And unlike Crimea, Iraq committed hundreds of acts of war against the US before it acted.

Any that occurred outside of Iraq, against the actual United States?

As to Iraq, maybe you could explain to me why you think ordinary Iraqis would want to continue being subjected to Saddam's government?

Ask the 100,000+ civilians we killed directly as collateral damage? Or the 500,000+ that died as indirect results of the war (e.g. not getting health care due to the city being in flames)?

That was the effect of the war on "ordinary Iraqi's".

Saddam, as bad as he was, had gotten steadily -less- brutal as a dictator as time went on. He was not at all escalating the violence against his own citizens -- for an example of that see Syria, where we aren't involved. (Funny that.)

If we were going to invade Iraq "for the good of its own people", we should have done it in the 80s. And if we were going to pick a place to "save from it self" in 2003, there are places far worse than Iraq.

The US invaded Afghanistan in a legitimate act of self defense after a series of attacks on diplomatic posts and military units culminating in the 9/11 attacks.

That's pretty much ridiculous on its face. Next time a Canadian thug mugs a politician will the US invade Canada in a legitimate act of self defense too?

The US used 9/11 and other incidents as an excuse to invade; but there was never any existential threat to the United States that mandated it. Nor was there any real evidence that Afghanistan posed a significant threat of any kind that couldn't have been managed entirely within our own borders.

As a professional photographer I deal with this all the time, and MOST people don't give a shit about someone pointing a camera at them. Some do, and if they want to get uppity about it then guess what- they can call the cops if they don't like it and be told to go piss up a rope.

Last time a professional photographer got all up in my face about its 'public' after I told him to fuck off, you know what I did... I pulled out my camera and started circling him, taking pictures and video of him, and told him it was going up on youtube...

Do you think he:

a) agreeably went about his business since, as he'd just explained to me, it was a public place, and he (and I) had every right to stand where we wanted, and take any pictures we wanted.

b) got batshit crazy angry that anyone would dare to apply his own, just argued, standard of what was acceptable to him.

I agree. Anything in public view is fair game for recording

Yet another who fails to see any difference between incidental recordings of something in public view and massive systemic recording of everything.

There is a difference.

As a society we've consented to the idea that anything we say or do in public may be seen or heard by someone else. We also accept that it might incidentally be captured on film.

But we DID NOT ever accept the the idea that we accept systematic surveillance of everything we say or do in public.

We accept that the person at the next table at the restaurant, or the service staff might overhear a part of our conversation. We accept that the family taking birthday photos two tables over might catch us in the background.We do not accept that the police can install mic's and camera's at every table in every restaurant, record everything, and store it forever.

They are NOT the same damned thing at all.

I'm mystified why people like you wish to argue that they are the same, or that acceptance of the former means we automatically accept the latter.

I don't. Most of society agrees with me. We can see there is a difference, and we can draw a line between incidental recordings, and surveillance. What exactly do you find so difficult to understand about it?

The law should reflect the society we want to live in; its that simple. People like you seem to wish to want to trap society into the unintended consequences of the laws we have. But that's not how its supposed to work.

Is $5000/mo a reasonable sum in Recife, Brazil? Probably.

5k/mo is 60k year. That's more then the median household income in the united states. MOST people could live on it, and for most people it would even be a raise.

So he is in the position of being unable to approach the house or her to collect rent on the house or to evict her.

Hire someone to collect the rent and serve the eviction notice. This is not a real problem.

The problem is ALL of these groups end up taken over by the nutters

Good point here. I did enjoy Westboro Baptist Church excommunicating its own founder though.

For example the stink recently over how playable female characters aren't in shooters anymore,

They aren't? I must be playing the wrong shooters.

So I hope all these game devs tell these PC police to fuck right off.

They released DNF; and the one where you go around playing dress up with the girls of DoA or something, I'm not worried.

Hell if you made No One Lives Forever today they'd probably scream the heroine was unacceptable because she used lipstick bombs and bobby pin lockpicks

Someone hasn't played Mortal Kombat 9. :)

This is all much ado about nothing.

There hasn't been a single example, AFAIK,

And how exactly would we know? When the court proceedings are largely secret with national security gag orders attached?

The lavabit situation is pretty unique in that we even found out about it.

And whether or not its a loophole is mooted by the fact that you suggest we can avoid even being asked for the keys by handing over anything and everything that is requested in the first place.

One example I can think of in B5 is Bestor (Walter Koenig aka Chekov),

How so? I agree he was pretty type-cast as a star trek actor; and likely found it difficult to find good work after it. But at the same time he was never that popular or noteworthy on ToS either except he was on the bridge so he was a shoo-in for the movies, but contributed little except comic relief for pronouncing v's like w's. He was hardly "star power".

I doubt ANYBODY said, "Hey, lets check out this B5 thing... I hear its got that Chekov guy from Star Trek"...

In my case, the first time I saw him on B5 I sort of groaned, but it worked out for the best. Honestly, Alfred Bester was a larger and much more fleshed out role than Pavel Chekov ever was, and Koenig gets points from me for doing some great acting. U think he was emmy nominated for B5... and deservedly so.

The creators weren't connected to Tesla as part of any form of commerce so it isn't a commercial.

But it encourages the watcher to engage in commerce with Tesla, which is pretty much the definition of a commercial.

So to sum up:

As long as you give them everything they ask for, AND they believe you have done so. Then they can't ask for the keys.

If you don't give them everything they want, or they don't beleive you gave them everything they want, then they can ask for the keys too, and get them.

That's a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

The only reason the government would ask for keys is in order to obtain the ability to do mass surveillance which cannot be justified Constitutionally

Well that, or they don't trust that you really gave them everything they asked for. Or at least that's what they can say.

Had Lavabit complied initially and just handed over the requested data the question of keys would never have come up.

Indeed. And if I always answer everything the cops ask me for in the affirmative the question of an illegal search will never come up either.

Oh, and I can't think of any case in which the government could legally demand the keys.

Pretty sure that's exactly what they did to Lavabit:

The government's move against Lavabit was resisted tenaciously by Levison. After much wrangling, Levison eventually handed over Lavabit's cryptographic key in digital form, after earlier trying to satisfy a court order by printing out and handing over a copy of the key in 4-point type, a move that irked the judge handling the case.

After Lavabit resisted complying with government demands, it was held in contempt of court and fined $5,000 a day until it turned a machine-readable version of the key over.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Of course that is true, and I wouldn't have made my comment if THAT is what the summary stated... but instead the entire summary is framed around the NSA...

From the first sentence:
"Perhaps no company has been as vocal with its feelings about the revelations about the NSA's collection methods as Google has, and the company has been making a series of changes to its infrastructure in recent months to make it more difficult for adversaries to snoop on users' sessions."

to the last one:
"This makes life much more difficult for anyoneâ"including the NSAâ"who is trying to snoop on those Gmail sessions."

So... its only natural that any argument is also framed within the context of the NSA.

once a final working codebase is established

aka... never.

Especially if you wrote it "rapidly changing approach and methods as you went" and "moved on to the next challenge" as soon as it would occasionally run without crashing on you.

That's sounds like a recipe for well designed code, right?

it can be rewritten to take advantage of the additional lock-down offered by static types.

Not by you though. You'll leave unraveling the spaghetti you left behind for someone else.

Don't feel bad for 'them' though. It won't happen, they'll just ship your mostly working prototype and call it a day.

And if its not running well enough to ship, then yeah, they'll toss it and rewrite it but you'll be a distant memory by them.

Unless Google is just handing them everything anyway via Prism, or whatever other programs are in place.

This is like installing bars over the windows to keep the govt out, knowing full well you already gave them the keys to the front door.

For Instance Mr Katsulas played a rather humanish Tomalok on Startrek, whereas his G'Kar had a pretty intense costume.

I really doubt the 4 episodes he appeared in star trek in a 5 year period would dictate that he be unrecognizable in B5.

And I guess counter examples could be Bill Mumy, who showed up as a human member of starfleet and Majel Barrett made a pretty recognizable appearance on B5 as well.