If you try one of these things, let it be the driving thing.
I want to know what ends up being more hazardous, a blind person behind the wheel, or listening to your digital recorder while being behind the wheel.
I couldn't resist, heh.

But in all seriousness, I don't know why these warnings are included, but they're on just about everything you buy, not just computer manuals.

From the warranty section in my braille display manual

Well... I don't think it's very likely that God will randomly decide to do anything to the display... but... even if he does, I have no idea how I could prove it.
take a look at this site for more dumb warnings and here's one that I came across while reading it just now...

Game idea anyone?

From the instructions for the Pac Mate QX400, not exact wording:
If the shell of the Pac Mate turns green stop using immediately. Um, how can I tell?

From an item on a breakfast show some 10 to 15 years ago about this very subject...
Fire guard: Caution may get hot.
Electric heater: Caution do not use as a projectile in a catapult.
Knife: Keep out of small children, hopefully a translation mistake.

Sometimes these are in response to a lawsuit but sometimes I have to wonder if someone's just checking to see if anyone reads the warnings.

Oh and one april fools day a motherboard manufacturer claimed their products included an RTFM chip which would be activated from that date forward, which detected if you call tech support without reading the manual and if you do will disable the product. The news was posted a few days early and caused an uproar because people thought it was real...

At CX2, are you serious?
Who would put an electric heater in a catapult?

TurtlePower, according to this breakfast show at the time yes.

TWard, puts me in mind of the guy who tied a bunch of helium balloons to a garden chair and went flying with a BB gun and a can of beer. His plan was to use the BB gun to let down the balloons one at a time when he was done but he panicked once he got up there, it took him a while to get up the courage to shoot any of the balloons. When he got back down the FAA fined him for unauthorised use of airspace and forced him to make a public apology. Worst thing is his fiance allegedly spent most of her savings on this misbegotten adventure of his.

Scarily I could imagine him trying to sue either the manufacturer of his garden chair for not warning him about tieing balloons to it, the balloons about not using them to fly in restricted airspace, or the BB gun though perhaps less likely. Thankfully it seems he didn't.

To be honest I disagree on the necessity of those warnings Tom, not because people aren't that stupid, but because really there shouldn't be such a big deal made of all this suing business, it has gotten way out of hand.

My personal favourite moron story was the one of the man in the copper bottomed boat who went boating during a thunder storm. One of his sons who were there at the time suggested the chap should head in towards shore, where upon he replied "no it's fine" then stood up next to the mast, stretched out his arms and said "come on god! let me have it" ---- and god did!

I never heard there was any legal issue attached to the story but it still amuses me for the level of stupidity on display.

Well you know what the old Prayer says Enes, "For what we are about to recieve may the lord make us truly thankful" .

Apparently the man did survive but with some fairly severe injuriess, and got off lucky at that.

Btw, very amusing article, I liked "Drunk, or pregnant, or both" A friend of mine who has just had a baby will find  that one particularly funny, especially sinse she gave up alcohol while she was pregnant.

Yes, 3D viewing is very bad, it's a scientific fact, it can cause the mother to give birth to dimentionally challenged children! .

I think Dark's point, and I'm sorry if I'm putting words in your mouth here Dark, is that in an ideal world these warnings shouldn't be necessary because the lawsuits would simply be ignored. Dark's point is that the problem addressed by these warnings is one within the legal system that permits such lawsuits, and the fact that noone has managed to change this state of affairs doesn't invalidate the point. There are many areas where laws fail to be reformed because too many people are invested in the current system.

LOL! Your incredulity is a little frightening in itself, enes. Aren't you concerned for the poor people who might try anything listed there? Of course it's all very amusing, but the instructions are there because we have a responsibility to design safe products, and although we can't possibly prevent every hazard in the design of the product itself, we are also somewhat obligated to try to prevent others from making those same mistakes if we know there's a possibility of it.

I think this comes down to the question of what could be reasonably expected. If a person could reasonably be expected to suffer some consequence, then as Dark and CX2 above suggested, I think the ideal situation is one where a lawsuit is clearly impossible. That is sadly still too often not recognised in English courts because there are still established interests preventing us from going forward, though from my understanding of the US legal system it's a good deal worse over there. Whereas, if the manufacturer of a product is positioned to advise against some hapless act, however it is conceived or for whatever reason it is undertaken by some poor creature, it should be noted as a safety precaution. This is really no different from warnings on exam papers telling you how to mark them correctly; it's purely "For the avoidance of doubt".

All this incidentally from someone who nearly lost his hand in an unprotected air conditioning system. The people designing that product didn't give a crap about safety, clearly …

Hi.
It's amazing all these stupid warnings you get. I believe that if people thought before they act we wouldn't need all of these rediculous warnings.
I've come across these kinds of warnings a lot. I remember some medications I had listed the side effects shaking, insomnia, and possibly death. Or even different appliances the warnings tell you not to put them near water or run them for a long period of time. You'd think that people would just know these things but they don't.
@Cx2, lol I remember that guy in the chair with the balloons. I remember reading about that and wanting to do the same thing. It's crazy the things that people think up.

Hi all.
Agree, there was a program on a dessert which stated do not turn over.
The warning was on the bottom of the box though.
And I have seen not necessarily warningsbut some stupidity appearing on windows updates and other things of all things.
The most recent was a couple months ago.
An update was to fix a security issue in a kernel mode driver then got immediate alerts to remove it because according to ms, some users had trouble with installing programs or rebooting.
However if you read that warning you would have to be booted into something.
There were suggestions on how to uninstall the update if you had issues in safe mmode, all techy though and at any rate, if my system didn't boot the first thing I'd do is put in my recovery mode cd.
I would be asked are you sure you want to recover the system?
I hit yes, and the system would be reformatted.
Similar updates by companies have come over in the years.
Microsoft seems to cop a lot of the publically noticed ones.
fonts not displaying right and a few other things.
I had one in early 2000 where on updating an update kept asking me to uninstall when updating and then windowsupdate would error.
I answered no thinking there was an error on my part.
the system started and the keyboard didn't work.
I put in my recovery disk hit yes and a reformat later it was booting up again.
I never got the same issue again and apparently there was something up at that time.
However after updating a system back in 1998 I got  another update which I installed.
In its description, it said basically, this update is to address the fact that whilst securing your system we blocked all internet access!
Despite the fact that if you were blocked you couldn't update.
I am sure others have things.
The most common things I see are for stupid people or people that still like to read, click and run spam attachments and links.
In a lot of updates over the last couple years I have got a message, stating you can't be hacked unless you click a link or open an attachment.
So why update then?
Answer because there are still people that do that sort of thing.
I have well had a friend in an organisation that said that every bit of security software, antivirus, os update, etc could potentially stuff the system and that he didn't use any of that stuff because it breaks things.
Further more he said we didn't need the best security we just have to use our brains more.
While I don't fully agree with this statement, it does seems there are still people that don't use their brains to the fullest, discounting those that have had most of them eaten by zombies or are actually zombies.