[Ximian]

Originally Posted by evil-G-nius

If you break into someone's house and you slip and break your hip, you should not be able to sue the home owner.

Nobody will disagree with you there, but it goes up to a point. You should not be setting up traps intended to maim an intruder. You'll lose all your money that way, maybe even quite a bit of your freedom. That's why a courtroom and lawyers exist - to help find the exact point where something in acceptable or not in a specific circumstance.

That woman that ordered hot coffee, got it, and put the cup between her legs while driving instead of a cup holder burned herself. SHe should NOT have been able to sue and win but she did.

It should be pretty common knowledge by now but apparently it is not. That specific case was twisted and used to turn the public opinion against people who sued for damaged from a company for wrongdoing and get awarded from punitive damage on top. That slimy marketing campaign was very effective. What kind of idiot should deserve money for spilling lukewarm coffee on themselves while driving? Again, everyone would agree with you except that's not even close to what happened in that case.

I'll summarize a few points to show why the punitive damage award of $3 million dollars was not enough for this victim, but you can read more details at https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts or many, many other sites.

• McDonald’s operations manual required the franchisee to hold its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit.
  
• (79-year old Stella) Liebeck’s case was far from an isolated event. McDonald’s had received more than 700 previous reports of injury from its coffee, including reports of third-degree burns, and had paid settlements in some cases.
  
• Mrs. Liebeck was not driving when her coffee spilled, nor was the car she was in moving. She was the passenger in a car...
  
• She was wearing sweatpants that absorbed the coffee and kept it against her skin. She suffered third-degree burns (the most serious kind) and required skin grafts on her inner thighs and elsewhere.
  
• Mrs. Liebeck offered to settle the case for $20,000 to cover her medical expenses and lost income. But McDonald’s never offered more than $800, so the case went to trial.
  
• a jury awarded her nearly $3 million in punitive damages for the burns she suffered.

If you couldn't tell, the "elsewhere" is referring to her genitals.

Based on these points, do you think she should have been able to successfully sue?

There should be a common sense & stupidity clause that can be expressed in these dumb ass cases. Just my opinion

A "common sense & stupidity clause" wouldn't be so easy to implement. There are ways the procedures in our legal system can weaponized to punish victims. It's very difficult to predict every single circumstance of how the judicial system can be misused. It's also very difficult to prevent this misuse in a fair and just way on the first try all the while anticipating and preventing ways the new rules/laws/clauses can be misused. I would bet a good amount of money that you can spend your whole life to come up the best version of such a clause and it would take only a few days for someone to figure out a way to effectively abuse it.

Having access to a courtroom with an impartial judge and jury of peers is an elegant solution that solves a lot of complexity. It's not the most optimal solution because every now and then, even ridiculous cases will be given their time in court. The benefit is that it sets a precedent for similar ridiculous cases so at least they serve a good purpose.

Back on the original topic, as someone with a computer science degree that flunked out of grad school before I even applied, my "expert" opinion is that only a complete moron would put that much trust in Telsa's autopilot or self-driving system. Like severely stupid with a clinical diagnosis.

You can't have reliable, safe, autonomous driving by relying on GPS, cameras, and other inaccurate sensors. You need many redundant precision location markers embedded in the road surface and smart, inter-connected infrastructure (e.g. a stop sign existing in a specific location, a speed limit changing based on road conditions/hazards/traffic, a traffic light for the east-west direction on intersection of A Ave and B St telling vehicles in a X mile radius it will be switching to a yellow light at time Y and red light at time Z). A vehicle driving at speed with passengers, around other occupied vehicles, and around pedestrians is a safety critical operation that is far more complex than it seems people want to admit. Autopilot on an airplane taking off on its own and landing on its own thousands of miles away is an easier task to automate than autonomous vehicles. In my opinion, it's more complex than autopilot for airplanes because the number of variables can quickly increase to hundreds with an exponential increase in number of calculations while airplanes have much less traffic (and no pedestrians that we care about) to deal with.

Telsa knows that morons exist. They know that their auto pilot, self-driving functionality can be misused. Have they done enough to inform the morons that they should not misuse these systems? Have they done what they reasonably can to prevent dangerous misuse of those systems? I don't think Tesla has. Based on that opinion and the little information we have on this incident so far, the families of the people that died in the Telsa certainly do have a legitimate case.