If "[we] as a society" includes our courts of law the question remains open. The initial ruling in Butlet v. Wolf (full text here) was that various restrictions imposed in Pennsylvania were illegal, in part because the extended duration of the crisis subjected the restrictions to greater scrutiny than normally applied during emergencies. This decision is under review by the 3rd circuit court of appeals which has stayed the ruling while it considers the case.

Prohibiting private and public assembly is an infringement of civil liberties. Confining people to their home provinces or their physical homes is an infringement of their civil liberties. Both the USA and the Roman republic recognized that restrictions of fundamental liberties can be temporarily justified during emergencies or as a punishment for a crime. Imposing such restrictions for a year and counting with no defined end can no longer be said to be temporary and therefore is tyrannical no matter how laudable the motivation for the tyrannical actions. You could very well have a benevolent tyrant who views his actions as necessary for Earth to win its centuries-long war against alien space bugs but he would nevertheless be a tyrant.

On the surface, it seems like the Japanese government has repeatedly acknowledged its crimes during World War II. See List of war apology statements issued by Japan.

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