tomo,
Evidently Matt has decided his work is now recognisable enough that it no longer needs a signature. True too. Someone else might mimic the drawing style, but the trenchant humour can only be him.

Reading around the traps on the Mann vs. Steyn verdict, a lot of people are saying it was foolish of Steyn to run his own defence. That strikes me as true if Steyn's principal aim was to win the case, but I don't think that was his objective. Sure, he'd have preferred to have won, but the main point was to put the hockey team in the spotlight.

For Steyn, a straightforward legal defence would have been two-pronged (I suspect):

  1. he merely quoted Simberg's colourful metaphor, and said he personally wouldn't have gone so far. That's ordinary journalism.
  2. his observation that the same university that had exonerated Sandusky later exonerated Mann. The first was found to have been wrong, which puts a perfectly reasonable question-mark over the second.

Steyn has a large following who, I'm sure he knows, wouldn't have been impressed with this legalistic argument. What's more, even if he'd hired a competent lawyer to put it, there's every chance a DC jury would still have found him guilty.

So I think he saw it as less of a risk to speak for himself, not so much to convince the jury, but to satisfy his followers. I think they probably got their money's worth too. His support base is pretty secure.

The Samsung thing was (I presume) the US arm of the company, and *maybe* not even from its upper management. But as Rossman says in that video, it's wrongheaded incentives that lead to the technician vandalising the telly in the first place and then to the attempts to bury the story.

On the verdict, I only find it slightly disappointing. Boths sides lost. Steyn and Simberg have damages to pay, and their legal costs. Mann has taken a number of hits on both personal and professional points and they are on the public record. No doubt he's relieved, but he can't feel very happy about it all the same.

Also, if this comment at Judith Curry's is right, Steyn and Simberg may only be required to pay $10 in punitive damages.

That would make it a proper pyrrhic victory for Mann.

Experience with any brand is down to luck I'd say. I've had Samsung tablets & phones since 2012 or thereabouts with no problems whatsoever. That, of course, could change tomorrow, who knows. Brands tend to cut production costs over time so past reliability isn't necessarily a good indicator of future reliability. I replaced a c. 6 year old Epson printer a couple of weeks back with the current iteration of the same model and there had been some obvious design changes to reduce build cost.

The Mann verdict is perplexing but maybe highlights the unpredictability of juries. On the face of it there would seem to be grounds to appeal but I don't know what options are available.

Tomo,

Not a good day at all...the worst part will be the smug grandstanding by the catastrophiliacs about how this all reinforces just how right they are and how wrong everyone else is who disagrees with them.

I hope this is appealed but unlike the likes of Mann, skeptics dont enjoy bottomless slush funds for mounting defences.