Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 1) 673

No, it's a question of degrees. If you think people are stupid now, do away with education and see how bad it gets. I guarantee you that eventually the population will make Honey Boo Boo look like a PhD.

So requiring state education (a.k.a. banning home schooling and private schools) is the same as "doing away with education"? How does that work? You SAY "it's a question of degrees", yet you reject any notion of individual rights. You clearly want no compromise at all, and have no interest in limiting the authority of the state. That's why I called you a statist and it's clearly completely accurate.

Comment Re:Stupid names (Score 1) 178

I only read the journal abstract but it appears you're using personal definitions for those terms if you don't think it fits.

Well according to Wikipedia:

A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and keep a record of it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.

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

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 1) 673

How about we give no one authority over anyone except themselves, and everyone authority over their own body and life.

That's different from anarchy how, exactly? Who resolves conflicts between two people? Who enforces contracts? Who sanctions destructive behavior?

Oh, right, magically everyone will act with total respect for everyone else's well-being. Nobody will act selfishly to the detriment of others at all. I had forgotten that Ayn Rand was God.

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.

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 3, Interesting) 673

The many impose their will on the few. That's the difference between a productive society and anarchy.

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.

Depends on how you define "better". We could give one person absolute authority over all (which is the ultimate expression of individual rights) and that person would probably say it's a pretty damn good outcome. Everyone else would probably think it sucks.

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.

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 1) 673

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?

Because they inevitably start using terms like "statist" to describe non-Randians.

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?

Comment Re:Stupid names (Score 1) 178

They're activating the immune system to attack nicotine. Sounds pretty vaccine-like to me.

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.

Comment Re:Paid sick leave (Score 1) 673

privilege-seeking employees

Yep staying at home when you're sick and having some time off is such a privilige. Over here it's considered a right and is codified in law.

... 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).

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 3, Interesting) 673

Why don't you take your 'sovereign citizens", "objectivist", "Atlas Shrugged is the word of God", "OMG RULES!" ass and get a job, or something.

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."

Comment Re:Office 2007 started the move into alternatives (Score 1) 148

The tablet war is already over (tablet sales are dropping FAST)

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.

Comment Re: No! (Score 1) 148

Have they solved the cross platform compatibility problems yet? Office isn't even compatible with iteself. Used to spend a lot of time repariing documents and PowerPoints on the Mac that got balled up when coming from the PC side. If you are trading files between MS, MAC, and Linux systems, how does Microsoft Office do?

I use Office 2007 on Windows and Office for OSX on the Mac (Maverick). I write technical documents, using plenty of advanced formatting features, for publication using Word, and they render exactly the same in the office and Mac version. That's using the .docx format. So that seems to work well, anyway.

As far as Linux, there is no MS Office version, and Libre and related systems have formatting issues in both directions.

Comment Re:its a tough subject (Score 2) 673

one of the rights that is given to individuals by society,

Who is this "society" that "gives" rights to people? Hmm? How is that handled? What rights can "society" take away? What if "society" is threatened by some individual because of what he does? What about what he says? Maybe he his spreading dangerous ideas. Maybe because of that he should be eliminated.

I think you are smart enough to see where this leads. "Society" needs to be protected - from dangerous ideas spread by some individual. So "society" implements a change to the "contract" (that nobody signed) and now "dangerous" speech is a death sentence.

Slashdot Top Deals

Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Working...