As with many posts here, you're missing a lot of details. The removal of pain is intended for factory farms. Places where the animals don't generally move much or interact, or have to be kept in pastures by electric fences.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sentience The state or quality of being sentient; possession of consciousness or sensory awareness. Cows are sentient.

Yes, but then people started actually reading it.

You didn't go into a prequel though, you went into a reboot. Now I'm not saying this invalidates even the majority of your criticisms, but it does invalidate the comparison to the Phantom Menace and complaints that it will alter shows that come after. It's a reboot because they will probably make at LEAST one more film with this cast and don't want to be constrained by the previous history. That in and of itself is not a terrible thing.

No. Because he shot Three Dog. And he felt... liberated.

If you are a troll, good job, you've managed to raise my blood pressure. If you are sincerely bringing up socialism as anything other than a straw man, can you explain it's relevancy to the concept of the police state? And can someone with mod points for the love of god make this something other than "Informative?" Funny, maybe. Hell I'd even take insightful. But INFORMATIVE, it is not.

Except odds are some outside landscaping company normally gets hired to mow the lawn every X amount of time, and brings their equipment with them.

Yes, I'm sure the President *personally* bothered to make sure that this was poorly handled. Not, say perhaps, some other relatively obscure Federal employee actually in charge of these kinds of exercises. I'm sure he cranks out these kinds of plans for fun in between all that boring stuff.

Too bad Bethesda can't seem to patch their games. VATS (the over-hyped, poor attempt at appeasing turn-based combat fans and only marketable aspect of the game's combat) has been broken for months now. I'd take "see you in a year" if it meant they actually fixed more bugs than they made. http://www.bethsoft.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=973957

At the risk of sounding asinine, dairy cattle are kept in a state which causes them to continue to produce far more milk for longer than they normally would if a calf was present and eating regularly. So saying milking them makes them feel better is like saying I give you a great big thing of soda, which let's assume you will enjoy and drink, and then turn around and prevent you from urinating when you normally would(for the sake of the metaphor assume I can do this reliably). Am I doing a "good" thing when I finally permit you to relieve yourself?

While I will agree that playing a game blurs the line in these examples, my point is still that the important part is *taking away* the language and using it to craft a self image outside of the original context. More importantly, I would dispute that anyone can truly compartmentalize everything so completely. Our minds tend to be leaky.

Hardly. While you could make the connection eventually, my point is not that *watching and enjoying a film* caused his behavior. When he *chooses* to take an image from media and emulate it with his language about himself, he has begun to internalize that image. It is still a *choice.* If I play and enjoy Grand Theft Auto games, I do not become a criminal. If I then create an image of myself which emulates the characters in these games and begin to use it in other spaces, then I've created a problematic situation. You're right, tons of people manage to compartmentalize these images. Using language to describe yourself as an emulator however, is the first sign that you aren't doing that at all.

Obviously it is not a private area. Strictly speaking, his information is on display and is fair game. I believe however that ideally speaking there would be some degree of respect for what is essentially a personalized space. Of course we hardly live in an ideal world.

Important follow up, it is also still a shame that this posturing was evidenced by snooping into what are, essentially, private areas of his life. My point is more about language and self-image than whether or not putting a man's private comments on display is a valid legal defense. If such talk occurs among officers in the locker room or anywhere else, it is equally disquieting for the reasons I mentioned above, and perhaps a more suitable target for the same defense. If you posture among coworkers, your image is already affecting how you do your job.

People are always keen to say "such and such" is just talk but the fact is the language we use about ourselves has a profound impact on our behavior. If a cop enjoys all that bad-ass posturing in art, and then builds that persona for their self, there is little doubt in my mind that at some point, no matter how much they might deny it, that kind of stuff will appear in their actual behavior on the job. I am NOT saying in this case it follows that the officers actually planted a weapon. But I don't really see a problem with someone being given pause over this kind of posturing. They do an important job and maintaining certain professional standards in their behavior keeps us safer all-around.