Indeed. I do that routinely, as that is the most productive setting for me. Never had any customer complaints either, once they saw the first results.

Simple: It is higher effort and cost and uncomfortable, unless you are used to it. In most IT departments, you can get away very well with shirt and (black, non-worn) jeans even as a consultant.

Indeed. Also, a medium-sized ISP head of network engineering once told me "most non-peering traffic is default route anyways". BGP seems to be used mostly internally and by some enterprising individuals. Might be the reason why we have seen only very few BGP based attacks. An they have a high risk of being detected immediately, while attackers that invest time (as opposed to automated attackers) want to be detected as late as possibly and preferably never. I mean, even adding a single hop with a BGP attack will be blatantly obvious in ping-time monitoring (think smoke-ping), and even the most stupid network operators are hopefully doing that as it is also the easiest way to detect failing or overloaded equipment.

Nice one!

I guess their troubles are how to define it so that they are a mere criminal gang (and hence have immunity like all "law enforcement"), yet others are committing acts of war so they can be drone-killed and it is (legally, but not ethically) not murder...

Indeed. Or restated in simpler form: A community that does not keep its egoistic idiots under control, eventually collapses. That seems to be the primary problem of the human race at this time.

Fascinating new insights, indeed! Unfortunately, all attempts at verifying these "insights" failed, except when complete morons were used as experimenters.

Apology accepted. Your 3) is spot on and there is also serious pressure from those pushing for even more surveillance. They do not even publish statistics of how many producers they have stopped here, likely because the number is so low.

You can kill, but you cannot torture. Blinding somebody for life intentionally is cruel and hence unacceptable. Not that such distinctions are understood in the US.

Really. A printer belongs behind a firewall and has no business having a public IP in the first place. This is neither a new risk not in any way surprising. Asking the manufacturer to secure the printer is not going to work.

Thanks for giving an example of functional illiteracy. It is one of the problems people relying too much on computers have.

If you try really, really hard and read my statement again several times, you might notice that I actually said that pen, paper and books are technology, but that they are enough technology for learning.

Well, then in your area of the world, things are different than in most. "Low hanging fruits" and all that. Cops cannot do things right if they get orders to produce as many visible results as possible and orders to stay away from things that are hard but would actually help people. I am of course talking about the higher ups giving the orders (and bowing to politics more often than not), not the ones doing the actual work. I do not doubt that many of them would prioritize exactly as you say, but they have to follow orders.

From one of the best universities on the planet in that area? No way. Give up, you are entirely outclassed.

Typically it is something like the crime is "downloading illegal pornography", and the attempt to do so is criminal as well. That is why searching for illegal pornography is illegal, because it is classified as a step in an attempt to obtain it. I have no idea how US law words this, an usually attempting and failing to do a crime like this is exceedingly hard to prove, so I expect you could just get away with it.

Anyways, searching for this stuff is an exceedingly bad idea unless you are not only an LEO, but are also tasked with this sort of thing.

At the present time, you are, of course, entirely correct!