies of all of your house keys; car keys and private documentation. After all; I am not depriving you of the originals and they are just a series of atoms. No biggie.
Roads didn't "belong" to vehicles--in fact, it was generally considered that the driver of the larger vehicle in an accident was at fault, which is common sense.
As for piracy--look, taking my keys (even to make a copy) requires the temporary loss of access to them, whereas with files it does not. Arguments against copyright infringement cannot hang on stealing, because it is plainly not stealing: instead, you have to construct them as being about the infringement on somebody's right to control access to their works (which is a bit more subtle, and far from settled).
You need to read more and talk less, and maybe you'll learn something. I don't blame you for being brainwashed by the societal norms these days, but if you want to be taken seriously you need to google your way to success.
You could take down the pirate bay legally because most of its use as a search engine is for illegal content.
Of course you would also have to take down torrent client repository because most people torrent illegal content. We know that most people who DOWNLOAD videos get copyrighted material because free to watch videos are usually available to stream.
Technically you could then take down Media Player Classic repository. Of course it just facilitates watching torrents and bootlegged DVDs.
Popcorn time is literally bittorrent + media player + search engine. It's just a convenient package. And as we've shown all of those things are illegal.
It's not a slippery slope at all. It's quite clear cut.
If a shop was distributing fenced goods or human traffic we wouldn't allow it to remain in business because they also distribute free and legitimate groceries.
Do you see how slippery the slope is? You have left from the tiny tiny tiny niche use of file transfer for free content to the massive industrious downloading of intellectual property.
As long as you are still being paid your salary though...easy to have a faux-morally superior position when it is not your efforts being ripped off.
You seem to miss that this project is based on three legal programs: a search engine, a torrent client and a media player. What next, ban search engines from displaying illegal content?
I guess the question is should the makers of lockpicks be punished for how they are used (or for that matter be stopped from distributing their lockpicks). There are plenty of commercially available products that can be use for illegal activities but we don't prevent them from being sold (let alone given away for free)
the 'we all know it is' argument holds no legal water. the law must be enumerated and explicit, providing guidelines for responsible behavior and drawing lines which one must cross in order to be in violation of the law.
Yes. Unless you think someone should be allowed to post videos of themselves breaking into your house and raping your family?
A crime is a crime. That's it. If you don't like copyright then advocate it's removal but we live in a consensus based society so if you lose you shut up about it.
Really? You advocate pulling down a video about what is effectively a debugging technique, just because the case study is breaking some DRM?
Also, you continually compare this to physical crimes, some banal (theft) and other repugnant (rape); in doing so, you cheapen your arguments and make your point, however defensible, unable to be taken seriously.
"a crime is a crime" is a tautology and cannot be reasoned with or discussed in any useful fashion. Your claim about "consensus-based society" is also plainly false, considering the forms of government in most of the West and even a cursory glance through history.
Is your argument that certain crimes are not crimes in your eyes?
You must see how that is completely incompatible with any functioning society. You have decided arbitrarily, in opposition to the majority of society according to our legal and civic models, that you are going to ignore the law regarding DRM?
That is fine. But you would be the first to call the police if people decided to ignore the law and it negatively impacted you. Your hypocritcal attitude is equalling breathtaking and juvenile.
Ultimately you believe "the law should stand except when I want something; then I should be allowed to steal it because the internetz and copyright is slaveries and yada yada...
Also - teenage mortality has reduced drastically[1]. It's hard to argue that could be a bad thing.
It is probably because we don't let them (wherever possible) carry out activities that might kill themselves.
I am a parent of 3; I will happily take my children mountain climbing, skiing, snowboarding, trekking, wild swimming. In a few years we plan to trek to Everest Base Camp and they are coming with me to the Andes.
We engage in controlled risk. If they break a limb skiing then they break a limb skiing. They pushed beyond their abilities in some way. I don't need to give them wrappers of cocaine from a criminal and a handgun to be a better parent.
There is also a very real risk of the "Tom Sawyer" bias. Each generation thinks their generation took greater risks and had more vivid adventures than the one previous. The cognitive dissonance curiously avoids the higher levels of child abuse, abduction, injury, poisoning, asphyxiation, malnutrition and disease. My father used to have great adventures playing as a child in asbestos riddled houses. You can talk to his friends about it sometimes...well the few that have not died before 60.
Oh look here is a group of kids that used lethal asbestos as chalk. [2] They really learned a valuable lesson about ad-hoc citizenry there.
[1]http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/gezondheid-welzijn/publi... [2]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-24942338