I just realized why you mentioned suicide notes at all... I meant notes as in "written private communications", I should have used a better term, given the context.
"1. Happy people, successful or not, probably won't be committing suicide. Am I a happy person? As much as you might think you can deduce, no matter how well you know me, you cannot tell. So, the crux is that obviously, he wasn't happy and just put on a good show to make those around him comfortable."
So perhaps getting into his private life a little deeper than he had allowed would yield some sort of reason that he was unhappy. If it doesn't, then it does not rule out the possibility of suicide, but it does raise the bar on proving that it was. If they can't look into his private life and see any reason at all for him to have done it, even in hindsight, that's a pretty big evidential hurdle.
"2. The vast majority of suicides leave no note. Of those who do, a very large percentage of those notes are attack notes meant to hurt those around them. If you've ever read one, the last thing they do is bring closure."
i'm well aware that suicide notes are a fiction. As for the belligerent ones... I've written them, thanks for sharing.
"3. If someone genuinely wants to die, they won't give a call for help. More likely, they'll just give it a go."
Absolutely true, but that doesn't mean that they won't have done anything which, at least after the fact, appears to indicate their intent.
"4. If someone is depressed, they do indeed off themselves for no reason -- that is unless you count, "I have enough energy today to actually do something about it" as a reason."
If they were depressed, there should be some evidence indicating that. Even clear cut cases of clinical depression are often ignored for a long time before the light bulb goes off in somebody's head that a psychologist should get involved, but that doesn't mean that the signs and symptoms were ever invisible, just ignored.
"Suicide isn't like some movie story. It isn't romantic at all -- there is often no cry for help, usually no note, and almost always no closure for the victims (those left behind)."
I am aware, but thank you for clarifying that anyway.
I think the real story here isn't that Wikipedia has temporarily suspended the DOJ from article edits. The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history. Many of us have been suspecting that the administration was doing that, but this is the kind of damning evidence that we've been looking for.
This needs to be the straw that breaks the PNAC's and neo-conservatism's back, and we can only hope that the Republican party rises from the ashes better and more rational for having done so. They're already making solid progress by picking the McCain horse, if only he would stop selling himself out to the fundies and stick to his old center-right positions. The time of the Religious Right's domination of American politics needs to come to an end, and if we can show their more moderate colleagues just how bad they really are I think there's a solid chance that they'll kick the monkey off of their back for good.
It's actually a bit gray. If the deceased were not so then you would be entirely correct, as this would be unsolicited system intrusion. However, upon his death his possessions, including his various passwords and access to his accounts, became the responsibility of the executor (one would assume that either the mother or father took on this role, as it would be an exceptionally odd thing for a 21 year old to actually write up a will stating otherwise), who has since requested that the intrusion be done on what is, essentially, their property.
What shocks me is that this was ruled a suicide without an inquest going through all of this already. That is a very radical conclusion to come to, and one with (as stated in the story) some pretty serious legal and financial ramifications; happy successful people don't just off themselves for no reason and without any sort of note or indication that things were not going quite so peachy as believed i am surprised that no investigation has been done if only to rule the possibility that it's an accident.
Yes, heaven forbid somebody has a skill set other than programming. I cannot fathom how people who don't know HTML 4 can walk down the street without falling down and breaking their necks, they might as well not know how to breathe.
Seriously though, the idealization of greed is hardly monopolized by people in their early 20s. I have a long-tem understanding with my friends and family that if they ever feel I am devoting my entire life to a job i hate that they are to do whatever necessary to get me fired so I can re-evaluate my priorities.
That's certainly possible, but hardly the simplest possibility. On the one hand, I could believe that there is a vast lawyer conspiracy to claim that they want smart, intelligent jurors when they actually want the opposite, and that this is effectively relayed to all of the lawyers and legal staff out there without it being leaked to the community at large... and on the other hand, I could conclude that the GP is not, in fact, as bright as he thinks he is. Most people think they're smarter than they really are, and secrets that big rarely stay secret for long, so I'm going with the latter assumption for the time being.
Indeed, I am taking a course taught by a lawyer who is working with some people in Guantanamo Bay and I know that he flies down there frequently to see his clients (one of my papers has the smudges and small airplane grit to prove it, he did some grading on the flight). He's working pro bono because the people he is representing have no money at all, although I believe his actual expenses are being covered, at least in part, by various funds and groups (he's the ACLU representative for his county). Even if he could trust the Gitmo guards (who think it's funny to do things like turn around the legally mandated signs indicating which direction is east so that the prisoners will be tricked into breaking their religious tenets...) not to break into any encrypted files or otherwise illegally observe their communications, there just aren't any computers at all for the clients to use.
Most terrorism suspects aren't Saudi billionaires living in comfortable modern homes in the Middle East, most of them are dirt poor and either holed up in some dark dirty corner of the globe or stuck in the world's largest and most paranoid prison complex. PGP just won't work for these people.
Again, I could be mistaken, but I believe that if the number of protons changes, it is a different element altogether, and that as such ions are the results of varying numbers of electrons orbiting the nucleus.
If lawyers are saying that they want smart people with critical thinking skills, and you're saying that you've been rejected for jury duty every time... let's just say that MY critical thinking skills don't give me any reason to assume you're quite the critical thinker you claim to be. Just a hunch.
That is correct, electrons have an exceptionally tiny mass that can be largely ignored in comparison to the nucleus (kind of like a person's mass is trivial compared to the mass of the planet). They have quite a bit to do with charge, though... they pretty much cause it, in fact.
That is probably just as likely. My understanding though is that, outside of the noble gases, atoms don't actually occur that much in nature, specifically because they are defined as having a neutral charge without which they are technically ions. Again, I could be mistaken as I am neither a physicist nor chemist and I am operating entirely on fuzzy memories.
Yeah, and everyone knows that a last-gen video card that works just fine for anyone uninterested in the bleeding edge costs around $1300... oh, wait...
Because in order to be an atom it must have a full nucleus and a number of electrons such that it has a neutral charge (122, in this case). Without having RTFA or holding a degree in atomic physics, I would guess that these nuclei are not being orbited by electrons, or at least not the correct number of them, and are therefore not defined as atoms. Beats me why they aren't referred to as ions instead, though.
Well it's not the cheapest (Americans spend a greater proportion of their income on health care than any other nationality), or most inclusive (many people are simply ineligible for American health insurance, let alone those who cannot afford it), or fairest (quality of care is almost completely dependent on access to wealth and location, get sick outside of the Northeast or California and you're largely SOL), or even the most advanced (we're tied with all the other wealthy industrialized nations)... so no, I wouldn't say that at all. What metrics are you talking about?
"In America, ambulances to not sit in the hospital parking lot for as long as hours because the ER won't accept patients. If they accepted them it would hose their waiting time stats ya see, while if they stay outside in the ambulance they aren't counted as being in line. Of course it sucks if somebody needs an ambulance during that wait..... This actually happens in the UK."
I'd much rather sit in an ambulance than a hospital waiting room, at least you'd get the EMTs stabilizing you and doing prep work. I've never spent less than 30 minutes in an ER waiting room regardless of severity of the problem or the volume of traffic, it generally takes hours.
"In America people do not wait months for basic services. They do in Canada... unless they have cash, then they drive to America."
My PCP has a 3 month *minimum* wait list for a first checkup (and more like 4-6 months unless you have a completely open schedule and can make it there during the one or two weird unbooked slots that far out), without which they won't even see you. Doesn't get much more basic than that. I've heard this alleged of Canada several times, and not once have I been given a solid example of something that takes months there and takes significantly less time here. Feel free to correct this, but I seriously doubt you can or will.
"Should I continue? Nah, you aren't going to give up on socialism."
If you've already blown your load, then no, you probably shouldn't. Nor am I a classical socialist, but I doubt you would recognize the difference anyway.
Really? It made pretty good sense to me. They looked at which systems were most effective, overall, at getting everyone the best possible care with a focus on which systems produced the overall healthiest citizens. The fact that they took speed of service less seriously than the mortality rate doesn't mean they were playing unfairly to the strengths of some systems over others, it means that they cared less about speed getting in the door than they did about people surviving... fair enough, really.
In terms of ratings, they appeared to look at who came out ahead overall. Neither France nor Italy (the top two major industrial nations) were at the top in any one category, just very near it on almost all of them. The US won on speed, and did very poorly at everything else. I'm not seeing what you object to, other than that it says something about what health care systems work best that doesn't jive well with whatever theory you hold.
Apparently you've never played with a trick deck, or against anyone who doesn't completely suck. Then again, you've apparently played a lot of the Pokemon CCG, so that should be about par for the course.
You seem to be under the impression that the US has the best health care in the world. We do not. Not even close. Nearly all of the top countries in that field have socialized health care systems (the exception being Singapore, a micro-nation). Quality of care does not "always" decrease from socialization... in fact, it appears that the exact opposite occurs in most cases.
But hey, since when have stupid things like "facts" or "ethics" ever meant jack shit to conservatives?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a moron with a sense of humor.
It was a joke, laugh.
I just realized why you mentioned suicide notes at all... I meant notes as in "written private communications", I should have used a better term, given the context.
"1. Happy people, successful or not, probably won't be committing suicide. Am I a happy person? As much as you might think you can deduce, no matter how well you know me, you cannot tell. So, the crux is that obviously, he wasn't happy and just put on a good show to make those around him comfortable."
So perhaps getting into his private life a little deeper than he had allowed would yield some sort of reason that he was unhappy. If it doesn't, then it does not rule out the possibility of suicide, but it does raise the bar on proving that it was. If they can't look into his private life and see any reason at all for him to have done it, even in hindsight, that's a pretty big evidential hurdle.
"2. The vast majority of suicides leave no note. Of those who do, a very large percentage of those notes are attack notes meant to hurt those around them. If you've ever read one, the last thing they do is bring closure."
i'm well aware that suicide notes are a fiction. As for the belligerent ones... I've written them, thanks for sharing.
"3. If someone genuinely wants to die, they won't give a call for help. More likely, they'll just give it a go."
Absolutely true, but that doesn't mean that they won't have done anything which, at least after the fact, appears to indicate their intent.
"4. If someone is depressed, they do indeed off themselves for no reason -- that is unless you count, "I have enough energy today to actually do something about it" as a reason."
If they were depressed, there should be some evidence indicating that. Even clear cut cases of clinical depression are often ignored for a long time before the light bulb goes off in somebody's head that a psychologist should get involved, but that doesn't mean that the signs and symptoms were ever invisible, just ignored.
"Suicide isn't like some movie story. It isn't romantic at all -- there is often no cry for help, usually no note, and almost always no closure for the victims (those left behind)."
I am aware, but thank you for clarifying that anyway.
Lobotomies aren't that cheap.
I think the real story here isn't that Wikipedia has temporarily suspended the DOJ from article edits. The real story, at least to me, is that the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history. Many of us have been suspecting that the administration was doing that, but this is the kind of damning evidence that we've been looking for.
This needs to be the straw that breaks the PNAC's and neo-conservatism's back, and we can only hope that the Republican party rises from the ashes better and more rational for having done so. They're already making solid progress by picking the McCain horse, if only he would stop selling himself out to the fundies and stick to his old center-right positions. The time of the Religious Right's domination of American politics needs to come to an end, and if we can show their more moderate colleagues just how bad they really are I think there's a solid chance that they'll kick the monkey off of their back for good.
It's actually a bit gray. If the deceased were not so then you would be entirely correct, as this would be unsolicited system intrusion. However, upon his death his possessions, including his various passwords and access to his accounts, became the responsibility of the executor (one would assume that either the mother or father took on this role, as it would be an exceptionally odd thing for a 21 year old to actually write up a will stating otherwise), who has since requested that the intrusion be done on what is, essentially, their property.
What shocks me is that this was ruled a suicide without an inquest going through all of this already. That is a very radical conclusion to come to, and one with (as stated in the story) some pretty serious legal and financial ramifications; happy successful people don't just off themselves for no reason and without any sort of note or indication that things were not going quite so peachy as believed i am surprised that no investigation has been done if only to rule the possibility that it's an accident.
His would require a lot of time and tape to be readable once more, as going through the paperv shredder has probably rendered it completely illegible.
Or was your concern that, even given a fresh copy, he might just be unable to read it anyway?
Damn, well said. And me without any mod points for you...
Yes, heaven forbid somebody has a skill set other than programming. I cannot fathom how people who don't know HTML 4 can walk down the street without falling down and breaking their necks, they might as well not know how to breathe.
Hey, I'm 23 years old you insensitive clod!
Seriously though, the idealization of greed is hardly monopolized by people in their early 20s. I have a long-tem understanding with my friends and family that if they ever feel I am devoting my entire life to a job i hate that they are to do whatever necessary to get me fired so I can re-evaluate my priorities.
Work to live, not the inverse.
That's certainly possible, but hardly the simplest possibility. On the one hand, I could believe that there is a vast lawyer conspiracy to claim that they want smart, intelligent jurors when they actually want the opposite, and that this is effectively relayed to all of the lawyers and legal staff out there without it being leaked to the community at large... and on the other hand, I could conclude that the GP is not, in fact, as bright as he thinks he is. Most people think they're smarter than they really are, and secrets that big rarely stay secret for long, so I'm going with the latter assumption for the time being.
And lawyers say they do... I comprehend him, I just think he's completely full of shit (not to mention himself).
Try again.
Indeed, I am taking a course taught by a lawyer who is working with some people in Guantanamo Bay and I know that he flies down there frequently to see his clients (one of my papers has the smudges and small airplane grit to prove it, he did some grading on the flight). He's working pro bono because the people he is representing have no money at all, although I believe his actual expenses are being covered, at least in part, by various funds and groups (he's the ACLU representative for his county). Even if he could trust the Gitmo guards (who think it's funny to do things like turn around the legally mandated signs indicating which direction is east so that the prisoners will be tricked into breaking their religious tenets...) not to break into any encrypted files or otherwise illegally observe their communications, there just aren't any computers at all for the clients to use.
Most terrorism suspects aren't Saudi billionaires living in comfortable modern homes in the Middle East, most of them are dirt poor and either holed up in some dark dirty corner of the globe or stuck in the world's largest and most paranoid prison complex. PGP just won't work for these people.
Again, I could be mistaken, but I believe that if the number of protons changes, it is a different element altogether, and that as such ions are the results of varying numbers of electrons orbiting the nucleus.
A little egotistical?
If lawyers are saying that they want smart people with critical thinking skills, and you're saying that you've been rejected for jury duty every time... let's just say that MY critical thinking skills don't give me any reason to assume you're quite the critical thinker you claim to be. Just a hunch.
That is correct, electrons have an exceptionally tiny mass that can be largely ignored in comparison to the nucleus (kind of like a person's mass is trivial compared to the mass of the planet). They have quite a bit to do with charge, though... they pretty much cause it, in fact.
That is probably just as likely. My understanding though is that, outside of the noble gases, atoms don't actually occur that much in nature, specifically because they are defined as having a neutral charge without which they are technically ions. Again, I could be mistaken as I am neither a physicist nor chemist and I am operating entirely on fuzzy memories.
Yeah, and everyone knows that a last-gen video card that works just fine for anyone uninterested in the bleeding edge costs around $1300... oh, wait...
Because in order to be an atom it must have a full nucleus and a number of electrons such that it has a neutral charge (122, in this case). Without having RTFA or holding a degree in atomic physics, I would guess that these nuclei are not being orbited by electrons, or at least not the correct number of them, and are therefore not defined as atoms. Beats me why they aren't referred to as ions instead, though.
Yeah, especially Jake.
"We do by every metric that matters."
Well it's not the cheapest (Americans spend a greater proportion of their income on health care than any other nationality), or most inclusive (many people are simply ineligible for American health insurance, let alone those who cannot afford it), or fairest (quality of care is almost completely dependent on access to wealth and location, get sick outside of the Northeast or California and you're largely SOL), or even the most advanced (we're tied with all the other wealthy industrialized nations)... so no, I wouldn't say that at all. What metrics are you talking about?
"In America, ambulances to not sit in the hospital parking lot for as long as hours because the ER won't accept patients. If they accepted them it would hose their waiting time stats ya see, while if they stay outside in the ambulance they aren't counted as being in line. Of course it sucks if somebody needs an ambulance during that wait..... This actually happens in the UK."
I'd much rather sit in an ambulance than a hospital waiting room, at least you'd get the EMTs stabilizing you and doing prep work. I've never spent less than 30 minutes in an ER waiting room regardless of severity of the problem or the volume of traffic, it generally takes hours.
"In America people do not wait months for basic services. They do in Canada... unless they have cash, then they drive to America."
My PCP has a 3 month *minimum* wait list for a first checkup (and more like 4-6 months unless you have a completely open schedule and can make it there during the one or two weird unbooked slots that far out), without which they won't even see you. Doesn't get much more basic than that. I've heard this alleged of Canada several times, and not once have I been given a solid example of something that takes months there and takes significantly less time here. Feel free to correct this, but I seriously doubt you can or will.
"Should I continue? Nah, you aren't going to give up on socialism."
If you've already blown your load, then no, you probably shouldn't. Nor am I a classical socialist, but I doubt you would recognize the difference anyway.
Really? It made pretty good sense to me. They looked at which systems were most effective, overall, at getting everyone the best possible care with a focus on which systems produced the overall healthiest citizens. The fact that they took speed of service less seriously than the mortality rate doesn't mean they were playing unfairly to the strengths of some systems over others, it means that they cared less about speed getting in the door than they did about people surviving... fair enough, really.
In terms of ratings, they appeared to look at who came out ahead overall. Neither France nor Italy (the top two major industrial nations) were at the top in any one category, just very near it on almost all of them. The US won on speed, and did very poorly at everything else. I'm not seeing what you object to, other than that it says something about what health care systems work best that doesn't jive well with whatever theory you hold.
"Who names these things, scientists or marketing wanks?"
Marketing wanks name them because they sign the paychecks. Life's unfair, cope.
Apparently you've never played with a trick deck, or against anyone who doesn't completely suck. Then again, you've apparently played a lot of the Pokemon CCG, so that should be about par for the course.
You seem to be under the impression that the US has the best health care in the world. We do not. Not even close. Nearly all of the top countries in that field have socialized health care systems (the exception being Singapore, a micro-nation). Quality of care does not "always" decrease from socialization... in fact, it appears that the exact opposite occurs in most cases.
But hey, since when have stupid things like "facts" or "ethics" ever meant jack shit to conservatives?