These manifestations of obscurantist stupidity are pretty much a phenomena of the USA and a few Muslim countries. There are no anti-vaxxers in Europe that I know of, nor Creationists. AGW deniers are a tiny minority. Most people have a deep trust in science around here, even in a backwards catholic country like mine (Portugal).
Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Economics. Here, the neoliberal myths from the Chicago school are dictated as the Gospel without any critical thinking allowed. And there's no way the vast empirical proofs to the contrary will convince the Neoliberal Ayatollas ruling Europe that their great ideas are stupid and wrong.
Either you believe in vaccines or you don't. Making them mandatory doesn't change the effectiveness of the vaccines, so the measure you're announcing is just plain stupid and childish. I wonder if you're old enough to have children.
In a free society you have the choice to be stupid... If you take away that choice then its no longer a free society.
Wrong. Your right to be stupid ends where the rights of other people begin. That's why it's not illegal to get shitfaced drunk but it's illegal to drive in that condition.
WTF??? Vaccination is to prevent infections. Allergies are not infections. They are not caused by micro-organisms and are therefore not contagious, so what does herd immunity have to do with it?
Actually, the anti-vaxxer movement could be a fantastic way of getting dumbfuck retards out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, as can be seen by TFA, anti-vaxxing doesn't affect only its adepts but also innocent people around them. Too bad.
Here in my own country, we have a vaccination plan with quite a few mandatory vaccines. Everybody has a little booklet we call the Vaccination Bulletin, where the nurses keep track of all the vaccines we take. We go to a Health Centre and get vaccinated for free. Kids can't attend public school unless they show their Vaccination Bulletin and prove all the mandatory vaccines are in order. Everybody vaccinates their kids. The only exceptions I can think of is ghetto people who may not do it, out of neglect. And anyway, only a very small minority of them.
Maybe you could institute a similar policy in the USA. If the nut heads don't want to vaccinate their kids, they should home school them. That would keep their little walking petri dishes away from normal children. Yes, for an American this may sound like anti-freedom, but I think my freedom of not getting infected with a bunch of crazy diseases far outweighs the rights of other people to be dumbfucking stupid. And I believe the anti-vaxxer crowd is a very small minority, even in the USA (here they're non-existent). Why should they have the right to hurt the vast majority of normal people?
Vaccines protect people in the developed world from a huge bunch of diseases that were eradicated decades ago or only exist in third world countries. Do you Americans really want to become Uganda in the name the freedom to be stupid? Get a fucking grip, already!
All the time people here post individualistic rants about everything, be it Social Security, taxes or health care. But then they seem to have ethic feelings about... advertising??? WTF?
I don't care which model of financing web sites use, it's really not my problem. I hate advertisements, and none of them is directed to me, since I don't have money to buy the products they are trying to sell me. So, if it's so easy to block annoying and useless advertisements, why should I not block them?
What is going to come up next? Maybe the advertisers will be asking for state subsidies, or lobbying for laws to make looking at ads mandatory. If advertisement ceases to be a viable financing model for the Web, another will come up. It's not my job to be artificially maintaining a failing business model.
the number one resource of a nation is people. And if you have a demographic of population decline (eventually), a lot of single males, and too many old people relative to young people, that's not a long-term trend for success.
Because having billions of starving young people fighting for resources is so much more fun!
And you are not allowed to memorise any song or film. Your memory must be erased after exposure, or else you might commit piracy by singing the song or telling the plot to someone.
As if the system is not personalised enough! People should vote for policies, not faces. We don't need any more vain politicians with bloated egos spitting out demagogic bullshit while taking bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H contributions from big corporations.
I've been going to a Lutheran church lately, and all they preach about is loving your neighbor, following Jesus's examples, etc. They never talk about contraception (since that's not a problem in that church anyway), politics, etc.; it's all just about being a better person. They do talk of course about asking for forgiveness for your sins, but they never specify what is and isn't a sin, I guess they figure you should be able to figure that out for yourself.
Now, if I happened to be capable of the slightest bit of religious feeling, I might attend one of those.
But your should understand how things happen here. My country is almost 900 years old. The Catholic religion is a defining characteristic of our national identity since the beginning. People perform the rites of the Catholic church in automatic pilot, not really bothering to think about them.
We have many emigrants scattered around the world. Christmas and Easter are the times in the year to visit your family. In the summer months, we have celebrations all around the country dedicated to all kinds of saints and the multiple incarnations of the Virgin Mary (every village has a patron saint). During those celebrations, some people go to church, most dance to raunchy music and get shitfaced drunk.
Most people don't practice religion, but they are baptised, they marry in a church (though this is sharply diminishing) and they declare themselves Catholics. They will never switch religion. In Europe, most people don't take religion as seriously as in the US so they don't bother very much. You take religion seriously, so you try to pick the one that suits you best.
I'm a devout Atheist, so just I do whatever I please. And it feels great! Instead, you should ask the millions of people who call themselves Catholics but can't make it without their rubbers or their pills. What I find strange is that you immediately assume Catholics will breed like rabbits without looking into actual data, or giving credit to people who know better than you.
People have a brain of their own. And they know it's completely impossible to live by the standards imposed by religious authorities. Standards, by the way, that these authorities fail follow themselves. Catholics don't ignore everything they're told, just the parts that that are out of line with practical everyday life.
Catholics are not alone. Every religion is more or less based on hipocrisy. If whatever god from any religion was to smite the infidels, there would be nobody alive on Earth.
I would say only the most retarded, mouth-frothing fanatics refuse to use contraception because it's a sin, or something. This is only a fringe minority with no relevance. The vast majority of cases of not using contraception should be attributed more to ignorance and/or stupidity than religion.
I'd say the same about other Catholics, namely Italians who are far more devout than the Portuguese.
As seen by your own example, ignorance is not exclusive of Catholics.
Also growing in popularity is "answer this marketing survey before you get more than one paragraph of the content". It's only one question now, but as it grows in popularity there will be more questions. Ultimately you'll have to fill out an entire multi-page survey before being allowed to access content. This will be linked to your real name and Facebook account, of course.
Yes, because annoying the fuck out of your users can't possibly go wrong...
Adblock is great until all of the sites you enjoy for free all go under because their ad revenue couldn't sustain the site. I don't use Adblock.....I just don't visit sites who are too aggressive with ads (i.e. pop-ups) or consistently have ads that I disagree with.
I fucking hate advertisement, and I don't have money to buy what the advertisements advertise, anyway, so even if I loved it, it wouldn't make any difference. I find advertisement profoundly annoying. So I use Adblock.
As a devote believer in the free market, I'm only concerned about my own selfish interest of not seeing any ads when I surf the Web. And if everybody is as selfish as me, everything will be fine. Oh, wait...
So, you're saying a free market is not the ultimate and final solution for something?
Oh, why, but why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate America?
The increase in productivity may benefit only the owners of the robots, at the expense of the rest of the population which will have to survive in unemployment and poverty. This is not possible because a piss-poor population will not have enough money to buy the goods built by the robots.
So, we'll have to find another planet to export our goods to, or socialise the benefits of increased productivity. Simple.
If you look at the world map you can see correlation with poverty and fertility rate, but no clear religious pattern. But don't look at facts and numbers. It will spoil your deeply entrenched prejudicial view of the world.
Attaboy! We don't need no commie wimpy treehuggin potsmokin eurotrash abortionist lesbian solar windows. We can get all the energy we need from burning tires!
Maybe you were scratching yourself at that time, but I spent many hours fixing applications because of the Y2K bug. If it wasn't for the effort of thousands of geeks all around the world, instead of a few systems failing here and there we could have had a huge problem worldwide.
What are you doing in a nerds website? Comments like yours usually come from laypeople who have no idea what had to be done because of Y2K.
If the world's IT systems have had a meltdown, every body would be blaming the geeks for not having done anything. Because the geeks made a great job, guess what, nothing happened. Then people blamed the geeks for having been alarmist, instead of thanking them.
That's a big problem with us, geeks. When you do a great job, nobody notices it because things go smooth. If you fuck up, everybody notices you.
Slashdot Mirror
These manifestations of obscurantist stupidity are pretty much a phenomena of the USA and a few Muslim countries. There are no anti-vaxxers in Europe that I know of, nor Creationists. AGW deniers are a tiny minority. Most people have a deep trust in science around here, even in a backwards catholic country like mine (Portugal).
Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Economics. Here, the neoliberal myths from the Chicago school are dictated as the Gospel without any critical thinking allowed. And there's no way the vast empirical proofs to the contrary will convince the Neoliberal Ayatollas ruling Europe that their great ideas are stupid and wrong.
Either you believe in vaccines or you don't. Making them mandatory doesn't change the effectiveness of the vaccines, so the measure you're announcing is just plain stupid and childish. I wonder if you're old enough to have children.
I also bet the old geezer would object to you saying his life was worth less than some kid who just barely stopped drooling on himself.
Not if he has a conscience. No old geezer that I know of would object.
In a free society you have the choice to be stupid... If you take away that choice then its no longer a free society.
Wrong. Your right to be stupid ends where the rights of other people begin. That's why it's not illegal to get shitfaced drunk but it's illegal to drive in that condition.
WTF??? Vaccination is to prevent infections. Allergies are not infections. They are not caused by micro-organisms and are therefore not contagious, so what does herd immunity have to do with it?
In order to know which vaccines my son should get, I had to essentially become and expert in each vaccine.
Which you pretty obviously aren't. So let the experts do their job and shut the fuck up, you ignorant retard!
Actually, the anti-vaxxer movement could be a fantastic way of getting dumbfuck retards out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, as can be seen by TFA, anti-vaxxing doesn't affect only its adepts but also innocent people around them. Too bad.
Here in my own country, we have a vaccination plan with quite a few mandatory vaccines. Everybody has a little booklet we call the Vaccination Bulletin, where the nurses keep track of all the vaccines we take. We go to a Health Centre and get vaccinated for free. Kids can't attend public school unless they show their Vaccination Bulletin and prove all the mandatory vaccines are in order. Everybody vaccinates their kids. The only exceptions I can think of is ghetto people who may not do it, out of neglect. And anyway, only a very small minority of them.
Maybe you could institute a similar policy in the USA. If the nut heads don't want to vaccinate their kids, they should home school them. That would keep their little walking petri dishes away from normal children. Yes, for an American this may sound like anti-freedom, but I think my freedom of not getting infected with a bunch of crazy diseases far outweighs the rights of other people to be dumbfucking stupid. And I believe the anti-vaxxer crowd is a very small minority, even in the USA (here they're non-existent). Why should they have the right to hurt the vast majority of normal people?
Vaccines protect people in the developed world from a huge bunch of diseases that were eradicated decades ago or only exist in third world countries. Do you Americans really want to become Uganda in the name the freedom to be stupid? Get a fucking grip, already!
Monitor is about 3-4 feet away from me.
You have more than 2 feet???
All the time people here post individualistic rants about everything, be it Social Security, taxes or health care. But then they seem to have ethic feelings about... advertising??? WTF?
I don't care which model of financing web sites use, it's really not my problem. I hate advertisements, and none of them is directed to me, since I don't have money to buy the products they are trying to sell me. So, if it's so easy to block annoying and useless advertisements, why should I not block them?
What is going to come up next? Maybe the advertisers will be asking for state subsidies, or lobbying for laws to make looking at ads mandatory. If advertisement ceases to be a viable financing model for the Web, another will come up. It's not my job to be artificially maintaining a failing business model.
it really only raises the standard of living for those at the top.
Fortunately we have The Free Market (tm) or this could be happening here too! Oh, the horror...
the number one resource of a nation is people. And if you have a demographic of population decline (eventually), a lot of single males, and too many old people relative to young people, that's not a long-term trend for success.
Because having billions of starving young people fighting for resources is so much more fun!
And you are not allowed to memorise any song or film. Your memory must be erased after exposure, or else you might commit piracy by singing the song or telling the plot to someone.
I predicted this some time ago, and even posted it on Slashdot.
Deniers never quit. They just find new things to deny. It's like an onion, you peel one layer of denial, there's another one under it.
As if the system is not personalised enough! People should vote for policies, not faces. We don't need any more vain politicians with bloated egos spitting out demagogic bullshit while taking bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H contributions from big corporations.
I've been going to a Lutheran church lately, and all they preach about is loving your neighbor, following Jesus's examples, etc. They never talk about contraception (since that's not a problem in that church anyway), politics, etc.; it's all just about being a better person. They do talk of course about asking for forgiveness for your sins, but they never specify what is and isn't a sin, I guess they figure you should be able to figure that out for yourself.
Now, if I happened to be capable of the slightest bit of religious feeling, I might attend one of those.
But your should understand how things happen here. My country is almost 900 years old. The Catholic religion is a defining characteristic of our national identity since the beginning. People perform the rites of the Catholic church in automatic pilot, not really bothering to think about them.
We have many emigrants scattered around the world. Christmas and Easter are the times in the year to visit your family. In the summer months, we have celebrations all around the country dedicated to all kinds of saints and the multiple incarnations of the Virgin Mary (every village has a patron saint). During those celebrations, some people go to church, most dance to raunchy music and get shitfaced drunk.
Most people don't practice religion, but they are baptised, they marry in a church (though this is sharply diminishing) and they declare themselves Catholics. They will never switch religion. In Europe, most people don't take religion as seriously as in the US so they don't bother very much. You take religion seriously, so you try to pick the one that suits you best.
I'm a devout Atheist, so just I do whatever I please. And it feels great! Instead, you should ask the millions of people who call themselves Catholics but can't make it without their rubbers or their pills. What I find strange is that you immediately assume Catholics will breed like rabbits without looking into actual data, or giving credit to people who know better than you.
People have a brain of their own. And they know it's completely impossible to live by the standards imposed by religious authorities. Standards, by the way, that these authorities fail follow themselves. Catholics don't ignore everything they're told, just the parts that that are out of line with practical everyday life.
Catholics are not alone. Every religion is more or less based on hipocrisy. If whatever god from any religion was to smite the infidels, there would be nobody alive on Earth.
A fair share of the few that attend, yes.
I would say only the most retarded, mouth-frothing fanatics refuse to use contraception because it's a sin, or something. This is only a fringe minority with no relevance. The vast majority of cases of not using contraception should be attributed more to ignorance and/or stupidity than religion.
I'd say the same about other Catholics, namely Italians who are far more devout than the Portuguese.
As seen by your own example, ignorance is not exclusive of Catholics.
Google's unobtrusive text ads are out. Solution: really big ads that get in your face before you can get to the content. These sorts of ads have become much more popular recently and I can only conclude it's because they work.
Also growing in popularity is "answer this marketing survey before you get more than one paragraph of the content". It's only one question now, but as it grows in popularity there will be more questions. Ultimately you'll have to fill out an entire multi-page survey before being allowed to access content. This will be linked to your real name and Facebook account, of course.
Yes, because annoying the fuck out of your users can't possibly go wrong...
And how is Google going to make money to pay for those next great innovations?
Really not our concern, is it? Don't you believe in free initiative?
Adblock is great until all of the sites you enjoy for free all go under because their ad revenue couldn't sustain the site. I don't use Adblock.....I just don't visit sites who are too aggressive with ads (i.e. pop-ups) or consistently have ads that I disagree with.
I fucking hate advertisement, and I don't have money to buy what the advertisements advertise, anyway, so even if I loved it, it wouldn't make any difference. I find advertisement profoundly annoying. So I use Adblock.
As a devote believer in the free market, I'm only concerned about my own selfish interest of not seeing any ads when I surf the Web. And if everybody is as selfish as me, everything will be fine. Oh, wait...
So, you're saying a free market is not the ultimate and final solution for something? Oh, why, but why do you hate freedom? Why do you hate America?
The increase in productivity may benefit only the owners of the robots, at the expense of the rest of the population which will have to survive in unemployment and poverty. This is not possible because a piss-poor population will not have enough money to buy the goods built by the robots.
So, we'll have to find another planet to export our goods to, or socialise the benefits of increased productivity. Simple.
The sheer ignorance displayed in these Slashdot discussions is appalling! I live in Portugal, a Catholic country which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world.
If you look at the world map you can see correlation with poverty and fertility rate, but no clear religious pattern. But don't look at facts and numbers. It will spoil your deeply entrenched prejudicial view of the world.
Attaboy! We don't need no commie wimpy treehuggin potsmokin eurotrash abortionist lesbian solar windows. We can get all the energy we need from burning tires!
We call him Barraca Abana in Portugal!
Maybe you were scratching yourself at that time, but I spent many hours fixing applications because of the Y2K bug. If it wasn't for the effort of thousands of geeks all around the world, instead of a few systems failing here and there we could have had a huge problem worldwide.
What are you doing in a nerds website? Comments like yours usually come from laypeople who have no idea what had to be done because of Y2K.
If the world's IT systems have had a meltdown, every body would be blaming the geeks for not having done anything. Because the geeks made a great job, guess what, nothing happened. Then people blamed the geeks for having been alarmist, instead of thanking them.
That's a big problem with us, geeks. When you do a great job, nobody notices it because things go smooth. If you fuck up, everybody notices you.