Fascinating! So you can point to legislation that levied taxes to pay Verizon to put down fiber in places where they've chosen not to? If those appropriations actually specify deliverable services that they're not providing, that should be super easy for you to point out. Maybe not as easy as making up some "insightful" but completely misleading stuff about how it was taxes that Verizon funded FiOS and that they promised service at specific addresses that they've abandoned. Looking forward to your links.

Because, of course, the entire infrastructure of the carrier's network, peering connections, management, power, data centers, and all the rest is just "some wires."

Well according to Wikipedia:

So this is not a vaccine, unless you use a really lose (personal) interpretation of that definition to make it fit.

Regardless of your ludicrous biases, I am not an Objectivist or anything like it. There is a difference between having a government respectful of individual rights, and one that justifies enforcing every aspect of everyone's life because they by claiming every activity affects all the taxpayers. You can have things like taxes that pay for education, without telling everyone their children will be wards of the state every day for eight hours or you go to jail, or that no one can smoke a plant because somewhere down the line the state has to pay for the consequences.

WTF ever happened to personal responsibility? Dismiss that, and you live under tyranny.

Actually, it's called the "tyranny of the majority", and it's how we got things like slavery, bans on gay marriage, prohibition, and the Third Reich.

You're imposing a false dichotomy. How about we give no one authority over anyone except themselves, and everyone authority over their own body and life. THAT is what is meant by valuing the rights of the individual. Or ... we do it your way, create a "society", put someone in charge, and THEN you have one person with absolute authority over all.

Does "they" refer to anarchist-leaning (or "Randians"), or does it refer to anyone that is both fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and is opposed to further centralization of authority and growth of the police state, military industrial complex, and mult-trillion-dollar debt?

It does (what, you expected me to read the summary before posting?). But there is nothing like a natural immunity to nicotine - in fact it works because it matches brain receptors that normally bind naturally to acetylcholine. It seems like a dangerous idea to mess around with a person's immune system that way. Autoimmune diseases are nasty, and many of them are deadly.

Nicotine is not a disease, and this is not a vaccine. The only reason I can think of for calling a drug a "vaccine" is to be able to use the blanket immunitiy from law suits and prosecution that pharmaceutical companies get for vaccines.

... Sick time is treated pretty similarly in the US. The big difference is the (enforced by law) mandatory vacation (holiday) time which the US doesn't have, and differences in the way part-time workers are treated as far as benefits (they usually don't get any).

Why do statist always think that when someone objects to elevating the rights of the state to impose its will on people, they always assume that the person objecting must be some crazy anarchist or something?

Individual rights always result in better outcomes than collectivist rights. You seem to think the latter is preferred, even when I pointed out where using such a principle can lead.

I think the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" has some excellent stuff in it - except near the bottom the invalidating disclaimer: "(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."

I can't speak to Android, but Apple still supports and issues updates to the three year old iPhone 4S. Microsoft sometimes just walks away from stuff.

I doubt you live in this one.

Yea, I wish that were the case. I've been looking for a Galaxy Tab 4 10 inch to replace my aging 9 inch android tablet the price on those things has been going up for the past few months.

Smaller tablet prices may be coming down, but that's because they're just the wrong size for anything. Too big for your pocket, but too little screen real estate for anything I can't do with my phone.