If it costs them extra to de-louse everything and do a factory reset on every returned smartphone then that's too bad.
Many devices don't have a true factory reset.
If I install a rooted firmware I can usually survive a so-called factory reset.
If I am a state actor or other highly-funded actor (Mafia?) out to damage a company's reputation and I deliberately replace the guts with look-alike act-alike p0wned hardeare that I know will he re-sold, I "win."
I don't blame Amazon for their actions.
Now, if hardware vendors were required to buy back returned merchandise for refurbishing or parts-recycling (including a true "factory reset), that would help the environment a lot. It might result in slightly higher prices but society will adjust.
Changes of administration bring changes of executive branch policy.
Until this is codified by statute or case law one way or the other OR one "side" concedes to the other politically, businesses and industry should be prepared to have their chains yanked every time the White House changes parties.
Not just with Net Neutrality but by any other issue with an active political tug-of-war. Health care, environmental rules, trade and tariffs, the list goes on.
OK it's a bug if you want "no single person" to control a blockchain, but it's a feature for "captive" blockchains like bank- or governmetn-backed digital tokens.
If the US Federal Reserve wants to issue tokens with a fixed value of, say, 1 United States Dollar, they will want to "control" the blockchain, perhaps only allowing banks and other licensed entities to process transactions.
The same goes for a business that uses transferable tokens as gift certificates - they or their agent will want to control the blockchain associated with those "e-gift certificates."
I miss the days when electronic communications protocols lasted over a century.
STOP - Telegram era over, Western Union says 2/2/2006 2:30:26 PM ET "DENVER - For more than 150 years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand-delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past. "
"ANY suggestion that any user's data was compromised during the events of February is entirely false and therefore libelous."
The fact that the filenames were confusingly similar to Windows filenames is not in dispute.
The fact that this confusion caused the users to believe that their data may have been compromised does not seem to be in dispute.
The fact that the users' data that is held in their brains - that is, what they reasonably believed to be true (i.e. that their computer was compromised when [if the publisher is to be believed] it was was in fact not true) - was compromised does not appear to be in dispute.
So, even if the users' data on their computers was not compromised, the events led them to reasonably believe false things, which may constitute a compromise of the data in the users' wetware.
In other words, even if they are not victims of a computer hack, they are victims of social engineering or perhaps more charitably victims of the publisher's reckless disregard for how a reasonable person would perceive their actions.
I don't know the law in such cases so I am not in a position to recommend anyone sue over this, but it might be worth asking a competent licensed attorney for advice.
What about job ads in college newspapers or other print outlets with a young demographic?
What about radio/TV ads during shows with a young demographic?
Yes, Facebook ads are generally invisible to the non-targeted but that is eay to fix.
The big question is: Is it legal to posts job ads in a way that effectively targets one group at the expense of a protected class, even if members of that class can see the ad if they go out of their way to find it (e.g. reading college newspapers)?
If the supply of cheap energy is not limited or is less than the demand, do nothing and share the joy.
Otherwise:
For residential users, have users sign an affidavit that they are not using more than a token amount of energy for business purposes, or have them provide a good-faith estimate of business use. If the business use is more than say 10% of their total usage, install a separate meter.
Charge residences the "cheap" rate for residential use plus up to 10% over as a "too small to worry about it" allowance.
Appropriate the remaining cheap electricity among all non-residential user and the "over the allowance" business use for residential users. If there is enough cheap electricity for everyone that month, everyone gets a low electricity bill.
If not, then the business and industrial users pay the brunt of the higher-priced electricity that is used by the community.
A simpler but more restrictive approach will be to say "only residential users get to get cheap electricity, and they have to install a separate business meter if their non-residential use is more than a very small amount."
You mean either "free up $X to be spent on something else" or "lower global spending by $X" or some mix of the two.
The spending to prepare for Y2K should never have been necessary, but it kept a lot of people employed.
If we had done time correctly back in the day, either that money would've been freed up for other things or it would not have been spent. If it didn't get spent, the economy would not have been as robust.
OK, I get it, the user interface etc. should be computerized for convenience.
But the part that "holds up in court" should be as close to the raw data as possible, which can and probably should be analog or at the very least a very simple, relatively-easy-to-audit-for-correctness digital system.
This web site describes a breathalyzer which appears to be analog. It also describes an intoxilyzer, which uses a microprocessor. If the electrical pulse being fed into the microprocessor can be captured for later playback in court, then the defense team's experts can interpret it using their own algorithms if they wish.
I expect that either computers and other things people "think of" as general-purpose computers - including tablets and smartphones but not including thermostats and feature phones - will be mostly "OS locked by firmware" in a few years.
They will do this either because x86 will migrate in that direction or because x86 will be supplanted by something else that will or which is already "mostly OS locked."
If you only count ARM-based PCs, smart-phones, and tablets that most people think of as a "general purpose computer" and you don't count PCs, phones, and tablets that are in fact are used as an embedded or special-purpose device, I think more than half of them are, for all practical purposes, "OS-locked" today. If they aren't technically OS-locked, it's very hard to get a different OS installed.
So, if you are using that Pi as a general purpose computer, yes, it counts toward the total, but I think it's in the "less than 50% which are not OS-locked" group. If you are using it as an embedded system or other special-purpose device, it's excluded from the count.
Just for reference, I think over a billion smart-phones were sold to end users in 2016. Almost all of them used ARM. Let's assume at least half of them were used for things other than the 3 very popular "special purpose tasks" of 1) making and receiving phone calls 2) surfing the web with the default web browser and 3) taking pictures or making movies with the default camera app (I picked 3 because if you have more than 3 very different, independent "special purpose tasks" then you've clearly crossed the line into "general purpose"). That's still half a billion ARM devices. Almost all of those either had a locked bootloader or a hard-to-bypass bootloader.
Raspberry Pi sales were under 15 million total during its first 5 years of life. It's not quite statistical noise but it's close.
I think most x86 machines are still sold with firmware that lets you erase the drive and install another OS.
I expect that to drop below 50% within a few years though. Either that, or x86 market will be supplanted by ARM or something else that is effectively OS-locked by the firmware.
It is true that most new x86 pcs have Windows 10 pre-installed and pre-paid-for.
1. First, the data is encrypted. 2. Every other bit/byte/sector goes to tape A, the other bit/byte/sectors go to tape B. 3. Store tape "A" separate from tape "B". 4. When transporting them, transport them separately.
A more redundant version would split the data into 3 groups, every third bit/byte/sector being in group A, B, or C respectively. For redundancy, the backup tapes would be "AB," "BC," and "CA" so that any two backup tapes could be used to recover the data, but having only 1 tape would be useless. Yes, this takes twice as much space on each tape and at least 50% more tapes, but you get some redundancy out of it. Of course you would still need the decryption key to decrypt it.
Here's an example of the 3-tape version:
Data:
Hello and goodbye.
Encrypted data (this is just gibberish for the sake of example):
EEdFJ3rQ]K;]bE0_y Padded encrypted data so it is a multiple of 3 characters in length: EEdFJ3rQ]K;]bE0_y[fill value]
2) If your backups are being sent off-site for destruction, do a preliminary bulk-erase before they are sent off-site so if they are stolen en route it will be harder to recover the hopefully-encrypted data. "Harder" means a normal tape drive will have a very high error rate reading the data, but someone with forensic tools might be able to recover it.
I don't know about you, but I profile becase I'm lazy or pressed for time. It's unfair to those I profile for obvious reasons, but it is expedient. It's unfair to me because the false-positive and false-negative results of assuming "it fits the profile" is a proxy for whatever it is I'm really trying to measure are both non-zero.
When I have the luxury of time, I have a duty to myself and other to skip the profiling.
When time is of the essence, such as when a sportscar is approaching me very fast and weaving in and out of traffic, and I profile the driver as an idiot who doesn't know how to drive safely or doesn't care because I don't have time to find out if he actually does have the skills to weave in and out of traffic at high speeds, assume the worst and get the [bleep] out of his way. Why? I'm probably right, and if I am wrong, I'm not hurting him and it's worth the inconvenience on my part.
Another funny thing: as Jim Crow laws were repealed, as affirmative action was enabled, as "racism" became synonymous with "pure evil", well during this time, black crime has steadily INCREASED. Really puts the lie to the whole "because we have been oppressed" idea.
Things are a lot more complicated than that. If your grandparents were oppressed, your parents probably didn't have the opportunities their non-oppressed peers had. If they didn't have those opportunities, then your socio-economic status is probably lower. To the extent that certain crimes are correlated with low socio-economic status, people whose grandparents were oppressed will be over-represented in statistics for those crimes.
There is also biology at work: If your grandparents were of a low socio-economic class, whether due to racial oppression or other reasons, your parents are more likely to have low nutrition and epigenic factors that impair their ability to succeed in life compared to their peers. This means they are more likely to be in a lower socio-economic class. If they are in a lower socio-economic class, odds are you will be too. These biological factors are independent of race - they are a fuction of the value your parents and their parents placed on good nutrition and good health, the ability of them to afford nutritious food and live a healthy lifestyle, and exposure to physical stress such as pollution and psychological stress such as worrying about bills. These aren't the only factors of course. If your parents or their parents placed a high value on education and instilled those values on your parents or you, the odds of you becoming successful are higher than if they were not. This is one reason Asian immigrants tend to do better than immigrants from other countries or poor families from other ethnicites: The parents of the immigrants valued education and passed those values on to the immigrants, who passed them on to their children.
First, I don't know what "total investigated" crimes mean, but according to the 2015 FBI crime stat, "Black or African American" represented 26.5% of total arrests. This includes women as well. Granted, that may be twice their representation in the population but it's nowhere near "a vast majority" of crimes. However, at least some of this disparity can be explained away comparing crime rates within socio-economic classes: If a socio-economic class that is heavily African-American also has a high crime rate and within that socio-economic class African-Americans commit crimes at the same rate as non-African-Americans, then your logic falls apart completely.
Looking just at the individual crimes you listed: robberies - 53.5%, a slim majority rapes - 28.2% assaults - data not in chart, but "other assaults" are 30.8% aggravated assaults - 32.1% murders - 51% - a slim majority drug crimes - not listed in chart, as just about any crime might be drug-related. Drug abuse violations - 27.0%, Driving under the influence (including alcohol) - 13.2% (right in line with the population)
Totalling just the measurable numbers above and leaving out drug crimes:
robberies - 39,052 of 73,023 rapes - 4,907 of 17,370 assaults - data not in chart, but "other assaults" are 254,600 of 826,920 aggravated assaults - 92,237 of 287,566 murders - includes non-negligent manslaughter 4,347 of 8,508 Total of these groups: 395143 of 1213387, or 32.5%, only slightly higher than the "other assaults" percentage, which is to be expected as that dominates this group.
Yes, 32.5% is much greater than the their overall arrest rate, and it's over 2 1/2 times their percentage of the population, which was at least 17.6% in 2015 (some Hispanics and pepole of two or more races may be African-American as well). However, much of the difference in crime rate in the United States is better attributed to socio-economic factors than anything else. To the extent that anything can be attributed to race, I strongly suspect that much of it is the legacy of "Jim Crow" and the racism of the past. I also suspect that some of it is a result of present-day racism, which, while not as prevalant as 50 years ago, still exists and still generates "defensive responses" - which in some cases may be criminal - in its victims.
The bottom line:
While your statement "those who care for their safety and the safety of their families have two choices" might actually be true if we lived in a community which matched your mistaken statistics, we don't live in such a country.
If you are going to appeal to racism on a technical forum, at least give your readers the courtesy of using statistics that are at least close to accurate. At least you did get the "7% of the population are Black males" right if you don't count Hispanics and those of more than one race, and assuming you meant the United States and not the entire world. Thank you for that much.
Oh, by the way, White people make up 82.6% of people arrested for driving under the influence, but they are 61% of the population (possibly up to 78% if all Hispanics and mult-racial people were also White).
I was unable to find a race/ethnic breakdown of licensed drivers or driving patterns of miles driven. It is possible that the high rate of White DUI arrests correspond to Whites having a higher-than-expected number of license drivers or miles driven that their percent of the population would suggest.
Replying to my own post before others say "parents:"
Parents committing fraud will be very difficult to detect until the child/victim discovers it on his own.
How can a bank tell the difference between a kid opening a credit card at his parent's urging so he can build up a credit history, and a parent opening the same account for fraudulent purposes? It is difficult or impossible without a personal interview, which isn't something most banks are going to do for your average consumer account.
But as for other perpetrators - banks should be diligent about authenticating the child-applicant as well as the parent/legal guardians who are signing the documents and about authenticating that they really are the parents or legal guardians.
Banks and others are being negligent when they offer loans and other contracts to people they know are minors.
The first thing they should be asking for is proof of emancipation or a parent or guardian's signature.
Second, because of the amount of fraud involved, they need to do some "due diligence" in verifying the emancipation order is legit or verifying the purported parent's signatures are legit.
Here's hoping a "pro-net-neutrality" ISP "screws its customers" for an hour by, say, randomly inserting pro-NN ads or slowing NetFlix to a crawl for 10 seconds every 5 minutes "because they can."
Of course, to work well they will need to alert their customers ahead of time and get buy-in from them.
I meant "neither" not "both" - that's what happens when you edit your post several times and don't rewrite the title.
Obviously, I don't want "Big Brother" nor do I want to live in an unsafe society. I want a society that is safe because relatively few people are motivated to hurt others, not because "Big Brother" is stopping crime before it happens.
If truly-unbreakable encryption is the norm, you really do make it a lot easier on terrorists and criminals. On the "pro freedom" side it also allows anonymous communications that a hostile government doesn't like to exist. Anyone who doesn't see these things is blind, ignorant, or a fool.
On the flip side, lack of truly-unbreakable encryption being the norm makes it easier to disrupt communications between terrorists and criminals. It also makes it all too easy for a government to turn evil quickly, assuming for the sake of argument that it's not already evil. Anyone who doesn't see these things is also blind, ignorant, or a fool.
So how can we have both a society that has truly free speech where encryption is the norm but also a society where crime, terrorism, and the like are not huge problems?
I recommend encouraging the use of routine, unbreakable encryption, while teaching our kids to respect each other and setting a good example as a nation by respecting other nations - that is, taking into account whether our actions as a nation will make countries or their citizens/residents see America.
In a couple of generations, we can be a country where kids and young adults know and value respect and where the rest of the world doesn't see us as a selfish country/bully that "needs to be given a bloody nose from time to time" or worse, and at the same time a country that not only says we value freedom of speech, but a country in which all private speech really is "private by default" and no court order can decrypt it in transit or in storage, because it will be technically impossible to do so.
---
As an aside, we are now realizing that so-called "unbreakable" encryption on smart-phones isn't really unbreakable. This can and should be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
If it costs them extra to de-louse everything and do a factory reset on every returned smartphone then that's too bad.
Many devices don't have a true factory reset.
If I install a rooted firmware I can usually survive a so-called factory reset.
If I am a state actor or other highly-funded actor (Mafia?) out to damage a company's reputation and I deliberately replace the guts with look-alike act-alike p0wned hardeare that I know will he re-sold, I "win."
I don't blame Amazon for their actions.
Now, if hardware vendors were required to buy back returned merchandise for refurbishing or parts-recycling (including a true "factory reset), that would help the environment a lot. It might result in slightly higher prices but society will adjust.
Changes of administration bring changes of executive branch policy.
Until this is codified by statute or case law one way or the other OR one "side" concedes to the other politically, businesses and industry should be prepared to have their chains yanked every time the White House changes parties.
Not just with Net Neutrality but by any other issue with an active political tug-of-war. Health care, environmental rules, trade and tariffs, the list goes on.
OK it's a bug if you want "no single person" to control a blockchain, but it's a feature for "captive" blockchains like bank- or governmetn-backed digital tokens.
If the US Federal Reserve wants to issue tokens with a fixed value of, say, 1 United States Dollar, they will want to "control" the blockchain, perhaps only allowing banks and other licensed entities to process transactions.
The same goes for a business that uses transferable tokens as gift certificates - they or their agent will want to control the blockchain associated with those "e-gift certificates."
I miss the days when electronic communications protocols lasted over a century.
STOP - Telegram era over, Western Union says 2/2/2006 2:30:26 PM ET
"DENVER - For more than 150 years, messages of joy, sorrow and success came in signature yellow envelopes hand-delivered by a courier. Now the Western Union telegram is officially a thing of the past. "
"ANY suggestion that any user's data was compromised during the events of February is entirely false and therefore libelous."
The fact that the filenames were confusingly similar to Windows filenames is not in dispute.
The fact that this confusion caused the users to believe that their data may have been compromised does not seem to be in dispute.
The fact that the users' data that is held in their brains - that is, what they reasonably believed to be true (i.e. that their computer was compromised when [if the publisher is to be believed] it was was in fact not true) - was compromised does not appear to be in dispute.
So, even if the users' data on their computers was not compromised, the events led them to reasonably believe false things, which may constitute a compromise of the data in the users' wetware.
In other words, even if they are not victims of a computer hack, they are victims of social engineering or perhaps more charitably victims of the publisher's reckless disregard for how a reasonable person would perceive their actions.
I don't know the law in such cases so I am not in a position to recommend anyone sue over this, but it might be worth asking a competent licensed attorney for advice.
What about job ads in college newspapers or other print outlets with a young demographic?
What about radio/TV ads during shows with a young demographic?
Yes, Facebook ads are generally invisible to the non-targeted but that is eay to fix.
The big question is: Is it legal to posts job ads in a way that effectively targets one group at the expense of a protected class, even if members of that class can see the ad if they go out of their way to find it (e.g. reading college newspapers)?
If the supply of cheap energy is not limited or is less than the demand, do nothing and share the joy.
Otherwise:
For residential users, have users sign an affidavit that they are not using more than a token amount of energy for business purposes, or have them provide a good-faith estimate of business use. If the business use is more than say 10% of their total usage, install a separate meter.
Charge residences the "cheap" rate for residential use plus up to 10% over as a "too small to worry about it" allowance.
Appropriate the remaining cheap electricity among all non-residential user and the "over the allowance" business use for residential users. If there is enough cheap electricity for everyone that month, everyone gets a low electricity bill.
If not, then the business and industrial users pay the brunt of the higher-priced electricity that is used by the community.
A simpler but more restrictive approach will be to say "only residential users get to get cheap electricity, and they have to install a separate business meter if their non-residential use is more than a very small amount."
You mean either "free up $X to be spent on something else" or "lower global spending by $X" or some mix of the two.
The spending to prepare for Y2K should never have been necessary, but it kept a lot of people employed.
If we had done time correctly back in the day, either that money would've been freed up for other things or it would not have been spent. If it didn't get spent, the economy would not have been as robust.
Suicide Linux - is that the add-on that auto-corrects all mispellings to
rm -rf / ; echo LOL
OK, I get it, the user interface etc. should be computerized for convenience.
But the part that "holds up in court" should be as close to the raw data as possible, which can and probably should be analog or at the very least a very simple, relatively-easy-to-audit-for-correctness digital system.
This web site describes a breathalyzer which appears to be analog. It also describes an intoxilyzer, which uses a microprocessor. If the electrical pulse being fed into the microprocessor can be captured for later playback in court, then the defense team's experts can interpret it using their own algorithms if they wish.
I should have clarified:
I expect that either computers and other things people "think of" as general-purpose computers - including tablets and smartphones but not including thermostats and feature phones - will be mostly "OS locked by firmware" in a few years.
They will do this either because x86 will migrate in that direction or because x86 will be supplanted by something else that will or which is already "mostly OS locked."
If you only count ARM-based PCs, smart-phones, and tablets that most people think of as a "general purpose computer" and you don't count PCs, phones, and tablets that are in fact are used as an embedded or special-purpose device, I think more than half of them are, for all practical purposes, "OS-locked" today. If they aren't technically OS-locked, it's very hard to get a different OS installed.
So, if you are using that Pi as a general purpose computer, yes, it counts toward the total, but I think it's in the "less than 50% which are not OS-locked" group. If you are using it as an embedded system or other special-purpose device, it's excluded from the count.
Just for reference, I think over a billion smart-phones were sold to end users in 2016. Almost all of them used ARM. Let's assume at least half of them were used for things other than the 3 very popular "special purpose tasks" of 1) making and receiving phone calls 2) surfing the web with the default web browser and 3) taking pictures or making movies with the default camera app (I picked 3 because if you have more than 3 very different, independent "special purpose tasks" then you've clearly crossed the line into "general purpose"). That's still half a billion ARM devices. Almost all of those either had a locked bootloader or a hard-to-bypass bootloader.
Raspberry Pi sales were under 15 million total during its first 5 years of life. It's not quite statistical noise but it's close.
Title summarizes parent post.
I think most x86 machines are still sold with firmware that lets you erase the drive and install another OS.
I expect that to drop below 50% within a few years though. Either that, or x86 market will be supplanted by ARM or something else that is effectively OS-locked by the firmware.
It is true that most new x86 pcs have Windows 10 pre-installed and pre-paid-for.
Maybe it's time to go to "split" backups:
1. First, the data is encrypted.
2. Every other bit/byte/sector goes to tape A, the other bit/byte/sectors go to tape B.
3. Store tape "A" separate from tape "B".
4. When transporting them, transport them separately.
A more redundant version would split the data into 3 groups, every third bit/byte/sector being in group A, B, or C respectively. For redundancy, the backup tapes would be "AB," "BC," and "CA" so that any two backup tapes could be used to recover the data, but having only 1 tape would be useless. Yes, this takes twice as much space on each tape and at least 50% more tapes, but you get some redundancy out of it. Of course you would still need the decryption key to decrypt it.
Here's an example of the 3-tape version:
Data:
Hello and goodbye.
Encrypted data (this is just gibberish for the sake of example):
EEdFJ3rQ]K;]bE0_y
Padded encrypted data so it is a multiple of 3 characters in length:
EEdFJ3rQ]K;]bE0_y[fill value]
ABC splitting by character:
A: EFrKb_
B: EJQ;Ey
C: d3]]0[fill value]
Tape AB: EEFJrQK;bE_y
Tape BC: EdJ3Q];]E0y[fill value]
Tape CA: C: dE3F]r]k0b[fill value]_
1) Encrypt your backups
2) If your backups are being sent off-site for destruction, do a preliminary bulk-erase before they are sent off-site so if they are stolen en route it will be harder to recover the hopefully-encrypted data. "Harder" means a normal tape drive will have a very high error rate reading the data, but someone with forensic tools might be able to recover it.
It focuses on profiling and why it happens.
I don't know about you, but I profile becase I'm lazy or pressed for time. It's unfair to those I profile for obvious reasons, but it is expedient. It's unfair to me because the false-positive and false-negative results of assuming "it fits the profile" is a proxy for whatever it is I'm really trying to measure are both non-zero.
When I have the luxury of time, I have a duty to myself and other to skip the profiling.
When time is of the essence, such as when a sportscar is approaching me very fast and weaving in and out of traffic, and I profile the driver as an idiot who doesn't know how to drive safely or doesn't care because I don't have time to find out if he actually does have the skills to weave in and out of traffic at high speeds, assume the worst and get the [bleep] out of his way. Why? I'm probably right, and if I am wrong, I'm not hurting him and it's worth the inconvenience on my part.
Another funny thing: as Jim Crow laws were repealed, as affirmative action was enabled, as "racism" became synonymous with "pure evil", well during this time, black crime has steadily INCREASED. Really puts the lie to the whole "because we have been oppressed" idea.
Things are a lot more complicated than that. If your grandparents were oppressed, your parents probably didn't have the opportunities their non-oppressed peers had. If they didn't have those opportunities, then your socio-economic status is probably lower. To the extent that certain crimes are correlated with low socio-economic status, people whose grandparents were oppressed will be over-represented in statistics for those crimes.
There is also biology at work: If your grandparents were of a low socio-economic class, whether due to racial oppression or other reasons, your parents are more likely to have low nutrition and epigenic factors that impair their ability to succeed in life compared to their peers. This means they are more likely to be in a lower socio-economic class. If they are in a lower socio-economic class, odds are you will be too. These biological factors are independent of race - they are a fuction of the value your parents and their parents placed on good nutrition and good health, the ability of them to afford nutritious food and live a healthy lifestyle, and exposure to physical stress such as pollution and psychological stress such as worrying about bills. These aren't the only factors of course. If your parents or their parents placed a high value on education and instilled those values on your parents or you, the odds of you becoming successful are higher than if they were not. This is one reason Asian immigrants tend to do better than immigrants from other countries or poor families from other ethnicites: The parents of the immigrants valued education and passed those values on to the immigrants, who passed them on to their children.
First, I don't know what "total investigated" crimes mean, but according to the 2015 FBI crime stat, "Black or African American" represented 26.5% of total arrests. This includes women as well. Granted, that may be twice their representation in the population but it's nowhere near "a vast majority" of crimes. However, at least some of this disparity can be explained away comparing crime rates within socio-economic classes: If a socio-economic class that is heavily African-American also has a high crime rate and within that socio-economic class African-Americans commit crimes at the same rate as non-African-Americans, then your logic falls apart completely.
Looking just at the individual crimes you listed:
robberies - 53.5%, a slim majority
rapes - 28.2%
assaults - data not in chart, but "other assaults" are 30.8%
aggravated assaults - 32.1%
murders - 51% - a slim majority
drug crimes - not listed in chart, as just about any crime might be drug-related. Drug abuse violations - 27.0%, Driving under the influence (including alcohol) - 13.2% (right in line with the population)
Totalling just the measurable numbers above and leaving out drug crimes:
robberies - 39,052 of 73,023
rapes - 4,907 of 17,370
assaults - data not in chart, but "other assaults" are 254,600 of 826,920
aggravated assaults - 92,237 of 287,566
murders - includes non-negligent manslaughter 4,347 of 8,508
Total of these groups: 395143 of 1213387, or 32.5%, only slightly higher than the "other assaults" percentage, which is to be expected as that dominates this group.
Yes, 32.5% is much greater than the their overall arrest rate, and it's over 2 1/2 times their percentage of the population, which was at least 17.6% in 2015 (some Hispanics and pepole of two or more races may be African-American as well). However, much of the difference in crime rate in the United States is better attributed to socio-economic factors than anything else. To the extent that anything can be attributed to race, I strongly suspect that much of it is the legacy of "Jim Crow" and the racism of the past. I also suspect that some of it is a result of present-day racism, which, while not as prevalant as 50 years ago, still exists and still generates "defensive responses" - which in some cases may be criminal - in its victims.
The bottom line:
While your statement "those who care for their safety and the safety of their families have two choices" might actually be true if we lived in a community which matched your mistaken statistics, we don't live in such a country.
If you are going to appeal to racism on a technical forum, at least give your readers the courtesy of using statistics that are at least close to accurate. At least you did get the "7% of the population are Black males" right if you don't count Hispanics and those of more than one race, and assuming you meant the United States and not the entire world. Thank you for that much.
Oh, by the way, White people make up 82.6% of people arrested for driving under the influence, but they are 61% of the population (possibly up to 78% if all Hispanics and mult-racial people were also White).
2015 crime figures are from
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t...
2015 population figures are from https://www.statista.com/stati...
I was unable to find a race/ethnic breakdown of licensed drivers or driving patterns of miles driven. It is possible that the high rate of White DUI arrests correspond to Whites having a higher-than-expected number of license drivers or miles driven that their percent of the population would suggest.
Replying to my own post before others say "parents:"
Parents committing fraud will be very difficult to detect until the child/victim discovers it on his own.
How can a bank tell the difference between a kid opening a credit card at his parent's urging so he can build up a credit history, and a parent opening the same account for fraudulent purposes? It is difficult or impossible without a personal interview, which isn't something most banks are going to do for your average consumer account.
But as for other perpetrators - banks should be diligent about authenticating the child-applicant as well as the parent/legal guardians who are signing the documents and about authenticating that they really are the parents or legal guardians.
Banks and others are being negligent when they offer loans and other contracts to people they know are minors.
The first thing they should be asking for is proof of emancipation or a parent or guardian's signature.
Second, because of the amount of fraud involved, they need to do some "due diligence" in verifying the emancipation order is legit or verifying the purported parent's signatures are legit.
Here's hoping a "pro-net-neutrality" ISP "screws its customers" for an hour by, say, randomly inserting pro-NN ads or slowing NetFlix to a crawl for 10 seconds every 5 minutes "because they can."
Of course, to work well they will need to alert their customers ahead of time and get buy-in from them.
Rod Sterling saw this in a different form half a century ago.
lack of truly-unbreakable encryption being the norm makes it easier to disrupt communications between terrorists and criminals.
Does it, though?
It makes those who use unbreakable encryption - especially in transit - easier to spot and disrupt. See: Great Firewall of China.
I meant "neither" not "both" - that's what happens when you edit your post several times and don't rewrite the title.
Obviously, I don't want "Big Brother" nor do I want to live in an unsafe society. I want a society that is safe because relatively few people are motivated to hurt others, not because "Big Brother" is stopping crime before it happens.
If truly-unbreakable encryption is the norm, you really do make it a lot easier on terrorists and criminals. On the "pro freedom" side it also allows anonymous communications that a hostile government doesn't like to exist. Anyone who doesn't see these things is blind, ignorant, or a fool.
On the flip side, lack of truly-unbreakable encryption being the norm makes it easier to disrupt communications between terrorists and criminals. It also makes it all too easy for a government to turn evil quickly, assuming for the sake of argument that it's not already evil. Anyone who doesn't see these things is also blind, ignorant, or a fool.
So how can we have both a society that has truly free speech where encryption is the norm but also a society where crime, terrorism, and the like are not huge problems?
I recommend encouraging the use of routine, unbreakable encryption, while teaching our kids to respect each other and setting a good example as a nation by respecting other nations - that is, taking into account whether our actions as a nation will make countries or their citizens/residents see America.
In a couple of generations, we can be a country where kids and young adults know and value respect and where the rest of the world doesn't see us as a selfish country/bully that "needs to be given a bloody nose from time to time" or worse, and at the same time a country that not only says we value freedom of speech, but a country in which all private speech really is "private by default" and no court order can decrypt it in transit or in storage, because it will be technically impossible to do so.
---
As an aside, we are now realizing that so-called "unbreakable" encryption on smart-phones isn't really unbreakable. This can and should be fixed.