I would go along with this logic if the airlines were not private companies (ignoring previous government bailouts that have happened for a moment), where the TSA has inserted itself into the middle.

Think about it: this is no different than if the TSA was patting people down as they walk into Walmart. Obviously, causing a plane crash has the potential for disaster, but so does bombing a shopping center. Or a refinery. Is the TSA checking people going in and out of those, or do the companies employ their own security, if needed? I'm betting it's the latter in just about all other cases.

As a consumer, if I feel like I need airlines to offer security, I will tell them about it and then I will refuse to fly on airlines that do not meet my standard. It's not my interest or in the interest of the airlines to have lax security because crashes cost a lot of money and lead to some really bad public opinion (isn't that why ValuJet changed its name?).

I don't have an issue with pat-downs done at airports as much as I have a problem with a third, uninvolved party having inserted itself in the middle to perform the "service". Consumers should have choices. If they don't want to be patted down, and some airline doesn't want to pay for the security, then they should be free to seek each other out and do business - at their own risk (risk of death or injury for the traveler, risk of huge financial liability for the airline).

The choice should belong to the parties involved, not to the TSA.

The issue at hand is not whether or not I think he's guilty (which, by the way, you apparently inferred from my words because I intentionally did not address it). The issue at hand is whether someone deserves a fair trial before they are condemned by a private entity's personal opinion, and the answer is "no". And I never condemned anyone that questioned my judgment. I merely stated the fact that PayPal is not required to wait for a trial before forming an opinion and acting upon it. If they're acting illegally, then that's another story.

And yes, it's fine for people to refuse to do business with PayPal because of things like this. I don't understand the sarcastic-sounding question at the end. Would you expect me to have disagreed with that?

I don't owe Bradley Manning a fair trial because I'm not a government entity. He is entitled to a fair trial before government punishment is meted out, period. I'm entitled to form an opinion of him based on available knowledge and I'm also free to decide to not associate with him in any way whether or not that opinion is based on fact or conjecture. PayPal is afforded the exact same rights that I am. They don't owe him anything and they certainly aren't forced to wait for government trials to conclude before they form an opinion of someone and act upon it, so long as they aren't violating traditional discriminatory statutes and the like.

Ah, good call. If I come across one of those, I definitely won't blast it.

I had one up until a couple of months ago. Then it died so I blasted it with a double-barreled shotgun. The mangled carcass is still sitting on the back seat of my SUV in a hefty bag. True story.

Privacy concerns aside, it seems like a good thing if the save files are *mirrored* online. I could see the benefit of wanting to load up my game elsewhere or having them saved in the cloud when my PS3 takes a dive into the crapper (which happened to me recently). However, I would be extraordinarily pissed if I couldn't play a certain game if my internet connection flaked out or if the servers are down or something like that.

Yes, it surely makes no sense to grow as much as possible when the opportunity presents itself because it's going to all come undone at some point. We might as well hide under our beds instead of going to work. Hell, I know the work I'm doing now is going to be a useless piece of shit in a decade, so why bother?

Should we just go ahead and declare this Suffixgate then? Otherwise, how will we refer to it in the future?

Smart businesses figure out what customers want, need, or can use that those businesses can provide and they give it to them. Not-as-smart businesses decide for customers what they should have and provide it to them, and then are satisfied with the more limited customer base that comes along with that philosophy.

That could be true, but in my experience, Best Buy has had a pretty huge selection of movies and TV shows in their DVD/Blu-ray section. The prices are pretty high, but I'm still surprised they would be making such a sudden, radical change, as opposed to letting the movie section just wither away over a period of time.

I have noticed that all Best Buys do not seem to have been created equal. Some are tiny, little dumps with stuff crammed in and without great selection. My local one is actually huge and has a big selection of music, movies, etc. I don't know where the store I mentioned above falls, but it very well could have been one of the little dumpy ones.

This story is second-hand so I don't have any further information or explanation, but this very week, my brother walked into a Best Buy in northern New Jersey looking for one of the seasons of Entourage on Blu-ray and, according to him, they were in the process of literally removing half of their stock of movies/TV on physical media. My brother asked one of the workers what was going on, and the worker told him that everything is moving toward streaming/downloads now so they're reducing their supply of physical media.

I wish I had more information on this, but I don't. Could be one store. Could be a national thing (I haven't seen it in my local Best Buy). The point being that at least one store of a huge national/international retailer disagrees with your prediction, to the point of drastically lowering their supply of physical media. Either they're just responding to a big decrease in demand, they know something we don't, or both.

Obviously not. But you can't have it both ways. Either there is secret information or there isn't. Once we agree there is a single piece of information that should be kept secret, then we're forced to give someone the power to make that decision.

My only point in bringing up technical specs is to show that most clear thinking individuals will agree that there is some information that should be secret. Therefore, we have to work within the system to protect that information. I'm not comfortable with the probability that 260,000 pages of diplomatic cables and the like contain nothing but political embarrassment and scandal.

And no, I don't trust politicians one bit. But I also know that if I released the classified information that I have access to, politicians wouldn't likely be the ones to pay the price either. Everone is in such a hurry to expose politicians for what we already know they are and they don't even stop to think what the unintended consequnces of releasing that much classified information could be.

Upsetting the apple cart isn't going to stop the problem. There needs to be classified information and if people don't like the gatekeepers of that information, then they had damn well better start electing some better ones. The big government people out there are reaping what they've sown for the last hundred years.

Ah, yes, because wars are fought and won by grunts with rifles. I suppose there's nothing vital about keeping radar tracking capabilities classified. And why on earth should we care if bad guys know what's in our missile uplinks and downlinks? Why don't we just fill everyone in on how we combat jamming? While we're at it, let's tell them all the capabilities of our ships, land-based weapons platforms, and so on. There's nothing there that could come back to bite us.

You know, to be honest with you, politically, I have serious libertarian leanings and I'm not sure we should even have a standing army, and I'm definitely sure we shouldn't have troops stationed in a hundred and some odd countries around the world. But to sit here and act like we should just think military capability isn't something that should be safeguarded is simply asinine.

There are an awful lot of people in this world that would kill us tomorrow if they had our capability instead of their own. That's not terror fear-mongering, it's a fact. Some would argue that it would be us reaping what we've sown. Maybe that's true, but if you think I'm going to help you find out, you're nuts.

The more comments I read, the more clear it is to me that the vast majority of people here are not entrusted with classified data of any kind.

Look, I understand your concern, I really do. But information is classified for a reason. I read a lot of comments here where people seem to think that this is simply a huge pile of embarrassing information so let's release it and give some people red faces. And some of it might be. But that's irrelevant.

Those of us who are entrusted with classified information are trusted to safeguard that information. We are required to safeguard that information under penalty of law. I'm not saying that bad things can't or don't get covered up, but as I said, information is classified for a reason and in 250,000 pages of documents, you're not going to be able to convince me that we're just talking about a pile of embarrassing memos.

I think part of the problem is that people assume that most classified documents are flashy, interesting things like nuclear secrets or stuff about Area 51. Unfortunately, the reality is that while that kind of thing exists, foreign operatives work tirelessly to reconstruct capabilities, situations, policies, and other, less sexy, things by piecing together little bits of information (not that they don't want the big stuff too). A confidential document might seem innocuous, when, in reality, it contains pieces to a larger puzzle.

You might think that exposing the puzzle to the world is the right thing to do, but I implore you to believe me when I say it's not. There are ways to combat wrong-doing and I know it stings to know that there are people in high places getting away with bad stuff here and there. There are checks and balances in place and there will always be whistle blowers keeping people honest. But releasing confidential documents to the outside world is just plain wrong. The soldier that did that should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because not only did he promise to protect the classified data that he leaked, but he also knows as well as I do that releasing it can do harm to all of us, not just the people that he wants to expose.

I follow, but my point is, systems should be made to follow your current identity.

There's almost no point in having a fingerprint point to an entry in a database that represents a previous identity. The old "person" ceases to exist so if someone wants to find that person, it's a dead end.

I think your real fear is that a person will have a link to who a person used to be and who they are now which can be abused, and yes, I think your concern is valid. But doesn't the government keep those links somewhere anyway? When you legally change your name, does the government (I'm thinking in the U.S. - I don't know about anywhere else) keep that record?

The library or your job or other places wouldn't really have much reason to keep that connection because they're invested in who you are now.

Also, in case we're on different pages, I'm assuming for this discussion that there isn't one huge thumbprint database somewhere, and that the library just has a server sitting there with their own. If we're talking about a big server somewhere, especially government, then I'm switching to your side.