Having played both football and rugby at the collegiate level (football on the organized school team, rugby on the school's club team) I exerted way more energy in football than I did rugby. Of course, since I played offensive line, I was essentially in a scrum every play of the game. When I found out you spend half the time in rugby just jogging around I was in heaven.

But if you don't react to the last one, then the last one will be used again (because it works). Are you thinking that if we didn't step up explosives/weapons scans and secure cockpit doors (you know, defenses against "old" attacks), that no terrorist with any self respect would repeat a very successful previous attack because ... it would seem out of fashion and not as rakish to do what someone else did? Come on now.

Considering your embrace of fiction, here, the irony in your assertions is pretty fantastic.

And leaving aside, for the moment, your fictional narrative ... your understanding of "entrapment" is incorrect. Not that it applies in any case you're mentioning, anyway.

Which of course they've tried multiple times. In two cases, the only reason they didn't kill a lot of people was technical trouble with their explosive devices - they had suicidal killers in place, ready to kill themselves and everyone onboard (and ideally, a lot of people on the ground in, for example, Detroit on Christmas day) ... but their QA teams fell short. Minor technical stuff. In the third case (that we know about), it was intelligence that made them aware of the printer-bombs in cargo, which were also an attempt to take down a large plane on approach. Just because such tactics aren't as sexy as flying into skyscrapers doesn't meant they weren't and aren't happy to keep picking away at that option as their technical skill improves. And groups like ISIS have a large group of crazies with lots of cash to work with.

I don't quite follow. Are you frustrated because those things are actually true? Because this does indeed look largely like a quality-of-the-people-working issue.

No it's not. Cause any kind of disturbance and the airlines can and will put you on their own internal "no-fly" lists. These are kept in addition to federal no-fly lists. It could be something as simple as getting shit-faced and belligerent ona flight to claiming you hacked a plane and changed engine power(I can guarantee you that guy will have a hard time booking a flight on a US domestic airline any time soon). If it's a right, it is one that is very easily lost.

They get paid regardless of whether they do a good job.

If it were not for your relatively low UID number, I'd say "you must be new here".

Facts and logic are fungible and elastic among Slashdotters when they negatively impact stubbornly-held (but incorrect nonetheless) worldviews, politics, (anti-)religious beliefs, and ideologies.

To a large extent Slashdot negative moderation serves the same purpose as sticking one's fingers in one's ears and going "lalalala I can't hear you!".

Strat

And if I start getting ads, I'm leaving.

Really? You think a "new generation" is so simple-minded that they can't use reason to put together a value system that arrives at the same destination as so many others? You think it's a good thing to change out values like ... stealing people's stuff is morally bad? Like, using your l33t haxx0r skills to ruin someone's reputation for the lulz is bad? You're confusing the tools and technologies that a new generation finds at their disposal with being somehow related to the philosophical underpinnings of their value system.

I'm delighted that, despite the fastest growing population in the world appearing to embrace medieval theocratic nonsense as the basis of their value system, that at least a fair portion of the world has gone more down the route of using reason to examine and reinforce their moral code. Yes, a "new generation" may indeed show less of the superstition-based trappings surrounding the fringes of judeo-christian culture, but basic stuff like "don't use your new [whatever technology] to steal people's shit" doesn't mean that a moral code based on that reasonable observation that doing so is objectively bad means that changing [whatever technology] means the moral code is changing. Just, sometimes, the venue in which it's applied.

That's why pretending that it's malware that's the issue, and not abusive thieves and vandals (people), is an act of moral cowardice. Because it's the same old stuff, different playing field. People who focus on the gun, the car, the piece of viral code, whatever - they're too chickenshit to address what's actually at play: other people whose world views are broken enough to make malicious use of the tools. People scared of making value judgments about other people always, always reach for the tool as the villain. That says more about that person than it does about the actual villain.

Hey look! You're doing it right now. That's actually pretty funny.

No. I'm smarter than a lot of people, and many many people are smarter than me.

Oh, I've done MUCH worse than that.

Why are you asking me? Have I condemned anybody? I'm condemning those who try to pretend that nothing bad is ever anybody's fault. That (relative to the article we're talking about, here) fact that focusing on the tools people use (or mis-use) and ignoring the fact that it's people using those tools is intellectual laziness and often cowardice in the face of political correctness.

So you agree - people are different, and not all are equal. But ignoring that, we're talking about when people use tools (like malware) to steal other people's assets and reputations.

You "expect" these things, yet provide no details on how exactly you "expect" these things to be or become fact.

Why should the 1% slave to support the 99%? What would be their motivation? Why would they not join the majority or simply move someplace else where they can keep more of the value created by their labor? Altruism? Altruism is a virtue only when it is voluntarily given. Otherwise it is theft and slavery.

On the other claw, it could also create tyrants from that 1% as they could demand compliance or cut off the tap, so to speak.

Like so many socialist style schemes, it requires humans to behave and act counter to basic human nature and without attempting to game the system. History has proven time and again that such schemes only work among a relatively small and culturally/politically homogenous population, and do not scale to multiple hundreds of millions of a culturally/politically diverse population.

Strat

Of course there is. I'm describing a pervasive, increasingly toxic type of craziness that impacts nearly every bit of public discourse that pops up when anything bad is being discussed. If such discussions were generally rational, there'd be nothing to have to talk about. But rational discussions involving causality and agency are now considered rude, like gluten.

I hope Android can go to Turbo Vision style interface before it finally reverts to a command-line interface.

It's no longer fashionable to associate human character, judgement, and action with unpleasant results. Malice? There is no malice. There is only the problematic tool or technology, against which we should rage. It's not murder, it's a "gun death." It's not a reckless jackass badly flying a GoPro in a crowded place, it's a "drone incident." It's not a bad driver, it's another "SUV death." It's not a criminal trying to steal your savings or reputation, it's "malware."

Talking out loud about how actual humans are responsible for the stupid or evil shit they do is no longer acceptable. That would mean assessing their intelligence, or making a considered moral judgement, based on some sort of, you know, identifiable value system. We can't have that! We'd need to post Trigger Warnings near any discussion that might result in the horrifying prospect of recognizing that not everyone is as smart as everyone else, or calling an evil actor evil, because, you know, judging. Much better to talk only about the scary tools, never about the people. Hey, Russian credit card scammers and bot farmers are really the victims, here - the malware made them use it. Probably of some sort of western patriarchal influence and whatnot.