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Comment The University is at fault here. (Score 1) 224

I work for a major STEM university and this is very obviously a bunch of ass covering by the university for not doing due diligence.

Here's some questions you need to think about:
1. Why does your outside contracted custodian have access to the breakers for your wet labs? If we blow fuses for just the lighting elements in any of the buildings on the campus I work at, we have to get an electrician because only the building deputy has keys to the electrical closets. This is because you can do far more damage than just killing samples in one fridge by flipping a breaker- or kill yourself if you don't know what you're doing because those are going to be three-phase breakers.

2. The care of the equipment and materials are entirely the responsibility of the owners. The fridges and other equipment here are typically paid for by the funding the professor in charge of the experiment receives. This was their fridge, and their materials. If it was worth $1.3 million (which is not a very high number btw for this stuff) then you need to put equivalent effort into protecting it. A $0.02 sticky note is not $1.3 million of protection.

If the researcher's case happened where I work, the custodians would not have been able to get to the breakers. Also, the building deputy, faculty, and building staff for the area would've been made aware of it since generally alarms going off on equipment is something that would prompt most people to tell the building deputy or the faculty involved over and over and annoy them.

The custodian should be fired for violating the primary rule of these labs which is "Don't touch anything that's not yours", but I don't think the company is liable for the research group and university staff not taking proper precautions.

Comment The studios/channels are stupid and to blame. (Score 1) 115

Basically the saga in one act:

Netflix: Hey we'd like to license your stuff so people can stream it over the internet to their PCs.
Studios/Channels: lol, yeah sure okay there guy. We'll sell you licensing rights for your stupid pipe dream.
Netflix: *becomes huge*
Customers: Buying DVDs and other shit is a pain in the ass and it's nice to have this big nice catalog that I can just watch whatever on whenever I want! I might actually stop pirating stuff!
Studios/Channels: ...oh. Well, we're not selling the rights to you again when the contract is up.
*every studio and channel makes its own insanely shitty streaming service*
Customers: *go right back to pirating everything*

thus what is old is now new again

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