Since 1993, a total of 43 patients in a persistent vegetative state, or PVS, have died after a judge ordered that treatment could be withdrawn.

BBC: Death plea case rejected by judge

Even more fundamentally, the digital economy's infrastructure has advanced basic material science and classes of machine tools that have led directly to the new high-power electronics (enabling hybrids) and to big, cheap flat-panel, thin-film PVs (derived from the massive thin-film machines that make flat-panel-TVs).

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