I don't know, but here is my guess. She probably got a lot of angry phone calls, to the point that other calls weren't getting through. Perhaps people also figured out her home telephone number and called her there.
However, I think whatever happened, as long as it was legal and didn't involve threats, that's something that an MEP should put up with without whining about it or calling it "harassment". If McCarthy had received such a response at something, oh, on some directive on child pornography or retirement benefits, I suspect she would not have considered it harassment but mainstream, widespread outrage. If you look at McCarthy's web site, you'll see that this issue isn't featured there prominently (in fact, I didn't see any reference to it at all on the web site).
MEPs need to come to understand that this is something that geeks and technologists are genuinely outraged over. It is something that matters to a lot of people, and it is something they need to take very seriously.
Of course, people trying to contact them should also realize that MEPs still just don't quite get it and perhaps adjust their behavior accordingly.
Technically and intellectually, these people are complete morons. Access databases? Fixing software problems by just having the software print something different? Apparently, they don't even know how to spell the name of the second biggest city in the US.
Not only are these people corrupting our voting process, they are also making billions in the process. Which means that they are smart when it comes to being criminal. And that's something we really need to worry about.
If I register a domain containing some big company's trademark pointing to some random site, people usually get up in arms. Isn't it a trademark problem if "http://microsoft-sdlkfjr.com" or "apple-sldkjflskj.com" or "http://coca-cola-sldkfjjs.com/" take me to VeriSign's site? Or is it suddenly OK if you do this by the billions and do it for commercial gain?
(Incidentally, one big problem with the SiteFinder service is that it takes forever to come up with its answers.)
It's a stance against customizing everything for China.
Well, gee, I suppose we just should ship Microsoft Windows with the default US English language pack and be done with it.
Seriously, given how different China is culturally and linguistically, everything does get customized for China anyway.
Wow. China being insular. Who would have thunk it?
They still strike me as less insular than the US, and the US's insularity doesn't seem to have hurt it.
I mean, the US is different and insular in so many ways from other nations: US measures (used almost nowhere else), US paper sizes and office supplies, US plugs, etc.
Why use that kind of biased language? That kind of phrase is usually followed by arguments of the form "since it's not pristine anymore anyway, we might as well chop it down", or "since people have lived there in the past, why not settle it again"?
The fact is: those people aren't living there anymore, and they haven't lived there for a long time. And it wasn't Europeans that killed them. Obviously, that environment is not a great environment for humans to live.
Besides, this hardly sounds all that unusual: haven't there been plenty of cities found in other American rain forests?
It makes no sense to perform that kind of comparison between "Microsoft" and "open source". Microsoft is a company with a product line. Open source is just a license. It's not even an "apples" vs. "oranges" comparison. I mean, if Microsoft releases a broken piece of software under an open source license, does open source quality all of a sudden decrease? The question of whether there exist insecure open source packages corresponding to some Microsoft package has a trivial answer: of course.
The proper comparison is to ask whether there exists highly secure open source packages comparable to Microsoft's package in functionality. And the answer is usually, "yes".
The difference between open source and Microsoft is that among the hundreds of open source systems, people can find a collection of open source tools that is secure. Because they are open source, they tend to interoperate and use open standards, and that means that you can more easily mix and match. Users and companies can audit and verify those tools themselves if they care to, they can fix bugs that they discover, and they can share their discoveries openly. No, the open source process doesn't guarantee security, but it makes it possible.
I would remind you that I have only defended my ethical position... whereas you have assailed me from the beginning, accusing me of malpractice and assault.
You are so paranoid about your legal issues that you seem to think everything is about you. I have said it before, and I say it again: it sounds like you practice to current US medical and legal standards.
You even went so far as to suggest that I prolonged the suffering of terminally-ill patients in order to maximize the financial return from the patient's insurance company.
Of course, you do. That's not an observation about you personally, nor an accusation, it's an observation about the for-profit practice of medicine in the US.
Also, my reference to Nazi germany was not to the ovens and Zyklon-B showers; I was referring to the euthanasia of the mentally ill and the mentally incompetent
So was mine. Do you do this with your patients as well--assume whatever is most convenient for you as opposed to trying to understand what they are saying? (And, yes, I used the term "mass murder" deliberately--Nazi killings of the mentally ill, the handicapped, and homosexuals certainly amounted to "mass murder".)
It's already happened: nurses and physicians have been convicted of murder for motives including financial, love triangles, and "mercy." It's too much power to put in the hands of one person, particularly when there is such terrible potential for abuse
And your point is what? Doctors already have the power to kill undetectably; permitting them to assist in suicides doesn't make a big difference there.
Furthermore, between a corrupt doctor that keeps me alive uncomfortably and unnecessarily for six months and a corrupt doctor that kills me prematurely by six months but quickly, I would much prefer the latter.
Unethical? No... I sleep very well at night.
As your own example with Nazi doctors shows, "sleeping well at night" is not a guarantee that one's ethical position is valid. In fact, your whole argument about your oath and your traditions sound pretty hollow: the Nazi doctors had sworn the same oaths and came out of the same traditions. So, for that matter, did the US doctors who performed all sorts of what we now consider unethical human experiments and other unethical procedures like forced sterilizations in the 20th century.
Perhaps an executioner-type profession, similar to what already exists in Saudi Arabia, is closer to what you had in mind.
Your tendentious remarks just again demonstrate your dogma and your inability to actually reason about ethics.
No, I didn't have an "executioner type profession" in mind; in fact, I am strictly opposed to the death penalty: I believe that the state has no right to kill people, for any reason. (But don't doctors, doctors that swore the same oaths as you, participate in executions in the US? Didn't doctors help design the procedures used in executions? Is the death penalty OK with you?)
What I did have in mind was a "priest type profession": people who have fully accepted the inevitability of death, who don't have a pathological fear of the hereafter, and who have the ethical depth and psychological training to deal with life-and-death issues and advise people truthfully and without any personal interest in their decisions. Unfortunately, none of that appears to be true for many doctors. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many doctors chose their profession really because they are unusually afraid of death or dying themselves.
Placing large numbers of chips adjacent to one another has obvious problems with heat and power, in particular when running at those speeds. That, rather than interconnect technology, is probably the main reason we still package up chips in large packages.
This might be useful for placing a small number of chips close together, in particular chips that may require different manufacturing processes.
Great! Maybe this will mean that Symantec's awful product will finally become illegal to use. After all, one of the first thing a virus writer needs to check is whether his virus gets caught by common antivirus software. And, unlikely as it may seem, even Symantec's software occasionally does actually catch viruses (usually, it just incorrectly claims that random shareware or free software contains virusese).
Thanks; I think that's it. It doesn't look too friendly to non-Windows clients, however.
The best thing is probably still just to get a small Mini-ITX box (under $200), stick one or two large hard disks into it, and run Linux on it. Or just one of the $199 Mini-ITX-based desktop machines and replace the hard drive.
They seem to be a little behind: seen today at my local computer store: 160G, Ethernet and USB2.0, SMB file server, $289. It's about the same size as your regular desktop disk enclosure. Don't remember the brand name, however. Didn't do NFS.
Euthanasia is typically used to refer to "mercy killing" of sick or ill individuals, whether by an act of commission, or ommission.
Yes. What does that have to do with whether "society determines whether a life is worth living" (I'm paraphrasing you), as you asserted? The term "euthanasia" is neutral with respect to who makes the determination of whether a life is worth living; all the word expresses is that the execution of the act itself is motivated by mercy (as opposed to, say, aggression or greed, as in the case of murder).
Even if we, as a society, decided that euthanasia was acceptable (it was practiced in Nazi germany, and the horrors that resulted are well-documented), I would still not personally participate in the active killing of patients.
The Nazis may have called their mass murder "euthanasia", but calling something by a certain word doesn't make it so. Furthermore, while the Nazis did indeed want society to make the determination of what lives were worth living, the term "euthanasia" doesn't carry that meaning; today, most acts of euthanasia are assisted suicide.
In any case, you are living an illusion if you believe that today, in the US, we don't make choices every day about what lives are worth living and what lives aren't worth living. We make those determinations in the allocation of billions of tax dollars and laws and policy decisions, and the effects are an allocation and distribution of many millions of years-of-life every year. The life-and-death decisions made by doctors are dwarved by that.
I don't know if you have ever stood by and watched a person die, or personally turned off their ventilator and inotropic drugs and watched them slowly expire... I have. It's difficult, to say the least.
Yes, it's just the kind of person you are, and it's the profession you chose. How that choice is linked to your dogmatic stance and your apparently inability to tolerate other beliefs is another thing to ponder.
You would have me participate and actively cause death amongst the patients I'm sworn to aid, and condemn me should I refuse. I will not do as you ask. Where, pray tell, is my right to self-determination? My right to a principled ethical stand?
I think you lost that right when your profession obtained a legal monopoly to large classes of drugs and devices: by obtaining that monopoly and simultaneously refusing to aid your patients in suicide, you are taking away their right to self-determination. So, which principle is more important to you? Your own discomfort at helping someone to commit suicide, or your choice to take away someone else's right to self-determination?
If you wish to overturn such a long-established ethical standard, seting aside the weight of history, expert opinion, and real-world experience, then the burden of proof is on YOU... YOU must prove your case.
What makes you think I would want to "overturn" the current "standard"? I'm not on a political campaign, I'm not out to save the world, I was merely trying to discuss ethics with you.
Besides, what you so dogmatically consider the one, true, right way of doing things really only applies right here, right now. Many other nations have made different choices, and standards have changed over the centuries, and they will continue to change.
I strongly object to your condemnation of my medical practice, and impugning of my ethics, particularly when you haven't experience or bioethical credentials to lend support to such an indictment.
I said I consider current medical practice and your behavior unethical. That is not the same as "condemning" or "impugning". You see, people can believe that someone else's behavior is unethical and still tolerate the choices that the other person is making. But your belief system seems to be so dogmatic that such considerations are foreign to you. To you, there is a right, ethical, proper answer, and then there is everything else.
First of all, Opteron has quite a big lead. There are Opteron-based distributions, compilers, and other tools.
Also, merely having "64 bit instructions" isn't enough. What matters is whether the processor has 64 bit addressing, the ability to address lots of memory, etc. It may, but how well it works remains to be seen.
You make wild, unfounded accusations about my practice of medicine, and then dare to take umbrage when I outline the legal difficulties behind your ravings? I might point out that you flat-out accused me of malpractice, necessitating my schooling you on the issues involved.
I'm not making a legal argument. It sounds very much like you practice medicine strictly to US legal and professional standards. The fact that you don't seem to be able to conceive that other people might consider those standards unethical just doesn't even seem to enter your mind.
In any case, what I originally "took umbrage" at was your misrepresentation of euthanasia:
when does life stop being worth living? This is the question that the euthanasia folks would dearly love society to answer...
The "euthanasia folks" don't want "society" to answer the question of when a life stops being worth living. In fact, the term "euthanasia" is neutral with respect to who makes that determination. However, often "euthanasia" refers to "assisted suicide", and in that context it is the individual who makes that determination, not society.
I'm curious what you do for a living, particularly when you attempt to speak with experience and authority on an issue you do not seem to fully grasp.
I am a software engineer. I have made no pretenses of being a medical authority. I have given you my personal views, and the fact that you seem to think that having personal views on the ethics of end-of-life care requires medical authority is in itself telling.
My statement about the person who slits their own wrists has to do with their mental state. It is my professional, ethical, and legal obligation to prevent persons, ostensibly not in their right mind, from harming themselves or others.
Well, your statement obviously has to do with their "mental state". Regrettably, you don't give much indication that you reflect on the rather complex issues behind notions like "mental state" or "intent".
Now, I have my own set of ethics, and I will not help [patients] kill themselves, if that is their wish...
Thank you for clearing that up, and I am not surprised at the answer. You are probably entirely in accordance with medical and legal standards of care in the US. However, I consider your position to be unethical. The medical profession has effectively a legal and practical monopoly on being able to assist patients in comfortable suicides. To me, that means that you have an obligation to assist patients in suicides even if you personally consider those actions to be unethical. (Of course, the current legal situation in the US means that actually assisting patients in suicides is difficult and risky; we cannot fulfill every obligation that we have in our lives.)
I'd like you to volunteer at your local Hospice, and see how end-of-life care is properly rendered. I have both personal and professional experience with Hospice, and have never been anything but impressed with their sensitivity and compassion.
Ah, yes, there is the "proper" way to die, the medically and legally approved one, the one based on "sensitivity and compassion". It doesn't seem to occur to you that different people have different preferences.
Those issues are part and parcel of the practice of modern medicine, whether it is malpractice, wrongful death, end-of-life care, or medical care of prisoners/detainees. That you are unaware of that particular reality of medical practice makes me wonder about your knowledge base.
This discussion isn't about knowledge or authority. The fact that you think it is, the fact that you apparently can discuss ethics only within the framework of standard practice of modern medicine and your legal obligations is exactly what I'm getting at.
You present the practice of medicine as if there is some fixed moral compass, some set of rules that you can follow, neatly lai
While the user can contact and freely exchange packets with sites not behind NAT boxes, he cannot be reached by connections which originate at other sites. In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT.
Even cheap consumer firewalls allow you to accept incoming connections and run services. Furthermore, despite a lot of noise, most broadband providers do not seem to block incoming traffic; too many games and other popular software rely on it.
The only thing that NATs change is that services should be more flexible in the ports they will work with: when you have multiple machines behind a NAT box, you end up having to assign non-standard ports to services if they are being offered by multiple firewalled machines.
I agree that the trend towards relegating end users to a "client" status is disturbing, but NAT is not primarily responsible for that. Inventing bogus technical arguments will not help us reverse that trend.
plenty of people have been taken to court for wrongful death... but I'm not aware of a single successful suit brought for wrongful life.
I have had two family members go through this, and that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People that can look forward to a long, healthy life after resuscitation generally want to be resuscitated. It's the other people, the people you resuscitate against their wishes, who are usually so ill and have such short life expectancies that they are not in a position to sue you for their pain and suffering afterwards.
Furthermore, many people will try to avoid getting into a situation where they lose control to physicians in the first place; that's unfortunate, because it means that they may miss out on some available palliative care, but they believe it beats the alternatives. That's the choice a number of my other family members have made.
Have you had any recent experience with an ER in the United States?
Note how you hide behind legal issues surrounding the ER and avoid all the other questions. You still haven't said, for example, whether you would let a patient in your care commit suicide and perhaps even assist him. It seems to me that if you respect your patients' life-and-death decisions, you should.
If I smell a rat (ie. they have DNR home-made tattoed on their chest, look otherwise healthy, and have slit their own wrists), or there is otherwise doubt that the situation is as-advertised, I'll err on the side of resuscitation.
If someone has slit their own wrists, where is the "doubt" about their intentions, DNR tattoo or not?
but you do not know what you are talking about.
No, YOU don't know what you are talking about. There are health systems in the world that are dealing better with the life-and-death intentions of their patients, and there are some doctors in the US that do. But it doesn't sound to me like you are one of them.
Even as an emergency physician, I refer patients to hospice for care, and ALWAYS honor patient wishes, even if their family does not.
Oh? So then you do assist in patient suicides? You would walk away from someone in the emergency room who tells you "let me die"? If I wear a bracelet saying "do not resuscitate", you would not perform CPR? Frankly, I really doubt it. In fact, you just told us that you don't believe critically ill patients are capable of making such decisions.
As for your assertion that health insurance plays a role in how long I let someone live... again, do NOT insult me. Insurance plays NO role in my resuscitation of a critical patient...
I wasn't talking about emergency rooms when it comes to insurance; obviously, there is no time to determine insurance coverage in many emergency room situations. But insurance plays a big role in what kinds of cancer treatments, transplants, drugs, and other treatments people get.
And someone who has insurance is likely to be talked into painful and futile "treatments" by their physicians. Why not? Medicine is increasingly big business: getting people to use your products and services is profit-maximizing. Marketing futile interventions towards the end of life and selling drugs to cope with symptoms rather than addressing underlying lifestyle issues is the obvious free-market approach. Even if your own ethics went beyond that, it wouldn't matter: if you don't go along, you'll simply be drowned out and marketed out of existence by the people who do.
Self-determination is a fundamental individual right, and one I honor scrupulously.
I think you have merely defined "self-determination" so narrowly that you maintain the illusion of honoring it.
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. [...] The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel.
If you are working in the sciences, you should be using a decent, scientific data analysis and plotting package. That means something like Splus/R. SPSS and Minitab are also commonly used (I don't have first hand experience with those). Matlab/Octave and Mathematica also have lots of plotting and data analysis functions. For plotting, GNUplot is also pretty decent, and for calculations, Perl/PDL and Numerical Python are other good choices. Excel, on the other hand, is hardly ever the right thing to use for scientific work; its feature set, user community, and testing is oriented towards business applications, not the sciences.
A true replacement needs to support MS plugins, VBA (ugh, but sorry, its needed), and so on before we can even consider it.
No, it's not needed. While MS Office-based applications (the kind of stuff requiring VBA or plug-ins) are pervasive, almost all of them are easily replaced with web-based solutions, solutions that generally work better, are more collaborative, and require less maintenance.
Unfortunately, I know its a chicken & egg situation
No, it's not. Start migrating your applications to the web. Soon, you won't be depending on the applications inside the office suite and you'll be using it for its original purpose: word processing and similar applications. Then, it doesn't matter which one you use.
This is good for security as well, since most MS Office related security problems (and there are many) are a result of its programmability.
You may find it funny, but broken copy/paste is actually the reason I don't use Linux on the desktop. Oh, I'm sorry, what, it's not broken ? It's just giving me a choice of which copy/paste method to use ? Sorry, that's not good enough.
It's not two different "methods" for copy/paste at all. X11, in addition to a clipboard, makes selections available across applications. That's a different mechanism to accomplish a different thing. Selections and clipboards are as different as clipboards and drag-and-drop.
That isn't to say that X11 support for clipboards, selections, and drag-and-drop is perfect--far from it. It's clunky and messy. But it is sufficient to provide high-quality functionality, and toolkits can hide the underlying complexity.
If you think that's a trivial complaint, then you probably aren't using a desktop at all
No, it's not a trivial complaint at all. That sort of thing is annoying. But the cause of it is mostly that many programs fail to support X11's selection mechanism, either because their authors simply didn't understand it or because the software in question is some ported Windows or cross-platform dreg. The solution is to file bug reports and make the authors of the software aware of the problem.
On Windows, I can copy/paste pretty much anything from any program to any other reasonable program -- images, files, text, URLs, whatever.
The support for cutting and pasting anything other than text in Windows is very spotty in my experience. It may be a little better than in X11, but that isn't saying much.
That brings up another issue... when does life stop being worth living? This is the question that the euthanasia folks would dearly love society to answer...
Quite to the contrary. Euthanasia generally means assisted suicide these days, not "mercy killings", as you seem to imply. Euthanasia supporters generally put the decision of when a life ends being worth living into the hands of the person himself.
In contrast, it is the legal system, medical establishment, and churches that claim the right to make this decision for individuals. Generally, the more "conservative" and "religious" people get, the more they try to deny individuals the right to determine when they want to die and how.
This is part of the drive behind people getting living wills, durable powers of attorney for healthcare, and advance directive, etc.
Who are you kidding? The current medical system apparently makes decisions on when to end life primarily on the available insurance benefits of the patient. Good insurance coverage seems to virtually guarantee a long, painful, lingering death; living wills and patient instructions are widely ignored.
Once you're critically ill/vegitative, unable to make that choice for yourself, and others are trying to deal with the emotional trauma of your incapacitation... that is NOT the time to attempt an objective conversation about it.
Unless they are in a coma or otherwise mentally impaired, someone who is critically ill is very much in a position to have an objective conservation about their death. The fact that you, as a physician, often choose to ignore people's explicit wishes and do not assist their suicide is just an expression of your arrogance.
Because, as a physician, I have SEEN life that's not worth living (at least it wouldn't be for me), and I would never want to get to that point.
Then your best bet is to stay away from hospitals once you know you are terminally ill. Or move to a place where physician assisted suicide is legal and widely practiced.
I also like the feel and size of the Happy Hacking keyboards, but prefer the newer layouts of recent PC keyboards (with some remapping) and a built-in pointing device.
Developed in the late 1950s, magnetic induction never really caught on
Gee, silly me, and I always thought Faraday developed "magnetic induction" and that it was in wide use. But, hey, it has turned out that, contrary to my own silly ideas, Gates actually invented the Internet and that BT invented the hyperlink, so I must be wrong on Faraday as well.
Honestly, cut the crap. Show me how PHP has better OO than C#.
PHP lets you substitude objects for one another based on their behaviors, like Smalltalk. C#, instead, imposes restrictions based on inheritance. C#'s choice simplifies type checking and make work easier for the compiler, but it severly limits the flexibility you have during object-oriented design and development.
Can you catch exceptions ?
Sure. But exceptions, convenient and useful as they are, have nothing to do with the object system of a language.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know, but here is my guess. She probably got a lot of angry phone calls, to the point that other calls weren't getting through. Perhaps people also figured out her home telephone number and called her there.
However, I think whatever happened, as long as it was legal and didn't involve threats, that's something that an MEP should put up with without whining about it or calling it "harassment". If McCarthy had received such a response at something, oh, on some directive on child pornography or retirement benefits, I suspect she would not have considered it harassment but mainstream, widespread outrage. If you look at McCarthy's web site, you'll see that this issue isn't featured there prominently (in fact, I didn't see any reference to it at all on the web site).
MEPs need to come to understand that this is something that geeks and technologists are genuinely outraged over. It is something that matters to a lot of people, and it is something they need to take very seriously.
Of course, people trying to contact them should also realize that MEPs still just don't quite get it and perhaps adjust their behavior accordingly.
Technically and intellectually, these people are complete morons. Access databases? Fixing software problems by just having the software print something different? Apparently, they don't even know how to spell the name of the second biggest city in the US.
Not only are these people corrupting our voting process, they are also making billions in the process. Which means that they are smart when it comes to being criminal. And that's something we really need to worry about.
If I register a domain containing some big company's trademark pointing to some random site, people usually get up in arms. Isn't it a trademark problem if "http://microsoft-sdlkfjr.com" or "apple-sldkjflskj.com" or "http://coca-cola-sldkfjjs.com/" take me to VeriSign's site? Or is it suddenly OK if you do this by the billions and do it for commercial gain?
(Incidentally, one big problem with the SiteFinder service is that it takes forever to come up with its answers.)
It's a stance against customizing everything for China.
Well, gee, I suppose we just should ship Microsoft Windows with the default US English language pack and be done with it.
Seriously, given how different China is culturally and linguistically, everything does get customized for China anyway.
Wow. China being insular. Who would have thunk it?
They still strike me as less insular than the US, and the US's insularity doesn't seem to have hurt it.
I mean, the US is different and insular in so many ways from other nations: US measures (used almost nowhere else), US paper sizes and office supplies, US plugs, etc.
Why use that kind of biased language? That kind of phrase is usually followed by arguments of the form "since it's not pristine anymore anyway, we might as well chop it down", or "since people have lived there in the past, why not settle it again"?
The fact is: those people aren't living there anymore, and they haven't lived there for a long time. And it wasn't Europeans that killed them. Obviously, that environment is not a great environment for humans to live.
Besides, this hardly sounds all that unusual: haven't there been plenty of cities found in other American rain forests?
It makes no sense to perform that kind of comparison between "Microsoft" and "open source". Microsoft is a company with a product line. Open source is just a license. It's not even an "apples" vs. "oranges" comparison. I mean, if Microsoft releases a broken piece of software under an open source license, does open source quality all of a sudden decrease? The question of whether there exist insecure open source packages corresponding to some Microsoft package has a trivial answer: of course.
The proper comparison is to ask whether there exists highly secure open source packages comparable to Microsoft's package in functionality. And the answer is usually, "yes".
The difference between open source and Microsoft is that among the hundreds of open source systems, people can find a collection of open source tools that is secure. Because they are open source, they tend to interoperate and use open standards, and that means that you can more easily mix and match. Users and companies can audit and verify those tools themselves if they care to, they can fix bugs that they discover, and they can share their discoveries openly. No, the open source process doesn't guarantee security, but it makes it possible.
I would remind you that I have only defended my ethical position... whereas you have assailed me from the beginning, accusing me of malpractice and assault.
You are so paranoid about your legal issues that you seem to think everything is about you. I have said it before, and I say it again: it sounds like you practice to current US medical and legal standards.
You even went so far as to suggest that I prolonged the suffering of terminally-ill patients in order to maximize the financial return from the patient's insurance company.
Of course, you do. That's not an observation about you personally, nor an accusation, it's an observation about the for-profit practice of medicine in the US.
Also, my reference to Nazi germany was not to the ovens and Zyklon-B showers; I was referring to the euthanasia of the mentally ill and the mentally incompetent
So was mine. Do you do this with your patients as well--assume whatever is most convenient for you as opposed to trying to understand what they are saying? (And, yes, I used the term "mass murder" deliberately--Nazi killings of the mentally ill, the handicapped, and homosexuals certainly amounted to "mass murder".)
It's already happened: nurses and physicians have been convicted of murder for motives including financial, love triangles, and "mercy." It's too much power to put in the hands of one person, particularly when there is such terrible potential for abuse
And your point is what? Doctors already have the power to kill undetectably; permitting them to assist in suicides doesn't make a big difference there.
Furthermore, between a corrupt doctor that keeps me alive uncomfortably and unnecessarily for six months and a corrupt doctor that kills me prematurely by six months but quickly, I would much prefer the latter.
Unethical? No... I sleep very well at night.
As your own example with Nazi doctors shows, "sleeping well at night" is not a guarantee that one's ethical position is valid. In fact, your whole argument about your oath and your traditions sound pretty hollow: the Nazi doctors had sworn the same oaths and came out of the same traditions. So, for that matter, did the US doctors who performed all sorts of what we now consider unethical human experiments and other unethical procedures like forced sterilizations in the 20th century.
Perhaps an executioner-type profession, similar to what already exists in Saudi Arabia, is closer to what you had in mind.
Your tendentious remarks just again demonstrate your dogma and your inability to actually reason about ethics.
No, I didn't have an "executioner type profession" in mind; in fact, I am strictly opposed to the death penalty: I believe that the state has no right to kill people, for any reason. (But don't doctors, doctors that swore the same oaths as you, participate in executions in the US? Didn't doctors help design the procedures used in executions? Is the death penalty OK with you?)
What I did have in mind was a "priest type profession": people who have fully accepted the inevitability of death, who don't have a pathological fear of the hereafter, and who have the ethical depth and psychological training to deal with life-and-death issues and advise people truthfully and without any personal interest in their decisions. Unfortunately, none of that appears to be true for many doctors. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many doctors chose their profession really because they are unusually afraid of death or dying themselves.
Placing large numbers of chips adjacent to one another has obvious problems with heat and power, in particular when running at those speeds. That, rather than interconnect technology, is probably the main reason we still package up chips in large packages.
This might be useful for placing a small number of chips close together, in particular chips that may require different manufacturing processes.
Great! Maybe this will mean that Symantec's awful product will finally become illegal to use. After all, one of the first thing a virus writer needs to check is whether his virus gets caught by common antivirus software. And, unlikely as it may seem, even Symantec's software occasionally does actually catch viruses (usually, it just incorrectly claims that random shareware or free software contains virusese).
Thanks; I think that's it. It doesn't look too friendly to non-Windows clients, however.
The best thing is probably still just to get a small Mini-ITX box (under $200), stick one or two large hard disks into it, and run Linux on it. Or just one of the $199 Mini-ITX-based desktop machines and replace the hard drive.
They seem to be a little behind: seen today at my local computer store: 160G, Ethernet and USB2.0, SMB file server, $289. It's about the same size as your regular desktop disk enclosure. Don't remember the brand name, however. Didn't do NFS.
Euthanasia is typically used to refer to "mercy killing" of sick or ill individuals, whether by an act of commission, or ommission.
Yes. What does that have to do with whether "society determines whether a life is worth living" (I'm paraphrasing you), as you asserted? The term "euthanasia" is neutral with respect to who makes the determination of whether a life is worth living; all the word expresses is that the execution of the act itself is motivated by mercy (as opposed to, say, aggression or greed, as in the case of murder).
Even if we, as a society, decided that euthanasia was acceptable (it was practiced in Nazi germany, and the horrors that resulted are well-documented), I would still not personally participate in the active killing of patients.
The Nazis may have called their mass murder "euthanasia", but calling something by a certain word doesn't make it so. Furthermore, while the Nazis did indeed want society to make the determination of what lives were worth living, the term "euthanasia" doesn't carry that meaning; today, most acts of euthanasia are assisted suicide.
In any case, you are living an illusion if you believe that today, in the US, we don't make choices every day about what lives are worth living and what lives aren't worth living. We make those determinations in the allocation of billions of tax dollars and laws and policy decisions, and the effects are an allocation and distribution of many millions of years-of-life every year. The life-and-death decisions made by doctors are dwarved by that.
I don't know if you have ever stood by and watched a person die, or personally turned off their ventilator and inotropic drugs and watched them slowly expire... I have. It's difficult, to say the least.
Yes, it's just the kind of person you are, and it's the profession you chose. How that choice is linked to your dogmatic stance and your apparently inability to tolerate other beliefs is another thing to ponder.
You would have me participate and actively cause death amongst the patients I'm sworn to aid, and condemn me should I refuse. I will not do as you ask. Where, pray tell, is my right to self-determination? My right to a principled ethical stand?
I think you lost that right when your profession obtained a legal monopoly to large classes of drugs and devices: by obtaining that monopoly and simultaneously refusing to aid your patients in suicide, you are taking away their right to self-determination. So, which principle is more important to you? Your own discomfort at helping someone to commit suicide, or your choice to take away someone else's right to self-determination?
If you wish to overturn such a long-established ethical standard, seting aside the weight of history, expert opinion, and real-world experience, then the burden of proof is on YOU... YOU must prove your case.
What makes you think I would want to "overturn" the current "standard"? I'm not on a political campaign, I'm not out to save the world, I was merely trying to discuss ethics with you.
Besides, what you so dogmatically consider the one, true, right way of doing things really only applies right here, right now. Many other nations have made different choices, and standards have changed over the centuries, and they will continue to change.
I strongly object to your condemnation of my medical practice, and impugning of my ethics, particularly when you haven't experience or bioethical credentials to lend support to such an indictment.
I said I consider current medical practice and your behavior unethical. That is not the same as "condemning" or "impugning". You see, people can believe that someone else's behavior is unethical and still tolerate the choices that the other person is making. But your belief system seems to be so dogmatic that such considerations are foreign to you. To you, there is a right, ethical, proper answer, and then there is everything else.
First of all, Opteron has quite a big lead. There are Opteron-based distributions, compilers, and other tools.
Also, merely having "64 bit instructions" isn't enough. What matters is whether the processor has 64 bit addressing, the ability to address lots of memory, etc. It may, but how well it works remains to be seen.
I'm not making a legal argument. It sounds very much like you practice medicine strictly to US legal and professional standards. The fact that you don't seem to be able to conceive that other people might consider those standards unethical just doesn't even seem to enter your mind.
In any case, what I originally "took umbrage" at was your misrepresentation of euthanasia:
The "euthanasia folks" don't want "society" to answer the question of when a life stops being worth living. In fact, the term "euthanasia" is neutral with respect to who makes that determination. However, often "euthanasia" refers to "assisted suicide", and in that context it is the individual who makes that determination, not society.
I'm curious what you do for a living, particularly when you attempt to speak with experience and authority on an issue you do not seem to fully grasp.
I am a software engineer. I have made no pretenses of being a medical authority. I have given you my personal views, and the fact that you seem to think that having personal views on the ethics of end-of-life care requires medical authority is in itself telling.
My statement about the person who slits their own wrists has to do with their mental state. It is my professional, ethical, and legal obligation to prevent persons, ostensibly not in their right mind, from harming themselves or others.
Well, your statement obviously has to do with their "mental state". Regrettably, you don't give much indication that you reflect on the rather complex issues behind notions like "mental state" or "intent".
Now, I have my own set of ethics, and I will not help [patients] kill themselves, if that is their wish...
Thank you for clearing that up, and I am not surprised at the answer. You are probably entirely in accordance with medical and legal standards of care in the US. However, I consider your position to be unethical. The medical profession has effectively a legal and practical monopoly on being able to assist patients in comfortable suicides. To me, that means that you have an obligation to assist patients in suicides even if you personally consider those actions to be unethical. (Of course, the current legal situation in the US means that actually assisting patients in suicides is difficult and risky; we cannot fulfill every obligation that we have in our lives.)
I'd like you to volunteer at your local Hospice, and see how end-of-life care is properly rendered. I have both personal and professional experience with Hospice, and have never been anything but impressed with their sensitivity and compassion.
Ah, yes, there is the "proper" way to die, the medically and legally approved one, the one based on "sensitivity and compassion". It doesn't seem to occur to you that different people have different preferences.
Those issues are part and parcel of the practice of modern medicine, whether it is malpractice, wrongful death, end-of-life care, or medical care of prisoners/detainees. That you are unaware of that particular reality of medical practice makes me wonder about your knowledge base.
This discussion isn't about knowledge or authority. The fact that you think it is, the fact that you apparently can discuss ethics only within the framework of standard practice of modern medicine and your legal obligations is exactly what I'm getting at.
You present the practice of medicine as if there is some fixed moral compass, some set of rules that you can follow, neatly lai
While the user can contact and freely exchange packets with sites not behind NAT boxes, he cannot be reached by connections which originate at other sites. In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT.
Even cheap consumer firewalls allow you to accept incoming connections and run services. Furthermore, despite a lot of noise, most broadband providers do not seem to block incoming traffic; too many games and other popular software rely on it.
The only thing that NATs change is that services should be more flexible in the ports they will work with: when you have multiple machines behind a NAT box, you end up having to assign non-standard ports to services if they are being offered by multiple firewalled machines.
I agree that the trend towards relegating end users to a "client" status is disturbing, but NAT is not primarily responsible for that. Inventing bogus technical arguments will not help us reverse that trend.
plenty of people have been taken to court for wrongful death... but I'm not aware of a single successful suit brought for wrongful life.
I have had two family members go through this, and that's a self-fulfilling prophecy. People that can look forward to a long, healthy life after resuscitation generally want to be resuscitated. It's the other people, the people you resuscitate against their wishes, who are usually so ill and have such short life expectancies that they are not in a position to sue you for their pain and suffering afterwards.
Furthermore, many people will try to avoid getting into a situation where they lose control to physicians in the first place; that's unfortunate, because it means that they may miss out on some available palliative care, but they believe it beats the alternatives. That's the choice a number of my other family members have made.
Have you had any recent experience with an ER in the United States?
Note how you hide behind legal issues surrounding the ER and avoid all the other questions. You still haven't said, for example, whether you would let a patient in your care commit suicide and perhaps even assist him. It seems to me that if you respect your patients' life-and-death decisions, you should.
If I smell a rat (ie. they have DNR home-made tattoed on their chest, look otherwise healthy, and have slit their own wrists), or there is otherwise doubt that the situation is as-advertised, I'll err on the side of resuscitation.
If someone has slit their own wrists, where is the "doubt" about their intentions, DNR tattoo or not?
but you do not know what you are talking about.
No, YOU don't know what you are talking about. There are health systems in the world that are dealing better with the life-and-death intentions of their patients, and there are some doctors in the US that do. But it doesn't sound to me like you are one of them.
Even as an emergency physician, I refer patients to hospice for care, and ALWAYS honor patient wishes, even if their family does not.
Oh? So then you do assist in patient suicides? You would walk away from someone in the emergency room who tells you "let me die"? If I wear a bracelet saying "do not resuscitate", you would not perform CPR? Frankly, I really doubt it. In fact, you just told us that you don't believe critically ill patients are capable of making such decisions.
As for your assertion that health insurance plays a role in how long I let someone live... again, do NOT insult me. Insurance plays NO role in my resuscitation of a critical patient...
I wasn't talking about emergency rooms when it comes to insurance; obviously, there is no time to determine insurance coverage in many emergency room situations. But insurance plays a big role in what kinds of cancer treatments, transplants, drugs, and other treatments people get.
And someone who has insurance is likely to be talked into painful and futile "treatments" by their physicians. Why not? Medicine is increasingly big business: getting people to use your products and services is profit-maximizing. Marketing futile interventions towards the end of life and selling drugs to cope with symptoms rather than addressing underlying lifestyle issues is the obvious free-market approach. Even if your own ethics went beyond that, it wouldn't matter: if you don't go along, you'll simply be drowned out and marketed out of existence by the people who do.
Self-determination is a fundamental individual right, and one I honor scrupulously.
I think you have merely defined "self-determination" so narrowly that you maintain the illusion of honoring it.
I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. [...] The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel.
If you are working in the sciences, you should be using a decent, scientific data analysis and plotting package. That means something like Splus/R. SPSS and Minitab are also commonly used (I don't have first hand experience with those). Matlab/Octave and Mathematica also have lots of plotting and data analysis functions. For plotting, GNUplot is also pretty decent, and for calculations, Perl/PDL and Numerical Python are other good choices. Excel, on the other hand, is hardly ever the right thing to use for scientific work; its feature set, user community, and testing is oriented towards business applications, not the sciences.
You can get "R" for free here.
A true replacement needs to support MS plugins, VBA (ugh, but sorry, its needed), and so on before we can even consider it.
No, it's not needed. While MS Office-based applications (the kind of stuff requiring VBA or plug-ins) are pervasive, almost all of them are easily replaced with web-based solutions, solutions that generally work better, are more collaborative, and require less maintenance.
Unfortunately, I know its a chicken & egg situation
No, it's not. Start migrating your applications to the web. Soon, you won't be depending on the applications inside the office suite and you'll be using it for its original purpose: word processing and similar applications. Then, it doesn't matter which one you use.
This is good for security as well, since most MS Office related security problems (and there are many) are a result of its programmability.
You may find it funny, but broken copy/paste is actually the reason I don't use Linux on the desktop. Oh, I'm sorry, what, it's not broken ? It's just giving me a choice of which copy/paste method to use ? Sorry, that's not good enough.
It's not two different "methods" for copy/paste at all. X11, in addition to a clipboard, makes selections available across applications. That's a different mechanism to accomplish a different thing. Selections and clipboards are as different as clipboards and drag-and-drop.
That isn't to say that X11 support for clipboards, selections, and drag-and-drop is perfect--far from it. It's clunky and messy. But it is sufficient to provide high-quality functionality, and toolkits can hide the underlying complexity.
If you think that's a trivial complaint, then you probably aren't using a desktop at all
No, it's not a trivial complaint at all. That sort of thing is annoying. But the cause of it is mostly that many programs fail to support X11's selection mechanism, either because their authors simply didn't understand it or because the software in question is some ported Windows or cross-platform dreg. The solution is to file bug reports and make the authors of the software aware of the problem.
On Windows, I can copy/paste pretty much anything from any program to any other reasonable program -- images, files, text, URLs, whatever.
The support for cutting and pasting anything other than text in Windows is very spotty in my experience. It may be a little better than in X11, but that isn't saying much.
That brings up another issue... when does life stop being worth living? This is the question that the euthanasia folks would dearly love society to answer...
Quite to the contrary. Euthanasia generally means assisted suicide these days, not "mercy killings", as you seem to imply. Euthanasia supporters generally put the decision of when a life ends being worth living into the hands of the person himself.
In contrast, it is the legal system, medical establishment, and churches that claim the right to make this decision for individuals. Generally, the more "conservative" and "religious" people get, the more they try to deny individuals the right to determine when they want to die and how.
This is part of the drive behind people getting living wills, durable powers of attorney for healthcare, and advance directive, etc.
Who are you kidding? The current medical system apparently makes decisions on when to end life primarily on the available insurance benefits of the patient. Good insurance coverage seems to virtually guarantee a long, painful, lingering death; living wills and patient instructions are widely ignored.
Once you're critically ill/vegitative, unable to make that choice for yourself, and others are trying to deal with the emotional trauma of your incapacitation... that is NOT the time to attempt an objective conversation about it.
Unless they are in a coma or otherwise mentally impaired, someone who is critically ill is very much in a position to have an objective conservation about their death. The fact that you, as a physician, often choose to ignore people's explicit wishes and do not assist their suicide is just an expression of your arrogance.
Because, as a physician, I have SEEN life that's not worth living (at least it wouldn't be for me), and I would never want to get to that point.
Then your best bet is to stay away from hospitals once you know you are terminally ill. Or move to a place where physician assisted suicide is legal and widely practiced.
I like the IBM Space Saver Trackpoint Keyboard. If you don't like the Trackpoint, there is a version with a track pad, and there are several IBM keyboards without pointing devices.
I also like the feel and size of the Happy Hacking keyboards, but prefer the newer layouts of recent PC keyboards (with some remapping) and a built-in pointing device.
Developed in the late 1950s, magnetic induction never really caught on
Gee, silly me, and I always thought Faraday developed "magnetic induction" and that it was in wide use. But, hey, it has turned out that, contrary to my own silly ideas, Gates actually invented the Internet and that BT invented the hyperlink, so I must be wrong on Faraday as well.
Honestly, cut the crap. Show me how PHP has better OO than C#.
PHP lets you substitude objects for one another based on their behaviors, like Smalltalk. C#, instead, imposes restrictions based on inheritance. C#'s choice simplifies type checking and make work easier for the compiler, but it severly limits the flexibility you have during object-oriented design and development.
Can you catch exceptions ?
Sure. But exceptions, convenient and useful as they are, have nothing to do with the object system of a language.