You are taking the position that an individual "owns" themselves That is not obviously true. I feel I belong to my family and my community.
Your position is not universal, and in fact strongly opposed by many. I believe that I have the absolute right to edit or terminate my own existence, either on purpose or accidentally. To the extent that anyone can own a person, people own themselves exclusively.
I disagree or rather yes, it does have the responsibility to provide you a rope. It is up to you whether you hang yourself or not.
I disagree, I think if you walk into a pharmacy and ask for something dangerous without a prescription they shouldn't be obligated to give it to you. It's the same with medical equipment that keeps you alive. If you want to risk your life you can do it but no one should be compelled to help you.
No one should be compelled. I mean it more in a negative manner, that it has an obligation to not stop people from helping. If someone wanted to offer a nitrogen tank, valve, tube and an easily head fitting bag for sale to people who want to commit suicide in a painless and ensured manner they be able to sell that (and people would). But in fact you cannot, and that is wrong.
100% agree for "read only" software, like scanning, diagnostics, etc. Control software is much more involved topic, let me illustrate it with a scenario: one family member is non-techy but has an insulin pump, another family member is techy and likes to hack around, they made a change to the insulin pump software to "improve it", but by accident the change triggered insulin overdose at night during sleep and family m…
Updating the software should be done by qualified medical software engineers. Just like you wouldn't let a random untrained family member do surgery on you or prescribe you any drug. The free software aspect would still benefit the community, and people won't be on the fate of 1 company. If the company stops supporting the software, you could go to a medical software service company that has in-house experts on helping users with deprecated medical devices. That would at least be possible with free software, not with proprietary.
I don't think he had a choice. If you had a good doctor that liked da Vinci robotic surgery, versus another one that did raven II would that factor more than the reputation of the doctor? Programmers who make life saving software are good in my opinion, even if the company they work for wants to make money. I think we should strive for the best features, and also be grateful for "fascist trailblazers". Shockley was k…
Did you seriously just use the holocaust as an example of successful R&D?
It was successful at least in R part of R&D by any definition of "successful" and "research".