To aficionados of the bean, there's nothing like a piping-hot cup of java to get the day off to a good start, and nothing more insipid than luke-warm coffee. That's what McDonald's thought, anyway--until it learned differently, the hard and expensive way, when seventy-nine-year-old Stella Liebeck successfully sued the company after she was burned by a spilled cup of hot coffee that she'd bought at the drive-through window of her local McDonald's. The jury awarded her $160,000 in compensatory damages and a whopping $2.7 million in punitive damages. After the trial judge reduced the punitive damages to $480,000, she and McDonald's settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.