So that means you think it's fine if a restaurant posts a sign saying "NO BLACKS".

The thing is, why do we need to be "serious about victory"? Why is this cause so important that we should murder millions of civilians, over an ideology?

It was exactly the same with Vietnam. What did we accomplish there? Nothing, except killing millions. How is Vietnam today? It's actually doing just fine, despite us losing there. Why do we care about how people on the other side of the planet live their lives? If they want to live under Sharia Law, who cares? If the people there are willing to allow them to govern them, and are unwilling to stand up against them, why should we? (The Sunni Muslims who live in the cities ISIS controls actually seem to support them; that's why ISIS is so strong there.) Now obviously, not everyone there likes them: the Kurds especially hate them. But that's fine, we can just equip and train the Kurds and let them keep ISIS contained.

You simply haven't made any kind of case why we should become mass murderers and draw the condemnation of the world for this cause. They are not any kind of serious threat to western nations, and in fact, the way I see it, they're a help: they're drawing away lots of angry Muslims who were born here to Muslim immigrants. Instead of staying here and causing problems (and us being unable to deport them because they're citizens), they're willingly going over there and getting killed by drone bombs or Kurdish or Iraqi militaries. Good riddance. It's kinda like a honeypot.

Finally, what would happen in your scenario anyway? You sound like you've thought it through about as well as Bush thought through his plans for eliminating Saddam in Iraq. What are you going to do after you eliminate ISIS and achieve military victory? We already won militarily in Iraq: there was no "namby pamby" war there, we won completely and decisively, and then look what happened: we got ISIS. This is what happens when you create a power vacuum in a culture you don't understand and try to set up a lame puppet government. Wiping out a city and eliminating ISIS is going to do the same thing.

Um, genocide really isn't considered acceptable these days. Besides, the people they're murdering are mainly the people in the areas they control, who would be nuked in your scenario, so that seems a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The obvious solution to me seems to be containment. Keep them contained within a certain area and don't let them expand their territory any more. The people under their control will suffer (but hey, at least they won't be irradiated to death), but oh well.

One thing I do wonder, however, is if having ISIS isn't necessarily such a bad thing for western nations. How many thousands of radical Muslims have willingly left western nations and traveled to Syria/Iraq to join ISIS? Last I heard, around 6000 ISIS fighters have already been KIA. Well, that's 6000 that we westerners don't have to live with, plus tens of thousands more that are still living over there and getting killed daily (of course, not all came from western nations, lots are Syrian or Iraqi).

Why is the workplace so special?

The workplace is special because people go there to earn a living, because without that paycheck they'll be homeless. Not that many people go to work just for the fun of it; most people go because they need money to survive, and would rather be sitting on the beach or hanging out with friends/family or just about anything else.

Because of this, society has decided that some rules are in order to keep being at work any more miserable than it already is, and to ensure people have a fair shot at being gainfully employed without being abused or forced out just because they're the wrong skin color or sex.

What people do on their own time is not subject to the same rules as when they're at work, working for an employer. If you want to be blatantly racist on your own time, you have that right thanks to the First Amendment. You might not make many friends that way, but if you want to be an ass, you can do that. On the job, however, you open the employer up to lawsuits if he doesn't take appropriate measures to stop your behavior on the job, so you'll most likely be fired if you say stupid racist shit there.

A free software github repo is not a workplace, and doesn't resemble one. It's some small project run by some volunteers. That's why this distinction is important.

However, while these morons are free to act as dumb as they want here, everyone else is free to criticize them.

Last I heard, ISIS wasn't just a bunch of wackos out in the desert like when the US was attacking AQ in their caves in Afghanistan, they have control of a bunch of sizable cities in both Syria and Iraq. If you cut their supply lines, you'll be starving all the civilians in those cities. As for "smoking them out into the open", they *are* in the open. They are the effective government in the cities they control. The problem is you can't just bomb them without killing all the civilians they're governing.

So as religion slowly loses foothold in our increasingly secular world, the Caliphate cannot achieve their objective. In the end, if they partially succeed, there will be a new radical Muslim state in the Middle East but I can't see any of the nation states giving land to them.

True, the idea of them establishing a new world-wide caliphate with all other nations submitting to them is simply ridiculous. However they can be successful in establishing a new nation-state in the middle east, and are already partly there. They just don't have firmly drawn borders yet, nor recognition from other nations as a viable nation-state. But there's lots of other places in the world where borders are not firm and are contested (like between China and India, and India and Pakistan), and you don't really need recognition from others to be a nation-state. As for giving land, they don't need that, they can just take it by force, which they have. That's how lots of nations get their land. Russia certainly didn't get Ukraine to willingly give them Crimea, they simply took it (though through some underhanded means). China basically just seized Tibet decades ago.

cannot operate within the economic global framework

North Korea doesn't really operate within the global economic framework either. And ISIS, last I heard, does sell oil on the international market somehow (along with other valuable archaeological artifacts), and uses that money to buy things.

AFAIK, the CIA never lost assassination powers, except for heads of state. That was basically a "gentleman's agreement" anyway; they didn't want more state agents trying to assassinate our President (like JFK), so they stopped assassinating other heads of state.

ISIS leaders probably don't really count in this policy. And the US routinely drone-bombs high-value targets in other countries; they've bombed lots of terrorist leaders in Yemen.

look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.

How is their campaign "futile"? If it weren't for the west's (mainly US's) military support, both direct (drone-bombing) and indirect (helping the Iraqi army and other forces with arms and training), they'd be a lot more successful than they are now. As it stands, they control a huge amount of territory, they have tens of thousands of armed soldiers, they enforce laws, they collect taxes and provide services to people living under their control; how is this "futile"? They don't need to unite all Muslims; no one's done that since Mohammed died. They just need to successfully erect their government and control territory and have popular support from the people under their control, and they've done that. Yeah, it's a horrible government, but so are the governments of North Korea and Myanmar.

The fact that they have survived this long with most Europe virtually recognizing them as a sovereign state

They *are* a sovereign state, by all rights. They control territory with military force, they tax citizens, they provide services, they buy and sell oil resources, they make and enforce laws, they have a standing army; how do they not meet the definition of a sovereign state or legitimate government? Yeah, they suck, they're brutal, etc., but so is North Korea.

That's odd, I wonder if that's peculiar to Michigan. In the places I've lived (AZ, NJ, VA), that is definitely not the norm.

This doesn't seem like a hard problem; you should just design your DB schema so that every order has a "shipped-to" address field, where the order was shipped to. The order information shouldn't change, so it obviously shouldn't be pointing to information which can also change. Yes, this duplicates data somewhat, but mailing addresses do not consume a lot of space.

Besides, just because a customer has a preferred ship-to address doesn't mean they'll always want every order shipped there. What if the customer is large and has multiple ship-to addresses? What if they want something shipped someplace odd for some odd reason?

Exactly. While the two parties may differ on certain things, on this issue, they are completely united. Voting Democrat isn't going to help stop domestic spying, because they're just as in favor of it as the Republicans, as seen by how it's been handled by both the Obama and Bush administrations.

Do you even know anything about Uber? Cab companies aren't required to have good cars; most of the cabs I've been in have been shitty old Crown Vics, which are horrible cars. Uber won't let you drive for them with a car that's more than a few years old (2008 IIRC). With Uber, I got to ride in almost-new Mercedes, for half the price of a cab.

And 15 mninutes???? With Uber, where I used to live in NJ, I could get a car within a couple of minutes. Calling a cab required a wait time of 30-60 minutes, and that was in a pretty dense area. This was only 20 or so miles from Manhattan.

A fare posted on the door doesn't help me much, since I don't know beforehand how many stop lights we'll stop at and all that. Uber tells me ahead of time how much the fare will probably be for the trip.

I'd like to know what the shippers have to say about these interceptions.

They probably can't say anything because they've been served with National Security letters and aren't allowed to talk about anything under threat of prosecution or worse.

Could they do this? Surely the government would just send them a National Security letter and force them to comply under threat of being disappeared.