(Found via Mike Flynn) The Dutch are worried: it seems euthanasia's not being offered to the mentally ill nearly often enough or easily enough and that's just wrong.
Gee, remember when The Netherlands was overrun by cruel, horrible fascists who, among other hideous injustices, euthanized the mentally ill and the handicapped, 'cos some lives were not worth living?
"Lebensunwertes Leben," horror to public policy in three generations -- Action T4 for the 21st Century!
One generation learns the hard way, the next forgets and the third reboots with minor changes, over and over.
10 KILL "UNWORTHY"
20 STOP KILLERS
30 VOW NEVER AGAIN 'this will fix it!
40 GOTO 10
D00d, I think there might be a bug in your code. And for once, it's not just that frikkin' GOTO statements are never good idea.
(Reminds me of the first time I used a BASIC Stamp on a project: no line numbers! Had to call up subroutines by name, utter heresy).
BASIC, eh? FORTRAN for me many, many moons ago, and I remember bupkis about it, too.
ReplyDeleteBASIC: the programming language (and I use the term very loosely) for people who aren't programmers.
ReplyDeleteI do admire the way the compiler for the Stamp takes one's BASIC and mashes it down very, very small. I had about a page and a half of program, which used about 10% of the available storage. Goofy thing was as reliable as a hammer; it read "tally" outputs from one device (using optoisolators) and spat out ASCII strings to control another.
What's wrong with offering Physician assisted suicide?
ReplyDeleteOffering, fine; encouraging, especially in the context of a government-run health-care system, especially to folks who may not be in a condition to meaningfully give consent, I am not so sure about that.
ReplyDeleteSuicide, Nazis, Obama, ... Nuts, I've had enough of all that for a while.
ReplyDeleteI saw this language once; it had no GOTO statement but, on a lark, it had a COMEFROM statement.
10 Print "Hello "
20 Print "World!"
30 ComeFrom 10
40 Print "Cutie!"
Run
Hello Cutie!
In C, it would be one line of code.
ReplyDeleteIn COBOL, it would be two pages.
I hate them both.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
ReplyDeleteEdsger W. Dijkstra