That is incorrect on a factual level. If a person is drunk, and falls onto the road and under the wheels of my car ending up dead, I do not commit a murder, even through it matches your criteria perfectly.
This is something that many that makes this argument miss: it should be a choice so people like ms. Ellison can choose their life, and those who cannot be like her and find their life torturous can choose death.
As someone who has worked with such people in my youth, I have a surprising revelation for you: quite a few of these people want to live as long as they can.
On the other hand, quite a few do not.
But trying to group everyone in certain group in a one box that is guaranteed to destroy any chance of you being able to understand the reality of this rather complex situation.
Did you know that that keeping an animal alive with disease that has symptoms on the level of terminal phase of AIDS or cancer would earn you a conviction of animal cruelty in most Western countries?
Actually you will. It's debatable if your brain will have the ability to process these however due to massive lack of oxygen which is needed to register the necessary impulses.
But while it may not take minutes of breathing, it will take minutes of blood circulating with CO instead of O2 to die. Make no mistake there, it's not a fast death by any stretch, nor a painless one. It's just more or less guaranteed one after a certain critical mass is reached.
Death penalty is a very bad example due to the fact that it's an anathema to entire western justice system. Its cornerstone is "better ten guilty men walk free then one innocent is put in jail".
Unfortunately a certain Western country allowed its justice system to be perverted for profit of private jails and political pandering to the lowest denominator and chose to throw this principle away. It's a highly unethical choice and hence makes for a very bad analogy of any kind in relation to something as ethically complex as euthanasia.
Bullet requires significant expertise and is far from guaranteed. I know of a case where a guy put an 7.62 assault rifle to his head and pulled a trigger in a suicide attempt. Half of his face went flying (literally) and but modern medicine allowed him to survive. As far as I know, he's still alive today, and it's been over ten years.
He's not. The argument presented is one of the biggest and most difficult ethical problems with assisted death. How long before society, family, and other people who have to bear the burden of a terminal patient who wants to live until the end start pressuring such a person to choose death for their own comfort?
This is a very real issue, and trying to pretend this has something to do with politics rather then ethics is quite a low blow that indeed belongs in the politics and has absolutely no place in medical ethics.
You can overdose on water too. Or pretty much any food. So?
Fact is, human body is extremely resilient. The stuff that is generally available is pretty likely to just cripple you in a horrible way but your body with help of modern emergency medicine will pull through it without fatality, or you will at least survive for quite a while in a fairly terrible agony before expiring. Which may sound good to the freaks that think that life of a terminal cancer patient or AIDS patient is worth living (hint: in most Western countries if you tried to keep an animal with symptoms like those alive, you'd be convicted of animal cruelty). Specialist drugs on the other hand have a very good chance of ending your life in a reasonably painless and quick fashion. Personally, if I had to choose how to suicide, I'd ask for sufficient amount of intravenous morphine.
Considering that OP talks about oral stuff, that is off the table. But there are plenty of specialist drugs that would do the job almost as well. Drinking low grade poison like ethanol on the other hand means a fairly slow and painful death at best and life with some very painful damage from non-fatal alcohol poisoning at worst. Which defeats the entire point of euthanasia in a sound manner.
The mistake you're making is in assuming that government is the ONLY coercive institution. That is simply false. Religious institutions are often far more coercive then governmental ones due to their relative freedom from due process and other similar limits imposed on government in most Western nations. Great examples include religious schools designed to essentially indoctrinate the young and vulnerable, scientologist "retraining courses" and so on. After all, most if not all of the big religions became big because they knew how to coerce people into accepting and propagating themselves.
Funny way to twist words when you don't like their meaning.
You see, we have the same thing here in Scandinavian countries now, and we actually call things by their own names. But if you want to call decently implemented socialism "balance", whatever helps you look in the mirror and not see a hypocrite is a good thing I guess.
But most of the current uplifting is done through technological progress. And with us clearly exhausting the low hanging fruit of it, we're seeing a very clear decline for young people.
If you look at predictions, while those young people who are still employed are well off, we're looking at the first generation that will on average have a worse life in terms of financial security then their parents. That means that technological progress is no longer able to outperform the stress caused on the system by social change in the society.
That's because it is a good thing when done right. Most in US screaming about socialism being bad seem to fail to notice that socialism was one of the most powerful drivers behind the rise and staying power of the middle class. 60s and 70s, often hailed as the golden age of USA were the time when the country was very socialist. Taxes on the rich were extremely high and social security net was quite wide-reaching.
It's in fact a very interesting argument that shrinking of middle class is currently going hand in hand with cutting of socialism in favour of capitalism in many strata of society.
Actually, this is a matter of breach of contract. When it became obvious that Microsoft was in violation in the anti-trust hearings at the court, they made an offer to the court: they will solve the problem by putting browser ballot into the OS. This was Microsoft's own suggestion. Court agreed and Microsoft entered into a contract with the court stating how and when it will implement this ballot.
Microsoft stalled a few times. However the problem didn't arise because court was always willing to grand Microsoft extensions to the deadline. However at one point, folks representing Microsoft admitted to the court at the hearing about another delay that it wasn't implemented at all.
It was probably a dumbest move of all times really. All they had to do was keep their mouths shut about it not being implemented and ask for yet another extension and court would have likely granted it.
So this is very much not about anti-trust any more. This is about Microsoft not honouring a contract, and penalties associated with this.
Bad news. Condom on top of condom carries a significantly increased chance of rupture for both condoms. That is why they never recommend it even for a single intercourse.
Well, the alarm clock issue hasn't really been fixed today. Both iphones and windows phones are known to have problems waking people up on time, though rarely because of phone software crashing, and more because of designers not really understanding how time saving and such works.
It's not really a false start, it had something around 350 of worldwide smartphone market in the golden age of symbian et al. It's just that like the old versions of symbian, it's not really a competitor in a modern smartphone market.
But as it was said above, windows phone is simply a different platform that shares a similar name.
One of the most popular sausages here in Finland is "metwursti", from the original german Mettwurst.
Except that here it usually uses the Russian recipe, which is about half horse meat and half pork or beef. It's a pretty damn good sausage too. I would imagine you can get some in USA unless there are health regulations against due to significant multiculturalism influence on food culture.
Slashdot Mirror
Bear hug!
Wait, is microsoft secretly russian?
That is incorrect on a factual level. If a person is drunk, and falls onto the road and under the wheels of my car ending up dead, I do not commit a murder, even through it matches your criteria perfectly.
This is something that many that makes this argument miss: it should be a choice so people like ms. Ellison can choose their life, and those who cannot be like her and find their life torturous can choose death.
This is not a case of "one size fits all".
As someone who has worked with such people in my youth, I have a surprising revelation for you: quite a few of these people want to live as long as they can.
On the other hand, quite a few do not.
But trying to group everyone in certain group in a one box that is guaranteed to destroy any chance of you being able to understand the reality of this rather complex situation.
Sad detail: most victims of drone strikes survive. Quite a few of them end up with permanent damage. Human bodies are very resilient.
Oh, it gets MUCH better.
Did you know that that keeping an animal alive with disease that has symptoms on the level of terminal phase of AIDS or cancer would earn you a conviction of animal cruelty in most Western countries?
Actually you will. It's debatable if your brain will have the ability to process these however due to massive lack of oxygen which is needed to register the necessary impulses.
But while it may not take minutes of breathing, it will take minutes of blood circulating with CO instead of O2 to die. Make no mistake there, it's not a fast death by any stretch, nor a painless one. It's just more or less guaranteed one after a certain critical mass is reached.
And it's even further away from a reasonably painless death.
Death penalty is a very bad example due to the fact that it's an anathema to entire western justice system. Its cornerstone is "better ten guilty men walk free then one innocent is put in jail".
Unfortunately a certain Western country allowed its justice system to be perverted for profit of private jails and political pandering to the lowest denominator and chose to throw this principle away. It's a highly unethical choice and hence makes for a very bad analogy of any kind in relation to something as ethically complex as euthanasia.
Bullet requires significant expertise and is far from guaranteed. I know of a case where a guy put an 7.62 assault rifle to his head and pulled a trigger in a suicide attempt. Half of his face went flying (literally) and but modern medicine allowed him to survive. As far as I know, he's still alive today, and it's been over ten years.
He's not. The argument presented is one of the biggest and most difficult ethical problems with assisted death. How long before society, family, and other people who have to bear the burden of a terminal patient who wants to live until the end start pressuring such a person to choose death for their own comfort?
This is a very real issue, and trying to pretend this has something to do with politics rather then ethics is quite a low blow that indeed belongs in the politics and has absolutely no place in medical ethics.
You can overdose on water too. Or pretty much any food. So?
Fact is, human body is extremely resilient. The stuff that is generally available is pretty likely to just cripple you in a horrible way but your body with help of modern emergency medicine will pull through it without fatality, or you will at least survive for quite a while in a fairly terrible agony before expiring. Which may sound good to the freaks that think that life of a terminal cancer patient or AIDS patient is worth living (hint: in most Western countries if you tried to keep an animal with symptoms like those alive, you'd be convicted of animal cruelty). Specialist drugs on the other hand have a very good chance of ending your life in a reasonably painless and quick fashion. Personally, if I had to choose how to suicide, I'd ask for sufficient amount of intravenous morphine.
Considering that OP talks about oral stuff, that is off the table. But there are plenty of specialist drugs that would do the job almost as well. Drinking low grade poison like ethanol on the other hand means a fairly slow and painful death at best and life with some very painful damage from non-fatal alcohol poisoning at worst. Which defeats the entire point of euthanasia in a sound manner.
Which is perhaps your goal?
The mistake you're making is in assuming that government is the ONLY coercive institution. That is simply false. Religious institutions are often far more coercive then governmental ones due to their relative freedom from due process and other similar limits imposed on government in most Western nations.
Great examples include religious schools designed to essentially indoctrinate the young and vulnerable, scientologist "retraining courses" and so on. After all, most if not all of the big religions became big because they knew how to coerce people into accepting and propagating themselves.
You should perhaps ask the most wealthy, competitive, open and uncorrupt societies in the world? You know, ones that are openly socialist?
Funny way to twist words when you don't like their meaning.
You see, we have the same thing here in Scandinavian countries now, and we actually call things by their own names. But if you want to call decently implemented socialism "balance", whatever helps you look in the mirror and not see a hypocrite is a good thing I guess.
But most of the current uplifting is done through technological progress. And with us clearly exhausting the low hanging fruit of it, we're seeing a very clear decline for young people.
If you look at predictions, while those young people who are still employed are well off, we're looking at the first generation that will on average have a worse life in terms of financial security then their parents. That means that technological progress is no longer able to outperform the stress caused on the system by social change in the society.
Because they themselves suggested it to the court. Both the idea and implementation of browser ballot were microsoft's own suggestions to the court.
That's because it is a good thing when done right. Most in US screaming about socialism being bad seem to fail to notice that socialism was one of the most powerful drivers behind the rise and staying power of the middle class. 60s and 70s, often hailed as the golden age of USA were the time when the country was very socialist. Taxes on the rich were extremely high and social security net was quite wide-reaching.
It's in fact a very interesting argument that shrinking of middle class is currently going hand in hand with cutting of socialism in favour of capitalism in many strata of society.
Actually, this is a matter of breach of contract. When it became obvious that Microsoft was in violation in the anti-trust hearings at the court, they made an offer to the court: they will solve the problem by putting browser ballot into the OS. This was Microsoft's own suggestion. Court agreed and Microsoft entered into a contract with the court stating how and when it will implement this ballot.
Microsoft stalled a few times. However the problem didn't arise because court was always willing to grand Microsoft extensions to the deadline. However at one point, folks representing Microsoft admitted to the court at the hearing about another delay that it wasn't implemented at all.
It was probably a dumbest move of all times really. All they had to do was keep their mouths shut about it not being implemented and ask for yet another extension and court would have likely granted it.
So this is very much not about anti-trust any more. This is about Microsoft not honouring a contract, and penalties associated with this.
Bad news. Condom on top of condom carries a significantly increased chance of rupture for both condoms. That is why they never recommend it even for a single intercourse.
While true, you would likely earn more as "noise" in android/ios market then as a noticed one in wp7/8 store.
It's just that the WP market share is just that tiny.
Insert "apple" into the other side of that equation and you will get "cheap" on the windows side.
Well, the alarm clock issue hasn't really been fixed today. Both iphones and windows phones are known to have problems waking people up on time, though rarely because of phone software crashing, and more because of designers not really understanding how time saving and such works.
It's not really a false start, it had something around 350 of worldwide smartphone market in the golden age of symbian et al. It's just that like the old versions of symbian, it's not really a competitor in a modern smartphone market.
But as it was said above, windows phone is simply a different platform that shares a similar name.
One of the most popular sausages here in Finland is "metwursti", from the original german Mettwurst.
Except that here it usually uses the Russian recipe, which is about half horse meat and half pork or beef. It's a pretty damn good sausage too. I would imagine you can get some in USA unless there are health regulations against due to significant multiculturalism influence on food culture.