OK, let me rephrase:

"You don't get to complain afterwards without sounding completely disingenuous in doing so."

You will get far more than $1000 in your civil rights lawsuit against Los Federales. It'll be a net win.

Doubly so if, as suggested, you've been recording the entire thing with your glass.

So you choose "fun" over "principles".

And that's fine, but you don't get to really complain about it afterwards when you contribute financially to the folks who only will be motivated by financial considerations.

Only because some folks insist that society pick up the tab for people who make bad decisions. Some of us would have a society that says "oh, you didn't buy insurance and now you're really sick? That's a bummer. What are YOU going do to save yourself?"

The trick is - the NSA has proven that you can't provide effective oversight if the overseers don't have actual direct access to that which they're overseeing.

If they rely on the folks they're overseeing to provide them with the data, it's trivial to provide the illusion of oversight with any of it's pesky actual observance of what is going on.

They're the ones who advertised "This Season Pass will contain all episodes of Breaking Bad, Season 5" without actually verifying they had the rights to offer all that content for that price.

You ABSOLUTELY can sign away your rights. People do it all the time.

I have the right to work for whomever will hire me. But in many states, I can sign away that right via a non-compete clause.

I have the right to say whatever non-defamatory statements I want to make. But I can certainly sign that right away as part of a confidentiality agreement, or non-disclosure agreement.

These are just the most trivial of examples. There are countless others.

Only in the laptops, and that's because in the "quest for thinner" things have had to be surface-mounted. In the Mac Pro, it's still upgradeable.

Not terribly concerned on that front, to be honest.

What's that supposed to mean?

No they don't. They started shipping with them in the mid 2000's, but never built a driver for one, and stopped including it in their hardware in 2009.

Thanks for playin', though.

I've been an Apple user for over a decade, and haven't found a need to open one up other than to increase memory or replace a hard drive.

Other people's mileage will, of course, vary, but the vast majority of folks don't need to tinker inside their machines (and in fact their lives would be so much simpler if they stopped).

Buy an Apple computer? They haven't had TPMs of any sort for a long time, near as I can tell from the literature.

If you're REALLY dead set on not even having it at all... You're going to be stuck 2 generations ago forever.

Or you can just buy Apple products, which don't have the TPM in them, last I knew.

This is what Abraham Lincoln did and he is considered a hero.

Not to fans of the Constitution he's not.

Lincoln destroyed the sanctity of the Constitution to preserve his vision of what the Union should be. I have no qualms with his pro-abolition stance, but his means of getting there were abhorrent.

I'm not ignorant to what's happening, but what part of my sentence was factually inaccurate? Did the military not take over the country and appoint a new leader? Is that not the textbook definition of a coup d'etat?

I'm well aware of the various failings of the Morsi administration, but let's be clear: if 17% of the population of the US was protesting the Obama administration, and the Joint Chiefs had suspended the rule of law embodied by the Constitution to appoint John Roberts as President, it would not be "wrong" of the US gov't-in-exile to be like "these folks have usurped lawful authority, fire at will, if you can."

That's not to say that I don't personally think Egypt will be better, post-coup (just as that's not to say that I don't think America might be better after some theoretical post-coup situation), I'm merely stating the fact that it can't come as a surprise to anyone that the supporters of a government, usurped by military power, are calling for violent means to "re-establish the lawful order".