Word: assistant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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This method of causing computer chaos has been used at least as far back as 1998, when the first software tools were developed to assist in DDoS assaults. But the attacks didn't garner much attention until 2000, when Amazon, eBay, Yahoo! and CNN were brought down in a single week by a Canadian teenager. They've been a scourge ever since and have even been employed in cyberwarfare. During the war between Russia and Georgia last year, hackers brought down several Georgian websites using a DDoS attack. And in the aftermath of Iran's tumultuous election in June, several...
Civilized, in this case, is a relative term. The deaths are typically videotaped, to protect Dignitas' doctors and nurses from prosecution for in any way coercing the patient. While Dignitas claims to be nonprofit - under Swiss laws, the most liberal in the world, you may assist in a suicide but not profit from it - its finances are less than transparent. The "clinic" over the years has moved between apartments, hotel rooms, a camper van. But none of that is what made the story so confounding, at a time when the tensions between private rights, public costs and first principles have...
...problem is that Sir Edward, while in failing health at age 85, was not dying. His eyesight was nearly gone, his hearing was weak, and he faced the prospect of life without his soulmate. But sorrow is not grounds for a doctor to assist in a suicide in most places that allow it. Nor is despair. The Netherlands permits euthanasia for those suffering intolerable pain; Oregon requires two doctors to confirm that the patient has less than six months to live...
...seeking to clarify the law, Michael Smythe, head of public policy at law firm Clifford Chance LLP in London, anticipates that the Director of Public Prosecutions will define what kinds of people - with what kinds of illnesses - others can assist with ending their lives. "You can imagine the public brouhaha if the guidelines permitted those who were temporarily ill or not very ill to be assisted in their premature passing without any sanctions for those assisting them," he says. (Read "True Freedom...
...thing is for sure, though: the clarified rules will deal only with people who travel overseas to assist with suicide and won't change the fact that helping someone die in Britain is illegal. And that, says Dominic Wilkinson, a medical-research fellow at Oxford University, raises other ethical considerations. "If we think it's O.K. for people to go overseas to end their lives, and it's not illegal for them to do it or for people to help them do it," he asks, "why do we think that people who want to do the same thing in this...