Everyone already has the right to a trial; plea bargains do not take that right away.

Punishing someone for exercising a right IS taking that right away. The government here is deliberately increasing the cost of exercising your right to a trial in order to discourage you from doing so. I don't know how that could be more clear.

You might as well say "everyone has the right to free speech if he purchases a $100,000 free speech license for 24 hours". Yes, in some sense it's true that everyone still has that right. But what good is a right you cannot exercise?

You're confusing "fellow citizens" with "accomplices" here.

Until they are proven guilty, they are merely "fellow citizens". If you were a criminal scumbag and you thought you could get off easy by incriminating your upstanding neighbor, why wouldn't you?

There's nothing wrong with getting a robbery suspect to turn on his accomplices

There is something wrong with encouraging neighbors to spy on neighbors.

And why would that be a bad thing? We already have the biggest prison population in the world. Perhaps our injustice system needs to work a little less efficiently?

Hell, with all the money it takes to keep people incarcerated, we would probably save money by giving everyone a trial and incarcerating fewer people. There's a big "peace dividend" in it for all of us when we stop waging war on our own citizens.

Plea bargaining was created as i understand it so that it could alleviate some pressure from the court system

If you want to reduce pressure on the court system, reduce the number of offences, or reduce the incentives people have to commit offences. Both solutions will lead to a healthier society than allowing the powerful to bully common people into prison sentences they don't deserve. Punishing people for exercising their right to a trial is off the table for any society that wants their justice system to actually deliver justice.

If enforcing a law isn't important enough to justify paying for the trials, then the law isn't important enough to be on the books.

so that it could be used as a bargaining chip to get them to comply with providing information about associates.

By giving people an incentive to lie about their fellow citizens. How is that supposed to be a good thing?

But abuse of the system does not mean it should be thrown out entirely.

Every use of plea bargaining is an abuse. Everyone has a right to a trial, even those who are most definitely guilty of a crime.

A better reform to honor Aaron Swartz would be the abolition of plea bargaining. Nobody should be coereced out of their right to a trial by an overzealous prosecutor with trumped up charges. Every prisoner, every single one, deserves a trial.

So, why don't we quit pretending and searching them so closely and turn our attention more directly on islamists around us in our countries and focus more on containing and pushing back against their countries that are openly antagonistic against us.

Because violence begets more violence. The greatest marketing tool for Al Qaeda is the claim that America is in a war against Islam. There is nothing to be gained by making that claim factual.

When is the rest of the world, going to finally have enough of these 'pease loving' American asshats and just start stomping them...HARD? They don't seem to want to play nice with the rest of the world, and frankly isn't everyone about to start getting tired of going out of our way to be some tolerant of those that show absolutely no tolerance to anyone different than they are?

Do some counting. Americans have killed a lot more innocent muslims in the middle east than muslims have killed innocent westerners. You are far more evil than those you claim to hate.

Ah, the good old "it doesn't happen to me, he's a liar" reasoning.

There are enough examples of the placebo effect that this reasoning is a fair place to start. If you claim to observe an effect that most people cannot, you need to produce data that shows you can discriminate the effect under blind conditions. Otherwise we have no reason to believe you are any different from EM hypersensitives, etc.

Can't think of a single use for this other than eves dropping where no electronics were allowed.

It would be nice to be able to turn the stereo on in the living room and hear it from the kitchen without cranking the volume up to eleven.

No, what I'm saying is that black people are disproportionately affected by those laws. Rates of drug use are roughly the same between white and black communities. Black people get arrested for drugs 4-5x more often than white people. You can figure the rest out for yourself.

Unless, as is very often in the case in retail settings - especially where packaged alchohol is sold, he'd been previously told that he wasn't allowed on the premises. That scenario makes subsequent arrival in the store trespass, immediately.

Let's say there's someone who comes to your front door and does stuff you don't like, on your property. You tell them to leave, and that the next time they set foot on your property, they'll be trespassing. If he shows up again, you can call the police and tell them exactly what's going on, and they can arrest. Especially (as is frequently the case with the sort of guy described, in the sort of business described) when the cops - by virtue of having to deal with the same people on a regular basis - already know the person in question isn't allowed to trespass.

Perhaps the best way to get society to demand the war on drugs end is to prosecute the middle and upper class like we do the lower class

If you could do that, it would solve most of our problems. The whole point of government is to protect the weak from the strong, but in practice it protects the strong from the weak.

But unless and until he reads AND UNDERSTANDS every line of the source he is
always going to have to be trusting somebody somewhere.

Even if he reads and undertands every line of the source, he's still trusting someone. He has to read and understand every line of the source code of the complier he is using, and the compiler that compiled that compiler, and so on.

Reflections on trusting trust is almost 30 years old now. It should be well known.

And what has he done for the black community that even comes close to approaching the gifts he's given to the overwhelmingly white upper class? Electing an Uncle Tom does not prove that there is no institutional racism. The truth of the matter is that Obama's presidency is nothing more than a means of getting black people to support policies that harm black people.

To enlighten you, here's a few articles discussing just how little Obama has done for his most dedicated supporters.

And yes, there's the argument that he is the "president of all Americans, not just African Americans". Which is very true. But the right way to help Americans is to help those who need it the most.

Depends on the material. Some printed inks are transparent to IR, and you'll get basically solid white, some inks aren't and you'll still get the patterns. This "trick" depends on the fact that the chlorophyll in plants is extremely IR reflective, that's all.