An actual place where this is used is seeding PRNGs used to select people for jury pools. They want the seed to be something verifiable by third parties after the fact, but not anything that could have been predicted in advance or manipulated to determine who will be in the pool.

The map shows the city in the wrong location. Should they have consulted two maps to verify the coordinates of their destination, or is there other in-context information that should have made it obvious the route was wrong?

This is unrelated to adults entering the country to perform skilled labor. The cost of developing their human capital has already been paid: when someone enters this country as an adult, we acquire a skilled laborer without having to pay the normal cost of educating him from childhood and sheltering him before he can work. We receive the benefit without the cost.

Do you think that there is a country that offers both greater liberty and greater opportunity to those willing to work hard?

I cannot agree with this more. Undergoing the hardship and risk of moving to a foreign country for the chance of a better life is the foundation of the American character.

Those who oppose immigration for fear of their own ability to compete have lost this spirit. The desire to succeed by holding back others rather than through one's own merit is not only cowardly and low, but it also impoverishes society. Public policy should not harm the population at large in order to protect a lazy few.

That's insane. So their job isn't to represent the wishes of their constituents, or even their best interests?

Which should be perfectly okay.

(Quibbling) You're thinking of the Revolutionary Guard. The Republic Guard is from the other Ira[nq].

I'm not sure you're correct, though. Iran has a conventional army several times larger than the Revolutionary Guard with a separate command structure. There are also the Basij militias that -- although nominally part of the Revolutionary Guard -- take their orders directly from the local clerics.

It seemed to me that the Na'vi were obviously the descendants of an extremely advanced civilization, who (living on a just-dangerous-enough-to-be-interesting garden world curated by a planet-spanning AI) had eventually reverted to a state of nature.

No you most certainly don't, any more than any nation has free roads or free public education. What you have is tax-funded health care. You may not pay when you visit a clinic, but unless your health care system runs on slave labor you are all certainly paying.

There are some missing steps between "you can live with things as they are" and "therefore you should not attempt to change anything."

A moment's reflection will show that this nonsensical argument would apply to anyone anywhere at any point in history.

Whether an Apple laptop is price competitive depends on how long after release you look at it. Apple generally updates their laptops every 250-350 days, and AFAIK the price stays the same during that period.

They claim to have permission from the copyright holder.

http://agdinteractive.com/global/legal.html

Why is it worse to be eaten by a person than eaten by a wolf? Prey animals are literally devoured alive, their tendons cut so they cannot run and their entrails ripped out of their still-struggling bodies. As the relative of human hunters, I am sure you know that the ability to kill cleanly is considered a minimum competence. It's natural for prey animals to die exhausted and in terror. That doesn't mean it's good. Sometimes -- a lot of the time -- unnatural is better.

I do not hunt. But if I did, I would do it humanely, with a gun.

I didn't know you could even get a degree in "IT". Which department at a university would offer that?

Did you grow up in Sherwood Forest?