How about a report detailing exactly how many legitimate "terror plots" have been foiled by these vaunted security measures?

That report comes pre-printed on every blank sheet of paper there is.

I had the same happen with soy butter (for someone with a peanut allergy). The can was opened and some was eaten. I was bringing it back home to give to my son (who was too young to eat peanut products at the time). TSA insisted that the flowing substance was considered liquid and could be dangerous. Luckily, my parents were nearby (were seeing me off) and were allowed to take it back to their house (where it could at least be used) instead of letting it be thrown away.

I'm sure a wanna-be-terrorist would have a great chance of taking over a plane with soy butter, almond butter, or *gasp* peanut butter. Sadly, the TSA acts hyper-scared about everything. Yes, this looks like a food item but it could be a cleverly hidden explosive instead. Possible? Yes. Probably? No. But since they need to justify their existence, they act like the possible IS probably and confiscate as much as they can.

If someone had a gun on September 11, 2001 perhaps the history would be different.

Pre-911 being hijacked meant "If you sit down and be quiet, we fly this plane to Cuba, protest for a bit and then everyone goes free. An inconvenience, but nobody gets hurt. If you try to fight back, you'll be killed." So even if someone had a gun in the first two planes, they would have likely kept quiet until it was too late.

The passengers in the third plane did try to shoot back when they found out what happened to the first two planes, but a passenger with a gun might not have made much of a difference. At that point, the terrorists had control of the airplane and even a gun wouldn't have given the passengers the upper hand quick enough to keep the terrorists from crashing the plane.

Nowadays, if someone tries to hijack a plane - even if they intend the "flight to Cuba" kind of hijacking - the passengers are going to rise up, guns or no guns.

Why have a puppeteer? Have the society set up so that the behavioral manipulation techniques were programmed into a computer. The computer then dutifully obeys its programming. (No "evil AI", just a computer following its instructions as it was programmed to do without the capacity for malice.) Humanity would march along on the path that the original programmers set - whether the current situation necessitates this path or not. You might have a few people immune to the manipulation, but they would be ostracized and possibly hunted down as criminals of the worst kind.

This would make a very good Sci-Fi story (and possibly has already been written by someone).

Consider all the money that Sony Pictures has potentially loss. The completed scripts that were stolen may not be used or placed into production for legal headaches alone. The five movies that were downloaded and possibly pirated within days may never be officially released considering its in the wild and part of an FBI investigation (loss of hundreds of millions in future revenue). The Sony executives whose high salaries were exposed may lose their jobs when the stock holders get to them.

And, yet, internal reports from Sony tell a tale of a company that refused to hire actual computer experts because they were "too expensive" and so just promoted some marketing staff to the IT positions. Because marketing knows exactly how to secure a company network as complex as Sony's right?

Sony set themselves up for this big time with their internal practices. Would this have happened had they hired people who knew what they were doing? Perhaps. But it's the difference between locking your door/having a home security system and tweeting "Oops. Forgot to lock my front door at 123 Someroad Place. Hope nobody breaks in while I'm gone for the week."

Does North Korea even have anything worthy of hacking?

They won't because they aren't releasing it now, but likely will wait for the threats to die down before quietly releasing it in theaters. Then, they'll release it on DVD/Blu-Ray hoping everyone will want to buy the movie that North Korea threatened death if we watched. From the reports, the movie was horrible and so probably wouldn't have brought in much anyway, but releasing on BitTorrent for free means they make nothing. Holding for possible future means possible future income. Movie companies will always choose possible future money over no money now any day.

I wish the First Amendment was just protecting a guy burning a flag. Most times, it seems like it's protecting the Westboro Baptist Church's right to protest (and make themselves look like idiots). I hate those people (and given that I'm Jewish, support gay marriage, love science, and am fairly liberal, the feeling's probably mutual), but as much as I'd love to see them silenced for good, I know the slippery slope that would start.

Anytime you are afraid, the terrorists win.

The politicians too. ("Vote for me because my opponent will cave to the terrorists and DESTROY AMERICA!!!")

Also some manufacturers. ("Senator X, deploy our Ultra-Cool-Sounding-But-Ultimately-Ineffective at all TSA check points. It'll give billions to us, the illusion of security to America, and a cushy job for you once you retire from the Senate.")

And the power hungry segments of law enforcement organizations. ("We need to be able to raid homes without warrants because TERRORISM!!!")

The public are the big losers when we get afraid thanks to terrorist threats (real or imagined in order to scare us into submission).

Guns are inherently dangerous because they were designed to kill/injure. This doesn't mean we need to fear all guns or ban them. Just treat guns carefully and with respect. I don't personally use guns (for various reasons), but if I did, I'd want to take all available precautions - not treat the gun like a "fun toy." (Which, sadly, some gun owners seem to regard it as. Not most gun owners, but some.) I do the same if I'm handling a sharp kitchen knife. I don't go swinging the knife around everywhere. I don't leave the knife where small children could get it. I only "point" the knife at things I don't mind the knife going into (vegetables, potatoes, etc). Were I to leave knives around my house with small children nearby, swing them around, and pretend to stab people with them, I'd be an irresponsible knife owner.

They write it off against a highly successful movie causing the actors/directors/crew of that movie to get less money than they would really be owed? (See: Hollywood Accounting)

I don't think of guns as inherently evil, but they are inherently dangerous. I don't have a problem with lawful gun owners who take proper precautions with their firearms. I have a big problem with the people who think that their gun is a cool toy to play with or teach their kids that it's fun to wave a gun around. I'm not willing to say that a majority of gun owners are like this, but there's a vocal group like this and these people scare me (and should scare responsible gun owners as well). People should treat guns with respect and always assume 1) that they are loaded (even if you JUST took all of the bullets out) and 2) that the gun is about to fire at whatever it is pointed at.

At this point, I don't even think it's about the money - though that's a strong secondary reason. It's control. The MPAA sees people watching movies online as a loss of control that they have with the theater-cable TV-DVD/Blu-Ray model. They can dictate what theaters their movies play in. If they don't like a theater's policies, they can refuse to allow that theater to play the latest movie. The same goes for cable TV. They can decide what channels play the movie. If they don't like the channel, it won't get the movie. Then comes the disc-formats that only approved devices can play. If a DVD/Blu-Ray manufacturer steps out of line, the MPAA can send them out of business.

But releasing a video on the Internet in a standard format means that people can pretty much do whatever they want with it whenever they want. If I want to watch it now but immediately skip over chunks, I can. Without sitting through the FBI warning and trailers for "new movies" (that were released a year after this 5 year old DVD was released).

Losing this level of control scares them to no end and they'll wield all the power they can to retain control for as long as possible.

Yes, offline viewing and no DRM would be nice. However, merely giving Netflix (and their competitors... we don't want to form a Netflix-monopoly) access to all back catalog entries more than a year old would go a long way towards combating piracy. Yes, you would still get people pirating HOT_NEW_MOVIE that just came out in theatres, but many more people would just wait for it to appear in their Netflix queues. Would this mean a DVD/Blu-Ray sales drop? Possibly, but the movie-on-disc format is probably going to go away at some point anyway.

Would Netflix's prices have to rise? Likely, but imagine Netflix with an online streaming catalog consisting of everything ever released up to December 2013. I'd gladly pay more money for that. Actually, the losers in a scenario like this would be the cable companies. Apart from sports, why would you need to pay for cable TV if you had Everything-Up-To-A-Year-Ago Netflix?

I remember buying my first computer. It had a 40 megabyte hard drive and I thought: "This is HUGE! There is no way I'll EVER fill this up." Now, can put thousands of times that amount on a microSD card the size of my fingernail. I just bought a 3TB external hard drive because our old 1TB models were filling up.