Tomatoe, tomahto

I'll take you up on that challenge.

The guy who did that is an experienced manufacturer of AK-47 rifles, with access to all the right tools. The AK-47 is not a "precision" firearm to begin with, the fit and finish are pretty loose compared to other rifles, leading to it's legendary reliability.

Is my dog always going to be awake, uninjured and in the same room as me?

Well, there's the difference between Oz and the US. In the US, we have these things called 'rights', which are inherent in every citizen. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are a collection of rules that protect these rights from the government- this is one reason why the 18th Amendment failed so spectacularly. One of these rights says that we get to keep things that go bang. That's why we don't have to justify owning a gun. A citizen shouldn't have to justify anything to his government.

Are other sorts of violent deaths acceptable to you?

Yes, there are societies out in the world where murder is socially accepted. In some cases, it's expected.

These guys stole Bitcoins? As the saying goes, "and nothing of value was lost".

I had a similar problem with my wife's insulin pump manufacturer. The unit is controlled by a wireless PDA. I read everything I could about the unit, but as a penetration tester, I was concerned that their security was not up to standard. I emailed and phoned the company, who flatly refused to disclose the details of their wireless technology or how it was secured. I even offered to sign a non-disclosure agreement. They just said "trust us, it's really complicated stuff". Fast forward a couple of years, and it appears that someone has indeed, broken their layer of obscurity. I've seen papers detailing how it may be possible to send commands to the pump to deliver the entire insulin reservoir. I again contacted the company, one of their managers answered "Who would want to do a thing like that?". I guess he never heard of 'For the Lulz'.

You're watching the wrong kind of porn

It's a Top Gun reference.

Maybe we can have this conversation once you've stopped jumping up and down on your soapbox. Until you stop letting your obvious dislike for our elected officials blind your judgement, you're little more than a troll.

Back when I was playing, I put a lot of thought into suggesting what could be done to fix the problem with the cross-server 5man randoms. A reputation system came to mind, but the problem with this is that the system would get gamed by griefers. Even with perfect play, some people would rate down everyone in the party just for the lulz. In my situation, I was fortunate enough to have most of the asshats coming from a single server. But I realized that any system that relied on player input was going to be ripe for abuse. The extended dungeon cooldown timer for ragequitters didn't do anything to relieve any of the problems either.

None of this is a mitigating factor for his actions. Even if they were experimenting on baby pandas and he disagreed with that, is it this still a valid affirmative defense? No. Feelings for cute baby pandas aside, if they were legally experimenting on these baby pandas, his actions are not defensible. There is NO possible scenario where he can assert an affirmative defense for his actions.

Oh maybe this is actually the Umbrella corporation, and they were making ready to release the T-virus? Yeah, that's the ticket.

Try taking a Criminal Justice 101 class, or any pre-Law class before discussing this topic again, please.

The "what" is the crime. This is the most important part. Let's take a murder since you seem so fond of it.

I've murdered you. This is the crime.

The "why" or motive, is nowhere near as important, and is generally not even considered to be an element of the crime. Nobody argues motive in a burglary, just that the burglary happened. "Why" is usually only important in murder, since we've sliced homicide into types of offenses. Why did I murder you? You posted a silly comment on Slashdot. Is this more important than the fact that I murdered you? No, but it helps dictate what crime I may be guilty of. We can use motive as a mitigating factor. Self-defense springs to mind. I had to kill you before you posted again. I'd probably walk, especially if this was Florida.

So let's look at the crime with the facts we know: Our guy here, using an account and password that he was not authorized to use, accessed a network he was not authorized to access, and proceeded to delete 15 VMWare images.

Please tell me a legally cogent "why" that can be used as a defense for these actions?