Thats the thing. Make a big emblazoned warning sign “not for sale bla2 legal thingy" so sellers and buyers would know.

We wrote to Origin, or whoever it was that put SC out at the time we couldn’t get it to work at all, and their reply was:

And yet you continue. Have fun, boy; we’ve wasted enough time here.

True. I guess it was possible to get back before you ran out, but I just gave up trying. I almost made it, once. 

still seems pretty stupid to let them be sold at all if it is an issue

What? No Ace Combat? :P

Assuming this is not sarcasm, thank you. If it is sarcasm, that’s not very nice, but you have demonstrated I can’t really detect sarcasm well online. 

I’m very bad at detecting sarcasm on the internet, so I’ll try and answer in sincerity: I think he was very dumb and naive, and that he’s probably screwed.

I you don't want the thing to fall into undesired hands then why not make it a felony to sell in the first place?  Much easier. 

Because we have had a whole lot of people all over the world over the course of several thousand years who have laid the foundation stones towards making a series of breakthrough discoveries in many different scientific fields - mainly from the renaissance period onwards - which let us build on top of that new…

If it is indeed classified, then it shouldn’t be available to the public. Only thing I can guess is that a former service member had theirs and, not thinking about whether to check on it being still classified, put it up for sale.

If the manuals are so sensitive that they don't want Russians looking at them, why the hell were they available on eBay?

Um, we went from pens and paper to petaflop supercomputers in ~60 years.

I don’t get it. If it’s supposed to be classified information then why are the manuals purchasable on ebay? Surely it would be against the rules or regulations or something?

I mean, if there are such classified documents on retail then it means security is poor or it’s just not that valuable info already.

easy, war pushes us beyond normalily in several ways. the government also gets first dibs on and keeps all the best toys for themselves for a good while. its how they stay ahead of those they rule over. tech utilized by governments is usually ahead of what us citizens are allowed to use by a good 10 or so years in…

But then again, I was born in 1962. Could not have imagined the tech we take for granted nowadays, even when we were thrilling to the exploits of our astronauts/cosmonauts on TV.

war tends to spur technological leaps

...for a jet that is now nearly 1/2 a century old. Oh, yeah, that’s really ‘classified’ information there. [/eyeroll]