I never stated an opinion either way on whether this was a bad lawsuit. My statement was that it was a lawsuit launched without the cooperation of the company. Which is definitely true in that case.

That said I did need to check my facts because I called it a class action lawsuit when it wasn't. But that issue is completely unrelated to anything that you said.

My apologies for my ambiguity. I could have been far clearer about what I was trying to say, and my motivations for having said it.

I see both parts of the discussion are among the older members of HN, glad to see they're setting a good example :)

I wouldn't call this a mistake. It is a very accurate heuristic not just in this particular case but in online discussions in general. There will be errors, but deploying a heuristic instead of a perfect algorithm makes great sense when dealing with the internet. Less acceptable for something like a scientific paper.

I'd say actually reading may be a better approach rather than to use an heuristic.

Perhaps you should read what I wrote then, because what I wrote was about a heuristic to identify intentions based on what was read. Would you suggest that in face to face discussions body language should ignored when it disagrees with what a person says?

First off, the lawsuit was justified, but not because of the temperature of the coffee. The coffee was being served at industry standard temperatures (defined in terms of what _other_ companies in the industry serve their coffee at), despite what many claim. The primary problem is that their coffee cup design was defective, and was prone to collapsing.

In response to the lawsuit, McDonald's has not changed the temperature of their coffee. If you order a black coffee at a McDonald's today (or at many other shops), it may very well be just as hot as the coffee that disfigured Liebeck in 1994. So for the love of god, don't spill coffee on yourself! Coffee as cool as 140F can cause third degree burns in mere seconds. That is well below what anybody serves coffee at. Coffee is dangerous. It's just that simple.

http://www.burnfoundation.org/programs/resource.cfm?c=1&a=3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...

Where did this meme of "Liebeck v. McDonald's was actually 100% reasonable, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool" come from?

In the immediate aftermath of the lawsuit, many Americans became extremely critical of any personal injury lawsuits. It appeared as though if it continued, the livelihoods of personal injury lawyers might be threatened. So an informal propaganda campaign was launched, featuring some selective truth (the burn photographs) and some lies (the idea that the coffee served to her was way hotter than coffee you and I are used to). These sort of lawyers are extremely good at being convincing, that is pretty much their job after all, and in a non-adversarial context it is not suprising that they are able to convince most people.

Exactly. The other effect is to move the Overton window. Prior to the propaganda campaign, those of us who would have said Liebeck wasn't even entitled to compensation for her actual medical costs would have been branded as unsympathetic and a bit cold-hearted. Now, we'd be considered baby-eating monsters with opinions too radical to be a part of public discourse.

These sort of lawyers are extremely good at being convincing, that is pretty much their job after all, and in a non-adversarial context it is not suprising that they are able to convince most people.

It's like the old adage, "Don't make enemies with people who buy ink by the barrel," taken to the next level. Lawyers ru(i)n almost everything in America.