Dean Esmay has a series of posts about the story of Terri Schiavo. I haven’t commented because, honestly, I don’t think my voice means anything in this discussion. Still, my dad and I had a brief discussion about this topic this morning, so I wanted to bring it up here.

The way I see it, letting Schiavo die by pulling her feeding tube is wrong. Period.

That’s not so say I think she should be forced to live in a vegetative state, though. If she’s in a vegetative state (an assertion that is challenged by her parents), then I think the right, humane thing to do would be to inject her with something to induce death.

It’s wrong to prolong her life unnaturally if there’s no hope of her ever regaining any semblance of a life. It’s also wrong, now that we have unnaturally prolonged her life, to kill her by starvation.

Just my two cents…

In a momentary lapse of judgement, I ordered Batman floormats for my car from Wickedcoolstuff.com. After two weeks of not hearing anything (11 days of hearing nothing after I was billed), I e-mailed them and got a response telling me that shipping was more than they had anticipated, and they were waiting for my confirmation that it was okay to bill me the $6 extra dollars.

Here is my reply to them:

Let me get this straight…

I placed my order on the sixth or seventh of February, and you e-mailed me to let me know that my billing address was incorrect.

On the ninth, according to your latest e-mail, you realized that the shipping costs were going to be higher than originally calculated, so you put my order on hold while you confirmed whether I’d like to pay the additional cost of shipping. If I’d received this e-mail, I would have simply shrugged at the extra seven or eight dollars in cost — that’s practically nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

I didn’t get that e-mail, and so my order has languished on hold since 2/9/2005… and on 2/11/2005, according to my bank, Wickedcoolstuff.com BILLED MY DEBIT CARD for $68.47!!!! (At least, the charge came through on 2/11/2005.)

Given that this feels like extremely shoddy business practice to me, I would prefer you cancel my order and refund my $68.47. I could have forgiven either the delay in shipping because of the (very small) increase in shipping price or the billing before shipping, but combined, they seem extremely dishonest to me.

I’m sorry I wasted your time (and more sorry that I wasted mine) by ordering from your website. It is a mistake that neither I nor any of my friends will make again.

—–
Robin B. Sizemore

http://www.onestackmind.com/mt/

Consider this your fair warning — don’t order things from Wickedcoolstuff.com. Just like the name, their customer service leads one to believe that they are run by sixteen year old punks.

The recent surge in local governments banning smoking in private places has been a source of a lot of debate. Back when I frequented the Lounge at Experts Exchange, I remember a discussion about the topic that ran for quite a while (and, most likely, eventually devolved into a flame war). A more recent (and far shorter than the EE discussion I remember) thread on this topic can be found at Say Anything. In the course of that conversation, I summed up my stance on this issue pretty well with this statement:

If the government has an interest in banning smoking … then the government should ban smoking, not pussy foot around by putting bans in place on smoking in private businesses.

So, when the headline on the February 18th issue of the Clay Communicator informed me that the county’s Board of Health was banning smoking in “public” places, my interest was piqued. (And it certainly didn’t lessen that interest when the first couple of paragraphs let me know that the measure passed 4-2 on a 5 person panel.)

Now that I’ve had time to read the article, I’ve got a few comments to make. Since I can’t find any issues of the Communicator past October 2004 on their website, I’ll quote the relevant passages here:

Boardsters Connie Harper (Chair), Joe Morris, Bobby Stover, Herman Rogers, and newbee Larry McLaughlin gathered at the table…

…

The newest bestest yet ordinance is slightly less restrictive than the January attempt but kept the most controversial parts including: fines up to $1000 plus court costs; illetgal to smoke a cig, pipe, cigar in front, behind, or within 10 feet of a business; makes it a crime to smoke in a private, nonpublic office space, and allows any sanitarian arrest powers without any training on proper police procedures.

…

As this reporter was writing, someone made a motion to accept. It sounded like a woman’s voice. Harper, “Is there a second”. She waited and waited and waited. Finally, Harper made the second. … The ayes and nays came. Herman Rogers and Larry McLaughlin said nay. Harper announced the vote was 4 in favor of the edict and 2 against. Joe Morris later took credit for the Motion.

(The Communicator is always a fun read, despite (because of?) the fact that it takes a more conversational tone than most newspapers.)

So, what we have here is a five-person board voting 4-2 to pass this ordinance. Bobby Stover’s vote wasn’t listed in the paper, but in order to pass the ordinance, he must have voted no. I wonder who voted twice, though.

Delta Communications, the corporation behind the Communicator, has this on their website (halfway down this page):

Feb. 15 am Most non smokers are saying, GOOD, get rid of those nasty smokers! Of course, if you read the cover page from the ordinance, the intent of the ordinance is eventually get rid of ALL tobacco use in the county. During the last meeting Lynn Sizemore Romano said this web site distorted the truth. Here’s the exact wording from the Clean Indoor Air Regulation, purpose and findings section, “advance the legislatively prescribed public policy to provide the state with a citizenry free from the use of tobacco.”

They seem rather focused on this point, and I would agree with them insofar as I think that the Board of Health should be a little more straightforward with the public. As I said before, if they want to ban smoking (or tobacco in general) they should do that, not dance around the topic with these insane laws that tell private business what legal activities than can and cannot permit on their premises.

I don’t often agree with the politics of the Communicator on a national level, but on this issue (and, indeed, many local issues), I’m with them all the way.

Whoever came up with this is a Loonatic, but I don’t quite think it’s as bad as some people seem to. From what I read, the only reason for trying to tie these cartoons in with the classics is to get publicity. The looks of these new characters don’t really resemble the old ones at all, and it’s not like we can’t go buy DVDs and show kids what real cartoons are.

( þ A Small Victory)

McQ, over at QandO Blog, comments on a New York Times article about robot soldiers in a post titled “Robo War“.

Part of me says that it’s a cool idea — on the examples of those robots already being used (to dig up roadside bombs and scour caves), all of me thinks it’s a cool idea — but part of me shares McQ’s sense of “the willies” on this. His comparisons are to Terminator or the movie version of I, Robot, but those things don’t worry me much — that level of AI is far beyond what we can do now, I think.

What did send a shiver down my spine was this paragraph from the NYT piece:

Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology – the science of very small structures – they may become swarms of “smart dust.” The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up.

It wouldn’t take much intelligence for a swarm of “smart dust” to be dangerous. Michael Crichton’s novel Prey was more frightening than either of those movies (or any other killer-robot movies or books I can think of), and it makes one wonder if a swarm of nano-robots couldn’t be far more dangerous than a “life-sized” robot warrior.

Where McQ says that it’s possible that his doubts are a product of watching too much SciFi, it’s probable that mine are a result of Crichton’s novel (and, wasn’t there a John Saul novel that dealt with nano-tech, too?) and an overactive imagination.