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Here's the DEA's list. Those marked as "List 1" are the most restricted. It's not that long a list. Iodine is the only chemical on List 1 that isn't particularly hazardous.

Fifty years it was considered constitutional to have laws forbidding marriages between blacks and white. Anyone arguing for a return to sterner times really needs to look at worldwide crime rates and explain why crime in the western world has generally been in decline for quite some time now - despite "trendy" methods of disciplining children and adults.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/viortrdtab.cfm

So, what's the message there? Beat children a little bit and tell them that a severe beating is that beating multiplied by ten? Yes, we all know some dicks. Whether we want to live in a society that allows these people to be flogged is a question that requires an argument more substantial than an appeal to tradition.

I see physical violence as being similar to honking the horn in a car. It should only be used to avert an immediate danger: If a child is about to touch a red hot stove, slapping their hand away makes sense. If a driver is about to cut across your lane, oblivious to the presence of your car, honking the horn may prevent an accident. Honking the horn as punishment, just like with beating a child, is more about punishment than an ernest attempt to teach a lesson. How often do we see people honking their horn as a warning? Most of the time I see it used to deliver a loud "fuck you!" With spankings, how often are they done in a calm and dispassionate manner? Do parents first talk to the child so they understand what is about to happen and why, or are they more likely to just reach for the belt and begin thrashing away? Are there not better ways of teaching a lesson - such as discussing actions and the denial of privileges?

Since it appears Wikipedia can't get it's shit sorted, let's just go back to the source. It appears the chart on Wikipedia is explicitly excluding the entire Simple Assault category, which is the bulk of the figure for both the US and the UK - according to the Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2009 (the latest available) the violent crime rate was 16.9 per 1,000. This means the violent crime rate was 1,690 per 100,000.

You know, that figure looks familiar...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_Kingdom#Extent_of_crime

UK: 16 per 1k, 1600 per 100k.

Oh, so not so much better after all. In fact, the US is just barely worse than the UK.

But not a majority of guns are used in violent crime.

* Roughly 7% of all violent crime in 2008 involved a firearm... ( http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/percentfirearm.cfm )
* Number of violent crimes in the US in 2008 - 1,392,628 ( http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm )
* Quick math: 97483.96 ... let's say 98,000
* there were over 4 million firearms manufactured in the US 2008 (4,152,082) ... this does not include manufactures outside the US.
* there were about 3.8 million produced in 2007

That's 2.4%-2.5% of guns produced (just of the US made guns, so this is a high estimate) being used for crime.

The DOJ disagrees with you. Page 4 of the PDF has a breakdown. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/dudsfp04.pdf

again with the correlation vs. causation...
How about the US Bureau of Justice Statistics report from 2009 that says:
"According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the total prison and jail population in 2009."

Obviously being a black non-Hispanic causes you to commit crimes, so we should probably make being a black non-Hispanic a crime...

only 7-8% of the driving public is ever pulled over in any event.

Make that about 8% of drivers each year . In 2005, it was 8.8%; source: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/ascii/cpp05.txt

Oh, and if it's links you want, here are some facts on that for you. From the article, which represents the best data gathered by the CDC and the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control:

Each year, women experience about 4.8 million intimate partner related physical assaults and rapes. Men are the victims of about 2.9 million intimate partner related physical assaults.
IPV resulted in 2,340 deaths in 2007. Of these deaths, 70% were females and 30% were males.

In other words, men are about half as much at risk of being assaulted by their intimate partners as women. (Note, however, that this figure also includes men whose parters are themselves men.) What's more, in cases where intimate partner violence is actually life-threatening -- as opposed to your slap in the face example -- the victim is far more likely to be female.

Next up, from the National Institute of Justice:

NCVS found that about 85 percent of victimizations by intimate partners in 1998 were against women ... The studies that find that women abuse men equally or even more than men abuse women are based on data compiled through the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), a survey tool developed in the 1970s. CTS may not be appropriate for intimate partner violence research because it does not measure control, coercion, or the motives for conflict tactics; it also leaves out sexual assault and violence by ex-spouses or partners and does not determine who initiated the violence ... A review of the research found that violence is instrumental in maintaining control and that more than 90 percent of "systematic, persistent, and injurious" violence is perpetrated by men.

Emphasis in the original. And frankly, I'm going to go with legitimate studies from justice sources before I trust your theory about who prefers their partners to be a certain age -- a theory, I might add, that strikes me as coming from someone of limited life experience.

Also, it is NOT a national ID. It is issued by my state...other states and the federal govt, for the most part..do not have the information from my DL immediately upon query.

From 2008: "The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has teamed up with law enforcement agencies in four states in a pilot project to transmit driver’s license photographs across state lines and deliver the photos to an officer’s computer within seconds of a request." http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/law-enforcement/strategies/information-led-policing/photo-sharing.htm

There isn't a national drivers license database.

"The computerized system uses the Global Justice XML Data Model (Global JXDM), an information-exchange standard designed specifically for criminal justice agencies that has been widely, but not universally, adopted."

And most important...where the fuck is it in the constitution for the Federal Govt. to issues national id??

It is where it always is, the commerce clause.

But hey, lets just let all those child molesters, murderers, thieves etc, out and see how safe you feel.

You mean drug users, right? Cause the number of arrests for drug abuse has risen dramatically, while all other crime has dropped (in some cases just as dramatically) in the last 15-20 years. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=kftp&tid=3

It's amazing how FOX has taken a 180 on violent video games. Back in 2005, going after violent video games was "against the free market" per FOX. Of course that was when Hillary Clinton was trying to get FEPA through. In 2006 violent video games were also great per FOX! Of course they were talking about Left Behind, and I guess a bullet in the head to a non-believer is fine and dandy (and even Christian like) per FOX. Oh and where does this doctor get her claims about the increase in rapes? According to the DOJ, the number of rapes have had a rapid decline since the early 90's. Maybe we should investigate Mario and Luigi to see if they had an impact on the high level of rapes back then? Mario did force himself down some tight holes after all.

This is nicely reflected in statistics on domestic violence. If you'd ask friends or colleagues what the statistics are on men at the receiving end of domestic violence, they'd probably laugh.

Fact is, approximately 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States. It's not like the 95%/5% distribution that most people think about.

The high recidivism thing is actually false according to http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17
But then, you're probably also trying to use the No True Scotsman logical fallacy with the 'real sex offenders' statement.

        During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 persons on parole were at-risk of reincarceration. This includes persons under parole supervision on January 1 or those entering parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007.
        Among nearly 300,000 prisoners released in 15 states in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years. A study of prisoners released in 1983 estimated 62.5%.
        Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 states in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.
        These offenders had accumulated 4.1 million arrest charges before their most recent imprisonment and another 744,000 charges within 3 years of release.
        Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were robbers (70.2%), burglars (74.0%), larcenists (74.6%), motor vehicle thieves (78.8%), those in prison for possessing or selling stolen property (77.4%), and those in prison for possessing, using, or selling illegal weapons (70.2%).
        Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

The Wikipedia article takes the statistics and presents them quite inaccurately. The source is cited, and the study used data from 15 states allowing serial crminals to move out ot the study's scope, so rates are underreported. Even so, Table 6 of the study http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsorp94.pdf shows that 7.3% of child molesters released in 1994 had prior convictions and 18.3% had prior arrests.for "Sex offenses against a child". The recidivism rate is much higher by any reasonable measure than 5%.

From those statistics: "An estimated 24% of those serving time for rape and 19% of those serving time for sexual assault had been on probation or parole at the time of the offense for which they were in State prison in 1991."

This would indicate that an effective parole/probation system could result in a significant reduction in rape and sexual assault.

The figures are for convictions three years after release, ( pg 2 http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsorp94.pdf) most would be on parole for most of that time. Trials tend to drag out out so three years is much too short of a time span to base any judgement on. Also the figures do not consider the number of charges against the criminal (pg 5). I would be more interested on the data at ten or fifteen years. Table 6 shows that 7.3% of child molesters had prior convictions for sex offense against children - that is better indication of the rate.

Also, you should recognize that the recidivism rate is higher than the reconviction rate. The study included fifteen states, so repeat offenders who committed their crimes out of those states were not reported. Those who prey on children get better at avoiding detection with practice. The bank robber may get arrested the first three times he commits his crimes, the child molester probably won't have his crimes reported in that number. Bank robbery is not an underreported crime, child molestation and rape are.

The CDC is tasked with tracking gun deaths independently from the FBI’s annual crime reports. The CDC’s most recent report does confirm 31,000 gun deaths, however, the FBI’s annual crime report of the same year only showed 17,000 murders and non-negligent manslaughters. Upon deeper exam, of the 31,000 deaths, 60% were suicides and 15% were accidents or “clean” shootings. Only 25% of the deaths are non justified point to point killings. That 25% represents less than half of the murders in the nation.

Fun Fact: according to the FBI, the #1 weapon used in violent crimes is the baseball bat.

Searching around the DoJ:Statistics Webpage could bring up more: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=938

The information is out there, are people willing to listen?

it still implies that because men are more likely the killer females are more likely the victim, while the statistics I pointed to show that over 65 percent of the murders are a man killing another man. The fact is that men kill more, but the stereotype that women suffer disproportionately under the aggression of men isn't.

The stats have a section where only male/female killings are considered. In fact, it's kind of hard to miss - it's right at the top of the page: Male offender/Female victim 22.7%
Female offender/Male victim 9.6%

The vast majority of the time, it's the woman who is the victim.

Like the anecdote heard all too often of nightlife incidents involving groups of both males and females where the men are driven to defend the women, often cheered on by them, which sometimes results in one man killing a man from the other group.

Don't you think this says more about "drunks shouldn't have guns"? Being cheered on, even by 1,000 women, is not a rationale to kill someone. "But judge, I couldn't help myself. She made me do it - she was cheering me on." This wouldn't even work for a speeding ticket. If you want to look at the social and cultural aspects, look no further than your gun culture. The US has an out-of-control crime problem, which explains why it has more people in jail than any other country in the world. Anecdotes like the one you describe are a symptom of that. They also have absolutely nothing to do with the ratio between men killing women and women killing men, which is a separate statistic.

A second contributor is laws that encourage murder. The three-strikes law is one such really bad law. "If I get caught this is my 3rd strike, so I have nothing to lose by killing the b*tch." Laws that encourage the killing of witnesses to a crime are dumb. People who vote for politicians who cynically push for such laws are equally dumb. A culture that supports this sort of stupidity via the voting booth, the executive branch, and the courts, is going to be a violent culture, because now both "sides" need to escalate, and when you create a situation where people have nothing to lose, don't be so surprised when they act "rationally" by killing people who could send them to jail for life.

Feminism proved that a lot of presumed inherently female aspects are stereotypical, why is it so hard for people to understand the same applies to a lot of male gender roles?

People understand, which is why the "she cheered me on" defense doesn't work. However, just because "a lot of" aspects are stereotypical doesn't invalidate that there is a biological basis for much human behaviour. To say that it can be explained away by culture doesn't work - the differential murder rate between men killing women and women killing men, and the universally higher rates of men as killers, say otherwise. Both sexes have the same "fight or flight" mechanism, but men are by far more likely to fight.

But let's look at other stuff that isn't so violent, but reinforces typical stereotypes. How about shopping? I love shopping, even when I don't buy anything. Guys? They admit that most of them approach it like a military mission - go in, acquire the target, and get out. Why the difference? It can't be entirely cultural when so many different cultures share the same stereotypical behaviour. Another one - shoes. How many pair of shoes does the average man have? 3 Women? it depends on age

a female from ages 13-16 may own about 15 pair of shoes including sneakers.
And older woman 16-21, who perhaps has a job: 25-40 pairs
A mature woman 25-50, anywhere from 40-60 pair of shoes

And th

The Wikipedia page you pointed to has dead links in the references. The correct data can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/gender.cfm
It is also worth pointing out that although males are more likely to kill, they are also more likely to be killed. This suggests that a large amount of the murders comes from male-to-male violence.

Furthermore there is no mention in the statistics of involvement of women, but from anecdotes you can assume that in a lot of cases a violent outburst involving a group of men and a women results in the man (generally being the physically stronger one) takes on the role of the defender/aggressor. Whether based on culture or evolutionary psychology males are more likely to commit violence beside the predisposition purely based on gender physiology. You understand how this might skew statistics, and might lead to the false impression that men are inherently more dangerous.

I also completely agree that men and women are equal but their differences (and especially strong points) should not be hidden to be PC. Men have a different psychology, and asking for directions is something they are more reluctant to do because it can be construed as a sign of defeat. But there is a difference between factual gender specific traits and clichés. When you start complaining about men and the toilet (mostly based on assumption) it's just feeding another common chiché about women...

That's not quite supported by the figures. Although recidivism rates are high when considered overall, the Justice Department figures for 1994 (I couldn't get the more recent pdf's to open)show that

Released prisoners with the lowest
rearrest rates were those in prison for
homicide (40.7%), rape (46.0%), other
sexual assault (41.4%), and driving
under the influence (51.5%).

Within 3 years, 2.5% of released
rapists were arrested for another rape,
and 1.2% of those who had served
time for homicide were arrested for
homicide.

The report specifically notes that although violent prisoners reoffend, the vast majority are not being arrested for another violent offence.

Wrong.
Nearly half of rapists / murders get arrested again for something else.
The vast majority are not arrested for the SAME violent offense.

Not necessarily: in a recent BJS study, the rate of inmate-on-inmate abuse among female inmates was more than twice as high as that reported by male inmates.

Not a whole lot of women in jail for brutal murderous rape, usually just the pedo kind.

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2202

Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.

There is a lot of evidence for statistics like this, you can start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#United_States_domestic_policy.

Federal prisons were estimated to hold 179,204 sentenced inmates in 2007. Of these, 15,647 were incarcerated for violent offenses, including 2,915 for homicide, 8,966 for robbery, and 3,939 for other violent crimes. In addition, 10,345 inmates were serving time for property crimes, including 504 for burglary, 7,834 for fraud, and 2,006 for other property offenses. A total of 95,446 were incarcerated for drug offenses. Also, 56,237 were incarcerated for public-order offenses, including 19,528 for immigration offenses and 24,435 for weapons offenses.
http://www.ojp.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/p07.pdf

According to a federal survey of jail inmates, of the total 440,670 jail inmates in the US in 2002, 112,447 (25.5%) were drug offenders: 48,823 (11.1%) for possession and 56,574 (12.8%) for trafficking.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/sdatji02.pdf

Released prisoners with the lowest rearrest rates were those in prison for homicide (40.7%), rape (46.0%), other sexual assault (41.4%), and driving under the influence (51.5%).

Within 3 years, 2.5% of released rapists were arrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for homicide.

The report specifically notes that although violent prisoners reoffend, the vast majority are not being arrested for another violent offence.

California leads the nation in GPS monitored parolees -- 6,500 -- at a cost of $60 million a year. Depending on arrests, there are typically about 250 sex offender parolees on GPS in Kern County

The quick math shows that's almost 10k per prisoner per year in California. Consider that California seems to be an extreme outlier, I only cited their numbers because of their large prison population, with the Justice Department's most recent (2001 sadly) data showing

the average annual operating cost per state inmate in 2001 was $22,650, or $62.05 per day; among facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it was $22,632 per inmate, or $62.01 per day.

A few articles point to the hidden costs of GPS - the significant increase in workload for local police forces being primarily responsible - the lack of actual real-time monitoring, the fact that serious crimes have been committed whilst the offender was being tracked using GPS, and the legal and ethic questions raised.

So have at it oh learned ones.

A survey of college women found that 2.8 percent had experienced either a completed (1.7 percent) or an attempted (1.1 percent) rape within a 9-month timeframe.
13.7% of undergraduate women had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault since entering college: 4.7% were victims of physically forced sexual assault; 7.8% of women were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after voluntarily consuming drugs, alcohol or both; and 0.6% were sexually assaulted when they were incapacitated after having been given a drug without their knowledge
Finally, a national-level study of college and community based women found that approximately 673,000 of nearly 6 million current college women (11.5 percent) have ever been raped, and approximately twelve percent of these rapes were reported to law enforcement

I'm not questioning the underlying idea that rape is pervasive and wrong. What I'm getting at is that by dragging out exaggerated, faulty numbers you introduce weakness into an argument. Those men in that room would have been horrified to hear that 13.7% of women had been sexually assaulted on campus - but that numbers not sexy enough for widespread hyperbole. All it took was for one guy to do a little digging into the stats, find the body of literature that criticized the methodology of that one source, and campus rape became a joke to half the community. Instead of disgust we had widespread disdain for the claim itself, and that is extremely damaging.

There is something extremely patronising, or condescending, which presumes that people cannot be motivated by subtle or nuanced arguments – every problem doesn’t have to directly affect 98.43% of the population to count.

I'm going to assume you're not an American, because an American who needs a citation for this fact is woefully ignorant of what's going on in this country. According to the National Institute of Justice, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice:

Seven percent of the 1.5 million prisoners in the United States are held in privately operated prisons, according to the most recent survey of prisons published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.[1] At midyear 2006, there were 84,867 State inmates and 27,108 Federal inmates in privately operated prisons—a 10-percent increase over the previous year.

The largest operator of private prisons is the Corrections Corporation of America. By its own assertion as of 2010:

The company is the fourth-largest corrections system in the nation, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA houses approximately 75,000 offenders and detainees in more than 60 facilities, 44 of which are company-owned, with a total bed capacity of more than 80,000.

The International Foundation for Protection Officers says:

...in spite of the many concerns associated with Prison Privatization, the trend toward increased privatization is likely to continue. In fact, recent initiatives like the Bush Administration's FAIR Act seek to ensure such an outcome by setting mandatory privatization quotas including the privatization of 7,200 federal corrections jobs.

If that's not good enough for you, pick up a newspaper once in a while.

There's a war in Mexico, and the soldiers routinely cross-over to US territory, kidnap citizens, and drag them back to Mexico. Or just outright kill them. Washington DC used to be the murder capitol of the nation, but now it's been eclipsed by Phoenix Arizona. (Phoenix is also the #1 city for kidnapping.)

It is important to place such claims in context with actual statistics from the Dept of Justice.

1) From 2000 to 2009 the violent crime rate in Phoenix proper is down 30% and property crimes declined 46%. The most recently available statistics - for the 1st quarter of 2010 - indicate violent crime rate in Phoenix has plunged over the last year -- down another 17% homicide specifically is down another 38% and robberies down another 27%.

2) The violent crime rate across the entire state of Arizona is at the lowest its been since 1983. Property crime rates are at similarly low levels too.

3) Essentially all kidnappings in Phoenix are of criminals themselves. The Phoenix Police Department has made an official statement that, "Unless you're involved in the dope trade, there's a very very slim chance [that you'll be kidnapped.]"

4) Violent and property crime rates in other border states have also dropped significantly over the last decade.
(numbers from 1998 to 2008 which is most recently available data)
California: Violent crime down 28%, Property crime down 19%
New Mexico: Violent crime down 32%, Property crime down 32%
Texas: Violent crime down 10%, Property crime down 12%

I disagree. You get arrested by a public law enforcement agency, have a public trial, and essentially no rights (depending on the crime).

While I'm not for the police state, I do believe that those convicted of a crime need to have their mugshots put up, especially for the following crimes:

DUI/DWI (doc, specifically Colorado's numbers but I imagine the true holds same in TN given the number of those in court for it repeatedly)
Pedophilia
Rape (pdf, specifically Deleware's statistics)
Murder (pdf, Washington state)
Scam/Con

People should know who you are and what your proclivities are. In the above cases you should expect no right to privacy after your first conviction (recidivism in these crimes is high, see links and also this document on recidivism).

I couldn't find numbers for scammers/con artists, though I'm sure they don't give up after their first arrest either. If anyone could find national averages it would be appreciated. All the above docs referred to national averages that I didn't turn up in my searches (search term: <crime> recidivism)

Yes they do. [ksl.com] But I agree, it is extremely rare. More importantly, if you point a socket wrench at someone, or accidentally touch the trigger of a drill, there's virtually no chance that you or someone you love can immediately die.

The linked article specifically states that this was likely an old gun, which the poster mentioned can rarely go off.

Most guns, especially handguns, have no other purpose than to kill human beings.

Really? I own just under 40 guns, 7 of which are handguns. I've fired all of them, and most of them quite a bit. I've never killed a human. I wonder what I could have possibly been doing with them given that that's apparently their only purpose . . . (I'll give you a hint: quite a few deer, a lot of ducks, and countless sheets of paper have felt my sting).

Oh really?

America's level of gun violence cannot be attributed to urbanization alone as international comparisons show. Singapore has the second highest population density in the world (almost 6,814 people per square kilometer, or about 50% more densely populated than Chicago, Illinois) but has the lowest level of gun violence of all the countries in the table above. Its rate of gun violence is 99 times lower than that of the United States which is 200 times less densely populated. The only way for a civilian to own a firearm in Singapore is to acquire an Arm & Explosives license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence [wikipedia.org]

America's level of gun violence also cannot be blamed solely on the presence of guns, as culture in general plays a huge role. While we - as a country - have a fairly high rate of gun violence, WITHIN the country, areas with higher gun ownership rates, and with concealed carry available, typically has LOWER crime rates than areas of the country with the strictest gun laws. Indeed, virtually every location that has passed concealed carry laws has witness a corresponding drop in crime. Also, countries that have passed strict gun laws, have typically seen a rise in violent crime follow. For instance, England all but completely banned the private ownership of firearms (yes it's still technically possible but it's a mountain or red tape), but gun crime still has managed to nearly DOUBLE in the last decade http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html. Now go to http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/State/StatebyState.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=9212893&CFTOKEN=77729842 and run the violent crime rates for the US from 1961 to 2008. We've been trending downwards ever since a peak in the 1970's. From 1998 to 2008 our violent crime rate has seen a roughly 20% reduction. Our homicide rate is at it's lowest point since 1965. We're buying guns at record rates. You'd think that if guns were the problem we'd be seeing crime rates soar, but that's not the case. Simply comparing our crime rates directly to other countries isn't comparing apples to apples.

If living in the wild west where everyone is armed to the teeth, constantly pulling out their handguns, and in the process, killin each other and anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby, might I recommend taking up residence in Venezuela or Colombia?

Might I recommend that given that guns are a rich part of the history and culture of this country, to the point that the right to possess them is coded into our highest law, that YOU move your butt somewhere else if you don't like it?

I have some personal experience in this area too. I hired the local (county) jail facility to do trash cleanup after a benefit I helped organized. (a mother and father of two were killed by a drunk driver and the surviving children would have been separated and placed in foster care if the only known next of kin- a disabled grandmother on a fixed income- couldn't find a means to support them). Anyways, it costs us close to $12.00 an hour per inmate plus the costs of sheriffs and guards at overtime rates to get about 40 inmates out to a 20 acre plot and dump trash cans, pick up litter, and help deconstruct two of the stages. My understanding is that the inmates only received about $3.50 an hour from the sheriff's department. Thankfully, a 3 local law-firms picked up the tab for that and it didn't come out of the collections.

Interesting. I have never really seen any information on the business side. Lots of information on how poorly the inmates themselves get paid, but I never heard of companies paying into the system at reasonable cost.

Doing a bit more research, I ran into the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program enacted by congress. It's restrictions seem reasonable, as long as oversight is done properly.

However, most everywhere I look keeps stating that it's a VERY low cost option for many companies and I can't find any real cost breakdowns. If you know of a place that would show this kind of info, I'd appreciate it if you'd share. I just keep finding conflicting reports

"Anything that creates a market incentive to lock people up undermines the very purpose of our criminal justice system," says Sheila Bedy, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute

Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law and just waiting for it to be my turn to get caught doing something idiotically illegal.

Western countries are transitioning from a military industrial economy to a jail and criminal justice economy, and that is where corporations and governments make their money on enforcing laws and creating new and tougher laws (copyright, patent, obscenity, drug, think-of-the-children, etc and so on). Ignorance of the law is no excuse so you'd better keep up and have a good attorney ready to help you. If anything feels good or seems intuitively natural to do then there are probably laws against it.

At any given point in time the average person is breaking numerous laws without even knowing it, or on average about three felonies a day. Just be grateful that you haven't been caught yet.

If you are rich and powerful enough you shouldn't have anything to worry about though, because as one United States President once said, "... when the President does it that means that it is not illegal."

Welcome to the New World Order! (same as the Old World Order, but with bigger prisons and more CCTV).

ANSI used to have a policy that they would not accept standards which contained patented components. That changed in the 1980s, I think. (The link to ANSI's patent policy is currently returning the message "Cannot connect to the configuration database. For tips on troubleshooting this error, search for article 823287 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com./")

The legal way to address this is to require that standards bodies, from IEEE to ANSI to MPEG-LA, lose their exemption to antitrust law if they promulgate standards which contain patented components. Without that exemption, when companies get together to agree on a standard, it's conspiracy in restraint of trade.

In general, most of the more annoying patent problems are really antitrust problems. Anyone can get a very narrow patent on a very specific way of doing something. Such a patent is not useful unless the very specific way is a de-facto standard enforced by market dominance. That's an antitrust issue.

The reason MPEG-LA gets away with this is that the Justice Department signed off on it in 1997. That's consistent with the FTC-DOJ 1995 guidelines in this area. Anyone can buy an MPEG-LA license under stated terms. So they meet the guidelines. The guidelines don't address the issue of the interaction of de-facto standards and market power. They should. That's what needs to be revised.

For background, here's a speech by an FTC commissioner of the Clinton era on this issue. He makes the point that antitrust lawyers and patent lawyers don't talk to each other much and don't understand each other's fields. Also see this Justice Department Antitrust Division talk from 2007. If you want to talk intelligently about this issue, you need to read these materials.

Things like this make me sad. Not just because I feel bad for the person, but also because frankly I don't want my taxes spent on keeping this man imprisoned for up to twenty years. Cost of imprisonment is on average 22,650 per year, at 20 years that's $453,000. In my opinion it's not worth that much to keep a man behind bars for guessing a password.

Can you back up your claim or are you just making it up?

The post you are replying to links to some stats that possibly contradict it after all, and you provided no evidence.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm#recidivism also seems to contradict your claims.

It reports that 24% of sex offenders were convicted of a new crime within 3 years, while 48% of non-sex offenders were. So non-sex offenders reoffend more often than sex offenders. And child molesters in particular have a reconviction rate of 20%.

Of course that's for any crime, for sex crimes in particular 3.5% of the child molesters were convicted for a new sex crime (not necessarily aginst a child) - which is the same rate as the generic sex offender category.

Wrong. Recidivism rates are much higher for people who are driven by a desire for money than they are for sexual offenders. Evidence from http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/ascii/rpr94.txt
"Released prisoners with the highest rearrest rates were --

robbers (70.2%)
burglars (74.0%)
larcenists (74.6%)
motor vehicle thieves (78.8%)
possessors/sellers of
stolen property (77.4%)
possessors/sellers of
illegal weapons (70.2%).

What these high-rate offenders have in common is that they were all in prison for what are generally thought of as crimes for money. By contrast, many of those with the lowest rearrest rates -- persons convicted of homicide (40.7%), rapists (46.0%), other sexual assaulters (41.4%), other violent offenders (51.7%), and those convicted of driving under the influence (51.5%) -- were in prison for crimes not generally motivated by desire for material gain."

Sexual offenders and pedophiles are a problem, but attempting to solve it with bad data won't work.

We execute more people than 90% of the countries that practice capital punishment, I would hardly call that " not many ".

Logic and statistics FAIL!!!.

For one thing, that's a totally vacuous statistic, and another, we don't execute that many people.

Only 52 inmates were executed in 2009, but approximately 10,000 murder convictions per year. That's 1/2 of 1%.

All this in a country of 300,000,000.

Why claim a $500 reward when you can exploit and steal more?

Because that is illegal... the idea of this project is to get honest security researchers incentives to find bugs so that the people who would exploit them, cannot.

People keep saying this, but it ain't illegal at all. Show me the law.

Exploiting computers and stealing aren't illegal you say?

Links to a number of laws: http://www.cybercrime.gov/cclaws.html

More sources of reading pleasure:

http://www.cybercrime.gov/cc.html
http://www.ustreas.gov/usss/financial_crimes.shtml#Computer
http://www.fbi.gov/cyberinvest/cyberhome.htm
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/technology/electronic-crime/welcome.htm

And in case the .gov websites aren't legit enough for you, there is always wikipedia ;}
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_crime

Oh, and as for stealing not being illegal, you are wrong there too.

http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/menugetf.cgi?COMMONQUERY=LAWS

Go to that link, scroll down to "PEN" for penal laws and click, then go down to section 155 on Larceny.
(Their site sucks and uses javascript for navigation, so I can't directly link. Bastards :} )

You can look up your own state laws similar (Under penal law, for the crime larceny)

Just to head off the inevitable "But I don't live in the US so everything you said doesn't matter", the answer is "no, it does, you are wrong."
Google is in the US, so is bound by US laws, which is the topic of conversation in this thread.
(Granted, California state laws for theft and not New York, but that was the link I had handy, they are all basically the same except for some minor details, and it was painful enough looking up anything on the NY site as it is :/ )

Not to be contrary - but it doesn't seem to be enough:
"A 2002 study survey showed that among nearly 275,000 prisoners released in 1994, 67.5% were rearrested within 3 years, and 51.8% were back in prison."

Source: Langan, Patrick A.; Levin, David J. (June 2, 2002). "Recidivism of Prisoners Released in 1994" (pdf). Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpr94.pdf

As a rule, I think it is not smart to fuck with armed people who work in jobs where they are much more likely to be killed (however 'rarely') than those of us in 'normal' jobs.

So the crab fishermen of Alaska are certainly allowed to fuck with cops then?

Number of US police officers who died in the line of duty in 2005: 156
Number of US police officers in 2004: 731,903 state and local
Deaths per 100,000: 21.31. This includes all kinds of deaths like having a heart attack on the job

Occupations with higher risks of dying on the job:
Workplace fatalities
Fishermen 147.2 deaths/100,000
Pilots 90.4 deaths/100,000
Timber cutter 84.6 deaths/100,000
Structural metal workers 61.0 deaths/100,000
Waste collectors 40.7 deaths/100,000
Farmers and ranchers 37.2 deaths/100,000
Power-line workers 34.9 deaths/100,000
Miners 34.5 deaths/100,000
Roofers 33.5 deaths/100,000
Truck drivers 27.5 deaths/100,000

The list only shows the top ten professions.

Essentially what you're arguing is, that anyone on that list should be allowed to smack you across the face with one of their work implements while on the job, because they have a dangerous job.

Sure, the police have a dangerous job. Big fucking deal. It's not like they didn't know before they signed up. It's not sprung on you after you've gone through training like some kind of huge secret. Unlike waste collectors - that one surprised me.

It is true that anything can be used as a weapon, but we've had times where guns were pervasive, name Ye Olde West, and it simply wasn't that safe. People carried guns, because the law simply didn't exist there, and even then there was stringent gun laws in some towns, including no pistols allowed.

A recent study that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun. I haven't read the article, and obviously there's some demographics issues that need to determined. For instance, how often do the shooting victims have a history of crime, and so on. (e.g. to control for bad drug deals and the like), so I'll put this up to a "maybe."

But at the same time, I think some criminal I saw on Gangland or something that said, "If I think they have a gun, I'm going to shoot them first, then rob them."

But violent crime is at an all time low, it's just not worth it.

And this is coming from someone that grew up in the boondocks with the county sheriff being at least 30 minutes away. (No. We never owned a gun.)

Texan executions: http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/annual.htm
US executions: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/exetab.htm

They are bordering on 50% of all executions in the US. Seems pretty valid.

As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.

Recidivism among murderers is quite low -- the three year rate is that 1.2% of those who've served time for homicide are arrested for a new homicide. (That's "arrested", not "convicted".)

One study in Finland found that all of the repeat murderers in their sample suffered from either schizophrenia or from severe alcoholism combined with personality disorder. So if you want to know who's most likely to commit murder, it might be that knowing who has severe mental health issues would tell you more than knowing who's been to jail.

And if we knew who has severe mental health issues, maybe we could even, you know, treat them. But I guess that would be socialism or something.

Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal

The only thing that people learn in our current prisons system, is how to be better criminals.

It wasn't always this way. NPR had a great story a few months ago about Folsom prison, once a model institution where almost every man got some job training. The majority of inmates never returned.

But that was "coddling" criminals -- and it went against the interests of the prison-industrial complex. Now Folsom is overcrowded to three times its design capacity, there are only a handful of classes with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long. And 75% of those released will be back within three years.

Ok, I didn't RFA. I'm too upset already...

The judge is trying to change the guidelines: http://www.usdoj.gov/—s&smanual2002.htm

I forget the court case, but I distinctly remember a case where the result was the "reasonable expectation of privacy" was enough to consider your papers to be private. I am not sure it was supreme court or not that did this. Many older cases without computers do apply to computers; yet for some reason we need to rehash resolved issues because of widespread computer ignorance.
My gym locker, car, parking ramp, office desk, etc are now fair game? My papers must reside on my property now?

I remember 5th amendment stuff.. coming from non-computer situations but totally relevant; but this guy decides that email is somehow DIFFERENT than the physical mail services. (BTW, the USPS has gone private which is one reason postage has been constantly going up...) At least if you ENCRYPT email you have supreme court rulings protecting your keys (FISHER v. UNITED STATES) the "Fisher Test."

One could argue that unencrypted insecure access to external systems removes the reasonable expectation of privacy; and therefore makes it publicly accessible in a way, like biometrics which are pubic - in a way. (BTW, biometrics are not private-- don't use them for 'private' keys!) Then you could take stuff like Trash-- if you trash an email, is it private? could they claim digital trash is like physical trash?? (your trash is public once it leaves your property.)

It was well documented in "Undocumented Windows. There's also the Court's Finding of Facts in US v Microsoft, and, if that weren't clear enough, The letter (warning: PDF) from now-former MS Group Manager Dennis Adler submitted as evidence in Comes v Microsoft makes it clear that this behavior did not stop as it was supposed to with the consent decree (although it may have become more innocuous and innocent overall). Quoting from that last: "Why not just document the API's, preface the document with some HONEST history (yes, we did use undoc'd APIs, yes we now have a policy in place of not doing that -- a policy that was not in place previously [...]"

Maybe. Maybe they've stopped now. The fact is that they did do it, they continued to do it even after the consent decree forbade it, and there is no evidence that they've stopped (although there is evidence that it's no longer standard policy).

I have nothing against advancing robotics, whatsoever.

But, many of the problems with the elderly being physically infirm can be treated with steroids. Society has this bizarre view of steroids of being a horrible drug causing anything from cancer to rage to psychotic episodes. The DEA has it listed as a Schedule III drug, which carries a worse fine for possession than Xanax, Rohypnol, Valium and Halcion. Anabolic steroids are on the same DEA classification as LSD. From a legal standpoint, they view as equal what is essentially a drug that increases the rate at which proteins fold to the most powerful hallucinogen known to man.

Give the elderly steroids, and let their doctors monitor them. Keep going with robotics, but steroids are here now.

If you're curious where your drug of choice lands on the DEA schedule, here's a link:

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/scheduling.html

..marijuana really isn't illegal at the federal level

NO, that's wrong. It's a SCHEDULE I drug along with opium, Heroin, LSD and a long list viewable here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/812.htm#c

The complex litany of penalties is viewable here:http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/841.htm#a

There was a Marihuana Tax Act... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937:
Excerpt From Wikipedia
In 1969 in Leary v. United States, part of the Act was ruled to be unconstitutional as a violation of the Fifth Amendment, since a person seeking the tax stamp would have to incriminate him/herself. In response the Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act as Title II of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. The 1937 Act was repealed by the 1970 Act.

..marijuana really isn't illegal at the federal level

NO, that's wrong. It's a SCHEDULE I drug along with opium, Heroin, LSD and a long list viewable here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/812.htm#c

The complex litany of penalties is viewable here:http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/841.htm#a

There was a Marihuana Tax Act... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marihuana_Tax_Act_of_1937:
Excerpt From Wikipedia
In 1969 in Leary v. United States, part of the Act was ruled to be unconstitutional as a violation of the Fifth Amendment, since a person seeking the tax stamp would have to incriminate him/herself. In response the Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act as Title II of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. The 1937 Act was repealed by the 1970 Act.

Nope. Try again.

Copyright cases are usually pursued in civil court because that allows the infringed to seek damages for the infringement. But it is a crime, and can be prosecuted as such. In fact, one can be prosecuted civilly and criminally for infringement.

Section 2319(b) of title 18, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

"(b) Any person who commits an offense under subsection (a) of this section-

"(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, with a retail value of more than $2,500;

"(2) shall be imprisoned not more than 10 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense is a second or subsequent offense under paragraph (1); and

"(3) shall be imprisoned not more than 1 year, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, in any other case."

I'm guessing you went to The Bureau of Justice Stastics site, which indeed says that in 2005, 53% were for violent crimes, 19% were property crimes, and 19% were drug crimes (it also says 8% are "public order" crimes; i.e., bullshit "crimes" like public intoxiction or prostitution).

While it's a relief that half of the prisoners aren't in there for drugs, fully one in five inmates are incarcerated for drugs.

It gives 2008 numbers for how many there are, but 20% of 2,310,984 is 462,197. Half a million Americans are imprisoned for drug crimes. And when they get out of prison, where will they get their money? Nobody wants to hire an ex-con. I would guess that for many of the violent and property offenders, it wasn't their first visit. How many started out getting busted for dope, then couldn't get work and stole to eat?

20% of prisoners, half a million people. It's a huge problem.

Ah yes, the corporate environment with custom coded macros in various MS Office applications, a new version of Office comes out and IT installs on a few systems as a test, old Excel and Access macros stop working, new projects from the test systems fail to work on the older installs, confusion, chaos, and the solution, buy more licenses for the new versions and start recoding all the old macros.

Funny thing is I didn't envision all the built in idiocy in Microsoft's licensing and forced upgrade schemes when I read that quote from Ballmer, to me "We're not saints" was more of a confession that the questionable business methods and outright illegal ones will continue as they are not saints and are in fact the opposite, they are scoundrels.