Something weird about an asymmetric war? Those happen. They're not going to go away. Learn to live with that fact.

What's your problem with weapons that can kill without warning? Do you also protest artillery? Snipers? Suicide bombers? Infrared sights? Concealed weapons? A weapon that can get explosive into an enemy target area without warning is a good weapon, and will be more effective in war. You don't want to live in a world where the government has that much power to terrorize, OK. Did you live through the Cuban Missile Crisis? We were very unpleasantly close to having nukes flying, and that, to me, is more terrifying than drones by a long shot. You've probably lived in that world all your life, and complaining about a minor addition is pointless.

If you're in Pakistan, and you avoid areas of US-designated enemy activity, you're pretty safe. This wouldn't apply if you lived in southern Israel, for example. The US tries to target only its enemies, and isn't that bad about it.

I share your concerns about police getting military weapons, but the base problem here is the militarization of the police, not the specific weapons. Giving police the equipment to fight a small war is not a good idea, regardless of the weapons used.

Sure, drones will become more common if we use them. Know what happens if we don't? Everybody else works on them anyway because they're effective weapons. Our enemies get them. Police departments get them. Other countries build more and more automated drones. We're very good at that sort of thing, so most countries will lag behind what we do, but not by all that much. Why do you want our enemies to get effective weapons before we do?

If you want to protest US activity in the region, fine. If you want to protest war in general, fine. If you want to protest undeclared wars, fine. All of those are reasonable things to protest, although I won't promise to agree with you. Protesting against weapons because you find them scary, because they're effective weapons, is silly.

The Second Amendment would be a whole lot easier to understand without the first part of the sentence. Does it mean nothing? Then why is it there, since AFAIK no other Constitutional provision provides and explanation? Does it mean bearing arms has something to do with a well-regulated Militia?

Okay, so tell me what part of the Constitution was violated? Bear in mind that we do not have to be in a declared war to take military action, something which has been recognized from George Washington on.

What we established in the post-WWII trials is that following orders is no excuse for behavior that violates the laws of war. We did not prosecute every single soldier who served in any Axis army, navy, and air force for fighting a war.

If an officer says "kill those prisoners", a soldier is guilty of a war crime if he does so. If an officer says "attack that hill", the soldier can attack the hill, and kill enemy soldiers, without being guilty, even if the war is judged illegal.

Congress is the only body that can declare war. This says nothing about use of military force in something other than a declared war, and we've been doing that for a LONG time.

You're assuming that Apple gets significant revenue from XP users. People who still run an ancient OS that no longer gets security updates are not likely to be good customers for anything computer-related. Apple probably has good figures, and I suspect there was a revenue vs. costs analysis before they dropped support.

Not to mention that Microsoft pulled its support last year, while Apple continued its support until this year. Apple drops support for its MacOSX machines a bit faster than I like, but other than that they're pretty good.

Last time I got a new iPhone, it turned out that copying the music files from one computer to another was a real pain, so I wound up re-ripping everything. Everything else I tried lost too much metadata. If there's a better solution, I'd like to know it, since I'm probably going to want to upgrade this phone in two years or so.

If you have six songs in iTunes, you should have no particular difficulty or expense in upgrading them. Seriously, when the DRM-free stuff came out I switched all my Apple music to DRM-free.

No. There still are a lot of people running XP, but I'll tell you something true of most of them: they don't want to spend much money on their computer (or they'd have something halfway modern by now). This means that they aren't promising customers. Apple is better off itself dropping support for ancient OSes rather than continue to support them for a trickle of sales, but it does annoy the people who have the older computers.

Some eBooks are. I've bought quite a few Nook books that say something like "The publisher doesn't want us to put DRM on this, so we didn't. Please don't take advantage of this to violate copyright." I've bought non-DRMed eBooks from elsewhere (if it's going to run on the Nook without coming from B&N, it's not going to have other DRM that isn't strippable).

I know of no places to legally get movies without DRM.

Okay, where do you buy movies that don't need some sort of special equipment or software that (in the US) you can legally get on Linux?

I run iTunes on WIndows 7. It does what I need it to do, not all that more awkwardly than some Windows-designed stuff I use. Perhaps you use it for different things that don't work as well?

How much of that was from smoking pot, and how much from the fact that pot was illegal? If you have to break the law to indulge in a mostly harmless activity, you're going to lose respect for the law and those who tell you your activity is extremely harmful, and you're going to be dealing with criminals frequently.

McCarthy was not 100% correct. He was partly correct.

He attempted to ruin people's lives because he suspected they were Communist, whether or not they were, or whether that made any difference (a Communist in the State Department was a danger, a Communist in Hollywood was harmless). He lied from the start about the extent of the danger. Had he gone after Communists in dangerous places, and made sure they were Communists, the story on him would have been much different.

Clinton did not commit a felony by using a private server, no more than Powell did. Kerry would be guilty of a felony if he used a private server, since the law changed shortly after Clinton left office.