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Comment Re:There is no problem (Score 2) 378

No. This isn't how human rights work.

For example, let's say you're running a sweatshop, and you lock all your workers inside throughout their shift, including locking fire exits. This is obviously a violation of their right to security of the person, since they could easily end up locked inside, burned alive. This is obviously a violation of human rights. You might say that these people could have chosen not to enter into that situation: nobody forced them to take up the job at the sweatshop. But that's not how human rights work. The owner of the sweatshop should still be prosecuted regardless, because they're exploiting their workers.

Comment Re:What about bullets? (Score 3, Informative) 513

That seems to be objectively not true. Using data from this website, and a map of gun violence by The Daily Beast, we find that the states that have the highest gun death rates - Louisiana, Nevada, Nevada, Arkansas, and Alabama all have concealed or open carry permit rates over 4% - with the last two at 7% and 16%, respectively, and with the notable exceptions of Mississippi and Alaska, which have gun death rates of around 1.5% each. So that would imply that the parts of the country with the most deaths by firearms are not the places with the most restrictions, since New York, California, and Rhode Island all have permit rates well below 1%.

I will concede that these statistics are for deaths by firearms, not for homicides by firearms; I couldn't immediately find any good statistics on that latter. Further, I make no attempt to ascertain whether states with tighter restrictions have lower death-by-firearm rates.

Comment Blatantly authoritarian (Score 1) 147

This is an example of what's wrong with the paternalistic attitude that's prevalent toward students. Acting as if high school students have absolutely no self-control by seizing their phones because they're deemed to be too distracting is certainly not a good way to form them into responsible adults who can take care of themselves.

It's worth emphasizing that the only reason this is allowed to stand is because high school students don't have another option. If an employer imposed the surrender of phones by employees, people would quit, or collectively advocate against it with their union. But high school students are legally required to go to school, and generally don't have much (if any) choice in which school, and aren't unionized.

Comment All warmongers care about is war (Score 1) 71

I remember listening to a talk from the Chaos Communications Conference called "We Lost The War". In it, the presenters posed the question of why there's so much talk of cyberwar, which they answered by saying that your standard warmongers are relevant only in war, so they want to shift as much discussion as possible toward war. Importantly, this means that the only reason cyberwar is being mentioned is to give relevance to warmongers. The fact is, computer security is inherently asymmetric. That means that retaliation is ineffective. Buying into the framing that's given by people such as Florence Parly makes absolutely no sense. Cyberwar doesn't have to exist at all; it only exists if we want it to. If not, traditional defensive computer security, as has always been done, is extremely effective.

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