And there daughter would still be alive today if not for this woman's depraved actions.
Hmm...you don't really understand how TRULY suicidal people think. She COULD still be alive today, but I wouldn't count on it.
On the contrary. I do understand, apparently better than you do. I also seem to understand, once again, better than you do, how the Law and common sense work. Please see my refutation of the other anonymous coward for some edification. It's found here: Brief Course in Logic and the Law
Someone that emotionally fragile would've committed suicide sooner or later. Who kills themselves because their e-boyfriend (never seen in real life or video chat) suddenly calls them names? Me, I would be pissed, not suicidal. And this is only if I don't just assume that some troll had gotten control of the account.
The refutation of this argument is as follows:
You are going to die sooner or later. Does that then mean that I can kill you right now and that I should face no punishment, since you would have died eventually anyway?
In case you're too dense to understand, the answer is "No, I can't kill you and face no consequences under that defence."
Likewise, if someone is falling off the Empire State Building, and I shoot them in the head as they pass the third floor, killing them a few tenths of a second before they hit the pavement, I'm guilty of murder, because I have committed an act that prematurely ended the life of another.
This woman was not 'the catalyst.' This is not about the potential for suicidal behaviour. This is more like the potential for my arm to break, and someone coming along and purposefully breaking it, and then I get an infection from having an open wound and die. The act of breaking my arm did not directly cause my death, but my death would not have occurred had my arm not been broken.
There is also a difference between simply having 'a bad day' and snapping, or having one thing go wrong and snapping at the drop of a hat, and snapping in response to a long term deception and prolonged or extreme psychological torture, which is what this amounts to. Young Persons such as children and teenagers and young adults do not have the same sort of coping skills and ability to deal with psychological trauma that mentally mature adults do. Things which an adult would shrug off, such as someone calling their shoes ugly, can cause a teenager to break down into hysterics and depression.
The fact that young people are less well able to deal with such things is why society takes a particularly harsh view on adults who prey on teenage minors, and upon teenage minors who prey upon the prepubescent. It's one of the sources of laws which say those above 18 can't have sex with those below it.
If you can't understand one of the simple foundations of our society, then I think you need to go study humanity a bit harder.
Can someone explain to me why we need something to give mass to something? Can't it just be that matter warps space-time? Since Mass and Energy are equivalent, why can't it just be that energy/mass warps space-time, and that mass is simply the effect we observe in the hree dimensional universe of this warping?
Occam's Razor says the whole concept of the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field are wrong, much like String Theory.
The girl's family should sue this woman in Civil Court for the wrongful death of their daughter. The burden of proof is much lower in civil court than in criminal, and they could ruin this woman for the rest of her life -- which is a hell of a lot more than she deserves, because she still gets to draw breath, but their daughter doesn't. And there daughter would still be alive today if not for this woman's depraved actions.
I question your mastery of the English language. The article is not about how to defend against missiles with lasers, but how to defend missiles against lasers -- specifically lasers which are aimed at a missile to poke a hole in it and/or destroy sensitive electronics.
You have no idea. I have to keep recalculating my age, adjusted for relativistic effects, just to keep myself from wanting to tell the Breeders to get off my damn lawn.
Apparently you've never talked to any one of the large number of men in America who saw combat in either World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or any of the other myriad police actions we've been involved in. I think the older generations are very well aware that there are things worse than painful death; being the one who didn't die can be a horrible, horrible experience.
Anyone who grew up in the 20's or 30's, or the 40's or 60's and 70's and saw the wounded who returned home, missing arms and legs, hands, eyes, or, worse still, their mental stability, knew that there are far worse things than death.
My generation and those younger than I have, on average, never experienced any sort of real hardship or suffering.
I'm not talking about the Youth -- that's an entirely separate discussion.
I'm talking about the namby-pamby morons in charge of the nation; people who are worried that the police dogs are going to scare the criminals they're being used against, or say that an adult can't take pictures of vandals because they're minors.
I am not a Doctor (for a couple more years), but...
I think that Alzheimer's is probably a confluence of different things instead of just a single disease. It could be that the plaque build up does not directly cause Alzheimer's, but that it creates an environment more conducive to the real disease agent's functioning. Or it could be that they are both expressions of an underlying pathology that as yet escapes us -- they're found together not because one causes the other but because they're both caused by the same thing.
I remember seeing some research a few months ago that showed that treating Alzheimer's patients with drugs to increase insulin sensitivity seemed to have some benefit, suggesting that the disease could be a third form of Diabetes.
I really do wonder if it should be Alzheimer's Syndrome instead of disease. It seems that there are several different causes of the condition, at least for the moment, which either contribute to the degeneration or could be the direct cause.
Judging from the number of spelling errors in the above post, I think it's safe to say that I am already being gradually robbed of at least one of my cognitive functions.
Haemorrhagic Fevers are bad, but not as bad as the public seems to paint them. Films such as Outbreak, and books such as Richard Preston's Hot Zone have made it seem like Filoviruses and other haemorrhagic diseases kill you in a matter of hours and cause you to have to be buried in a water-tight plastic bag. This is about as accurate as saying cancer patients are going to mutant into something that looks like a Horta due to out-of-control cellular replication.
For Ebola in particular, there are methods of treatment, including a post-exposure vaccine that has shown to be 99% effective in monkeys. The only downside is that it must be administered very quickly, or there will be too much damage already done to the patient (within 4 days.)
I can thinking of many ways of dying that are far more agonising that Ebola. MS would be one. To be gradually robbed of my motor and mental skills would be a horrible and terrifying experience. As someone who recently lost a family member who suffered from senile dementia (and whose dementia was directly responsible for her death), I can say that it is definitely worse for the sufferer than for the family. As painful as your loved one not knowing who you are is, it is far more painful for them, and to watch them, come back to moments of lucidity, only to have to have where they are and what has happened explained to them yet again.
I think it is a sign of the times that people seem to think that physical agony can even begin to compare to psychological agony.
You mean like the Pilgrims? Pure myth. They actually wanted the kind repressive society we're complaining about here. They left England because it wasn't "pure" enough for them.
I have a perfectly good grasp of history. You need to understand the metaphorical content of a thing along with its literal meaning. I want to leave the United States and go found my own land, because the United States is not pure enough for me. It has compromised upon the ideals upon which it was founded. I want to go found my autarchist paradise, where we each are responsible for our own selves, and no one tries to force their own morals on anyone else.
From Brigham Young to Jim Jones, going off to form your own little society has been about imposing your own vision on the world, not about escaping somebody else's.
I wouldn't mind imposing my own vision on the world, as my vision is that no one gets to force their way of life on anyone else.
And what's this BS about "weak willed"? These censorship things mostly come from the Christian Right. They have many shortcomings, but lack of will is certainly not one of them.
I think it is a sign of being weak-willed that one will not take responsibility for raising one's own children and wishes to foist that responsibility off on others, namely, the government. Many times have I heard married people tell me, someone without children, that I simply do not understand the responsibility that is involved in raising a child -- on the contrary, I do. That is why I don't have one.
Christianity, after all, is a religion where a vast majority, or at least a visible majority, of its adherents would have us believe that someone else is responsible for all their evil actions; "The devil made me do it." It's a religion based upon abdication of personal responsibility and free will; you surrender your own will to the will of God.
Do you know the Lord's Prayer? "Thy will be done." I have never heard a phrase that better sums up complete and total abdication of personal will to that of another. No slave could better state their willingness to serve their master.
It's too bad there's no longer a land where a like-minded group of people could flee to escape the persecution of the short-sighted and the weak-willed who will trade their essential liberty for temporary and false security.
Actually, this brings up an interesting idea. If one had the ability to create a three-dimensional projection, one could use two thin layers of material capable of detecting a laser, set apart, to determine the direction which a 'gun' was aiming into the display, for use in more realistic aiming in FPS games. God knows I'm a better shot with a real gun than a gun in an FPS.
Actually, no, I don't. I think if Sagan was miraculously reconstituted today, he would take one look at the shape of our Education System and of the Sciences and Space Program in the States and he would die of shock and sadness.
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary. I do understand, apparently better than you do. I also seem to understand, once again, better than you do, how the Law and common sense work. Please see my refutation of the other anonymous coward for some edification. It's found here: Brief Course in Logic and the Law
The refutation of this argument is as follows:
You are going to die sooner or later. Does that then mean that I can kill you right now and that I should face no punishment, since you would have died eventually anyway?
In case you're too dense to understand, the answer is "No, I can't kill you and face no consequences under that defence."
Likewise, if someone is falling off the Empire State Building, and I shoot them in the head as they pass the third floor, killing them a few tenths of a second before they hit the pavement, I'm guilty of murder, because I have committed an act that prematurely ended the life of another.
This woman was not 'the catalyst.' This is not about the potential for suicidal behaviour. This is more like the potential for my arm to break, and someone coming along and purposefully breaking it, and then I get an infection from having an open wound and die. The act of breaking my arm did not directly cause my death, but my death would not have occurred had my arm not been broken.
There is also a difference between simply having 'a bad day' and snapping, or having one thing go wrong and snapping at the drop of a hat, and snapping in response to a long term deception and prolonged or extreme psychological torture, which is what this amounts to. Young Persons such as children and teenagers and young adults do not have the same sort of coping skills and ability to deal with psychological trauma that mentally mature adults do. Things which an adult would shrug off, such as someone calling their shoes ugly, can cause a teenager to break down into hysterics and depression.
The fact that young people are less well able to deal with such things is why society takes a particularly harsh view on adults who prey on teenage minors, and upon teenage minors who prey upon the prepubescent. It's one of the sources of laws which say those above 18 can't have sex with those below it.
If you can't understand one of the simple foundations of our society, then I think you need to go study humanity a bit harder.
Can someone explain to me why we need something to give mass to something? Can't it just be that matter warps space-time? Since Mass and Energy are equivalent, why can't it just be that energy/mass warps space-time, and that mass is simply the effect we observe in the hree dimensional universe of this warping?
Occam's Razor says the whole concept of the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Field are wrong, much like String Theory.
The girl's family should sue this woman in Civil Court for the wrongful death of their daughter. The burden of proof is much lower in civil court than in criminal, and they could ruin this woman for the rest of her life -- which is a hell of a lot more than she deserves, because she still gets to draw breath, but their daughter doesn't. And there daughter would still be alive today if not for this woman's depraved actions.
Requesting large scale planetary bombardment with 'photgraphy tag' bombs.
FOR THE SPELLING EMPEROR!
No.
Just say, 'no.'
I question your mastery of the English language. The article is not about how to defend against missiles with lasers, but how to defend missiles against lasers -- specifically lasers which are aimed at a missile to poke a hole in it and/or destroy sensitive electronics.
You have no idea. I have to keep recalculating my age, adjusted for relativistic effects, just to keep myself from wanting to tell the Breeders to get off my damn lawn.
I'm more annoyed with people who confuse paedophilia for something else.
I resent that remark! I'm clearly Homo Superior.
Apparently you've never talked to any one of the large number of men in America who saw combat in either World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or any of the other myriad police actions we've been involved in. I think the older generations are very well aware that there are things worse than painful death; being the one who didn't die can be a horrible, horrible experience.
Anyone who grew up in the 20's or 30's, or the 40's or 60's and 70's and saw the wounded who returned home, missing arms and legs, hands, eyes, or, worse still, their mental stability, knew that there are far worse things than death.
My generation and those younger than I have, on average, never experienced any sort of real hardship or suffering.
I'm not talking about the Youth -- that's an entirely separate discussion.
I'm talking about the namby-pamby morons in charge of the nation; people who are worried that the police dogs are going to scare the criminals they're being used against, or say that an adult can't take pictures of vandals because they're minors.
I am not a Doctor (for a couple more years), but...
I think that Alzheimer's is probably a confluence of different things instead of just a single disease. It could be that the plaque build up does not directly cause Alzheimer's, but that it creates an environment more conducive to the real disease agent's functioning. Or it could be that they are both expressions of an underlying pathology that as yet escapes us -- they're found together not because one causes the other but because they're both caused by the same thing.
I remember seeing some research a few months ago that showed that treating Alzheimer's patients with drugs to increase insulin sensitivity seemed to have some benefit, suggesting that the disease could be a third form of Diabetes.
I really do wonder if it should be Alzheimer's Syndrome instead of disease. It seems that there are several different causes of the condition, at least for the moment, which either contribute to the degeneration or could be the direct cause.
Is it just me, or is England already well down the spiral towards "What the Fuck are you Thinking, Nation?"
Judging from the number of spelling errors in the above post, I think it's safe to say that I am already being gradually robbed of at least one of my cognitive functions.
Haemorrhagic Fevers are bad, but not as bad as the public seems to paint them. Films such as Outbreak, and books such as Richard Preston's Hot Zone have made it seem like Filoviruses and other haemorrhagic diseases kill you in a matter of hours and cause you to have to be buried in a water-tight plastic bag. This is about as accurate as saying cancer patients are going to mutant into something that looks like a Horta due to out-of-control cellular replication.
For Ebola in particular, there are methods of treatment, including a post-exposure vaccine that has shown to be 99% effective in monkeys. The only downside is that it must be administered very quickly, or there will be too much damage already done to the patient (within 4 days.)
I can thinking of many ways of dying that are far more agonising that Ebola. MS would be one. To be gradually robbed of my motor and mental skills would be a horrible and terrifying experience. As someone who recently lost a family member who suffered from senile dementia (and whose dementia was directly responsible for her death), I can say that it is definitely worse for the sufferer than for the family. As painful as your loved one not knowing who you are is, it is far more painful for them, and to watch them, come back to moments of lucidity, only to have to have where they are and what has happened explained to them yet again.
I think it is a sign of the times that people seem to think that physical agony can even begin to compare to psychological agony.
I have a perfectly good grasp of history. You need to understand the metaphorical content of a thing along with its literal meaning. I want to leave the United States and go found my own land, because the United States is not pure enough for me. It has compromised upon the ideals upon which it was founded. I want to go found my autarchist paradise, where we each are responsible for our own selves, and no one tries to force their own morals on anyone else.
I wouldn't mind imposing my own vision on the world, as my vision is that no one gets to force their way of life on anyone else.
I think it is a sign of being weak-willed that one will not take responsibility for raising one's own children and wishes to foist that responsibility off on others, namely, the government. Many times have I heard married people tell me, someone without children, that I simply do not understand the responsibility that is involved in raising a child -- on the contrary, I do. That is why I don't have one.
Christianity, after all, is a religion where a vast majority, or at least a visible majority, of its adherents would have us believe that someone else is responsible for all their evil actions; "The devil made me do it." It's a religion based upon abdication of personal responsibility and free will; you surrender your own will to the will of God.
Do you know the Lord's Prayer? "Thy will be done." I have never heard a phrase that better sums up complete and total abdication of personal will to that of another. No slave could better state their willingness to serve their master.
It's too bad there's no longer a land where a like-minded group of people could flee to escape the persecution of the short-sighted and the weak-willed who will trade their essential liberty for temporary and false security.
I think that's what the makers or the law were thinking about when they made it...
Actually, this brings up an interesting idea. If one had the ability to create a three-dimensional projection, one could use two thin layers of material capable of detecting a laser, set apart, to determine the direction which a 'gun' was aiming into the display, for use in more realistic aiming in FPS games. God knows I'm a better shot with a real gun than a gun in an FPS.
I don't think there are intelligent enough brains left on earth to slake the thirst for knowledge that would possess a Zombie Sagan.
At least, we can only pray.
Actually, no, I don't. I think if Sagan was miraculously reconstituted today, he would take one look at the shape of our Education System and of the Sciences and Space Program in the States and he would die of shock and sadness.
I wish Sagan could be here to see this.
Aw, c'mon dude, Everyone knows what happens at 25:
Speed Jive,
don't wanna stay alive
When you're 25...