That woman needs a healthy dose of "welcome to reality".
If you haven't noticed, this is reality. The reality is she has the power to do this and get away with it. The reality is that prosecutors are beyond reproach in this system and there's nothing that peons like you or I can do about it. This is the world we actually live in. This is what it means to live in a police state.
he would still have to spend some time in prison with much more serious offenders
That's the law.
If you're going to fall back on the "its the law", you have to enforce the law all the time. But our justice system has discretion built into it. That's why e.g. John Corzine is still a free man. But why does Corzine benefit from that discretion and Swartz does not? Wealth and power, obviously. That's the problem here. Justice isn't blind.
The DOJ reaction? Slap a 50 years sentence on him.
If that's the prosecutor's reaction, she is certainly not competent for the job she does
That's EVERY prosecutor's reaction. It's standard operating procedure, called plea bargaining. So what you're saying is that just about every prosecutor is unfit to hold that position. Which is quite true.
The United States has imprisoned more of its population than any other country in the world. If that's your goal, than the US justice system works great. If you want a free society, the US justice system is reprehensible.
One of the ideas they stole is the powerful command line, only they made it slightly less like an inbuilt scripting language and made it into a full-blown scripting language.
That's the problem. If you wanted a full blown scripting language on Windows, there was always VB, or you could install Python or Ruby or what have you. A full blown scripting language is a poor substitute for an interactive shell however, or we'd all be using Perl instead of bash.
This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line.
Window's command line is garbage, so that's not a fair comparison at all.
For the expert, the command line is hard to beat for speed and efficiency. For anyone who isn't an expert, the command line is a major hindrance.
For the expert, the written word is hard to beat for precision and expressivness. For anyone who isn't an expert, the written word is a major hinderance. And yet, here we all are communicating with the written word.
I suspect you meant "proportional representation" in which case the US would be run by 4chan. It's far easier to get a bunch of pranksters to vote in support of something silly than it is to get a bunch of serious activists to agree on the right solution to complex problems.
Bullshit. Proportional representation systems are in place around the world, and generally work better than ours does. The problem with the US is not that there are too many silly alternatives. It's that there are not enough serious alternatives. Arguably, there are not any real alternatives at all. Proportional representation would fix that.
Everything is more complex than everyone thinks.
Therefore we must never change anything, even if the change has been tried many times and shown to be workable.
It was 'beef protein' but had to be pushed down the pipe with gaseous ammonia in order to bring it's bacteria counts down to an acceptable number. Which made it taste like floor cleaner.
Yes, and if NY strip steak were shredded to such a fine consistency it would have to be treated the same way. Bacteria grows on all cuts of meat.
And I call bullshit on your "floor cleaner" observation. Ammonia is volatile and quickly offgasses. You're far more likely to be experiencing the placebo effect than detecting any actual difference in the beef.
Easily solved. Institute a 99% exit tax. If you want to control the lions share of the economy, you can pay the lions share of the costs. If you try to evade, fuck you. You're lucky if confiscating everything is all that happens.
The writing was on the wall when they started hitting their biggest fans with cease and decist orders. An Atari that valued its history for more what they could sell the rights might not be in this situation today.
Beef and beef by products. Google 'pink slime' to get the muckraker version. They (McFood) did remove it eventually.
The travesty with that is that the "pink slime" is real beef. Muscle tissue. Not the highest quality, but that doesn't matter at all in hamburger. Now all the people who processed that beef are out of jobs, and since it's all geting thrown away instead of eaten our beef prices are higher. Good job.
If he can get Mega back into the big leagues again, it's going to put some serious strain the undersea fiber that feeds the USA. That's the most expensive wired bandwidth around and he's planning to host nothing in the USA.
Sounds like an easy point to place a firewall and drop all the traffic to/from Mega.
However you want it to. Just click the drop down arrow at the left of the search box, and it will give you a selection of engines. If you want Google SSL, it's there. If you want Duck Duck Go, it's there. Mine even has Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon entries.
I'm not sure how comprehensive the default install is, this particular selection of search engines might have been configured by the person who packages it for Debian.
The FBI informed the banks that over 90% of stated income loans were fraudulent. In response, the banks increased the number of stated income loans they made. That is racketeering.
We as a culture forgot to care about people suffering because of unjust laws. Nobody cares if you're disproportinately punished for your civil disobedience, because "it's the law, hrrr".
Well yes, "crashing the system" is "breaking the rules."
Unless you're a banker.
Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no "want" associated with it.
Information tends towards freedom. Like water tends to assume the shape of its container. Saying "wants" is a cute anthropomorphism that is irrelevant to the point.
Sure, but they don't know me from a customer until I wait in line and waste their resources. Once I say "marriage equality" the manager can ask me to leave and I will, but it's too late then.
Things in the virtual world should be treated as their real-world equivalents.
There's no law that prevents me from going to a Chick-Fil-A and standing in line, and when I get up to the front to order saying "I'd like... hrm... um.. I would liiiike.... oh yeah, I'd like marriage equality for homosexuals." If I get a few thousand of my friends together to do just that, I've created a real world DDOS that is entirely legal.
Similarly, there is no law that prevents me from requesting index.html on a site. If I get a few thousand of my friends together to do that, I've done a DDOS. So why should that be illegal?
Making laws that affect millions of people need on ONE sensationalist case is how you end up with really bad law
This is not just one bad case. Any of us could be Aaron Swartz. Fewer that 3% of those accused of a federal crime exercise their right to a trial. When was the last time the government was 97% accurate about anything? Ever? We know for a fact that we are imprisoning innocent people who are too afraid to go to trial. That needs to stop.
Aaron didn't just violate a TOS. He physically entered a network closet he shouldn't have been in and hid computer equipment in there that crashed the network, so other people couldn't use it
The bastard, clearly he deserves 35 years in prison for that.
The prosecutor was asking for six months minimum security
If the prosecutor thought 6 months was an appropriate punishment for what he did, she should have charged him with crimes where 6 months was the punishment and taken him to trial on that.
New laws based on this case just aren't needed
The need for new laws existed long before this case. Prosecutorial abuse is rampant in this country and it's time it's addressed.
Slashdot Mirror
That woman needs a healthy dose of "welcome to reality".
If you haven't noticed, this is reality. The reality is she has the power to do this and get away with it. The reality is that prosecutors are beyond reproach in this system and there's nothing that peons like you or I can do about it. This is the world we actually live in. This is what it means to live in a police state.
he would still have to spend some time in prison with much more serious offenders
That's the law.
If you're going to fall back on the "its the law", you have to enforce the law all the time. But our justice system has discretion built into it. That's why e.g. John Corzine is still a free man. But why does Corzine benefit from that discretion and Swartz does not? Wealth and power, obviously. That's the problem here. Justice isn't blind.
The DOJ reaction? Slap a 50 years sentence on him.
If that's the prosecutor's reaction, she is certainly not competent for the job she does
That's EVERY prosecutor's reaction. It's standard operating procedure, called plea bargaining. So what you're saying is that just about every prosecutor is unfit to hold that position. Which is quite true.
The United States has imprisoned more of its population than any other country in the world. If that's your goal, than the US justice system works great. If you want a free society, the US justice system is reprehensible.
One of the ideas they stole is the powerful command line, only they made it slightly less like an inbuilt scripting language and made it into a full-blown scripting language.
That's the problem. If you wanted a full blown scripting language on Windows, there was always VB, or you could install Python or Ruby or what have you. A full blown scripting language is a poor substitute for an interactive shell however, or we'd all be using Perl instead of bash.
This would be a valuable observation if you had first spent 18 months at the Windows command line.
Window's command line is garbage, so that's not a fair comparison at all.
For the expert, the command line is hard to beat for speed and efficiency. For anyone who isn't an expert, the command line is a major hindrance.
For the expert, the written word is hard to beat for precision and expressivness. For anyone who isn't an expert, the written word is a major hinderance. And yet, here we all are communicating with the written word.
I suspect you meant "proportional representation" in which case the US would be run by 4chan. It's far easier to get a bunch of pranksters to vote in support of something silly than it is to get a bunch of serious activists to agree on the right solution to complex problems.
Bullshit. Proportional representation systems are in place around the world, and generally work better than ours does. The problem with the US is not that there are too many silly alternatives. It's that there are not enough serious alternatives. Arguably, there are not any real alternatives at all. Proportional representation would fix that.
Everything is more complex than everyone thinks.
Therefore we must never change anything, even if the change has been tried many times and shown to be workable.
It was 'beef protein' but had to be pushed down the pipe with gaseous ammonia in order to bring it's bacteria counts down to an acceptable number. Which made it taste like floor cleaner.
Yes, and if NY strip steak were shredded to such a fine consistency it would have to be treated the same way. Bacteria grows on all cuts of meat.
And I call bullshit on your "floor cleaner" observation. Ammonia is volatile and quickly offgasses. You're far more likely to be experiencing the placebo effect than detecting any actual difference in the beef.
Easily solved. Institute a 99% exit tax. If you want to control the lions share of the economy, you can pay the lions share of the costs. If you try to evade, fuck you. You're lucky if confiscating everything is all that happens.
Because that's the party of Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon.
The writing was on the wall when they started hitting their biggest fans with cease and decist orders. An Atari that valued its history for more what they could sell the rights might not be in this situation today.
Infogrames used to make some nice stuff. But that pretty much stopped with the Amiga.
Atari has been through bankruptcy before, and will likely go through it again.
Why? Because somebody will buy the name, which still resonates for some reason.
It's also why people go to Chuck E. Cheese's.
Coincidently or not, both of those companies were founded by the same guy, Nolan Bushnell.
Beef and beef by products. Google 'pink slime' to get the muckraker version. They (McFood) did remove it eventually.
The travesty with that is that the "pink slime" is real beef. Muscle tissue. Not the highest quality, but that doesn't matter at all in hamburger. Now all the people who processed that beef are out of jobs, and since it's all geting thrown away instead of eaten our beef prices are higher. Good job.
If he can get Mega back into the big leagues again, it's going to put some serious strain the undersea fiber that feeds the USA.
That's the most expensive wired bandwidth around and he's planning to host nothing in the USA.
Sounds like an easy point to place a firewall and drop all the traffic to/from Mega.
However you want it to. Just click the drop down arrow at the left of the search box, and it will give you a selection of engines. If you want Google SSL, it's there. If you want Duck Duck Go, it's there. Mine even has Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon entries.
I'm not sure how comprehensive the default install is, this particular selection of search engines might have been configured by the person who packages it for Debian.
The FBI informed the banks that over 90% of stated income loans were fraudulent. In response, the banks increased the number of stated income loans they made. That is racketeering.
So the law is always right then?
We as a culture forgot to care about people suffering because of unjust laws. Nobody cares if you're disproportinately punished for your civil disobedience, because "it's the law, hrrr".
Well yes, "crashing the system" is "breaking the rules."
Unless you're a banker.
Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no "want" associated with it.
Information tends towards freedom. Like water tends to assume the shape of its container. Saying "wants" is a cute anthropomorphism that is irrelevant to the point.
Sure, but they don't know me from a customer until I wait in line and waste their resources. Once I say "marriage equality" the manager can ask me to leave and I will, but it's too late then.
Things in the virtual world should be treated as their real-world equivalents.
There's no law that prevents me from going to a Chick-Fil-A and standing in line, and when I get up to the front to order saying "I'd like... hrm... um.. I would liiiike.... oh yeah, I'd like marriage equality for homosexuals." If I get a few thousand of my friends together to do just that, I've created a real world DDOS that is entirely legal.
Similarly, there is no law that prevents me from requesting index.html on a site. If I get a few thousand of my friends together to do that, I've done a DDOS. So why should that be illegal?
Oh, we remember. It's the authorities who need to remember that sometimes they are on the wrong side of history.
If you happen to drop a bhat, and it blows away in the wind, don't step on it. Just let it go.
Making laws that affect millions of people need on ONE sensationalist case is how you end up with really bad law
This is not just one bad case. Any of us could be Aaron Swartz. Fewer that 3% of those accused of a federal crime exercise their right to a trial. When was the last time the government was 97% accurate about anything? Ever? We know for a fact that we are imprisoning innocent people who are too afraid to go to trial. That needs to stop.
Aaron didn't just violate a TOS. He physically entered a network closet he shouldn't have been in and hid computer equipment in there that crashed the network, so other people couldn't use it
The bastard, clearly he deserves 35 years in prison for that.
The prosecutor was asking for six months minimum security
If the prosecutor thought 6 months was an appropriate punishment for what he did, she should have charged him with crimes where 6 months was the punishment and taken him to trial on that.
New laws based on this case just aren't needed
The need for new laws existed long before this case. Prosecutorial abuse is rampant in this country and it's time it's addressed.