>braindead users don't get the concept of 'hot coffee' and it's your fault
The coffee was served hotter than it should have been, and wastely hotter than it would have been if it had been taken from the machine at home, it was served in a cup that was so difficult to open that the customer had to put it between her legs, and when the coffee was spilled she suffered 3th degree burns to her crotch.
And she only asked that they payed her medical expenses. It was the jury who gave her all those millions.
Okay, okay. I don't claim to be an expert on that case.
But: If you buy coffee, it's hot enough to hurt you (or it's crap. There's a range of temperatures that are decent, and personal factors determine what is deemed too hot as well).
I don't buy the 'had to put between the legs to open the cup' thing. In that case don't do it near your private parts, open it properly. Not between your legs, probably sitting in a car. Why is there no applied concept of common sense?
Leaving the whole cause of the accident aside, the next part was really emphasized my point:
The jury gives you millions for 'damage'. Let's not discuss if the problem was the person sueing, but what you have to think about is this:
What message are you sending out, if someone suing a company for (arguably only) slightly irritating service (a couple degrees ~too~ hot, usability issues with a coffee cup, both probably annoying but didn't completely destroy the tiny rest of that company's customers..) could get you the FU money this community is often obsessed about? If you asked for the money on day one of the trial or made the jury feel so sorry for you that they drown you in money at the end is not relevant.
Which leads to my first post again: A culture of fear for being sued, with damages completely out of proportion [1].
1: In a large area of the world. I understand that it can seem completely normal if you limit your view to the area where this is happening.
It was hot enough to melt her genitals and cause serious disfigurement. If she had spilled it anywhere, she would have been seriously injured...
The coffee was scalding hot. The temperature of the coffee was from a corporate order intended to save a few bucks on having to re-brew coffee. The McDonald's corporation was negligent.
In this case, Dropbox was horribly negligent. Releasing all of the data in my Dropbox folder to everyone is not a 'minor inconvenience'. It is a big fucking deal, particularly if I had no idea it could happen so easily, and I am paying them under the assumption that their service is relatively secure.
I think there's no question that Dropbox seriously dropped the ball, but as programmers we should be extremely concerned about the prospect of companies being held liable not just for actual damages but theoretically possible and potentially non-economic yet non-existent damages.
How do you heat liquid water to more than 100°C? Coffee is supposed to be just below 100°C when you brew it, or it is not good. Goes for home made or McD coffee. Whatever, maybe in some parts of the world, the laws of physics don't apply and liquid water does not lose energy though evaporation...
Back on topic: Dropbox is telling everybody that they are "encrypting" stuff on their drives. How do they decrypt without a password? This case is a much different from the "stupid McD coffee customer" case, because details on cloud storage technicalities are not common knowledge, whereas "boiling water may be hot" kinda is.
"hot liquid" and "liquid so hot that it will burn my skin" are not necessarily the same thing. Unless you think that people should feel afraid of a hot bath or a hottub (or even going to a hot spring).
In more precise terms, 'boiling' is a subset of 'hot.'
If you increase the atmospheric pressure, you can raise the boiling point of water well beyond 100°C. Of course, that has little to do with brewing coffee.
So you bring the water to a boil, and then let it sit for a minute, then pour it over the grounds. Then as the coffee steeps, the liquid further cools down. It is just below 100 when you brew it.... not when you drink it. It is much cooler when you drink it, (65 to 80 C).
> Which leads to my first post again: A culture of fear for being sued, with damages completely out of proportion [1].
There had been more than 700 previous cases, where McDonald had settled with the victims for a total of more than US$ 500.000, but hadn't changed their practice. The wast majority of the damages in this case was not "compensatory damages", intended to compensate the victim for her injury, but "punitive damages", intended to be large enough that McDonald would change their business practice. The punitive damages were set to be equivalent to two days worth of coffee sold at McDonald.
We can argue whether McDonald should be forced by law to lower the serving temperature. A UK court came to the opposite conclusion in a similar case. However, if we accept that as a premise, the size of damages doesn't seem out of line.
> If you buy coffee, it's hot enough to hurt you (or it's crap. There's a range of temperatures that are decent, and personal factors determine what is deemed too hot as well).
McDonald's keeps coffee at >82°C, which is much hotter than any coffee served elsewhere.
No, that's not true - it depends on where you buy it from and what their policy on coffee temperature is.
And I don't know if you bought coffee from McDonalds, but at some point they used to serve coffee in containers made out of a thick layer of cellulose (from what I could see) which wasn't leaking any heat; giving you absolutely no clue whatsoever to how hot or cold the coffee was just by holding it. Think about that for a second - when you're holding a glass with hot tea or coffee, you can feel it in your hand. But what if that glass was cold as if holding iced tea?
Yes, I got burned too, but not as badly as to suffer 3rd degree burns and I still buy coffee from McD. But I imagine I would get pretty pissed too above a certain threshold.
Here's a good recent documentary that goes into detail about the famous hot coffee case. It was eye-opening for sure. I never thought that I would going in, but I came away thinking McDonald's was woefully negligent in that case.
Where is the logic there? Something is difficult to open so the immediate response is to put it between your legs? And it's a hot beverage? Sorry...that's idiotic. Zero dollars. Stop wasting the court's time. It doesn't matter what McD did or did not do. You are primarily responsible for your own well being. Nobody tricked her into thinking the coffee was iced tea. Nobody told her that she must use her thighs (?!) to open it.
Sure that doctor gave you the wrong medicine, but you're responsible for your own well-being. How hard is it to Google the name of the medicine and see that it has nothing to do with your condition? How hard is it to remember that the medicine that the doctor told you he was writing a prescription for and the one that he actually wrote on the paper aren't the same? Stop wasting the court's time. Zero dollars.
Not the same logic at all.
Being given the wrong medicine is entirely different due to the relationship between patient and doctor. That is a relationship defined by the position of trust the doctor has. It is a privileged relationship. And a Doctor is known to have years of training and experience behind his belt.
The relationship between a customer and a minimum-wage worker employee is entirely different. You don't expect them to have the years of training and experience behind them to help ensure everything runs smoothly.
You step into someone's hot tub and the water was (actually) boiling. Now you have second degree burns from the waist down. But you should have known better. It's called a hot tub, right? You knew there was a risk that you would be burned by the water. You're just an idiot for assuming that you could just jump in. Stop waisting the court's time. Zero dollars.
(There is no 'position of trust' with a 'hot tub operator,' nor do you require years of training to own/operate a hot tub).
In addition to lambada's response about the doctor-patient relationship, there is also an expectation of common knowledge. You are not expected to know anything about the medicine given to you since that is the doctor's responsibility, but you are expected to take it as instructed. You are expected to know that if you do anything unusual with it you may be putting yourself in danger.
If you do something idiotic like crush it up into powder, then snort it at five times the dosage, that's on you. If you then go into shock and suffer a stroke, guess what.... zero dollars, stop wasting the court's time, you are an idiot.
The coffee was served hotter than it should have been, and wastely hotter than it would have been if it had been taken from the machine at home, it was served in a cup that was so difficult to open that the customer had to put it between her legs, and when the coffee was spilled she suffered 3th degree burns to her crotch.
And she only asked that they payed her medical expenses. It was the jury who gave her all those millions.