Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide
New submitter digitalFlack writes "Apparently Martin Manley has been a popular blogger and newspaper journalist for many years. For his own reasons, no indication of illness, he decided sixty years on this planet was enough. He designed a 40-page website with sections such as: 'Why Suicide?' and 'Why Age 60?.' Martin planned his suicide meticulously, but to manage his legacy, he picked Yahoo. He even pre-paid for five years. After he left this mortal coil on his 60th birthday, Yahoo decided they don't want his traffic, so they took the site down. Sorry, Martin."
Yahoo didn't know he also prepaid lawyers. Or at least lets hope so.
Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service, sudden death of a party is a sleazy way to weasel out of a service contract.
In the meantime, there is a mirror located here.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Not only was this website paid for, it was obviously part of the deceased's last wishes. If Yahoo has no respect for the law or its customers, it should at least show some respect to a dude's last wish.
What a strange response, regardless of the reasoning behind Yahoo canceling the service (looks like they're pushing the ToS button). I see this as tantamount to somebody buying a burial plot and funeral services, and being dumped in the wilderness with the justification, "they'll never know, since they're dead!"
http://www.zeroshare.info/
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
He's gonna haunt the shit out of them now
If he has an heir who wants to go the effort of trying to get a refund from yahoo, I'm sure yahoo will refund it as soon as the lawyers send the appropriate letter. It won't get it back online, though. They could use the money to put the site up somewhere else, if they wanted.
So my guess (gambling is for fools, that's why I only make guesses) is that yahoo would not ever be sued. To be sued they would have to first be asked for the refund, and then refuse; and then refuse again when threatened with legal action. At that point it would be punted to the lawyers, who would look at the amount of money for 5 years of hosting, and recommend refund very quickly.
This little quote from the guy's site:
The thought of being in a nursing home, physically or mentally disabled, was the single scariest thing I had ever thought about
This is exactly what I've been thinking for years now; I've always thought that I will commit a suicide and end my life one day when I feel I'm getting too old, when I feel I'm losing control over my own thoughts and body. Honestly, the most horrible thing that I could imagine is being locked up in a bed 24/7 at the mercy of others without being able to do anything by myself -- I do not want to end there. I will commit a suicide if it looks like it's coming to that, I want to be in charge of my own life. As such I fully understand the guy's reasoning and I agree: good for him.
We could use your argument to make murder legal as long as the victim does not get to know about it.
1. Get customers to sign up for 5 year plans of web hosting.
2. Kill customer, make is look like a suicide.
3.?
4. Profit!
with the exception of some of the Alzheimer stuff he mentioned every thing he described is treatable, and even a lot of the Alzheimer stuff is. That is, if you have access to the health care. This sounds more like a failing of our society than anything else.
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I was gonna rant about refunding the estate for the residual value of his contract, and for the 5 year domain registration.. or at least transfer it to his estate.. BUT.. Yahoo's TOS specifically deals with death.
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Allegedly, this was in effect for a while.. the page
http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html
says it was last updated March 16, 2012.
For a man who made a living with his words, maybe he should have read the TOS ( short by some comparison). Or, maybe like the false 'treasure hunt', he knew Yahoo would cancel his account, and through both methods he gains some post-mortem notoriety. Either way.. I hope he gets some pleasure out of all this attention to his life being generated today.
Shooting yourself in front of a police station just sounds cliche, and way too urban.
I just find it somewhat distasteful. I haven't yet decided how I'd wanna go, but I'd try to do it in such a way that it doesn't involve bystanders or possibly cause anyone to actually see me dying. So, I'd probably opt for going somewhere far out-of-sight and just overdosing on something that's certain to kill me -- no messy blood, no bystanders being sprayed with brains, no collateral damage, just a clean death.
Putting a bullet to your head in front of witnesses and the police means there's little to no investigation - or, cost to society. They clean up the street, but it's obvious why, how, and when you died.
Disappearing into the woods could prompt a million-dollar manhunt trying to 'rescue' you, until or unless they find you first. And once they do find you, they'll have to do an autopsy to investigate cause of death - possibly quite an expensive one, as your remains will have degraded. You'll cause a lot of extra cost and grief to society that you could have avoided.
Maybe that was important to him.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I intend to be living a fantastic life and raising hell for another decade or three yet. Deal with it.
So... your magic number isn't 60, but possibly 85 or 90. Ok, that's fine. I am more than happy to let you define how long you think your quality of life is good. So what happens after that?
I've one great-great-uncle who lived to be 106. (They found him one evening leaned up against a fencepost, where he'd evidently stopped to take a little break whilst making his daily walk around his farm. Nothing wrong with him, the doctor said, except that he finally just wore out.)
Yeah, and I've got an 80+ year old great uncle in-law or something who's been bedridden for years now. Adult-onset type 2 diabetes. The diabetes so far has caused blindness, and has led to the amputation of both legs. It could happen to anyone, even you. 51 is a long way from 70.
My own grandfather developed Alzheimer's, and although he remained perfectly healthy in body until the end, that was probably the most horrifying and heart wrenching thing to undergo. He was terrified at least for as long as knew what was happening, and it wasn't much better for those around him.
We all wish to age gracefully, die in our sleep peacefully, and while I agree arbitrarily committing suicide on your 60th birthday is nuts... committing suicide when the circumstances of your final days are rapidly becoming apparent is pretty rational in my books.
http://www.zeroshare.info/
http://web.archive.org/web/20130815235729/http://martinmanleylifeanddeath.com as well, which is guaranteed to reflect the original.
Whether David sues Goliath is pretty much irrelevant. It's whether Yahoo! suffers a (IMHO well deserved) PR disaster that counts. It's news like these that people keep in mind when they think of companies. Next time I think about using Yahoo, I'll remember: "Oh, that was that bunch of jerks that kicked a dead customer out who pre-paid for 5 years? Okay, better look elsewhere."
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I know somebody who died in the woods on a hike.
It was a while ago, probably in the 1960s. His name was Eric, he was probably in his 50s or 60s, and he was a doctor (a radiologist). He used to lead day hikes in the New York City area for the American Youth Hostels, and his hikes were very popular.
One day, he was hiking with his wife (I think in Bear Mountain park). He was coming down a mountain, and told his wife, "You go down that way, and I'll go down this way." His wife got to the bottom and he didn't show up.
Volunteers launched a massive effort to find the body. They combed the mountain slope shoulder-to-shoulder, but never found anything. (This was fairly dense woods.)
I remember seeing the "Missing" poster.
Given how he felt about the outdoors, it was as good a way to die as any. But his wife, family, and friends had a lot of discomfort at not knowing for certain that he was dead. It's sort of like being "missing" in the Latin American dictatorships.
Years later, somebody found the body.
If I can be free to speculate, it was most likely that he died of a heart attack. Perhaps he felt it coming on and didn't want his wife to watch him die. But that doesn't make sense. Most heart attacks aren't fatal, and they could have gotten him to the hospital. He was also diagnosed as being clinically depressed (like lots of people his age). Maybe he just decided to give up. We'll never know.
The moral of this story is that dying in a favorite place is a good way to face the inevitable. But just disappearing is painful for your survivors.
Anybody who hasn't heard about any of the other sucky things yahoo has done over the years probably won't hear about this one either. Or if they do, remember it. If he'd been from slashdot he would have used prgmr.com or something
I'm going to use a tank of Nitrogen and put on some good music.
I'll end up feeling happy and die in a matter of minutes.
(Not now, when I'm older, and don't have pets and don't want to go to a home)
"No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."
Open and shut, IMHO. Yahoo is just following its terms.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
By the time you know you've got Alzheimers, it's too late to consider suicide.
No. Highly recommended to get perspective on things.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm not trying to justify what yahoo did -- it was scummy, and I hope they get prosecuted
What for?
"...any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"They'll shut down my pre-paid legacy account over my dead body!"
Use http://web.archive.org/web/20130816143409/http://www.martinmanleylifeanddeath.com/why_not even before it was down there were some bad links when omitting the hostname.
This little quote from the guy's site:
The thought of being in a nursing home, physically or mentally disabled, was the single scariest thing I had ever thought about
This is exactly what I've been thinking for years now...
I worked as a nurses' aide in a nursing home one college during summer. (Nurses' Aide = butt-wiper.) It was a depressing, terrifying job. Most "residents" had bed-pads because they couldn't get up to go poo. We had:
* A woman who had long lost her mind, was cemented in a fetal position, and regularly coded. Staff had to restart her heart each time, because she had no living relatives or living will.
* A woman who had long lost control of her body, but not her mind, and was just never visited by any of her children.
* The many who would be tied down to their bed, to prevent them from getting up and wandering around.
* The profoundly retarded girl (36 yo) that staff would purposely put into (rigid) seizure, in order to make it easier to change her bedding.
* The Alzheimer's woman who thought I was her son. When she'd be combative to other staff, they'd have me ask her, "please mom, just eat this pudding," which had sleep meds mixed in.
* Bedsores.
* And Golda, senile and assumed incapable of coherent speech. Staff were just to lazy to listen between the word salad and half-words. She eventually spoke a full sentence to me ("I need to go to the bathroom"), the only one in five years, I was told. I took her in, stepped away, and she had her first taste of freedom in years.
Needless to say, I will not allow myself to fall into such a situation in infirmity. Adult children of old people –– Your parent knows that living alone at home, doing what s/he wishes to do, may suffer a fatal fall or similar in their home. They are probably at peace with this. Don't let your own fear of personal, potential guilt lead you to essentially put your aging parent in a white-walled jail for their remaining years. Would you want to spend your last 10 years of life in a bed, with only a TV to keep you company?
I've long heard suicide described as the only action which is illegal to attempt, but not to succeed at. The reason attempted suicide is illegal is because society judges that only a mentally ill person would do it, so we use criminal law as a wedge to force a person to get help. Obviously this is at odds with euthanasia so society has been discussing that for a generation or more.
On his website he describes why he chose this method and place. He wanted to make sure that it did work and did not simply leave him in a vegetative state (hence the firearm), did not cause any harm to other people (5 AM at a police station's parking lot - the coordinates are on his website), and he placed a suicide call to the police before killing himself to make sure that his body would immediately be found by someone professionally trained to handle the situation. I love life way too much to think about suicide, but apparently this gentleman put a lot of thought into it and wanted to make sure he caused the least possible harm.
I've made a dear friend promise that she will help me get what I need for the last hobby I take up when I feel I'm getting old - heroin-and-handgliding. Gonna go out with a splat!
Suicide and euthenasia are ancient taboos, with a strong religious influence propping that view up in the supposedly modern day. A truly enlightened populace would be able to maturely address, and deal with, such issues as simple life choices.
"Checking out today sir?"
"Yes, thanks; I've enjoyed my stay".
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
So in America you use criminal law to deal with mentally ill people? To me that sounds like misuse of criminal law. A sane law system has a criminal law to deal with criminals (who then should go to jail), and a separate law to deal with the mentally ill (who can be forcefully put into closed psychiatry if they are a danger to themselves or others). I consider criminalizing the mentally ill a crime in itself.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
More importantly: If you committed suicide, you're dead (otherwise it would be attempted suicide). How are they going to punish you after your death?
Apparently, they cancel your webhosting service.