I don't own a gun.

Actually, I have 4 keychains on my keychain... one keychain has house keys, one has work keys, one has car keys, and the last one just has usb drives. They are all latched together via a carabiner, so I can easily remove any of them.

Absolutely, Joe Paranoid is sure the government is listening in on his conversations, so he gets a NSI phone to protect himself from Big Brother.

Why is he worried about the government listening to conversations he has on a phone that he can't even use to have a regular conversations in the first place because it isn't even activated or registered? The *ONLY* number he could call is 911, and every single 911 call is recorded anyways.

While actually holding people accountable, even if you don't necessarily always issue the fine, at least to some extent diminishes the number of abuses that would otherwise certainly occur.

But it would create other problems.

Again with the "would".... you seem to be under the impression that there is no accountability right now. There's already accountability with absolutely any phone line that can be traced to its holder, and with the current amount of accountability, there's absolutely no indication that anyone who calls 911 over what they believe is a sincere emergency would be more worried about being recorded or traced than they are with addressing the emergency.

Before copyright there was little if any protection for those that created and if you didn't have a patron life was pretty rough for you.

This is false. Before copyright, and in particular, before the printing press, copying was sufficiently labour intensive and error prone to functionally act a deterrent... it didn't stop everyone, of course, but then consider that the laws against copyright infringement don't stop everyone today either.

by that logic one may argue that copying has not deprived anyone of income...

True... but copying *HAS* deprived the right's holder of the value behind the exclusivity that copyright is supposed to have, and this is something that until an infringement occurs, the copyright holder actually *DOES* have. Exclusivity is something that works creators have always had... they have it implicitly when they create the work if they simply do not publish in the first place, and before the printing press they had a measure of it by virtue of the fact that copying back then was so difficult that it tended to act as a copying deterrent all by itself.

I haven't been suggesting that they should be enforcing it any more than they already are.... I'm just saying that a traceable phone line at least holds somebody accountable for when and where abuse *does* occur. I don't argue that are some circumstances that may warrant remaining anonymous when reporting a situation to proper authorities, but all of the ones I can think of are not real emergencies, per se. Can you think of *ANY* that are remotely feasible on matters that a 911 emergency response team would be dispatched to? Why would someone reporting that somebody is having a heart attack be less likely to report it if they knew that their identity was more likely known? While actually holding people accountable, even if you don't necessarily always issue the fine, at least to some extent diminishes the number of abuses that would otherwise certainly occur.

The aforementioned post suggested that with the existence of such fines, people may actually hesitate to call 911 in the event that they believed someone was having a heart attack, so yes... you did imply it.

Except of course it isn't feasible... as evidenced by the fact that nobody would ever get fined for calling 911 when the caller sincerely believed that someone was having a heart attack, even if they were mistaken in that belief.

But abuses of 911 still happen... and their chief problem is that they can and sometimes do interfere with their ability to deal with actual emergencies. The fines exist to hold people accountable for such abuse, but with a NIS phone, there is nobody to really hold accountable. Of course, there was nobody to really hold accountable for 911 abuse calls made from pay phones either... which also had no fee to call 911. I would imagine with NIS cell phones, however... it as an issue of scale.

I do not advocate disallowing NIS cell phones from calling 911, however, unless they can show that the 30% of actual emergency calls made from NIS phones, however low that might be considered, would have feasibly been reported just as quickly if NIS phones were not allowed to call 911.

By that logic copyright is depriving everyone else of the value of the content that multiplication entails.

It's not depriving them of anything they would have had if the person hadn't published the work in the first place. Publishing, however, generally enriches society, so copyright is supposed to provide the creator with some of the same sense of assurance that people will not copy the work when they publish as an incentive to do so. The argument that creators do not need copyright as an incentive simply because plenty of people were creating and publishing works before copyright was invented does not consider all of the factors that are actually involved, and is a specious one, or at least highly suspect... in particular, it fails to account for the simple fact that in those times, there were entirely natural barriers that prevented many people from making copies of works - physical labour-intensive, high chance of errors, not to mention an overall high degree of illiteracy. As some and eventually all of those barriers were reduced or stripped away, all that copyright does is extend the assurance that creators had long before copyright ever existed that people would not copy their works, even if it only does so through wholly artificial means.

But when it cannot offer that assurance, then it becomes less valuable to the creator.... ultimately leading the creator to resorting to self-censorship or else very limited availability for the work. DRM, anyone? It's a sign that in today's age of free copying and ignoring of copyright, that copyright has already lost a lot its value to creators.... and it will, I'm afraid, only get worse - at least for people who obey the law.

The counter argument to that, which I don't personally agree with for a moment, but I'm just pointing out for the sake of playing devil's advocate, is that everyone else is just as free to not send their kids to school if they don't want to risk exposure to a potentially large enough group of unvaccinated kids that there might be a danger for them in the first place.

The question is not so much "should it?" but "does it?"

They may be, as you say, willingly endangering everyone, but in reality they are not doing so out of any real sense of malice, so response with deadly force is absurd, to say the least. It is, in just one word, ignorance. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Killing somebody simply because they are ignorant ultimately amounts to killing someone simply because of what they believe.

Are you sure that's a road you want America to go down?

I've given examples from real life that shows that people actually *do* abuse 911, even if they are somehow examples of what *NOT* to do... and the above cited a hypothetical scenario that there's not a shred evidence is, or has ever been, a real-world concern.

And somehow *I'm* just engaging in rationalization and trying to generalize a worst case scenario as common?

You seem to be pointing fingers, so I ask you, when did I ever suggest that I was a believer in a religion that disallows vaccination?

I am a proponent of vaccination, I'm just aware enough of what people of other beliefs think to have cause to genuinely believe this is liable to run afoul of the constitution without an explicit religious exemption. The law may still get there in the end, but it will be a long and hard battle... one I don't even expect that many people alive today will see the conclusion of.

The fines that I speak of are something that is already here... now. They've existed for years, and those fines don't even really seem to stop some people from calling about things that AREN'T emergencies, as I mentiioned above.... what makes you think it would stop someone from calling because somebody is having a heart attack?

Frankly, I can't even imagine if anyone has ever questioned whether someone is having a heart attack of unknown severity is considered justification to call 911 simply because they know they will be fined if it is determined to not be an emergency.... because it's absurd to even *think* that it would not be considered legitimate by the dispatcher. The only way it would even be a problem is if you actually knew they were not having a heart attack and were just trying to prank 911... of course, if when the emergency team arrives, you claim to have genuinely believed the person was having a heart attack, then you probably wouldn't be fined... but you would likely receive a warning, and probably even given an educational leaflet on how to identify such things in the future.

I foresee a incident coming in the not too distant future where the state mandates vaccines for all children and some anti-vax parent says over my dead body and the state decides to take him/her up on it.

I don't think the state will actually kill anyone over the matter, as that would just turn them into martyrs. More probably, the court will simply take custody of the child and relocate the child into a foster home that is at least in another city if not another state.

The next several years could prove to be very interesting...