Go back a few years later and ask some of those patients with partial recovery if they're still happy they survived. Many are NOT. And you're a fool if you would take "any form of partial recovery over death." Permanent vegetative state? Dementia that prevents you from recognizing anyone? Pain 24/7? We have euthanasia because we recognize that some things are worse than death. If you can't think of some situations where you'd rather be dead, you are just showing your lack of imagination.
Also, medicine is NOT "advancing at such a rapid rate that I expect partial recoveries will be only a temporary state of being." Even if we could replace your damaged brain with a new one, YOU would still have ceased to exist. 64% of all medical studies cannot be replicated, and most of the rest, the effect is far less than the original study. Thank the whole "publish or perish" cycle, where new results get all the funding, attention, and tenure tracks, and trying to repeat old studies to see if the results hold is for suckers. A great example of bad medical a bad medical study was the Women's Health Initiative, which suffered from a combination of bad design, non-representative population, commercial interference, bad stats, and sensationalism, resulting in the erroneous conclusion that HRT is risky to women.
The immediate result was driving millions of women off hormone replacement therapy and onto antidepressants (which we now have to worry about the link between SSRIs and dementia). Long term, there's also the increased death rates of those who don't use estrogen-only hormone replacement therapy, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, quicker bone density loss, earlier onset dementia and Alzheimer's, and we're not even counting economic and individual losses due to the disease of menopause being mis-treated as "normal" (it's only normal because for most of the lifespan of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens we - and I say we because the two species interbred quite a lot - didn't live long enough for menopause to rear its' ugly head). This affects everyone - after all, pretty much everyone has a mother at some point, and many have sisters, daughters, female life partners, or (gasp) are themselves women.
Your faith is not based on facts. Just look at how many doctors have DNRs, because they know how useless extreme measures are.
Wow, someone who wants to race to the bottom even quicker. Then again, what can you expect from an AC?
Technically if they had configured the security there wouldn't be a problem.
Provably false, because it is impossible to anticipate every security problem, especially since you're trying to hit a moving target. Never been done, can't be done within the heat death of the universe.
Web enabled is inevitable
Only if you're someone who wants to really screw over users, with things like all-time connections required, downloadable content, adware, etc. Local networks did just fine for a LONG time for all sorts of business applications, and both standalone and local networks for things like games and other forms of entertainment. You show the lack of imagination given by not knowing history. The internet is a symptom, and has caused more harm than good for the average person. Fake news wouldn't be possible without stupidity like Failbook and Twithead.
Honestly the economy sucks, jobs are scarce and the web offers the possibility of breaking barriers by giving the average joe global reach
First, there is a limited demand for internet-enabled jobs, and already far too many people trying to fill that demand, which is why most intenet-based jobs pay less than minimum wage by the time you account for everything. Second, we're seeing the beginning of the bursting of the second internet bubble. You can't eat virtual pizza, your bitcoin is a terrible form of currency (as seen by the 18% drop in value in 5 days, the vast majority of "App developers" still make far less than the minimum wage and that has always been the case, and always will be, because people always hope that they will be the exception.
If you want to compete with developers in India, you'll end up with their standard of living - which means a country where, like India, there are so many people without a toilet (indoor OR outdoor) that they could literally form a line from the earth to the moon - something that will NOT change over the next 40 years because poverty is both ingrained in the corruption and class structure, and because the reservoir of poverty is just too large - and of course it doesn't help that India will have more people than China in 5 years.
Also, your "ground breaking technologies" are not. Most of the "new technologies" are shit, same as ruby used to be the latest hotness. Anything based on javascript is inherently worse than Flash - at least flash doesn't need a web browser to run in, and can be easily confined either to the local machine or local network. It also requires far less ram and cpu to do the same job. This is the problem with so many of the "new technologies" - holier than swiss cheese, layered upon other layers that are also full of bloat and rot (even Flash was bloat, but nowhere near as bad as, say, chrome or firefox).
We can exist fine without the internet. Specialized networks with limited access, non-interchangeable protocols, devoted to specific tasks, are going to happen, if only because the current internet is defective by design when it comes to security - the original goal was to be as failsafe as possible, no matter how much of the intervening network was destroyed - but that also means that any node can always attack anyone and everyone. Heck, it was possible at the dawn of the internet to take Microsoft down with a dial-up modem and a 386.
Society started failing when trickle-down economics and both the left and the right started ignoring economic disparity (which includes the Clintons even before he became president, having helped dismantle some of the new deal economic protections that actually allowed the economy to grow by growing the base instead of feeding the rich - a policy Obama continued by, among other things, bailing out the car companies and
It's just more marketing hype. It's like trying to claim that the latest LED TVs are better than the top-end plasma TVs from a few years ago. Just BS to sell a product that is cheaper to make.
News flash: Obama has defined the Russians as enemies who tried to interfere in the US election, same as the US interfered in Canadian, Japanese, UK, German, so many south american, etc. politics.
And now the latest fake news from Obama and his gang - the supposed hacking of the russians into an electrical grid that turned out to be totally false. An individual's laptop that was never even connected to the grid had some OMG malware. Fuckheads. Every one of you. Nobody can take the current administration, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DHS, or any other government agency as operating independent of political influence and on behalf of the average citizen.
Fortunately, it's a self-regulating problem. You could even make a cheesy movie out of it - "Self-destruct sequence activated..."
The world isn't digital limited to 8, 16, 24, 32, or even 64 bits. Good luck trying to express all possible colors using a limited amount of pixels with a limited subset of colors. Squids have 16 different color receptors, not just red-green-blue for most humans, and 4 base colors for quadrachromic-sighted humans.
These are two separate issues. People who are no longer able to breed aren't exactly capable of continuing to contribute to the overpopulation problem, and who knows, it may be one of them who realizes that we are not going to willingly solve the problems of global warming and overpopulation and hack into the missile systems to trigger WW3 and nuclear winter.
Here we have universal health care, and your advance medical directives are visible to anyone looking at your file. They simply cannot be ignored. You can refuse all care including food and hydration, and all they'll give is pain medication. You'll die, and you won't even be aware of it. This avoid the whole "I'm not able to consent to euthanasia any more" problem. Plus, it's really easy to commit suicide nowadays with all the information on the internet. Just search for scholarly articles on massive insulin overdoses. You won't know what hit you.
Any time there's money involved in an estate, lawyers are going to be there. That includes payouts to your estate after death. Even if it's not really required, they'll make damn sure it is.
My problem is not being paid for it. I'm all for organ transplants, but if someone wants to take whatever parts of me are still functional after I die, they're going to have to compensate my estate. That's all I'm waiting for.
So you want to add another layer of lawyers to suck off you even after you're dead? Bad enough they f*ck you over when you're alive...
I don't want to see religious views protected either, all I mean is that in practical terms it would be politically unpalatable.
Only in the more backwards countries. Much of the modern world has gone secular. For example, here the catholic church knows to keep it's mouth shut about abortion, same sex marriage, etc. if they want to stay even a bit relevant. And any politician trying to introduce their personal religious beliefs into policy gets smacked down for being a whacko religious nutcase. A lot has changed in the last couple of generations, when you couldn't throw a rock without breaking a church window.
It's not that odd. If they can pop out the old battery and put in a new, safer one, why shouldn't they? Gives them something a lot more unique than a "courageous" iPhone. And once you mod it to take replacement batteries, you don't have to replace it because the battery won't hold a charge. And since it won't get updates, you won't experience update slowdown obsolescence. How many updates are "must have" anyway?
It's a known fact. 5 chinese bitcoin mines control the majority of the new bitcoins generated. Or weren't you here a few months ago when that was covered?
Problem is, it often doesn't work when css sheets specify !important font overrides. CSS breaks the original premise of html - separation of content and presentation. It's part of what makes the web so defective by design nowadays. Same as dynamic content manipulation by javascript.
If you want an application, make one - don't bastardize the browser to act like one.
Actually, in many policies the 2-year exclusion window is now void because it's considered discriminating against a pre-existing condition. Gives the insurers incentive to provide better mental health care coverage so they can avoid the big pay-out from people taking the really really big easy.
So a couple of misguided lawsuits in the US, the home of ill-conceived lawsuits, and a grieving mother who has taken exception to the fact that doctors endeavour to keep blood pumping around a body in order to preserve the organs for transplant.
Thankfully the majority of the population are smart enough to consent to organ donation.
Given the trends in fake news, scams on social media that keep finding suckers, etc., don't be so sure. 95% support organ donations, but only 45% when it's their organ that's up for grabs, and 40% of those are blocked by next of kin. They figure it's better to receive than to give.
Bull. Shit. The national post article cites an opinion, not a proven medical fact. Fake news (then again, the national post is also canada's leading conservative oil-friendly climate change denier rag).
As for the other ones, "technically still alive" means nothing. There are plenty of people who are brain-dead who are "technically still alive." Same as the chicken whose head you chop off but runs around. And they all cite the same unproven opinion.
Should we do anesthesia during organ harvesting? Makes no difference either way, really. Once you're unconscious, you aren't aware of pain, even if your brain isn't dead. That's what being unconscious means. If you feel it, by definition you're not unconscious. But if you're brain dead, there's nothing to experience pain, joy, fear, whatever.
Probably the first organ that should be harvested is the brain, and not just for the protective membrane around it.
I have no problem discriminating against religious people who discriminate against others. As they sow, so shall they reap. Besides, shouldn't they be eager to get into heaven so they can worship all day? Keeping them alive is discriminating against their beliefs that heaven awaits them.
Of course, these are the same people who don't want to donate their organs because they don't want to be missing something when they get there, even though the bible says they get a whole new perfect body, and they don't want to be cremated because that's what the "heathens" did way back when.
I've offered to do both a live directed kidney donation (risk of death 2.6% after having a kidney removed - not the 0.03% bs stat based on a fraudulent study that is frequently cited to back up the lie that "donors live longer than non-donors") and a live directed liver lobe donation (risk of death, short or long term, to right lobe liver donors ~1%). Turns out that the intended recipient wasn't healthy enough. And was also one of those religious types deathly afraid of dying.
Seems that god must like cowards - he made so many of them in his own image.
You're living in the dark ages. Assisted death has been around on the down-low for decades. Now that it's legal here, it's just bringing the practice into the light. There are doctors who have launched lawsuits against it, but they are, without exception, connected with religious organizations, and mostly seen as the attention-seeking assholes they are.
Strange how people who believe death is the gateway to eternal peace and happiness are so damn afraid of it. Just goes to show that, deep down. they know it's all bullshit.
Do you really want to be one of those patients that makes a "partial recovery?" Go watch a few of them - sure, they're mostly aware, but their whole day is watching tv, having someone change their diapers, getting bathed once a month, maybe being fed through a tube, and having paranoid delusions because a mind that's not stimulated makes up shit.
Given a 50% chance of ending like that, kill me, or I'll do it myself if I'm able.
"and then claim they assumed you had not opted out because they "couldn't find" an opt-out record for you?"
For the paranoids, I offer a 'Not an organ donor!" tattoo for your sternum for only $99.99
Just don't give those to people who ride motorcycles w/o a helmet 'cause it can cause a paradox in the space-time continuum.
I brought up that subject while in the ER after a motorcycle incident (the city had ripped up the pavement in a curve AND turned off the street lighting), and he agreed it's not the ones who die, but the ones with no helmet who "live", who are really screwed. Not competent enough to refuse treatment so they can die, but aware enough that death is preferable to living.
Slashdot Mirror
Try doing a side-by-side. Stand off to the side - plasmas still kick ass at all angles.
Go back a few years later and ask some of those patients with partial recovery if they're still happy they survived. Many are NOT. And you're a fool if you would take "any form of partial recovery over death." Permanent vegetative state? Dementia that prevents you from recognizing anyone? Pain 24/7? We have euthanasia because we recognize that some things are worse than death. If you can't think of some situations where you'd rather be dead, you are just showing your lack of imagination.
Also, medicine is NOT "advancing at such a rapid rate that I expect partial recoveries will be only a temporary state of being." Even if we could replace your damaged brain with a new one, YOU would still have ceased to exist. 64% of all medical studies cannot be replicated, and most of the rest, the effect is far less than the original study. Thank the whole "publish or perish" cycle, where new results get all the funding, attention, and tenure tracks, and trying to repeat old studies to see if the results hold is for suckers. A great example of bad medical a bad medical study was the Women's Health Initiative, which suffered from a combination of bad design, non-representative population, commercial interference, bad stats, and sensationalism, resulting in the erroneous conclusion that HRT is risky to women.
The immediate result was driving millions of women off hormone replacement therapy and onto antidepressants (which we now have to worry about the link between SSRIs and dementia). Long term, there's also the increased death rates of those who don't use estrogen-only hormone replacement therapy, increased risk of cardiovascular disease, quicker bone density loss, earlier onset dementia and Alzheimer's, and we're not even counting economic and individual losses due to the disease of menopause being mis-treated as "normal" (it's only normal because for most of the lifespan of Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens we - and I say we because the two species interbred quite a lot - didn't live long enough for menopause to rear its' ugly head). This affects everyone - after all, pretty much everyone has a mother at some point, and many have sisters, daughters, female life partners, or (gasp) are themselves women.
Your faith is not based on facts. Just look at how many doctors have DNRs, because they know how useless extreme measures are.
Wow, someone who wants to race to the bottom even quicker. Then again, what can you expect from an AC?
Technically if they had configured the security there wouldn't be a problem.
Provably false, because it is impossible to anticipate every security problem, especially since you're trying to hit a moving target. Never been done, can't be done within the heat death of the universe.
Web enabled is inevitable
Only if you're someone who wants to really screw over users, with things like all-time connections required, downloadable content, adware, etc. Local networks did just fine for a LONG time for all sorts of business applications, and both standalone and local networks for things like games and other forms of entertainment. You show the lack of imagination given by not knowing history. The internet is a symptom, and has caused more harm than good for the average person. Fake news wouldn't be possible without stupidity like Failbook and Twithead.
Honestly the economy sucks, jobs are scarce and the web offers the possibility of breaking barriers by giving the average joe global reach
First, there is a limited demand for internet-enabled jobs, and already far too many people trying to fill that demand, which is why most intenet-based jobs pay less than minimum wage by the time you account for everything. Second, we're seeing the beginning of the bursting of the second internet bubble. You can't eat virtual pizza, your bitcoin is a terrible form of currency (as seen by the 18% drop in value in 5 days, the vast majority of "App developers" still make far less than the minimum wage and that has always been the case, and always will be, because people always hope that they will be the exception.
If you want to compete with developers in India, you'll end up with their standard of living - which means a country where, like India, there are so many people without a toilet (indoor OR outdoor) that they could literally form a line from the earth to the moon - something that will NOT change over the next 40 years because poverty is both ingrained in the corruption and class structure, and because the reservoir of poverty is just too large - and of course it doesn't help that India will have more people than China in 5 years.
Also, your "ground breaking technologies" are not. Most of the "new technologies" are shit, same as ruby used to be the latest hotness. Anything based on javascript is inherently worse than Flash - at least flash doesn't need a web browser to run in, and can be easily confined either to the local machine or local network. It also requires far less ram and cpu to do the same job. This is the problem with so many of the "new technologies" - holier than swiss cheese, layered upon other layers that are also full of bloat and rot (even Flash was bloat, but nowhere near as bad as, say, chrome or firefox).
We can exist fine without the internet. Specialized networks with limited access, non-interchangeable protocols, devoted to specific tasks, are going to happen, if only because the current internet is defective by design when it comes to security - the original goal was to be as failsafe as possible, no matter how much of the intervening network was destroyed - but that also means that any node can always attack anyone and everyone. Heck, it was possible at the dawn of the internet to take Microsoft down with a dial-up modem and a 386.
Society started failing when trickle-down economics and both the left and the right started ignoring economic disparity (which includes the Clintons even before he became president, having helped dismantle some of the new deal economic protections that actually allowed the economy to grow by growing the base instead of feeding the rich - a policy Obama continued by, among other things, bailing out the car companies and
Good thing my copy of dBASE5 still runs like a charm under dosbox and is impervious to all this web crap. Clipper still works like a charm too ...
It's just more marketing hype. It's like trying to claim that the latest LED TVs are better than the top-end plasma TVs from a few years ago. Just BS to sell a product that is cheaper to make.
News flash: Obama has defined the Russians as enemies who tried to interfere in the US election, same as the US interfered in Canadian, Japanese, UK, German, so many south american, etc. politics.
And now the latest fake news from Obama and his gang - the supposed hacking of the russians into an electrical grid that turned out to be totally false. An individual's laptop that was never even connected to the grid had some OMG malware. Fuckheads. Every one of you. Nobody can take the current administration, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DHS, or any other government agency as operating independent of political influence and on behalf of the average citizen.
Fortunately, it's a self-regulating problem. You could even make a cheesy movie out of it - "Self-destruct sequence activated ..."
This means they can express all colors
The world isn't digital limited to 8, 16, 24, 32, or even 64 bits. Good luck trying to express all possible colors using a limited amount of pixels with a limited subset of colors. Squids have 16 different color receptors, not just red-green-blue for most humans, and 4 base colors for quadrachromic-sighted humans.
It's the battery. Guess you haven't been following the story. The inaccurate charging circuits/software is an apple problem.
These are two separate issues. People who are no longer able to breed aren't exactly capable of continuing to contribute to the overpopulation problem, and who knows, it may be one of them who realizes that we are not going to willingly solve the problems of global warming and overpopulation and hack into the missile systems to trigger WW3 and nuclear winter.
Here we have universal health care, and your advance medical directives are visible to anyone looking at your file. They simply cannot be ignored. You can refuse all care including food and hydration, and all they'll give is pain medication. You'll die, and you won't even be aware of it. This avoid the whole "I'm not able to consent to euthanasia any more" problem. Plus, it's really easy to commit suicide nowadays with all the information on the internet. Just search for scholarly articles on massive insulin overdoses. You won't know what hit you.
Any time there's money involved in an estate, lawyers are going to be there. That includes payouts to your estate after death. Even if it's not really required, they'll make damn sure it is.
And have no battery life..
Don't worry - they'll work out some really hot deals in that department, same as always.
Still better to just buy a laptop and plug a keyboard, mouse, screen, and printer into it and get two screens that are actually USABLE!
My problem is not being paid for it. I'm all for organ transplants, but if someone wants to take whatever parts of me are still functional after I die, they're going to have to compensate my estate. That's all I'm waiting for.
So you want to add another layer of lawyers to suck off you even after you're dead? Bad enough they f*ck you over when you're alive ...
I don't want to see religious views protected either, all I mean is that in practical terms it would be politically unpalatable.
Only in the more backwards countries. Much of the modern world has gone secular. For example, here the catholic church knows to keep it's mouth shut about abortion, same sex marriage, etc. if they want to stay even a bit relevant. And any politician trying to introduce their personal religious beliefs into policy gets smacked down for being a whacko religious nutcase. A lot has changed in the last couple of generations, when you couldn't throw a rock without breaking a church window.
It's not that odd. If they can pop out the old battery and put in a new, safer one, why shouldn't they? Gives them something a lot more unique than a "courageous" iPhone. And once you mod it to take replacement batteries, you don't have to replace it because the battery won't hold a charge. And since it won't get updates, you won't experience update slowdown obsolescence. How many updates are "must have" anyway?
It's a known fact. 5 chinese bitcoin mines control the majority of the new bitcoins generated. Or weren't you here a few months ago when that was covered?
Problem is, it often doesn't work when css sheets specify !important font overrides. CSS breaks the original premise of html - separation of content and presentation. It's part of what makes the web so defective by design nowadays. Same as dynamic content manipulation by javascript.
If you want an application, make one - don't bastardize the browser to act like one.
Actually, in many policies the 2-year exclusion window is now void because it's considered discriminating against a pre-existing condition. Gives the insurers incentive to provide better mental health care coverage so they can avoid the big pay-out from people taking the really really big easy.
So a couple of misguided lawsuits in the US, the home of ill-conceived lawsuits, and a grieving mother who has taken exception to the fact that doctors endeavour to keep blood pumping around a body in order to preserve the organs for transplant. Thankfully the majority of the population are smart enough to consent to organ donation.
Given the trends in fake news, scams on social media that keep finding suckers, etc., don't be so sure. 95% support organ donations, but only 45% when it's their organ that's up for grabs, and 40% of those are blocked by next of kin. They figure it's better to receive than to give.
Bull. Shit. The national post article cites an opinion, not a proven medical fact. Fake news (then again, the national post is also canada's leading conservative oil-friendly climate change denier rag).
As for the other ones, "technically still alive" means nothing. There are plenty of people who are brain-dead who are "technically still alive." Same as the chicken whose head you chop off but runs around. And they all cite the same unproven opinion.
Should we do anesthesia during organ harvesting? Makes no difference either way, really. Once you're unconscious, you aren't aware of pain, even if your brain isn't dead. That's what being unconscious means. If you feel it, by definition you're not unconscious. But if you're brain dead, there's nothing to experience pain, joy, fear, whatever.
Probably the first organ that should be harvested is the brain, and not just for the protective membrane around it.
I have no problem discriminating against religious people who discriminate against others. As they sow, so shall they reap. Besides, shouldn't they be eager to get into heaven so they can worship all day? Keeping them alive is discriminating against their beliefs that heaven awaits them.
Of course, these are the same people who don't want to donate their organs because they don't want to be missing something when they get there, even though the bible says they get a whole new perfect body, and they don't want to be cremated because that's what the "heathens" did way back when.
I've offered to do both a live directed kidney donation (risk of death 2.6% after having a kidney removed - not the 0.03% bs stat based on a fraudulent study that is frequently cited to back up the lie that "donors live longer than non-donors") and a live directed liver lobe donation (risk of death, short or long term, to right lobe liver donors ~1%). Turns out that the intended recipient wasn't healthy enough. And was also one of those religious types deathly afraid of dying.
Seems that god must like cowards - he made so many of them in his own image.
You're living in the dark ages. Assisted death has been around on the down-low for decades. Now that it's legal here, it's just bringing the practice into the light. There are doctors who have launched lawsuits against it, but they are, without exception, connected with religious organizations, and mostly seen as the attention-seeking assholes they are.
Strange how people who believe death is the gateway to eternal peace and happiness are so damn afraid of it. Just goes to show that, deep down. they know it's all bullshit.
Do you really want to be one of those patients that makes a "partial recovery?" Go watch a few of them - sure, they're mostly aware, but their whole day is watching tv, having someone change their diapers, getting bathed once a month, maybe being fed through a tube, and having paranoid delusions because a mind that's not stimulated makes up shit.
Given a 50% chance of ending like that, kill me, or I'll do it myself if I'm able.
I seriously doubt that if they accidentally harvest your organs that you'll be all that upset about it.
"and then claim they assumed you had not opted out because they "couldn't find" an opt-out record for you?"
For the paranoids, I offer a 'Not an organ donor!" tattoo for your sternum for only $99.99
Just don't give those to people who ride motorcycles w/o a helmet 'cause it can cause a paradox in the space-time continuum.
I brought up that subject while in the ER after a motorcycle incident (the city had ripped up the pavement in a curve AND turned off the street lighting), and he agreed it's not the ones who die, but the ones with no helmet who "live", who are really screwed. Not competent enough to refuse treatment so they can die, but aware enough that death is preferable to living.