echo1

From private sympathizers in the US, not from the US Government.

Apologies for digging up the ancient thread, but the community edition has been released recently. See here

HDMI == Single Link DVI with audio. No quality difference. Single link DVI (and by extension HDMI) only supports up to 1920x1200, for anything above that, you need dual link DVI or Displayport. Dual link DVI is standard on any graphics card made over the past few years AFAIK.

I like the new theme. I haven't been on in a while, so it could well be old news by now.

vim is my IDE. Eclipse and Netbeans make me want to cry.

It seems to me that most gun crime involves hand guns anyway. I think gun laws should be more about making sure that only responsible people get their hands on them, rather than banning things that look like assault rifles. Aren't there states that have bans against black guns? School children running around with guns? That's going to end well.

Wee bit out of date there, they replaced the Dimension branding with Inspiron a few years back. Go look at your nearest Dell site. sesdelta: Depends on how good the PSU inside the Dell is.

You call your own government terrorists. Then you accuse me of jumping to conclusions before elaborating further on how you think your government are terrorists. Lolwut? Also, you never told us which illustrious crue of gun-toting yokels you belong to. Agreed. I'd waiver the right to own a gazillion M16s than have something like the PATRIOT act.

Obama is a terrorist? Gosh darn, I knew it all along!

He sweeps the floor.

Are you a member of a STATE MILITIA?

I'm convinced by now that there's a super-di-dooper top secret black ops echelon inside the US government whose sole purpose is to troll the general public with bizarre aerial contraptions. And it's working.

Dare I ask what happened to the weapons pack?

Well, also certain variants of the Pentium 4 (600 series) and Pentium D (900 series), but that's largely incidental.

I think you're missing the point. From a legal perspective, the people who are not in a sound state of mind are often regarded as incapable of making rational decisions. AFAIK, if someone who has threatened or attempted suicide is brought into a hospital, they are deprived of a lot of their rights to make medical decisions about themselves. And of course, you have things like pleas of insanity in criminal law - if someone suffers from a mental illness that affects their judgment in the particular circumstance, the degree to which they are held responsible for their actions is lessened. I'm sure you'd agree that asking someone to kill you is a pretty serious step to take, and if you have some form of serious depression, you are pretty much automatically incapable of making rational judgments about the value of your own life. So how do you reconcile the ability of such a person to request that their life be ended with the fact that in certain other important matters, the validity of that person's decisions is seen as invalid because of their mental state? Of course, you could argue (correctly) that someone in extreme pain with nothing to look forward to but their own death is not going to be in a 'sound state of mind', but obviously there are varying degrees and types of these things. What I was saying was a criticism of things like the Swiss system where they give manic depressives the right to ask the health system to kill themselves for them. I'm not sure if this sarcasm thing was directed at something that I said. I don't recall being sarcastic. Hyperbolic for effect, sure. The circumcision thing was an example of the latter. Neither was it particularly relevant given that it was example to address a point brought up in relation to something else I had said earlier.

That's great. You have a lot of pain, spitting at people, breaking people's legs, and dolphins suffocating themselves, but you can't actually say what is wrong with my argument. It's quite funny to watch really. So in other words you were talking out of your ass? Thanks for answering my question. And what about the right to vote? I don't recall saying that any one should be denied the right to democratic political representation. Please show me if I suggested otherwise. ---------- Post added at 08:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:12 PM ---------- The point is that there are plenty of scenarios where people's freedoms are restricted or denied, even when no one else is affected. Sometimes they are limited to specific circumstances such as the fact that children have very little legal autonomy. Sometimes they are universally applicable, such as the bans and restrictions on various drugs, many of which will have no effect on anyone other than myself if I take them. Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but it's an important starting block to note that people don't get automatic rights until the bigger picture is looked at. Well, I provided examples of people making decisions about the death of others in countries where euthanasia is legal. I also showed how these countries have no problem with letting people who are not in a sound state of mind make the most serious irreversible choice that one person could possibly make. So the slippery slope is not an inherently 'unsubstantiated' piece of scare mongering invented by religious people, it does happen in the real world. The question of course, is the slippery slope inherent with euthanasia, or is there some way of 'fixing' it? I say that it's an inherent problem (and have explained elsewhere probably a few more times than once). Some might say that it can be made to work in a way that it is only there for the people who really need who are in a position where they can make that choice. There are many valid reasons on both sides. These are the interesting aspects of a euthanasia debate, not dolphins choking themselves, or whether my cat has a soul.

Now, the last I checked, a demagogue was someone who tugged on people's emotional strings to make people agree with them. It's ironic that you use this term given that you then say - Again, you're trying to short circuit any meaningful discussion of the issue by trying to force me into a guilt trip, and make me out to have no empathy. If you can show me where I ever doubted that suffering indescribable pain is a bad thing, please do point it out. The problem is that the issue is far more complicated than just "This person is in pain, they should automatically have the right to get their doctors to kill them", a concept that you appear to have an inability to grasp. You need to lay off the pills. Or perhaps take more of them... If that's an actual fact, I would like to see some sort of citation for it. Else, please stop talking out of your ass.

Pretty much self-explanatory... If you use multiple ones, vote for your favorite.

Well, you're somewhat missing the point that I was making. Decisions are made on the behalf of children (and grown ups) all the time, and I was questioning the morality of some such decisions. I think in a roundabout way you agreed with the actual point I made.

If I decide that my morality and culture dictates that I should carry out female circumcision against young girls, should the law accommodate to this?

I use "kosher" as a figure of speech for something that is acceptable. As far as I know, this is a relatively common phrase and not necessarily limited to Jewish people. In this circumstance, I'm using it to refer to things that could be considered objectively wrong - things such as people being killed without their explicit permission/consent by their doctors or families. Elsewhere I've shown that the former was quite common place in at least one country that allows euthanasia. I'm sure the latter has happened more than a few times, I just am unaware of any noteworthy examples or studies into the matter. For one thing, suicide is not illegal in most countries (I saw 'not illegal' as opposed to 'legal', as it's hardly encouraged, and if you threaten or attempt suicide, you'll probably be hospitalized which seems to me as a pretty logical thing to do). The issue is that euthanasia is of course assisted suicide. And once you drag other people into the process of doing the killing, it raises a multitude of ethical issues, some of which I have discussed above.

I'm not American. Thanks for the assumption. If you're making a rational argument, I don't see it. All you're doing is throwing out some semi-illegible rants that about breaking my legs and dolphins suffocating themselves. What this has to do with anything is anyone's guess.

The last I checked, the right to life is enshrined in the laws of most developed countries.

I can see where you're coming from, but at the same time, psychotherapy or counseling isn't like treating an infection, the success depends entirely on how the person interacts with the process, so if you get someone who has sold themselves on the idea of suicide, they're probably going to resist the process so that they will skip to the bit where they get to die. The other issue is that unlike someone rotting away from a debilitating paralysis, a person with suicidal tendencies likely has the means to kill themselves by their own hands. So telling them to go to a doctor so they can die doesn't necessarily offer advantages, especially if they know that someone might try and talk them out of it or hospitalize them. You talk about dignity and humanity, but if you're going to be dead, you probably wont care about that kind of thing. In fact, some people go out in deliberately gruesome ways in order to send a sort of final 'fuck you' to the world. On the flipside, if you care about what happens to others after you die, the odds are that you may have doubts and stop short of going through with suicide. I'm all for getting help to people who are in these situations, but I'm not sure if this sort of 'scamming' of suicidal people in order to get them to seek psychiatric help is really the best idea, either on principle or in practice.