Factcheck.org are currently a bunch of progressive shills and liars. Their name is currently an oxymoron. They should be called conflate_and_confuse.shill. You fell into their trap of conflating gun homicides with homicides (GUN HOMICIDES != ALL HOMICIDES). If you get murdered, you don't care what killed you, you are just unhappy because you were murdered. I will say it slowly for all the libtards in the audience. In all of the concealed carry states, when gun ownership/legal carry was made more/available, the TOTAL HOMICIDE RATE AND TOTAL VIOLENT CRIME RATES WENT DOWN, A LOT (25-35% OR MORE). CONCEALED CARRY BY LAW ABIDING CITIZENS DETERS CRIME EFFECTIVELY, USUALLY WITHOUT THE DISCHARGE OF THE FIREARM...
Conversely, when the UK/Ireland/Jamaica/Washington DC/Chicago banned firearms, their murder and/or violent crime rates all spiked up markedly... Progressives, put down your reality distortion field. No one is buying your bullshit anymore. Citizens should be able to concealed carry as spelled out in the constitution for the same reason that police officers carry: firearms are very good at projecting superior force over a distance.
Or cut the violent crime by 70% by executing violent criminals like was done 100 years ago. Murder, attempted murder, violent rape etc should be punishable by death. Rope is cheap, hang em by the neck until dead. No more violent re-offenders. Problem solved.
As an American who grew up shooting (yes, it is a sport), I had my first bb gun when I was 5 and my first rifle when I was 9. I was only allowed to shoot them supervised until my parents were satisfied that I was competent and responsible enough to shoot it safely on my own in both cases.
From what I have seen, the issue with accidental shootings (which by the way is about.1% the number of fatalities from medical mistakes and about 1% of the fatalities from preventable, hospital acquired fatal infections) is this. There are two types of people out there. 99.99% of the 55,000,000 gun owners are extremely responsible and dependable. Around half of households own guns in the US, meaning that about 175 million people have access to firearms. This means that at any given time, there are a few thousand irresponsible gun owners who likely did not grow up with guns and bought one because they thought it would be "cool". Rather than educating and training themselves (this can easily be done through the local gun range, most of which are run by retired LEOs or retired military), they illegally chuck their gun in the closet, sometimes loaded, and forget about it.
They don't teach their kids about guns or show their kids videos of people shooting watermelons or take them to the range and show them how to shoot and what happens to anything that gets shot. So one day their kids find the gun and play with it and someone sometimes gets shot and die (around 600 per year in a country of 360,000,000).
The vast majority of shootings are intentional. The solution is to execute violent criminals who use a gun in the commission of a violent crime. We used to do this, and the repeat offenders were very infrequent and the crime rate was far lower. Now we pay to store these irredeemable scum for 20 years so they can learn how to be better criminals and not get caught and then we turn them loose back into society, and they frequently do worse crimes.
The first of several huge differences here is that riding your bike is an activity that is known and understood by the public. The pedestrian in your example, while you were breaking laws, likely saw you and had a chance to avoid you. Your use of a bicycle has positive impacts on society (improved health, reduced carbon footprint etc.) Also, there are inherent motivators for paying attention while riding a bike in that you yourself are in personal danger from vehicles and other hazards, and you may have been injured in the collision.
The drone operator was operating his drone illegally above people in a reckless manner in direct violation of the law. The people who were injured didn't see the drone coming and had no opportunity to avoid being clobbered in the head by what amounts to a 18" x 18" falling brick. They are lucky they weren't killed. The drone operator was not at risk of being injured when his drone crashed, because there is virtually zero inherent danger in remotely operating a drone once it is in the air.
As you can see, there are unique differences between operating a bicycle and a drone that cause your argument to break down. Drone operators want to practice their hobby and they complain about all the constraint and regulation, but then you have a large segment (20%? go on youtube) of drone hobbyists who operate their flying camcorders/kinetic bombs as complete sociopaths and you wonder why society wants to regulate you. As a non-drone operator, my opinion of drone operation is that anything over around 16oz should be banned everywhere without a 16h or more training license that requires both demonstration of knowledge of the law, good judgement and expertise flying your drone, except at specifically designated areas in parks or other wide open spaces. Any drone flying around in neighborhoods or cities or other populated areas that weighs more than like 8oz should be required to have a fail safe parachute similar to a model rocket, or an airbag. All drones larger than 16oz or so should be required to have a license that is identified by a simple sequence of primary colors and shapes displayed on the drone for easy identification by LEO or concerned citizens. (If I'm close enough to read/record your license with my smartphone, you were probably breaking the law.)
Never EVER us the USPS to ship anything that you are not prepared to lose. They still have the government employee mentality of not giving a shit about the quality of their work. Individual mail carriers might care, but nearly everyone else in the organization doesn't give two shits about getting your package to it's destination. FedEx and UPS exist for a reason. When conducting business, one of these two carriers is always the way to go because they deliver consistently and on time.
The USPS was a great idea 240 years ago and they served their purpose for a long time, but it is high time that we fully privatize them and let them go bankrupt if they can't perform a competent service. Congress at the same time must put in place the same protections for email and other electronic correspondence that exist now for physical mail, since that is now how we communicate.
The thing is, why do you need anonymous calls? Phone calls were never anonymous until the advent of personal VOIP or TTY (I thought TTY used to be set up like 911 where they had to log all calls, not the content, but the incoming number was identified for internal tracking purposes). For the last 80 plus years, law enforcement could at the very least trace your call and get call logs through the phone company with a warrant.
The trust/certificate system that I proposed would not be run by the government, rather by the private sector phone companies and VOIP companies to return integrity to the system. The purpose is that during emergency calls or with a warrant, the government could get access to accurate information.
Even with your proposed anonymous system that is flagged as such, if someone calls in a bomb threat or says they have a hostage, the police must investigate, and in a situation with that kind of potential, they are going to go in on high alert with everything that they need to deal with that situation, because they want to come home alive to their family, just like you want to after your day at the office... so it doesn't really solve anything. As long as phone calls remain the primary method of citizens contacting law enforcement, we need a trusted system, because it is clearly being abused.
"Lets re-visit the numbers that you listed above. 189 black people murdered by whites out of 37.7M is 1 in 199471. 409 white people murdered by blacks out of 197.7M is 1 in 483374. So, by the statistics that YOU provided, a black person is 2.4 times more likely to be murdered by a white person than a white person is to be murdered by a black person. I was not wrong, and he was lying."
Except that is not how statistics or probability work. What you just calculated there is the fraction of the population that was killed (which is what I explained above). 2.4x more blacks than whites were killed across race AS A FRACTION OF THEIR TOTAL POPULATION which is neither relevant nor meaningful nor indicative of probability. It is NOT the same as the likelihood of being murdered by someone of a different race which is what you are asserting... Whoever fed you this line of reasoning was clearly trying to confuse the issue, and apparently they succeeded.
The bottom line is that cross race murders are insignificant on a personal risk level (1/1,000,000 W on B and 1/93,000 B on W), but when looking at trends and societal problems, the statistics do not support your assertion.
Hmm, OK, I guess I see what you were saying now, not that the other guy was wrong, he is 100% right, I crunched the numbers and a white person is statistically like 11X more likely to be shot by a black person (1/93,000) than a black person is to be shot by a white person (1/1,000,000). So you were wrong and he was not lying.
Further, your assertion that "a larger percentage of the total black male population will be shot by a white man than the percentage of the white male population that will be shot by a black man" is meaningless for the purposes of this discussion. Who cares what % of the population was killed? Unless you are in a war of attrition % of the total population killed mean nothing... Blacks killed 408 whites or 0.0002% of the white population, whites killed 189 blacks or 0.00042% of the black population.
If you are fixated on effect on the overall populations, I suggest that you might want to look first at the 2200 blacks murdered by other blacks, which is 0.005% of the population, or 12x more than were killed by whites. But no one looks at the stats that way because all those zeros mean that it is a meaningless statistic to the overall population. Murder has no consequence for the size of either population. Murder has a personal impact on the perpetrator, the victim and their families which is why the statistics that people care about are the actual numbers of murders as well as your chances of being murdered in a year.
... By not removing the ACTUAL DAMN FILE, just a link to it, they failed to comply with the DMCA request, which requires deletion of all files associated with the request, not just links. So no, thanks for playing, but that is not DMCA compliance and I was quite correct in my assertion.
I can see what you are getting at, however, your numbers still don't make sense.
A black person's chances of getting murdered by a fellow black are 2245/45M = 0.005%or 1 in 20,000.
A black persons chance of getting murdered by a white are 189/45M = 0.0004% or 1 in 238,000
2434 blacks are murdered each year. 189/2434 murders are committed by whites, or 7.8% of blacks are murdered by whites. 92% of blacks are murdered by other blacks.
2918 whites are murdered each year. 409/2918 murders are committed by blacks, or 14% of whites are murdered by blacks. 80% of whites are killed by other whites.
Thus if you are white murder victim, you are 1.8x more likely to be killed by a black than a black is to be killed by a white: (14%/7.8%=180%)
You asserted: "From this we see that a black person is about 2.5x more likely to be murdered by a white person than the other way around. That's the opposite of what you said."
Whites killed by blacks/blacks killed by whites = 409/189 = 2.15x more whites killed by blacks that vice versa. You are demonstrably and easily proven wrong. If you are trying to look at statistical chances, we can do that too:
I calculated statistical chances for you in the last post, namely a black person's odds of being murdered by a white person were 1/1,046,032 versus a white persons chance of being murdered by a black are 1/92,176 meaning that a white persons odds of being murdered by a black are ((1/92,176/(1/1,046,032)) = 1134% or roughly 11x more likely, which is even more dramatically opposite to what your assertion is that blacks are more likely to be killed by whites. It doesn't bear out in the raw numbers either: 409 whites killed by blacks vs 189 blacks killed by whites, or the calculated statistics... sorry, you can't get there using proper statistics. I should know, I taught applied statistics for 4 years... Maybe this is where Mark Twain would throw in the damn liars and statisticians, but there is a right way and a wrong way to apply statistics, and you are doing it wrong (at this point I don't even know how you got your 2.5x more blacks killed by whites numbers).
Playing with percentages can get easily confused which is what I suspect happened to you because your math is way off. Percentages are handy for comparison, but can be easily confused or used to conflate facts. Population corrected incidence probability gives you a real world grasp of a populations risk chance to be murdered by any sub group, and how those risks compare to other sub groups.
Using the FBI UCR from 2013:
Out of 197.7M whites, 189 murdered a black person, 2509 murdered a white person Thus, 1/1,046,032 whites was an interracial murderer. A black person statistically has to meet over 1M whites to run into an interracial murderer (whitey is pretty safe these days, apparently). 1/78,800 whites murdered another white.
Out of 37.7M blacks, 409 murdered a white person, 2245 murdered a black person Thus, 1/92,176 blacks was an interracial murderer. A white person has to meet 92K random blacks to statistically meet an interracial murderer. 1/16,792 blacks murdered another black. This number is huge by comparison and very troubling.
Thus, blacks are 1,134% more likely to murder a white person, than vice versa (1M / 92K) and blacks murdered 116% more whites than vice versa in 2013 even though there are 160M fewer blacks than whites. If you are white, your odds of being killed by a white person are still 6x more likely than being killed by a black person if you were to randomly run into equal numbers of whites and blacks. However, blacks account for only 14% of the population, and young black males commit ~90% (~368 black on white) murders in the black community and they are only 12M or ~3.8% of the population. Thus 1/32,608 black men was an interracial murderer. Thus, any random young black man is 240% more likely to murder a white than any random white person is to murder another white person and any random young black man is 20,900% more likely to murder a black person than any random white person is to murder a black person.
The numbers that stand out as troubling should be obvious to anyone willing to look. The black perpetrator murder rate numbers in aggregate and by comparison indicate that there is something wrong in society, and blacks are disproportionately getting murdered by other blacks (2245 dead) far beyond what their risk is from the greater society (189 dead) or other ethnic groups. Recall also that these stats are for a single year, and the number of murderers does not necessarily correlate 1:1 with number of murders, they are cumulative with some overlap for repeat offenders and these numbers do not account for non-fatal shootings, rape and other violent crimes.
The fact that we have BLM going ballistic over what have turned out to be mostly justified police shootings of habitual criminal thugs fighting with police while remaining completely silent on the issue of black on black murder (and black on white murder for that matter) is a testament to the MSM disinformation apparatus.
Playing with percentages can get easily confused and obfuscate the underlying issue. They are handy for comparison, but can be easily misconstrued or used to conflate facts (see my reply to AC above). The best place to go for the raw facts is here: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
From 2013:
Out of 197.7M whites, 189 murdered a black person, 2509 murdered a white person
Out of 37.7M blacks, 409 murdered a white person, 2245 murdered a black person
You might want to brush up on basic math and/or the facts you claim to know so well.
This is common knowledge so I assumed I didn't need to cite it, but here they are:
Fact 1: ~52% of all murders committed in the US between 1980 and 2008 were committed by blacks, the vast majority of these murders were committed by black men 15-40 years old. The percentage holds relatively steady over time.
Fact 2: 93% of black murderer victims are other blacks for the same time span.
You appear to be attempting to conflate any one young black man's chance of committing a murder, which is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion and definitely not the statistic that I cited. I am talking about a problem that society needs to address, not a problem that should concern you in your everyday interactions with people on the street.
The odds of any one person you meet being a murder, averaged across all blacks, based on the stats is around 0.01%. But that is distributed across all blacks. Since ~90% of the homicides are committed by young black men and they are around 12M out of the total population of 46M blacks in the US, the percentage jumps to about 0.04% for black men 15-40 to be a murderer. On an daily interpersonal interaction, out of every 2500 black men you meet in this demographic, one will be a murderer statistically. This may seem small, but compare it with another minority population, the Asian risk rate is 0.0007%, or one young male murderer out of every 143,000 (due to a more even distribution). Whites and Hispanics both have about the same odds at 0.0017% or one out of every 14,700 young men you meet. Crunching the numbers means that a young black man is 5700% more likely to commit a murder than an Asian. Both are minorities without the cultural benefits of being white. Any way you read these statistics, a glaring societal problem is apparent, and the people who are suffering and getting murdered disproportionately are other blacks.
Actually it is illegal for an employer to discriminate in that way and they can face serious sanction if they do.
The more likely scenario these days is someone participating in a pro marriage or pro life march being discriminated against, as multiple CEOs have been targeted and lost their jobs because of their religious beliefs. Either way, it is pointless to march with a mask on. It indicates that you support your cause, just not enough to put your name/identity at stake.
Megaupload was well known all across the web. Pretty much everyone here on slashdot knows what it was. I don't care what Dotcom's lawyers said in court, they were always an illegal file sharing business and probably 95% of their bandwidth was illegal file sharing. That there was one instance where someone was trying to honeypot illegal downloaders using Megaupload does not justify all the rest of megaupload's behavior.
The purpose of rapid entry raids is to prevent the suspect from reacting, either by destroying evidence or going for a weapon. I am glad that NZ is such a great, peaceful place where you never have any dangerous criminals, but that is why it is used, and most of the time it is safer for everyone involved.
I am aware of the facts, you might want to try to get yours other places besides just Kim Dotcom's lawyers...
The question you should ask yourself is why did Shakespeare write his plays? Let me tell you: he wrote them under the sponsorship of a monarch. If you are fine with all of your art being created for a few rich rulers, that was the system we had before copyright... I prefer my art to be created for me and cater to my tastes, which is what copyright allows.
But it can and should be. The record labels traditionally put up tens of thousands of dollars for the recording studio and to launch the music, but with the digital age, you can have a comparable in home studio for a few thousand and digital distribution channels essentially cost you nothing. The record labels are slowly dying and eventually the digital distribution of music will net more money for artists, especially if they would wise up and form a guild like the SAG or some such, where they could force the digital distribution channels to take a reasonable profit and give the rest back to the artist. It would also be useful to get congress to limit the record labels to a statutory duration of ownership of music, such that regardless of what contracts were signed, after a term of 7 years or something from signing any contract that assigns copyright, the record label's claim on the music expires and the rights revert back the artists. This would circumvent abusive contracts while giving the record labels plenty of time to make a profit.
Yes they did. Prior to copyright, creating art cost you huge amounts of money (relatively) and was created exclusively for the rich. Copyright has allowed for the democratization of art, which is a good thing. These days virtually any work is available to the consumer for $10-$25.
Books used to be copied by hand, making the physical work of copying them the added value and the base cost of a book was often multiple times your annual income. If you had a book it was a family Bible passed down through generations. Most authors had to be independently wealthy or be sponsored by the church or state in order to write. Because of this most books were religious or functional in nature. With the advent of the printing press, it was possible to cheaply copy books, and copyright was used to encourage the creation of new works for profit. In the modern age we have literally millions of books created in the last 100 years alone.
Music, plays and artworks all existed before copyright, and were almost exclusively created by artists sponsored by a monarch or extremely rich individual, with the work being hoarded by them and protected by the difficulty involved in producing or copying it. Copyright allowed for the democratization of art, allowing thousands of middle class citizens to each contribute a little to an artist's livelihood and middle class citizen could make a reasonable income as a successful artist.
With the digital age and internet, we are again experiencing a revolution in how much it costs to create music for example, as well as how easy it is to distribute said music. The RIAA and their ilk are a dying vestige from a bygone era, but they neither own copyright nor was it created for them. They served a purpose when it cost tens of thousands of dollars to record and publish music. I think it would be a great idea as a country if we permanently tied copyright (and patents for that mater) to the creators, and let the creators own them for their life or 30 years, whichever is longer, and limited any company to exclusive ownership rights for 7 years maximum, after which time the rights revert back to the creators to redistribute or re-license, but that is a topic for another discussion.
The benefit to the public is the massive amount of copyrighted material available for a tiny fraction of your annual income. That was always to goal of copyright, to make it lucrative such that more people could engage in the creative process, and judging by quantity and quality, the US outputs more music of nearly all genre, more movies, more TV episodes, a ton of new books etc every year than any other country.
The case you cite in Mexico, there are a few things you should know about Mexico. It is basically a lawless state with every official and police officer corrupt and run by the drug cartels. Anyone who was not corrupt was systematically murdered over the last 20 years. US border patrol is ROUTINELY fired at by Mexican nationals who are running drugs and people across the border from the Mexico side. This teenager and 3 male friends attempted to enter the US illegally, they fought with border patrol agents and Sergio managed to break free, resisting arrest and he was shot while fleeing. I find it very telling that the video you link to is clipped together with only a few seconds and only the audio of the gunshot? What happened before that? Oh the Mexican "authorities" didn't make any more publicly available? Gee I wonder why.
I am sorry, I don't have that much sympathy for Sergio. The same thing routinely happens at Mexico's southern border with zero world outrage. Worse things happen to Australian illegal aliens. So yes, the US will not allow a federal agent to be extradited to the incorporated drug cartel of Mexico over a shooting that occurred during the commission of a crime. US police and federal agents are allowed to shoot fleeing suspects when they feel that they are a continued threat to US citizens. This little thug was probably a drug smuggler. The border agent should be reviewed and potentially disciplined depending on the totality of the events as they are available, with zero credence give to any testimony from the suspects Mexican national family or the Mexican "authorities" who are both corrupt and criminal. If the facts warrant, maybe even charge the agent in the US with gross negligence or manslaughter, but certainly not murder, which requires ill intent and malice. The border agent did not initiate the criminal activity or resist arrest, which escalated the incident. $10 says the boy who was shot had a bunch of drugs on him that were removed by Mexican police and returned to the cartel. Or they were acting as a diversion while the cartel ran drugs somewhere nearby.
Regarding Germany, both guards were convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for shooting someone trying to escape a fascist regime, not trying to enter a country illegally and assaulting a federal officer. Those guards were acting under explicit orders from East Germany. And their sentences were suspended, meaning they served zero time. Hardly justice for murdering a truly innocent person. A few decades before that, Germany murdered a few million Jews simply for being Jewish, so they are hardly the gold standard on how to treat people, thank you very much for playing...
And where is the outrage over the several thousand illegal aliens who are being detained by the Australians under conditions so bad that they are setting themselves on fire? Stop hating on America for doing what every other country on the planet does and protecting it's border from unlawful entry. https://www.theguardian.com/au...
The America hating around the world has always bothered me with it's irrationality. It is akin to having a bodyguard protect you for decades, get shot and bleed for you, ask only that you treat them with respect, and they pay you (through imbalanced trade deals or outright foreign aid) for the pleasure... The deal the civilized world has had with the US for 70 plus years has been extraordinary. I guess the asshole attitude towards the US has finally reached the US citizens, because now we have Trump, and he seems fixated on making every country pay its own way for defense and on balancing the trade deals. I guess the saying really is true, you don't appreciate how good you had it until you lose it.
The whole BS about corporate profits is just a canard used by small minds to justify the unjustifiable. US corporate profits are a side effect of accepting people from everywhere into the US and judging based on the worth of their ideas. The US is the largest stabilizing influence in the world. US companies are profitable because we invent and create useful products and services and come up with good ideas. We rightly want to protect those from pirating, just as Australia and every other country does of it's products and ideas. Why should the US be judged on a different basis than your home country when it comes to IP or commercial products?
China is on the other side of the planet from the US (literally). They are just about in your back yard. The Chinese want to become the lone super power and dominate the planet (sorry, that is just the truth). They also believe that they are the master race and everyone else are savages. Does this sound familiar yet, something like Germany and Poland around 1936? http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/...
If we wind up with a global war with China, it will be because it was inevitable due to their above stated goals (which are no secret). If it happens before they are ready to implement all of the military specs and tech they stole from the US over the last 8 years, so much the better for the world. Your complete ignorance and lack of understanding of geopolitics is breathtaking, considering you would probably be in the first wave of those killed or subjugated and sent to work the the Chinese military factories or concentration camps, while your wives and daughters would be taken as prizes by the 25 million surplus Chinese men who can't find a woman in China, to be used as a (sub human in their culture) substitute... The US could probably win in a prolonged war with China while Australia would cease to exist in a few days without US support.
See my post above. In a nut shell, a non citizen resident who lied on his application for residency of NZ violated criminal law and stole millions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials and made millions of dollars from what amounts to the worlds policeman and current superpower/main stabilizing force in the world (the US). When the US told him to stop, he gave the US the finger.
The US could sanction/blockade NZ and destroy their economy for less cost to the US than Dotcom inflicted in copyright infringement. The US could pull back our carrier groups and tell China that it was open season on NZ and the kiwis would all be speaking Mandarin in a week... Obama was a commensurate pussy. I wouldn't put this kind of thing past Trump, even though it might be bad policy long term. The US actively protects many tiny countries like NZ from bad actor states like China. If the US drops it's active protection, very bad things could happen to NZ, with no impact to the US. I suspect that for the next 8 years, poking the big dog in the eye will be a very bad idea.
Actually, the citizens of NZ and AU greatly benefit from good relations with the US. Consider what would happen if the US blocked all trading between the US and those states. What would happen to their economies? How many popular movies, games and software come from the US, not to mention physical goods from US companies? Consider if the US pulled all of our carrier groups back to US assets. What would happen between NZ and AU and China? I hope you can speak Mandarin, with your large amount of desirable real estate (Australia) and tiny population/military (24M people and #23 in military firepower, China and Russia are #2&3 in terms of military and China outnumbers you 58:1, NZ doesn't even make the lists...) Both NZ and AU have a lot to lose pissing of the US over a single citizen who clearly broke laws and committed crimes in the US and basically gave the US the finger when we told him to stop.
Looking at a criminal being extradited to the US who stole and incurred real financial harm in the millions of dollars to a friendly state who provides a massive amount of protection from bad actors like China for many small neighboring countries like AU and NZ as well as providing significant trading benefits is short sighted at best... All the America haters out there, your alternatives are China or Russia depending on where you live. The US has fostered peace, freedom and economic growth for 70 years, both China and Russia have murdered millions of their own citizens in that same time frame (Soviet Russia killed between 15 and 61 million people in that time frame, Communist China killed at least 65 million, and if you think they will treat you better if you side with them over the US, you are sadly mistaken). 5 minutes after the US ceases to be a threat to Chinese world domination, one of the most racist countries on the planet (China) will wipe you out (or enslave you) and resettle some of its population to your cities and towns.
I agree that plea bargaining is problematic, as it also leads to massive overcharging (from what a prosecutor knows that they could reasonably get a conviction on) in order to scare the suspect into pleading guilty rather than facing the potential of life in prison for driving a getaway car or some such.
OTOH, the real world is a lot messier than TV crime shows, and in the real world, unless you have a video tape of the crime being committed or a tape of the suspect confessing to a confidant, or the crime was committed in front of 10 people in broad daylight after the suspect yells "hey look imma commit a crime" our justice system is imperfect based on imperfect knowledge. This is just the nature of reality. If you can get a criminal that you suspect of committing a crime to confess to the crime that you as a prosecutor are confident beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed, then it saves the taxpayer tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum and reduces the burden on the justice system. There are other, better ways to unburden the justice system for the price of a rope noose or a bullet (execute convicted murderers, attempted murderers, violent rapists, child molesters, etc like we used to do, but that is a discussion for another day.)
The bottom line is if you steal from US companies, or facilitate theft, of millions of dollars (it is at least that) in a country with an extradition agreement to the US (or a small country that the US is willing to hurt to get you), prepare to get extradited. I am not sure what the surprise is. On a moral level, Kim knew he was stealing from copyright holders, and making millions doing it. With the advent of the internet, you can commit a crime in a foreign country without physically being there, and if the laws are reasonable or similar to the country you are in, or the country has any conditions mentioned above, it is not a great shock that you will get extradited.
People on Slashdot are constantly pissing and moaning about copyright, and while I agree that copyright duration is too long, this is not even that. Kim Dotcom knowingly and willingly facilitated people downloading newly released movies, software, etc. and ignored requests to take down infringing material (and that is the key difference with YouTube). I know it is not a popular opinion to have on Slashdot, but consider that without copyright we would not be able to have professional actors or musicians or authors among others. The key principles of copyright were violated in this case and we should protect those from violation on the net.
Slashdot Mirror
Factcheck.org are currently a bunch of progressive shills and liars. Their name is currently an oxymoron. They should be called conflate_and_confuse.shill. You fell into their trap of conflating gun homicides with homicides (GUN HOMICIDES != ALL HOMICIDES). If you get murdered, you don't care what killed you, you are just unhappy because you were murdered. I will say it slowly for all the libtards in the audience. In all of the concealed carry states, when gun ownership/legal carry was made more/available, the TOTAL HOMICIDE RATE AND TOTAL VIOLENT CRIME RATES WENT DOWN, A LOT (25-35% OR MORE). CONCEALED CARRY BY LAW ABIDING CITIZENS DETERS CRIME EFFECTIVELY, USUALLY WITHOUT THE DISCHARGE OF THE FIREARM...
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015...
Conversely, when the UK/Ireland/Jamaica/Washington DC/Chicago banned firearms, their murder and/or violent crime rates all spiked up markedly... Progressives, put down your reality distortion field. No one is buying your bullshit anymore. Citizens should be able to concealed carry as spelled out in the constitution for the same reason that police officers carry: firearms are very good at projecting superior force over a distance.
http://crimeresearch.org/2013/...
Or cut the violent crime by 70% by executing violent criminals like was done 100 years ago. Murder, attempted murder, violent rape etc should be punishable by death. Rope is cheap, hang em by the neck until dead. No more violent re-offenders. Problem solved.
As an American who grew up shooting (yes, it is a sport), I had my first bb gun when I was 5 and my first rifle when I was 9. I was only allowed to shoot them supervised until my parents were satisfied that I was competent and responsible enough to shoot it safely on my own in both cases.
From what I have seen, the issue with accidental shootings (which by the way is about .1% the number of fatalities from medical mistakes and about 1% of the fatalities from preventable, hospital acquired fatal infections) is this. There are two types of people out there. 99.99% of the 55,000,000 gun owners are extremely responsible and dependable. Around half of households own guns in the US, meaning that about 175 million people have access to firearms. This means that at any given time, there are a few thousand irresponsible gun owners who likely did not grow up with guns and bought one because they thought it would be "cool". Rather than educating and training themselves (this can easily be done through the local gun range, most of which are run by retired LEOs or retired military), they illegally chuck their gun in the closet, sometimes loaded, and forget about it.
They don't teach their kids about guns or show their kids videos of people shooting watermelons or take them to the range and show them how to shoot and what happens to anything that gets shot. So one day their kids find the gun and play with it and someone sometimes gets shot and die (around 600 per year in a country of 360,000,000).
The vast majority of shootings are intentional. The solution is to execute violent criminals who use a gun in the commission of a violent crime. We used to do this, and the repeat offenders were very infrequent and the crime rate was far lower. Now we pay to store these irredeemable scum for 20 years so they can learn how to be better criminals and not get caught and then we turn them loose back into society, and they frequently do worse crimes.
The first of several huge differences here is that riding your bike is an activity that is known and understood by the public. The pedestrian in your example, while you were breaking laws, likely saw you and had a chance to avoid you. Your use of a bicycle has positive impacts on society (improved health, reduced carbon footprint etc.) Also, there are inherent motivators for paying attention while riding a bike in that you yourself are in personal danger from vehicles and other hazards, and you may have been injured in the collision.
The drone operator was operating his drone illegally above people in a reckless manner in direct violation of the law. The people who were injured didn't see the drone coming and had no opportunity to avoid being clobbered in the head by what amounts to a 18" x 18" falling brick. They are lucky they weren't killed. The drone operator was not at risk of being injured when his drone crashed, because there is virtually zero inherent danger in remotely operating a drone once it is in the air.
As you can see, there are unique differences between operating a bicycle and a drone that cause your argument to break down. Drone operators want to practice their hobby and they complain about all the constraint and regulation, but then you have a large segment (20%? go on youtube) of drone hobbyists who operate their flying camcorders/kinetic bombs as complete sociopaths and you wonder why society wants to regulate you. As a non-drone operator, my opinion of drone operation is that anything over around 16oz should be banned everywhere without a 16h or more training license that requires both demonstration of knowledge of the law, good judgement and expertise flying your drone, except at specifically designated areas in parks or other wide open spaces. Any drone flying around in neighborhoods or cities or other populated areas that weighs more than like 8oz should be required to have a fail safe parachute similar to a model rocket, or an airbag. All drones larger than 16oz or so should be required to have a license that is identified by a simple sequence of primary colors and shapes displayed on the drone for easy identification by LEO or concerned citizens. (If I'm close enough to read/record your license with my smartphone, you were probably breaking the law.)
Never EVER us the USPS to ship anything that you are not prepared to lose. They still have the government employee mentality of not giving a shit about the quality of their work. Individual mail carriers might care, but nearly everyone else in the organization doesn't give two shits about getting your package to it's destination. FedEx and UPS exist for a reason. When conducting business, one of these two carriers is always the way to go because they deliver consistently and on time.
The USPS was a great idea 240 years ago and they served their purpose for a long time, but it is high time that we fully privatize them and let them go bankrupt if they can't perform a competent service. Congress at the same time must put in place the same protections for email and other electronic correspondence that exist now for physical mail, since that is now how we communicate.
The thing is, why do you need anonymous calls? Phone calls were never anonymous until the advent of personal VOIP or TTY (I thought TTY used to be set up like 911 where they had to log all calls, not the content, but the incoming number was identified for internal tracking purposes). For the last 80 plus years, law enforcement could at the very least trace your call and get call logs through the phone company with a warrant.
The trust/certificate system that I proposed would not be run by the government, rather by the private sector phone companies and VOIP companies to return integrity to the system. The purpose is that during emergency calls or with a warrant, the government could get access to accurate information.
Even with your proposed anonymous system that is flagged as such, if someone calls in a bomb threat or says they have a hostage, the police must investigate, and in a situation with that kind of potential, they are going to go in on high alert with everything that they need to deal with that situation, because they want to come home alive to their family, just like you want to after your day at the office... so it doesn't really solve anything. As long as phone calls remain the primary method of citizens contacting law enforcement, we need a trusted system, because it is clearly being abused.
"Lets re-visit the numbers that you listed above. 189 black people murdered by whites out of 37.7M is 1 in 199471. 409 white people murdered by blacks out of 197.7M is 1 in 483374. So, by the statistics that YOU provided, a black person is 2.4 times more likely to be murdered by a white person than a white person is to be murdered by a black person. I was not wrong, and he was lying."
Except that is not how statistics or probability work. What you just calculated there is the fraction of the population that was killed (which is what I explained above). 2.4x more blacks than whites were killed across race AS A FRACTION OF THEIR TOTAL POPULATION which is neither relevant nor meaningful nor indicative of probability. It is NOT the same as the likelihood of being murdered by someone of a different race which is what you are asserting... Whoever fed you this line of reasoning was clearly trying to confuse the issue, and apparently they succeeded.
The bottom line is that cross race murders are insignificant on a personal risk level (1/1,000,000 W on B and 1/93,000 B on W), but when looking at trends and societal problems, the statistics do not support your assertion.
Hmm, OK, I guess I see what you were saying now, not that the other guy was wrong, he is 100% right, I crunched the numbers and a white person is statistically like 11X more likely to be shot by a black person (1/93,000) than a black person is to be shot by a white person (1/1,000,000). So you were wrong and he was not lying.
Further, your assertion that "a larger percentage of the total black male population will be shot by a white man than the percentage of the white male population that will be shot by a black man" is meaningless for the purposes of this discussion. Who cares what % of the population was killed? Unless you are in a war of attrition % of the total population killed mean nothing... Blacks killed 408 whites or 0.0002% of the white population, whites killed 189 blacks or 0.00042% of the black population.
If you are fixated on effect on the overall populations, I suggest that you might want to look first at the 2200 blacks murdered by other blacks, which is 0.005% of the population, or 12x more than were killed by whites. But no one looks at the stats that way because all those zeros mean that it is a meaningless statistic to the overall population. Murder has no consequence for the size of either population. Murder has a personal impact on the perpetrator, the victim and their families which is why the statistics that people care about are the actual numbers of murders as well as your chances of being murdered in a year.
... By not removing the ACTUAL DAMN FILE, just a link to it, they failed to comply with the DMCA request, which requires deletion of all files associated with the request, not just links. So no, thanks for playing, but that is not DMCA compliance and I was quite correct in my assertion.
I can see what you are getting at, however, your numbers still don't make sense.
A black person's chances of getting murdered by a fellow black are 2245/45M = 0.005%or 1 in 20,000.
A black persons chance of getting murdered by a white are 189/45M = 0.0004% or 1 in 238,000
2434 blacks are murdered each year. 189/2434 murders are committed by whites, or 7.8% of blacks are murdered by whites. 92% of blacks are murdered by other blacks.
2918 whites are murdered each year. 409/2918 murders are committed by blacks, or 14% of whites are murdered by blacks. 80% of whites are killed by other whites.
Thus if you are white murder victim, you are 1.8x more likely to be killed by a black than a black is to be killed by a white: (14%/7.8%=180%)
You asserted: "From this we see that a black person is about 2.5x more likely to be murdered by a white person than the other way around. That's the opposite of what you said."
Whites killed by blacks/blacks killed by whites = 409/189 = 2.15x more whites killed by blacks that vice versa. You are demonstrably and easily proven wrong. If you are trying to look at statistical chances, we can do that too:
I calculated statistical chances for you in the last post, namely a black person's odds of being murdered by a white person were 1/1,046,032 versus a white persons chance of being murdered by a black are 1/92,176 meaning that a white persons odds of being murdered by a black are ((1/92,176/(1/1,046,032)) = 1134% or roughly 11x more likely, which is even more dramatically opposite to what your assertion is that blacks are more likely to be killed by whites. It doesn't bear out in the raw numbers either: 409 whites killed by blacks vs 189 blacks killed by whites, or the calculated statistics... sorry, you can't get there using proper statistics. I should know, I taught applied statistics for 4 years... Maybe this is where Mark Twain would throw in the damn liars and statisticians, but there is a right way and a wrong way to apply statistics, and you are doing it wrong (at this point I don't even know how you got your 2.5x more blacks killed by whites numbers).
Playing with percentages can get easily confused which is what I suspect happened to you because your math is way off. Percentages are handy for comparison, but can be easily confused or used to conflate facts. Population corrected incidence probability gives you a real world grasp of a populations risk chance to be murdered by any sub group, and how those risks compare to other sub groups.
Using the FBI UCR from 2013:
Out of 197.7M whites, 189 murdered a black person, 2509 murdered a white person
Thus, 1/1,046,032 whites was an interracial murderer. A black person statistically has to meet over 1M whites to run into an interracial murderer (whitey is pretty safe these days, apparently). 1/78,800 whites murdered another white.
Out of 37.7M blacks, 409 murdered a white person, 2245 murdered a black person
Thus, 1/92,176 blacks was an interracial murderer. A white person has to meet 92K random blacks to statistically meet an interracial murderer. 1/16,792 blacks murdered another black. This number is huge by comparison and very troubling.
Thus, blacks are 1,134% more likely to murder a white person, than vice versa (1M / 92K) and blacks murdered 116% more whites than vice versa in 2013 even though there are 160M fewer blacks than whites. If you are white, your odds of being killed by a white person are still 6x more likely than being killed by a black person if you were to randomly run into equal numbers of whites and blacks. However, blacks account for only 14% of the population, and young black males commit ~90% (~368 black on white) murders in the black community and they are only 12M or ~3.8% of the population. Thus 1/32,608 black men was an interracial murderer. Thus, any random young black man is 240% more likely to murder a white than any random white person is to murder another white person and any random young black man is 20,900% more likely to murder a black person than any random white person is to murder a black person.
The numbers that stand out as troubling should be obvious to anyone willing to look. The black perpetrator murder rate numbers in aggregate and by comparison indicate that there is something wrong in society, and blacks are disproportionately getting murdered by other blacks (2245 dead) far beyond what their risk is from the greater society (189 dead) or other ethnic groups. Recall also that these stats are for a single year, and the number of murderers does not necessarily correlate 1:1 with number of murders, they are cumulative with some overlap for repeat offenders and these numbers do not account for non-fatal shootings, rape and other violent crimes.
The fact that we have BLM going ballistic over what have turned out to be mostly justified police shootings of habitual criminal thugs fighting with police while remaining completely silent on the issue of black on black murder (and black on white murder for that matter) is a testament to the MSM disinformation apparatus.
Playing with percentages can get easily confused and obfuscate the underlying issue. They are handy for comparison, but can be easily misconstrued or used to conflate facts (see my reply to AC above). The best place to go for the raw facts is here: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
From 2013:
Out of 197.7M whites, 189 murdered a black person, 2509 murdered a white person
Out of 37.7M blacks, 409 murdered a white person, 2245 murdered a black person
You might want to brush up on basic math and/or the facts you claim to know so well.
This is common knowledge so I assumed I didn't need to cite it, but here they are:
Fact 1: ~52% of all murders committed in the US between 1980 and 2008 were committed by blacks, the vast majority of these murders were committed by black men 15-40 years old. The percentage holds relatively steady over time.
Fact 2: 93% of black murderer victims are other blacks for the same time span.
Fact 3: Blacks are 14% of the population
http://www.dailywire.com/news/...
Or if you prefer the raw data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
You appear to be attempting to conflate any one young black man's chance of committing a murder, which is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion and definitely not the statistic that I cited. I am talking about a problem that society needs to address, not a problem that should concern you in your everyday interactions with people on the street.
The odds of any one person you meet being a murder, averaged across all blacks, based on the stats is around 0.01%. But that is distributed across all blacks. Since ~90% of the homicides are committed by young black men and they are around 12M out of the total population of 46M blacks in the US, the percentage jumps to about 0.04% for black men 15-40 to be a murderer. On an daily interpersonal interaction, out of every 2500 black men you meet in this demographic, one will be a murderer statistically. This may seem small, but compare it with another minority population, the Asian risk rate is 0.0007%, or one young male murderer out of every 143,000 (due to a more even distribution). Whites and Hispanics both have about the same odds at 0.0017% or one out of every 14,700 young men you meet. Crunching the numbers means that a young black man is 5700% more likely to commit a murder than an Asian. Both are minorities without the cultural benefits of being white. Any way you read these statistics, a glaring societal problem is apparent, and the people who are suffering and getting murdered disproportionately are other blacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually it is illegal for an employer to discriminate in that way and they can face serious sanction if they do.
The more likely scenario these days is someone participating in a pro marriage or pro life march being discriminated against, as multiple CEOs have been targeted and lost their jobs because of their religious beliefs. Either way, it is pointless to march with a mask on. It indicates that you support your cause, just not enough to put your name/identity at stake.
Megaupload was well known all across the web. Pretty much everyone here on slashdot knows what it was. I don't care what Dotcom's lawyers said in court, they were always an illegal file sharing business and probably 95% of their bandwidth was illegal file sharing. That there was one instance where someone was trying to honeypot illegal downloaders using Megaupload does not justify all the rest of megaupload's behavior.
The purpose of rapid entry raids is to prevent the suspect from reacting, either by destroying evidence or going for a weapon. I am glad that NZ is such a great, peaceful place where you never have any dangerous criminals, but that is why it is used, and most of the time it is safer for everyone involved.
I am aware of the facts, you might want to try to get yours other places besides just Kim Dotcom's lawyers...
The question you should ask yourself is why did Shakespeare write his plays? Let me tell you: he wrote them under the sponsorship of a monarch. If you are fine with all of your art being created for a few rich rulers, that was the system we had before copyright... I prefer my art to be created for me and cater to my tastes, which is what copyright allows.
But it can and should be. The record labels traditionally put up tens of thousands of dollars for the recording studio and to launch the music, but with the digital age, you can have a comparable in home studio for a few thousand and digital distribution channels essentially cost you nothing. The record labels are slowly dying and eventually the digital distribution of music will net more money for artists, especially if they would wise up and form a guild like the SAG or some such, where they could force the digital distribution channels to take a reasonable profit and give the rest back to the artist. It would also be useful to get congress to limit the record labels to a statutory duration of ownership of music, such that regardless of what contracts were signed, after a term of 7 years or something from signing any contract that assigns copyright, the record label's claim on the music expires and the rights revert back the artists. This would circumvent abusive contracts while giving the record labels plenty of time to make a profit.
Yes they did. Prior to copyright, creating art cost you huge amounts of money (relatively) and was created exclusively for the rich. Copyright has allowed for the democratization of art, which is a good thing. These days virtually any work is available to the consumer for $10-$25.
Books used to be copied by hand, making the physical work of copying them the added value and the base cost of a book was often multiple times your annual income. If you had a book it was a family Bible passed down through generations. Most authors had to be independently wealthy or be sponsored by the church or state in order to write. Because of this most books were religious or functional in nature. With the advent of the printing press, it was possible to cheaply copy books, and copyright was used to encourage the creation of new works for profit. In the modern age we have literally millions of books created in the last 100 years alone.
Music, plays and artworks all existed before copyright, and were almost exclusively created by artists sponsored by a monarch or extremely rich individual, with the work being hoarded by them and protected by the difficulty involved in producing or copying it. Copyright allowed for the democratization of art, allowing thousands of middle class citizens to each contribute a little to an artist's livelihood and middle class citizen could make a reasonable income as a successful artist.
With the digital age and internet, we are again experiencing a revolution in how much it costs to create music for example, as well as how easy it is to distribute said music. The RIAA and their ilk are a dying vestige from a bygone era, but they neither own copyright nor was it created for them. They served a purpose when it cost tens of thousands of dollars to record and publish music. I think it would be a great idea as a country if we permanently tied copyright (and patents for that mater) to the creators, and let the creators own them for their life or 30 years, whichever is longer, and limited any company to exclusive ownership rights for 7 years maximum, after which time the rights revert back to the creators to redistribute or re-license, but that is a topic for another discussion.
The benefit to the public is the massive amount of copyrighted material available for a tiny fraction of your annual income. That was always to goal of copyright, to make it lucrative such that more people could engage in the creative process, and judging by quantity and quality, the US outputs more music of nearly all genre, more movies, more TV episodes, a ton of new books etc every year than any other country.
The case you cite in Mexico, there are a few things you should know about Mexico. It is basically a lawless state with every official and police officer corrupt and run by the drug cartels. Anyone who was not corrupt was systematically murdered over the last 20 years. US border patrol is ROUTINELY fired at by Mexican nationals who are running drugs and people across the border from the Mexico side. This teenager and 3 male friends attempted to enter the US illegally, they fought with border patrol agents and Sergio managed to break free, resisting arrest and he was shot while fleeing. I find it very telling that the video you link to is clipped together with only a few seconds and only the audio of the gunshot? What happened before that? Oh the Mexican "authorities" didn't make any more publicly available? Gee I wonder why.
I am sorry, I don't have that much sympathy for Sergio. The same thing routinely happens at Mexico's southern border with zero world outrage. Worse things happen to Australian illegal aliens. So yes, the US will not allow a federal agent to be extradited to the incorporated drug cartel of Mexico over a shooting that occurred during the commission of a crime. US police and federal agents are allowed to shoot fleeing suspects when they feel that they are a continued threat to US citizens. This little thug was probably a drug smuggler. The border agent should be reviewed and potentially disciplined depending on the totality of the events as they are available, with zero credence give to any testimony from the suspects Mexican national family or the Mexican "authorities" who are both corrupt and criminal. If the facts warrant, maybe even charge the agent in the US with gross negligence or manslaughter, but certainly not murder, which requires ill intent and malice. The border agent did not initiate the criminal activity or resist arrest, which escalated the incident. $10 says the boy who was shot had a bunch of drugs on him that were removed by Mexican police and returned to the cartel. Or they were acting as a diversion while the cartel ran drugs somewhere nearby.
Regarding Germany, both guards were convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for shooting someone trying to escape a fascist regime, not trying to enter a country illegally and assaulting a federal officer. Those guards were acting under explicit orders from East Germany. And their sentences were suspended, meaning they served zero time. Hardly justice for murdering a truly innocent person. A few decades before that, Germany murdered a few million Jews simply for being Jewish, so they are hardly the gold standard on how to treat people, thank you very much for playing...
And where is the outrage over the several thousand illegal aliens who are being detained by the Australians under conditions so bad that they are setting themselves on fire? Stop hating on America for doing what every other country on the planet does and protecting it's border from unlawful entry. https://www.theguardian.com/au...
The America hating around the world has always bothered me with it's irrationality. It is akin to having a bodyguard protect you for decades, get shot and bleed for you, ask only that you treat them with respect, and they pay you (through imbalanced trade deals or outright foreign aid) for the pleasure... The deal the civilized world has had with the US for 70 plus years has been extraordinary. I guess the asshole attitude towards the US has finally reached the US citizens, because now we have Trump, and he seems fixated on making every country pay its own way for defense and on balancing the trade deals. I guess the saying really is true, you don't appreciate how good you had it until you lose it.
The whole BS about corporate profits is just a canard used by small minds to justify the unjustifiable. US corporate profits are a side effect of accepting people from everywhere into the US and judging based on the worth of their ideas. The US is the largest stabilizing influence in the world. US companies are profitable because we invent and create useful products and services and come up with good ideas. We rightly want to protect those from pirating, just as Australia and every other country does of it's products and ideas. Why should the US be judged on a different basis than your home country when it comes to IP or commercial products?
A few thoughts on a war with the Chinese:
The Chinese outnumber you 58:1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Chinese are #2 in global firepower, Australia is #23 http://www.globalfirepower.com...
China is on the other side of the planet from the US (literally). They are just about in your back yard. The Chinese want to become the lone super power and dominate the planet (sorry, that is just the truth). They also believe that they are the master race and everyone else are savages. Does this sound familiar yet, something like Germany and Poland around 1936? http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/...
If we wind up with a global war with China, it will be because it was inevitable due to their above stated goals (which are no secret). If it happens before they are ready to implement all of the military specs and tech they stole from the US over the last 8 years, so much the better for the world. Your complete ignorance and lack of understanding of geopolitics is breathtaking, considering you would probably be in the first wave of those killed or subjugated and sent to work the the Chinese military factories or concentration camps, while your wives and daughters would be taken as prizes by the 25 million surplus Chinese men who can't find a woman in China, to be used as a (sub human in their culture) substitute... The US could probably win in a prolonged war with China while Australia would cease to exist in a few days without US support.
See my post above. In a nut shell, a non citizen resident who lied on his application for residency of NZ violated criminal law and stole millions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials and made millions of dollars from what amounts to the worlds policeman and current superpower/main stabilizing force in the world (the US). When the US told him to stop, he gave the US the finger.
The US could sanction/blockade NZ and destroy their economy for less cost to the US than Dotcom inflicted in copyright infringement. The US could pull back our carrier groups and tell China that it was open season on NZ and the kiwis would all be speaking Mandarin in a week... Obama was a commensurate pussy. I wouldn't put this kind of thing past Trump, even though it might be bad policy long term. The US actively protects many tiny countries like NZ from bad actor states like China. If the US drops it's active protection, very bad things could happen to NZ, with no impact to the US. I suspect that for the next 8 years, poking the big dog in the eye will be a very bad idea.
Actually, the citizens of NZ and AU greatly benefit from good relations with the US. Consider what would happen if the US blocked all trading between the US and those states. What would happen to their economies? How many popular movies, games and software come from the US, not to mention physical goods from US companies? Consider if the US pulled all of our carrier groups back to US assets. What would happen between NZ and AU and China? I hope you can speak Mandarin, with your large amount of desirable real estate (Australia) and tiny population/military (24M people and #23 in military firepower, China and Russia are #2&3 in terms of military and China outnumbers you 58:1, NZ doesn't even make the lists...) Both NZ and AU have a lot to lose pissing of the US over a single citizen who clearly broke laws and committed crimes in the US and basically gave the US the finger when we told him to stop.
http://www.globalfirepower.com...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Looking at a criminal being extradited to the US who stole and incurred real financial harm in the millions of dollars to a friendly state who provides a massive amount of protection from bad actors like China for many small neighboring countries like AU and NZ as well as providing significant trading benefits is short sighted at best... All the America haters out there, your alternatives are China or Russia depending on where you live. The US has fostered peace, freedom and economic growth for 70 years, both China and Russia have murdered millions of their own citizens in that same time frame (Soviet Russia killed between 15 and 61 million people in that time frame, Communist China killed at least 65 million, and if you think they will treat you better if you side with them over the US, you are sadly mistaken). 5 minutes after the US ceases to be a threat to Chinese world domination, one of the most racist countries on the planet (China) will wipe you out (or enslave you) and resettle some of its population to your cities and towns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/...
I agree that plea bargaining is problematic, as it also leads to massive overcharging (from what a prosecutor knows that they could reasonably get a conviction on) in order to scare the suspect into pleading guilty rather than facing the potential of life in prison for driving a getaway car or some such.
OTOH, the real world is a lot messier than TV crime shows, and in the real world, unless you have a video tape of the crime being committed or a tape of the suspect confessing to a confidant, or the crime was committed in front of 10 people in broad daylight after the suspect yells "hey look imma commit a crime" our justice system is imperfect based on imperfect knowledge. This is just the nature of reality. If you can get a criminal that you suspect of committing a crime to confess to the crime that you as a prosecutor are confident beyond a reasonable doubt that they committed, then it saves the taxpayer tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum and reduces the burden on the justice system. There are other, better ways to unburden the justice system for the price of a rope noose or a bullet (execute convicted murderers, attempted murderers, violent rapists, child molesters, etc like we used to do, but that is a discussion for another day.)
The bottom line is if you steal from US companies, or facilitate theft, of millions of dollars (it is at least that) in a country with an extradition agreement to the US (or a small country that the US is willing to hurt to get you), prepare to get extradited. I am not sure what the surprise is. On a moral level, Kim knew he was stealing from copyright holders, and making millions doing it. With the advent of the internet, you can commit a crime in a foreign country without physically being there, and if the laws are reasonable or similar to the country you are in, or the country has any conditions mentioned above, it is not a great shock that you will get extradited.
People on Slashdot are constantly pissing and moaning about copyright, and while I agree that copyright duration is too long, this is not even that. Kim Dotcom knowingly and willingly facilitated people downloading newly released movies, software, etc. and ignored requests to take down infringing material (and that is the key difference with YouTube). I know it is not a popular opinion to have on Slashdot, but consider that without copyright we would not be able to have professional actors or musicians or authors among others. The key principles of copyright were violated in this case and we should protect those from violation on the net.