If you're referring to me, you'll have to excuse me for being unable to feel sorry for someone seeking to legitimize something so horrible as this brain surgery, and I'm suggesting that his friend may have killed himself regardless if he had been forced to undergo the surgery.

Shit happens. Let's not try to seek making life a living hell for others to try to bring back somebody who's already dead.

There are other places and ways he can grieve rather than publicly supporting something completely inhumane.

Yes, something did go horribly wrong. Unfortunately, nobody's cared to understand non-obvious failure modes of that procedure. So, nobody thought that anything could go wrong when they decided to do it, at least not anything non-obvious that can not be corrected by further surgery. It didn't stop it from going wrong, though.

In fact, when I started estrogen HRT (I'm transgendered) I asked my doctor about it just to make sure I wasn't making some awful mistake. His theory was that it was only because it seemed that my brain was female, and he postulated that a female brain might not, to put it in slashdot speak, have the proper device driver for it all to work right. Unfortunately, nobody told my doctor that what happened to me is possible. I'm not even sure I'm faulting circumcision correctly, but what I do know is what I feel, that I'm circumcised, that problem is with the same body part involved in that, and that no other trans person I've met can corroborate my experience. (I would likely still be transgendered and seek estrogen HRT even intact--I believe that because there are intact trans women and I can't figure out what difference it would make anyway in that matter.)

What do I do about it, though? I guess I have to wait until they can grow me a new one from stem cells and replace it. I'm SOL in the meantime. Fortunately, I found other ways to satisfy myself, so all's not lost. I just may never be successful in giving my parents grandchildren.

I'm comparing this to circumcision to hopefully make readers think. Some may agree with circumcision but disagree with this brain surgery and vice-versa.

I only meant to raise the question of what can possibly go wrong and is it worth it to risk the occasional disaster when something less invasive and traumatic, like relaxed drug laws and treatment, might solve the problem just as well or even better.

Which drugs are we talking about here? Some drugs, like meth, are "modern chemistry." Other drugs, like opium, alcohol, caffeine, weed, shrooms, etc, etc are as old as the hills.

For that matter, who are we to judge what form of pleasure somebody may experience or not? It also calls into question the term "addicted." What constitutes addiction, and when do we determine "addiction" is bad? SSRI-class drugs are highly addictive; I know that firsthand from quitting. They tell me sex is addictive, but I'm on slashdot so I wouldn't know lol. Cheesecake can be addictive, and so can caffeine.

Are we performing this horrific procedure on people simply because our own lives are miserable and we don't like that somebody found a way to be happy? Or is this a person who is unable to support themselves? Would this person be able to support themselves if not for whatever habit we want to correct by completely annihilating their ability to feel pleasure of any kind?

I agree with your conclusion. Creepy and dangerous.

Agreed, but because I think it's the completely wrong approach and that it completely ignores the root cause. It's like using circumcision to treat urinary tract infections. There are plenty less-traumatic and less-invasive ways of achieving the goal. At least there may be a way to undo a stomach staple that I haven't cared to learn about. If things go horribly wrong after that piece of brain is flushed down a garbage disposal, how do you ever get it back? Or is suicide the option left for whoever you may wish this upon?

It probably isn't appropriate to bring circumcision into this thread, because brain surgeries like this are a whole world more revolting and horrific.

Would you want to be upgraded into a real-life Cyberman because somebody disagreed with one of your habits?

Perhaps the true horror here is the complete lack of empathy I find in comments like yours.

*sigh* I let myself be trolled by yet another Slashdot troll story.

Never being able to feel satisfied again? Who the hell would want to live like that? Jesus. At least I was only circumcised so that I'd only feel pain from just my genitals and never pleasure. If my whole world were that way... christ, the things people like you would wish on other people is frightening.

How much moralizing did your friend have to put up with that only drove him to be more addicted rather than accepting he's addicted and choosing treatment. How much stigma was associated with "being committed" in his mind? For that matter, how many shitty, controlling people were in his life that he needed to escape into a drug. For that matter, WHAT drug. Alcohol? Cocaine? Cough syrup? Meth? Heroin? Weed? Ah, I see, it was just... drugs. Because every one I just listed is exactly the same.

At least in the mind of a puritan. I know people who moralize about using tylenol. I'm not kidding. I don't know if that's you, but come on.

If you haven't already, go read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

There's nothing sad about this. Not everybody needs a general purpose computer. What they want is a Facebook machine, a Tumblr machine, a Youtube machine, and a Netflix machine. And give it to them. I'm sick and tired of hand-holding users who can't handle a general-purpose computer that can run more than 1 thing at once. I don't run Windows at home. I don't get paid to do support. When something blows up, I get called over to read over the dialogs and apply common sense, because I'm the "computer guy," and apparently anything on a computer is illegible to anyone who isn't a "computer guy." Maybe there's a small hope that when folks get their MyFace device, they'll take responsibility for knowing how to operate it themselves.

Where your post really baffles me is this:

When your doctor tells you to stop eating unhealthy foods because you're at risk of diabetes, do you give him shit like that? When your mechanic tells you that you need to bring your car in to get an oil change on time, do you throw your hands up in the air and bitch about not being an expert?

Back when I used to try to help people improve their computing experience, I would regularly recommend Firefox and install it for them after cleaning up a ton of malware.

Then a month later when they were drowning in malware again, what did I find? They were back to using IE.

I'm afraid GP is correct, but partially. If a home user is still using IE on XP, they've probably already been warned multiple times by experts, and they deserve whatever happens to them.

However, as others have pointed out, the most likely to be affected by this is corporate users. I've started to run into web apps at work that refuse to work under IE 8, but guess what? Installing Firefox or Chrome isn't even an option because we have vendor lockin to a call center vendor that insists on using IE 8 despite what the default browser is. I also have a feeling that there's no way the company will pay to upgrade about 30 agent stations from XP to 7. After all, why should they? The vendor we're locked into considers Vista support experimental, and it's not like XP's gotten rusty and is breaking down or anything.

This is just a sad, sad tale of vendor lockin and short-sightedness by closed-source corporate software developers. Welcome to the world of closed-source! Yes, we know it's broken, but shit we can do about it! It's closed-source, and the vendor I was talking about, Microsoft, and any other closed-source vendor doesn't give a shit how much pain they cause end users.

I'm not quite sure I understand your analogy.

It would seem to make more sense if you compared, say, health inspections to code reviews. The other half of your analogy would better compare end users to restaurant goers.

In general, I know a good restaurant when I eat at one and a bad restaurant when I eat at one.

One restaurant owner who didn't want to hear my complaints had the audacity to call the police, as though his rudeness wasn't enough to scare me away on its own (Dairy Queen if you're curious, will never go to any again, especially after learning how little International Dairy Queen cares about the quality of any of the businesses that franchise that name). It was even worse on the owner because he didn't know that friends I was with that he wanted to eject along with me had paid for food and were waiting for it to finish cooking and be taken out to them. So, when the cops arrived, the cops ended up forcing him to refund my friends before they would escort anybody off the property. I don't think I need a professional qualification to call that a bad restaurant, at least the one I went to.

Hopefully, however, his kitchen would pass a health inspection.

On the other hand, there are several local restaurants I've learned I never need to worry about having a less-than-perfect experience with. The thing about most reviews is that they reflect, in the end, how much the business cared about the customer's experience. If the Dairy Queen owner who lost his shit with me had handled my complaint professionally, I might have given the place a 4 or 5 star (granted, it's Dairy Queen, it's a low bar). All he really needed to do was remake my order, something that was a fairly typical way of handling complaints I remember from my fast food days. It's worth more than the cost of some ice cream and cheese cake to turn a complaint into a positive experience for the customer to most rational business owners, and I typically look to reviews of that kind of thing to weed out bad management and toxic ownership (the kind that doesn't care that I'm going to continue to tell this story as long as there are still Dairy Queens in business around me).

Professional reviews don't really touch on that kind of thing. I imagine it's bad business to be too frank in any review world. I also imagine that business owners would never dream of allowing a known reviewer's experience to go nearly as poorly as my Dairy Queen experience. There is value in a lay person's review, even if it's a different kind of value.

How does this answer the criticism that nuclear can be a safe, viable power source if only we weren't too busy sticking our heads in the sand and letting our existing nuclear plants deteriorate to the point where we can only look forward to more nuclear disasters to further fuel the anti-nuclear sentiment?

Ok, I'm going to get modded to hell for suggesting this, but I can't help but to wonder. I read all these comments from non-USians about how this is a US problem, not a video game problem. So, ok, the rest of the world consumes the same video games, same movies, same news broadcasts, pretty much same everything. So what's different?

It's not even gun laws that are necessarily different. Look at Sweden.

What's different is that we mutilate the genitals of boys at birth.

Why can't we have a study to see whether there's a correlation and causation there between circumcision and tendency to violence and extreme emotions? I heard over the summer that the rate of circumcision is down to something like 50%, so we should have some populations to gather data from.

It seems to me that it's more likely than causing the forming mind of an infant to undergo an experience of indescribable pain might be more potent than any violent or disturbing video game.

Not quite the same, but here you go: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Yes, but it was the Germans who were oppressing them then. I don't understand why that means the Arabs need to give up something to accommodate them.

Frankly, they seem to be a bunch of troublemakers who rely on Christian myth to be history's perpetual victims. They're drama queens, nothing more.

They could have stayed in Germany or moved to the USA after WW2, but they didn't. Instead they moved to the worst possible place in the world for them to be. They were probably counting on the Arabs to overreact so that their Zionist nonsense would be legitimized. I can see by your post that it worked.

Maybe you should step out of your black-and-white either-you're-for-us-or-against-us world for once. You're going to miss this, but I'll try to make it clear anyway. Just like there are Jews who don't practice ritual male genital mutilation or all of the silly rules concerning menstruation, there are Jews who aren't involved in this drama. It has nothing to do with race except for people like you who want to paint it as some holy war against god's chosen people, lump all Jews together as the good guys, lump all Arabs together as the bad guys, and then try to force us all a little closer to WW3.

I've come to believe that this whole thing has more to do with a military-industrial complex propped up by Christian myth about the end of the world than it has to do with any legitimate grievences. It's as though the Christian world needs some actor to convince themselves that god exists and that the Israelies are this dude's chosen people who can never be defeated more than Jews need some kind of fatherland and breathing room.

Heck, I have karma to burn. Mod me troll, but as a homosexual, I'm flabbergasted about what part of "until death do we part" straight folks are missing about this whole deal.

Add in kids, and I really don't get it. I must be weird or something for not sleeping with everything I have a chance with and not cheating when I am sleeping with someone.