He remembers, but he's talking about something else. Not script kiddies attacking you, but government agencies breaking into your system before it even reaches the shop that you'll eventually buy it from.
Looks like the German courts' one-sided ruling are favoring home grown boys
Except that the guys who brought the cases are also Germans. Axel Springer, for example, is one of the largest newspaper and magazine publishers in Germany.
So, how about you get your facts straightened out and try again?
Or more to the point, how *you* are going to pay for the web.
I put as much content online as I consume. Much of it is free, some of it is "if you like it, here you can donate" and some is paid.
For me it works. I've been doing this for 20 years and I don't do advertisement and I'm proud of it.
There are other business models beyond selling your readers to advertisers. For example, I stopped downloading MP3s and re-started buying music when it became so easy and convenient with iTunes that finding a torrent and copying it to my phone was more trouble than it was worth.
I'm also happy to click the links to buy something on sites that provide me a service, say a tech review site that links to the items so you can buy them directly. Sure, maybe if I went to some price comparison site and did some checking I might save five bucks, but what for?
All in all, advertising is a pretty great way to pay for things.
No, it's a pretty fucked-up backwards way of getting shafted and sold while you falsely believe you're getting something for free.
If the tracking and privacy issues could be solved.
They can't, because advertisers are not interested in showing ads anymore. They are interested in re-targetting, in tracking and in invading your privacy to the maximum extent possible. Because their whole industry is on the mental level of North Korea and they don't live in the same world as the rest of us anymore.
Even then... 90% of adblock users would keep adblocking because the real issue is they want free AND ad-free.
Sure, who wouldn't want?
But that doesn't mean that a lot of the same people would not be willing to pay if you would offer them something worth the money.
Yes, but why would they rather sue adblock writers instead?
Because we are not their customers - we are their product. Most sites these days are in the business of selling your attention to advertisers, their actual customers. If you use adblock (or stop visiting them), you cannot be sold anymore. That they don't like.
What you say near the end is what is the most fascinating about ancient history: That we regularily underestimate their capabilities, often vastly. There was so much trade going on between so distant areas in a time where our mental image has isolated villages barely surviving.
Check out the Maronites in the Lebanese Civil War.
I did a few Google searches, and couldn't find terrorism references. Links, please.
Blaming Islam, while failing to note the inhumanity of man towards others regardless of religion is part of the problem.
As the saying goes, there are many evil people in the world, but to get a good man to do evil, you need religion.
Failing to note how religion and inhumanity often go hand-in-hand is utter stupidity. Of course religion is not the only source of inhuman behaviour, I never claimed that. But you have to be ignorant to pretty much all of history to not see how religion reinforces, supports and provides justification for unbelievable atrocities.
But go ahead, make excuses. Close your eyes. Ignore the log in thine own eye.
I never bombed an airport, nor did I cut off any heads. So please, don't insult your own intelligence.
If Christians were in the same social and economic situation as the Muslims are right now they would behave exactly the same.
There are Christians living in the Middle East. A minority yes, but a few millions. Never heard of them becoming terrorists, maybe you can enlighten us?
Stop the excuses. Christians might react violently as well, yes. But claiming they would behave exactly the same is the exact reductionism you rail against. No, they would not. Maybe similar, maybe not, but definitely not exactly.
Islam is part of the problem. Maybe a small part, maybe a big part, that's an interesting discussion. But claiming its contribution is zero is delusional.
Yes, but only Islam has kept to the murderous passages religiously. Christianity used to be just as evil, but if the pope called for another crusade today, people would check the calendar if it's the first of April, and if not, laugh and assume someone quoted a story from The Onion.
But if an Imam says "go and kill the heathens", some especially stupid losers actually do so.
You point to Europol as a source, but the definition of "terror attack" that Europol uses is much, much more broad than what is commonly called so. In fact, most of their successful "terror attacks" have zero victims.
If we narrow it down to what the general public and the media would call a "terror attack", then the correlation becomes quite strong. A lot of the attacks where people are harmed and killed are religiously motivated, commonly islamic.
I'm not saying that is the only factor - 1.5 billion muslims are not terrorists - but it is probably the single largest common source. There is also left-wing and right-wing bombings and shootings, as well as separatist and so on - but by victims, islamic terrorism leads by a wide margin.
In german legal jargon there is the term "allgemeines Lebensrisiko" - the risk of being alive. But it doesn't include terrorist attacks, because they are not in the same class as being hit by lightning bolts or getting your basement flooded because once in a century there's really heay rain.
My profession is IT security. I very good understand that there's no 100% perfect security. But I also understand that everyone saying "we can do nothing" is too lazy and/or incompetent to do something.
In 2012, for instance, only 2.8 percent of the terrorist attacks in Europe were religiously-motivated, but nearly half of the people murdered in these attacks were killed by religiously-inspired terrorists.
I have no idea what they classify as "terror attacks" when I look at the numbers for my home country. Well, I read their definition of "terror attack" and apparently when the local neo-nazis throw in the windows of a refugee home, that's a terror attack by their definition.
Yeah, that is shitty behaviour. But is it really in the same class as blowing up a train full of people?
intentional acts can be controlled while accidents cannot.
I made no such assumption. On the contrary, I expect from the government and the car companies and everyone else involved to do their best to reduce the accident rate.
We can not eliminate (the possibility of) terrorism without giving up our freedom.
So we should give up and take it up the butt like a man? Sorry, no.
Running a shop and car driving are bad analogies because they both involve people voluntarily engaging in an inherently risky activity, and intentionally accepting that risk. If I get into my car, I know that driving is not 100% safe.
When I get into a plane, I likewise accept that there's a small risk involved. I accept that risk, because it is so small.
But nobody signed up for the risk of being bombed. It is not inherent in the activities that are at risk.
We should not accept this risk as a "cost of doing business" because it is not.
This is the part that most people who don't think deeply get wrong.
Christianity is a defeated religion, its claws and fangs have long been removed by humanism, by the enlightenment, and by the simple fact that people would laugh and call for a psychologist if the pope were to call another crusade.
Islam never had to fight with an Enlightenment over how life should be, how to view human beings, what inalienable rights are and so on. It's a strong religion. One where even without a central pope, one of the many Imams saying something stupid at prayer results in thousands of people burning flags in the streets, or worse. People take it seriously.
You can go to Italy, or any other still strongly christian country, and offer people a hundred bucks if they say "god is a faggot" on camera. Some will do it, some will blow you off, some will insult you, maybe one or two will spit or slap you in the face. Do not try that stunt in any strongly islamic country. Not in Saudia Arabia, not in Iran or Indonesia. You would be dead before you have a representative sample size.
The biggest stupidity is to not see correlation. True, there are cases of terrorists of that religion or of this. But you must be a complete idiot to not see that there is a strong correlation between Islam and terrorism. Not 100% of course. But if there is a terrorist attack anywhere in the world in this year, betting money on the fact that the terrorists are muslims is a pretty safe bet.
You can't deny this correlation, because it exists. And not just in the west, the same fucktards also blow up their own people - most terrorist attacks happen in the Near East or in Africa and we never hear about them, because in the news they are a sideline notice at best.
But what does it have to do with... ah wait... it's mentioning twitter. so i guess it's all right then.
Because it is "stuff that matters". And discussions on/. are not the same as on other news sites. When you post here that banning encryption is not the right answer, people nod and mod you down for stating the obvious.
It's good to have a discussion with "your" crowd. And it fucking does matter. Brussels might be half a world away for the american crowd, but I, for example, was actually on my way to my local airport to take a flight to that very Brussels, that very airport, when I heard the news. I know the area that was bombed, I've seen it many times when I passed by on my way to the security checks.
It matters, because it affects a lot of us directly or indirectly, and because of the consequences such as politician dumbheads calling for more surveillance and so on.
These terrorist attacks are horrible, but we need to deal with them as a problem, not let our countries deteriorate in a frightened panic.
Yes, but: There is a massive difference between accidental death and murder. We kind of accept road deaths because while we strive to make roads and cars as secure as possible, we understand there is a risk remaining.
If you advocate for more surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in response to these attacks, you are cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to undermine the fundamental values of our society.
Everyone with three working brain cells knows that surveillance and new laws the whole security theatre is not, never has been and never will be the answer. I've posted many times here and elsewhere that security check points at airpoints are bullshit, terrorists will just put bombs in the crowds in front. What happened today was very close to that, and I've been saying it for years, it was only a matter of time until even the dumbest terrorist has the same idea.
But if you advocate sitting still and just accepting the risk, you are stupid as well, because one of the fundamental requirements of a free society is that it can defend itself against its enemies. That includes the Bushs and the Merkels from within and the Bin Ladens and Daesh from without.
Our society fails that because it has become too open. If you let everyone in, bad people will be among them. If you can't define what your society is, you don't have one. If you cannot see a difference between "us" and "them" then maybe you are in utopia, and maybe you are just an idiot, because "they" see this difference. While our politicians and other professional idiots repeat the "nothing to do with islam, not all muslims are like this" mantra, and fight tooth and nail against people saying "these people we don't want in our society", the Islamists know with absolute precision and certainty who "we" and "they" are.
When you are in a fight with someone who wants to hurt you, you don't stop and ask him why he is so angry or whether his mother didn't love him or the poor guy just lost his job and drank a little much. You defend yourself, you hit back, until he is no longer a threat and then you can sit back and ask "wtf was that all about?".
Islam is the enemy of a free society, just like christianity was the enemy of free society until enlightenment and humanism won and defanged it. It's still a PITA but the times of crusades and inquisitions are over, not because they grew up from within, but because outside pressure forced the church to adapt, or die.
The same needs to happen to Islam. Become civilized, abandon all that sharia and jihad shit, or face extinction.
These "moderates" you are talking about are not the same kind of moderate that the word usually indicates. A majority of muslims favors sharia law, for example, with all the beheadings and stonings and hands cutting included. A lot of muslims think the proper penalty for leaving the faith is death. And Jihad is universally accepted, the discussion is more or less what kind of war it should be. Most muslims don't agree with the terrorists, but in the same sense that many villagers in medieval Europe probably thought that burning alive is a little too much for old granny. But in general, you know, witches are evil and should be punished.
There is no "Islam v2" to the best of my knowledge. What there is is a few muslims who actually don't practice much of their religion, just like there are christians who go to church on xmas and otherwise ignore the whole thing.
Most people in these discussions miss the most blatant whitewashing of calling mainstream islam "moderate". It is far from moderate. If it were a political party, or a "social club" (like the KKK), it would probably be outlawed in most European countries.
But religious christians fear that if they allow one religion to be scrutinized and held accountable, their religion will be next.
Going dark -- this is a crock. No one's going dark.
This is key. Their main argument is bullshit. They are not going dark. If anything, they have massively more surveillance than they did, let's say, 50 years ago. Or 30 years. Or virtually any time.
20 years ago, what chances did police have to get a recording or transcript of a conversation between criminals one month after the fact? Unless they already were watching and wiretapping them, almost none. Today, chances are quite good that you will find some e-mails, chat log or other exchange.
10 years ago, what chances did police have to find out where someone was on a given day one year later? Unless they were already shadowing him, almost none. Today, he checked in on Facebook or Foursquare or his phone location data gives him away.
Maybe there was a high point a few years ago, when most of what we have today was already there, but encryption was lagging behind. Maybe compared to that short golden period they now see less - but it is still vastly more than ever before in the history of police work.
And when someone lies to get something, you already know they can't be trusted, so giving them something that can potentially be abused would be really, really, very, very stupid.
As they see it, it's better to be unhappy on your private yacht with a cocktail in your hand and ten girls competing to suck your dick then to be happy in a dirty one-room appartment looking for a temp job.
That is the thing. That is why we don't "get" the 0.01% - they are a completely different species from us. I have some insight into this society through 2nd hand experience and some of it is unbelievable. Bending the rules is absolutely normal there, expected even. To interpret every world event in the context of "what advantage can I take from it" is 2nd nature. To go into every shop, every business talk, every social event and every friendship with the "what can I get from this, and can I get it cheaper?" attitude is the driving force. Yes, these people drop or don't make friendships if they don't see which specific advantage they get from it. I know people whose first statement about anything they like is "let's make the price lower". And their general attitude to everyone else and what is wrong in the world is "and what?".
We are far more distant from the elites that run this world than the french peasant starving in the mud is from the sun king.
Why you think they see them as problems at all? For most wealthy people, the financial crisis was a present from heaven, they made a killing. It's regular people who lost their life savings, have you read about even one business celebrity having to sell even one of his yachts or villas?
They don't fix what - for them - is not a problem. Unless (Gates) the reputation to be gained is worth the effort.
What the Zuck want's to do is dial the tech up to 11 and milk it for all it's worth.
He took a number and waits in line, yes? People have promised various versions of that for a decade.
VR is anti-social tech IRL. Aside from the privacy of using it on the plane or home solo, this won't live up to the hype he and everyone is hoping for.
It's not the anti-social part. Even for stuff you usually do alone at home (I mean, gaming, web-surfing, the usual stuff), it's a hype and nothing more. It delivers precious little for all the effort. The "oh cool" effect goes away after a while. There's nothing generally requested or required that you can do with VR that you can't do without.
True of every bullshit that ever found followers. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Pen & Teller, saying "Read the bible, we need more atheists". The same is true of the program of most political parties, especially the ones like the right-wing crazies gaining ground in Europe over the refugee crises at the moment, or all of the republicans in the race in the US right now.
Slashdot Mirror
He remembers, but he's talking about something else. Not script kiddies attacking you, but government agencies breaking into your system before it even reaches the shop that you'll eventually buy it from.
That's a little bit of a different threat.
Advertisers will always find a way to shit all over something good if they think there's money for them in it.
Advertisers are the true tragedy of the commons. Forget about the cow example, use advertisement.
Looks like the German courts' one-sided ruling are favoring home grown boys
Except that the guys who brought the cases are also Germans. Axel Springer, for example, is one of the largest newspaper and magazine publishers in Germany.
So, how about you get your facts straightened out and try again?
Or more to the point, how *you* are going to pay for the web.
I put as much content online as I consume. Much of it is free, some of it is "if you like it, here you can donate" and some is paid.
For me it works. I've been doing this for 20 years and I don't do advertisement and I'm proud of it.
There are other business models beyond selling your readers to advertisers. For example, I stopped downloading MP3s and re-started buying music when it became so easy and convenient with iTunes that finding a torrent and copying it to my phone was more trouble than it was worth.
I'm also happy to click the links to buy something on sites that provide me a service, say a tech review site that links to the items so you can buy them directly. Sure, maybe if I went to some price comparison site and did some checking I might save five bucks, but what for?
All in all, advertising is a pretty great way to pay for things.
No, it's a pretty fucked-up backwards way of getting shafted and sold while you falsely believe you're getting something for free.
If the tracking and privacy issues could be solved.
They can't, because advertisers are not interested in showing ads anymore. They are interested in re-targetting, in tracking and in invading your privacy to the maximum extent possible. Because their whole industry is on the mental level of North Korea and they don't live in the same world as the rest of us anymore.
Even then... 90% of adblock users would keep adblocking because the real issue is they want free AND ad-free.
Sure, who wouldn't want?
But that doesn't mean that a lot of the same people would not be willing to pay if you would offer them something worth the money.
Yes, but why would they rather sue adblock writers instead?
Because we are not their customers - we are their product. Most sites these days are in the business of selling your attention to advertisers, their actual customers. If you use adblock (or stop visiting them), you cannot be sold anymore. That they don't like.
What you say near the end is what is the most fascinating about ancient history: That we regularily underestimate their capabilities, often vastly. There was so much trade going on between so distant areas in a time where our mental image has isolated villages barely surviving.
Check out the Maronites in the Lebanese Civil War.
I did a few Google searches, and couldn't find terrorism references. Links, please.
Blaming Islam, while failing to note the inhumanity of man towards others regardless of religion is part of the problem.
As the saying goes, there are many evil people in the world, but to get a good man to do evil, you need religion.
Failing to note how religion and inhumanity often go hand-in-hand is utter stupidity. Of course religion is not the only source of inhuman behaviour, I never claimed that. But you have to be ignorant to pretty much all of history to not see how religion reinforces, supports and provides justification for unbelievable atrocities.
But go ahead, make excuses. Close your eyes. Ignore the log in thine own eye.
I never bombed an airport, nor did I cut off any heads. So please, don't insult your own intelligence.
If Christians were in the same social and economic situation as the Muslims are right now they would behave exactly the same.
There are Christians living in the Middle East. A minority yes, but a few millions. Never heard of them becoming terrorists, maybe you can enlighten us?
Stop the excuses. Christians might react violently as well, yes. But claiming they would behave exactly the same is the exact reductionism you rail against. No, they would not. Maybe similar, maybe not, but definitely not exactly.
Islam is part of the problem. Maybe a small part, maybe a big part, that's an interesting discussion. But claiming its contribution is zero is delusional.
Yes, but only Islam has kept to the murderous passages religiously. Christianity used to be just as evil, but if the pope called for another crusade today, people would check the calendar if it's the first of April, and if not, laugh and assume someone quoted a story from The Onion.
But if an Imam says "go and kill the heathens", some especially stupid losers actually do so.
You point to Europol as a source, but the definition of "terror attack" that Europol uses is much, much more broad than what is commonly called so. In fact, most of their successful "terror attacks" have zero victims.
If we narrow it down to what the general public and the media would call a "terror attack", then the correlation becomes quite strong. A lot of the attacks where people are harmed and killed are religiously motivated, commonly islamic.
I'm not saying that is the only factor - 1.5 billion muslims are not terrorists - but it is probably the single largest common source. There is also left-wing and right-wing bombings and shootings, as well as separatist and so on - but by victims, islamic terrorism leads by a wide margin.
In german legal jargon there is the term "allgemeines Lebensrisiko" - the risk of being alive. But it doesn't include terrorist attacks, because they are not in the same class as being hit by lightning bolts or getting your basement flooded because once in a century there's really heay rain.
My profession is IT security. I very good understand that there's no 100% perfect security. But I also understand that everyone saying "we can do nothing" is too lazy and/or incompetent to do something.
Your own source contradicts you:
In 2012, for instance, only 2.8 percent of the terrorist attacks in Europe were religiously-motivated, but nearly half of the people murdered in these attacks were killed by religiously-inspired terrorists.
I have no idea what they classify as "terror attacks" when I look at the numbers for my home country. Well, I read their definition of "terror attack" and apparently when the local neo-nazis throw in the windows of a refugee home, that's a terror attack by their definition.
Yeah, that is shitty behaviour. But is it really in the same class as blowing up a train full of people?
intentional acts can be controlled while accidents cannot.
I made no such assumption. On the contrary, I expect from the government and the car companies and everyone else involved to do their best to reduce the accident rate.
We can not eliminate (the possibility of) terrorism without giving up our freedom.
So we should give up and take it up the butt like a man? Sorry, no.
Running a shop and car driving are bad analogies because they both involve people voluntarily engaging in an inherently risky activity, and intentionally accepting that risk. If I get into my car, I know that driving is not 100% safe.
When I get into a plane, I likewise accept that there's a small risk involved. I accept that risk, because it is so small.
But nobody signed up for the risk of being bombed. It is not inherent in the activities that are at risk.
We should not accept this risk as a "cost of doing business" because it is not.
This is the part that most people who don't think deeply get wrong.
Christianity is a defeated religion, its claws and fangs have long been removed by humanism, by the enlightenment, and by the simple fact that people would laugh and call for a psychologist if the pope were to call another crusade.
Islam never had to fight with an Enlightenment over how life should be, how to view human beings, what inalienable rights are and so on. It's a strong religion. One where even without a central pope, one of the many Imams saying something stupid at prayer results in thousands of people burning flags in the streets, or worse. People take it seriously.
You can go to Italy, or any other still strongly christian country, and offer people a hundred bucks if they say "god is a faggot" on camera. Some will do it, some will blow you off, some will insult you, maybe one or two will spit or slap you in the face.
Do not try that stunt in any strongly islamic country. Not in Saudia Arabia, not in Iran or Indonesia. You would be dead before you have a representative sample size.
The biggest stupidity is to not see correlation. True, there are cases of terrorists of that religion or of this. But you must be a complete idiot to not see that there is a strong correlation between Islam and terrorism. Not 100% of course. But if there is a terrorist attack anywhere in the world in this year, betting money on the fact that the terrorists are muslims is a pretty safe bet.
You can't deny this correlation, because it exists. And not just in the west, the same fucktards also blow up their own people - most terrorist attacks happen in the Near East or in Africa and we never hear about them, because in the news they are a sideline notice at best.
But what does it have to do with ... ah wait ... it's mentioning twitter. so i guess it's all right then.
Because it is "stuff that matters". And discussions on /. are not the same as on other news sites. When you post here that banning encryption is not the right answer, people nod and mod you down for stating the obvious.
It's good to have a discussion with "your" crowd. And it fucking does matter. Brussels might be half a world away for the american crowd, but I, for example, was actually on my way to my local airport to take a flight to that very Brussels, that very airport, when I heard the news. I know the area that was bombed, I've seen it many times when I passed by on my way to the security checks.
It matters, because it affects a lot of us directly or indirectly, and because of the consequences such as politician dumbheads calling for more surveillance and so on.
These terrorist attacks are horrible, but we need to deal with them as a problem, not let our countries deteriorate in a frightened panic.
Yes, but: There is a massive difference between accidental death and murder. We kind of accept road deaths because while we strive to make roads and cars as secure as possible, we understand there is a risk remaining.
If you advocate for more surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties in response to these attacks, you are cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to undermine the fundamental values of our society.
Everyone with three working brain cells knows that surveillance and new laws the whole security theatre is not, never has been and never will be the answer. I've posted many times here and elsewhere that security check points at airpoints are bullshit, terrorists will just put bombs in the crowds in front. What happened today was very close to that, and I've been saying it for years, it was only a matter of time until even the dumbest terrorist has the same idea.
But if you advocate sitting still and just accepting the risk, you are stupid as well, because one of the fundamental requirements of a free society is that it can defend itself against its enemies. That includes the Bushs and the Merkels from within and the Bin Ladens and Daesh from without.
Our society fails that because it has become too open. If you let everyone in, bad people will be among them. If you can't define what your society is, you don't have one. If you cannot see a difference between "us" and "them" then maybe you are in utopia, and maybe you are just an idiot, because "they" see this difference. While our politicians and other professional idiots repeat the "nothing to do with islam, not all muslims are like this" mantra, and fight tooth and nail against people saying "these people we don't want in our society", the Islamists know with absolute precision and certainty who "we" and "they" are.
When you are in a fight with someone who wants to hurt you, you don't stop and ask him why he is so angry or whether his mother didn't love him or the poor guy just lost his job and drank a little much. You defend yourself, you hit back, until he is no longer a threat and then you can sit back and ask "wtf was that all about?".
Islam is the enemy of a free society, just like christianity was the enemy of free society until enlightenment and humanism won and defanged it. It's still a PITA but the times of crusades and inquisitions are over, not because they grew up from within, but because outside pressure forced the church to adapt, or die.
The same needs to happen to Islam. Become civilized, abandon all that sharia and jihad shit, or face extinction.
These "moderates" you are talking about are not the same kind of moderate that the word usually indicates. A majority of muslims favors sharia law, for example, with all the beheadings and stonings and hands cutting included. A lot of muslims think the proper penalty for leaving the faith is death. And Jihad is universally accepted, the discussion is more or less what kind of war it should be. Most muslims don't agree with the terrorists, but in the same sense that many villagers in medieval Europe probably thought that burning alive is a little too much for old granny. But in general, you know, witches are evil and should be punished.
There is no "Islam v2" to the best of my knowledge. What there is is a few muslims who actually don't practice much of their religion, just like there are christians who go to church on xmas and otherwise ignore the whole thing.
They eliminated most of the bombings, now they have hundreds of stabbings.
Most people in these discussions miss the most blatant whitewashing of calling mainstream islam "moderate". It is far from moderate. If it were a political party, or a "social club" (like the KKK), it would probably be outlawed in most European countries.
But religious christians fear that if they allow one religion to be scrutinized and held accountable, their religion will be next.
Going dark -- this is a crock. No one's going dark.
This is key. Their main argument is bullshit. They are not going dark. If anything, they have massively more surveillance than they did, let's say, 50 years ago. Or 30 years. Or virtually any time.
20 years ago, what chances did police have to get a recording or transcript of a conversation between criminals one month after the fact? Unless they already were watching and wiretapping them, almost none. Today, chances are quite good that you will find some e-mails, chat log or other exchange.
10 years ago, what chances did police have to find out where someone was on a given day one year later? Unless they were already shadowing him, almost none. Today, he checked in on Facebook or Foursquare or his phone location data gives him away.
Maybe there was a high point a few years ago, when most of what we have today was already there, but encryption was lagging behind. Maybe compared to that short golden period they now see less - but it is still vastly more than ever before in the history of police work.
And when someone lies to get something, you already know they can't be trusted, so giving them something that can potentially be abused would be really, really, very, very stupid.
As they see it, it's better to be unhappy on your private yacht with a cocktail in your hand and ten girls competing to suck your dick then to be happy in a dirty one-room appartment looking for a temp job.
That is the thing. That is why we don't "get" the 0.01% - they are a completely different species from us. I have some insight into this society through 2nd hand experience and some of it is unbelievable. Bending the rules is absolutely normal there, expected even. To interpret every world event in the context of "what advantage can I take from it" is 2nd nature. To go into every shop, every business talk, every social event and every friendship with the "what can I get from this, and can I get it cheaper?" attitude is the driving force. Yes, these people drop or don't make friendships if they don't see which specific advantage they get from it. I know people whose first statement about anything they like is "let's make the price lower". And their general attitude to everyone else and what is wrong in the world is "and what?".
We are far more distant from the elites that run this world than the french peasant starving in the mud is from the sun king.
Why you think they see them as problems at all? For most wealthy people, the financial crisis was a present from heaven, they made a killing. It's regular people who lost their life savings, have you read about even one business celebrity having to sell even one of his yachts or villas?
They don't fix what - for them - is not a problem.
Unless (Gates) the reputation to be gained is worth the effort.
What the Zuck want's to do is dial the tech up to 11 and milk it for all it's worth.
He took a number and waits in line, yes? People have promised various versions of that for a decade.
VR is anti-social tech IRL. Aside from the privacy of using it on the plane or home solo, this won't live up to the hype he and everyone is hoping for.
It's not the anti-social part. Even for stuff you usually do alone at home (I mean, gaming, web-surfing, the usual stuff), it's a hype and nothing more. It delivers precious little for all the effort. The "oh cool" effect goes away after a while. There's nothing generally requested or required that you can do with VR that you can't do without.
True of every bullshit that ever found followers. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Pen & Teller, saying "Read the bible, we need more atheists". The same is true of the program of most political parties, especially the ones like the right-wing crazies gaining ground in Europe over the refugee crises at the moment, or all of the republicans in the race in the US right now.