You generally want some lives to be lost in a combat situation.
No... you want to get your way. You don't WANT some lives to be lost.
Even for a home invasion situation you don't WANT a life to be lost. You WANT that creep OUT and you will do whatever it takes INCLUDING ending a life, but killing is not what you WANT to do. In an ideal situation you could just spot the invader and say "go away" and they'd turn and leave. But since that's highly unlikely and since there's a good chance there will be a struggle then the safest bet for you is to end the conflict as immediately as possible and in such a way that minimizes your own chances of being harmed. Therefore, you shoot 'em with an intent to kill (so they don't shoot back).
For general political WARS, your statement still goes too far. In a combat situation the goal is almost never "to end lives". The goal is to end a dispute (in neutralize the opponent) and to get your way. Lives being taken is more of a by product of the process than the goal itself. Total annihilation / beating them to nothing is often the simplest route to achieving the end of the war, but make no mistake. It's not that you WANT lives to be lost or resources to be destroyed... you just want break your opponent and get your way.
Then there's the extremist viewpoint. It's the viewpoint that anyone who disagrees must be the devil and should be killed. That attitude certainly breeds a type of combat, but it's not combat in general. And really, the defender (the "not extreme party") still only wants to stay alive through the combat... they're not necessarily interested in killing.
I can expect plenty of privacy in public places. I can expect anything I do that's not too attention-getting to be ignored and forgotten. Only children think in terms of absolutes: "it's not absolutely private so it must be absolutely public".
I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but I was absolutely amused by your "Only children think in terms of absolutes". Think about it. You use the word ONLY (which is by definition an ABSOLUTE word due to the limits it imposes) to belittle what you believed to be someone else's use of absolute thinking. Classic slashdot.
And by the way, you were both right. You were just being too much of an ass to respect / take into account the fact that they were technically right (ignoring philosophical issues). You were approaching it from a completely different direction choosing to ignore the technical part (the facts / the truth) because you have issues with the philosophical issues.
The fact remains that it's in public and therefore it has a chance of being public. You don't have any right to privacy there. You only have a desire to not be remembered and so far in your life that been the case. But having privacy and being unremembered are different things - I would think that anyone who wants to call people children (or insinuate that they think like a child) would be able to understand the difference.
Any program which runs right is obsolete.