Currently watching Hot Coffee, a documentary that takes a look at so-called frivilous lawsuits.
It focuses on that infamous case from years ago where an elderly women spilled coffee on herself, sued McDonald’s, and won $2.7 million dollars.
Did you know that the woman was burned so badly from the coffee, she required skin grafts? Did you know the burns were between her legs and on her crotch? The movie shows the damage of her burns and it turned my stomach.
The movie blazes through her story quickly and jumps into commerce’s attempts to cap the types of damages a citizen can be rewarded in civil cases. According to the movie, it’s the coffee case that is most often cited as an example of what a frivolous lawsuit is, and why reform is needed to stop citizens from milking millions from large companies. Caps and tort reform and all that business.
For the public relations firms, lobbyists, and politicians representing tort reform, it is just that— business. For the people with skin grafts, amputated legs, and fetal brain injuries, it’s not business, its their lives.
Source: hotcoffeethemovie.com
Net neutrality isn’t a fair fight. It’s an abstract issue concerning whether Internet service providers can treat different kinds of data in different ways, and to understand it, people mainly look to see who’s on which side of the battle. That turns out to be, in the pro camp, innovative Internet companies like Google and Yahoo, who have playful logos and give you stuff for free, versus scary cable megaliths like Comcast, a.k.a. the guys who gouge you monthly and schedule installation appointments for eight-hour windows. It’s the wide open future of the Internet versus roadblocks and toll-taking. There may not be a clearer good-guys/bad-guys fight in all of technologydom. There’s a third player, too, a kind of white knight—the Federal Communications Commission’s baby-faced new chairman, Julius Genachowski. A college and law-school chum of President Obama’s, Genachowski has made net neutrality one of his signature issues, viewing it as a part of the bedrock on which America’s Webby future will rest. In his mind, to be for net neutrality is to be on the side of history. When the history of the Internet does get written, a few decades hence, it will recall that today in Washington, the bad guys won.
Source: newsweek
Advice from a law professor: don't talk to the police. Ever. Ever. Never.
I’m halfway through the video and its pretty interesting. Bottom line, you’ll never be able to talk yourself out of being arrested.
Source: claytoncubitt
