Trials are an extremely important part of the American legal system. The right to a fair trial by a jury of your peers is the bedrock of the American legal system. I'm not convinced the practice of plea bargaining, which is deliberately intended to short circuit this system, was ever a good idea.
Even if a plea bargain is a good idea in some cases, the way its used these days to create "Trial by Prosecutor" is absolutely ghastly. In other words, the prosecutor uses certain flaws of our legal system that are unrelated to Constitutional requirements (the costs, for example, that will bankrupt an ordinary person, and the fact that public defenders are often unqualified and routinely mishandle cases) to dispense with Trial by Jury altogether, even if the option still technically exists (violating the spirit of the law if not the letter of the law).
Plea bargains have been common for more than a century, but lately they have begun to put the trial system out of business in some courtrooms. By one count, fewer than one in 40 felony cases now make it to trial, according to data from nine states that have published such records since the 1970s, when the ratio was about one in 12. The decline has been even steeper in federal district courts. -- Sentencing Shift Gives New Leverage to Prosecutors
Besides this, we now have a similar situation in Civil Trials, where binding arbitration agreements are forced on parties as soon as they try to get involved in any commercial transaction.
What all this ends up being is an end run around the Constitution. If the Constitution had intended Trial by Jury to be rare, and most cases to be decided by a single appointed official, they would have set up the Constitution that way. In fact, many of the people involved in setting up the United States had bad memories of the Court of Star Chamber, in which no one was allowed to argue their cases and arbitrary rulings were the norm.
If one thing should come out of the Aaron Swartz case, and one thing only, it is this: The rules for civil disobedience in this country have changed. With juries out of the picture, stunts like what Swartz pulled at MIT are far more difficult ways to create legal precedent. Which is important because Civil Disobedience against unjust laws has a long history of moving change in this country when the legislative process was moving slowly or not at all (or in the wrong direction, as it is now).
Now, there were other periods in history where civil disobedience was extremely dangerous, which led to more extreme forms of civil disobedience than peaceful protests. The political movements in previous centuries knew what kind of justice awaited them in the courts, so they used the gun or the bomb to make their points, rather than sit ins or other forms of peaceful protest. Returning to those bad old days is honestly not something I'm looking forward to.
"In 2009, the 69-year-old owner, Russ Caswell, received a letter from the DOJ indicating the government was pursuing a civil forfeiture case against him with the intention of seizing his familyâ(TM)s motelâ"it was built in 1955 by Russâ(TM)s fatherâ"and the surrounding property. Ms. Ortizâ(TM)s office asserted that the motel had been the site of multiple crimes by its occupants over the years: 15 low-level drug offenses between 1994 and 2008 (out of an estimated 125,000 room rentals). Of those who stayed in the motel from 2001 to 2008,.05% were arrested for drug crimes on the property. Local and state officials in charge of those investigations never accused the Caswells of any wrongdoing." -- Carmen Ortizâ(TM)s Sordid Rap Sheet By Christian Stork
The article continues:
"According to the sworn testimony of a DEA agent operating out of Boston, it was his job to comb through news stories for properties that might be subject to forfeiture. When he finds a likely candidate, he goes to the Registry of Deeds, determines the value of the property in question, and refers it to the U.S. attorney for seizure. It is DEA policy to reject anything with less than $50,000 equity." -- Carmen Ortizâ(TM)s Sordid Rap Sheet By Christian Stork
And, finally:
"Mr. Salzman doesnâ(TM)t buy the message of deterrence. He asserts that just up the street, a Motel 6, Walmart and Home Depot all operate with similarâ"in many cases higherâ"rates of drug crimes on their properties, referencing numbers obtained from the Tewksbury Police Department. "...
"...But those corporations have extensive financial and legal resources, and would put up much more of a fight than a small business owned and operated by a single family. Before a public interest law firm took on his case, Mr. Caswell had already spent over $100,000 and was near bankruptcy."-- Carmen Ortizâ(TM)s Sordid Rap Sheet By Christian Stork
What imbecile appointed Carmen Ortiz as a prosecutor, anyway?
Have you ever tried her on the Sims? I've been married 14 years and the only game I ever saw her get into was something called Mafia Wars for iPhone.
She and I have similar tastes in movies and Tv, though she was more upset when they killed a major character in season 2 of Boardwalk Empire than I was...
Watt says he created the program and handed it off to Gonzalez without knowing how it would be used. But he didn't think he could win his case, so he pleaded guilty and was ordered to spend two years behind bars and pay millions in restitution. Watt says Heymann wanted to impose even harsher penalties, including the maximum prison sentence he could have received for his crimes. The prosecutor even claimed Watt had psychopathic tendencies and was trying to bring down the entire financial system, Watt told Business Insider. Those accusations came after Watt admitted to liking the movie "Fight Club," according to Watt.
I'd like to know if people are actually guilty or not, and this business of forcing plea bargains seems guaranteed to put the innocent away along with the guilty.
It's another data point for Heymann and Ortiz, and with enough of them, you'll eventually get a pattern.
Yes, but the people who hid Jews in Nazi Germany and operated the Underground Railroad in the American South did so in secret. It's not always about open disobedience.
In a predatory police state, like the one we now live in, there are different rules for civil disobedience.
"Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no 'want' associated with it. YOU want information to be free, even information that other people spent money creating. That's an entirely different thing."
People misunderstand this because of the "too cute" way it is phrased. It is more akin to the old saying "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." In this modern, networked age keeping information secret requires a tremendous effort, while spreading information is trivial. (And that's what it comes down to, secrecy. Preventing people from knowing the information without jumping through whatever financial or institutional hoops they are supposed to jump through to view, read or listen to the information.) Because of this, nasty, draconian laws with out-sized police state penalties are the approach used by most copyright holders:
"There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!
If Aaron Swartz is guilty of breaking the laws he was accused of breaking, MIT's administration is also guilty because they left the doors to JSTOR's vault open on purpose so that pretty much anyone could come in off the street and "steal" JSTOR's "crown jewels." If I were a "creative" prosecutor like Heymann, I'm sure I could come up with tons of crimes to charge the MIT staff with... but MIT has the political clout to fight back. They could have extended that clout to protect Aaron Swartz, but preferred to see him prosecuted. Why, I'm not sure. Heymann and Ortiz may suffer political setbacks from this (though powerful parts of the establishment are cheering them, never doubt it), but MIT as an institution has permanently tarnished its reputation, which was built on a "Wild West" approach to technology. No reason to treat them as a haven for eccentric techies any more... in fact you are probably better off attending a more obscure school if you don't want to be under Big Brother-esque surveillance these days. No techie who isn't a stickler for "respect for the rules" (what creative minds such sticklers have, too!) should even consider MIT as a school of choice any more.
You wouldn't have expected that from MIT, which prior to the Swartz suicide was a kind of Hacker Mecca. Now, of course, that reputation should be permanently tarnished, and talented people shouldn't put any stock in it.
If you break the law you are committing a crime, this includes hiding Jews in Nazi Germany or smuggling slaves out of the Antebellum South via the Underground Railway. Yes, breaking bad laws still make you a criminal. I've read commentary saying Aaron Swartz was no Robin Hood, but Robin Hood was considered an extremely vile criminal by law enforcement in his day, if the legend is to be believed.
Civil Disobedience is one way of disobeying unjust laws. It's where you show open, public contempt for a bad law in the hope that people will see how bad it is. However, it's not the only form of legitimate resistance to unjust laws. In a police state, resisting bad laws anonymously might be the only viable way to protest them. Sometimes that can be civil disobedience too (see "'Repent Harlequin' said the Tick-Tock Man," for a fictional example or some of the plots against Hitler for real life examples).
Sometimes the purpose of disobeying an unjust law isn't a political protest, but to reduce the harm caused by the law. People who hid Jews under Nazi regimes had no illusions that Der Fuehrer was going to change his mind, they just wanted those particular Jews to be able to avoid being murdered by the State.
So, some forms of "Hactivism" are public disobedience, some are Anonymous, and some are based on the concept of harm reduction. I'm not sure which version Aaron Swartz was going for, but I don't think it was public disobedience. Some of the rationale I've read from him suggests it was more in the "harm reduction" category, allowing scholars who were being discriminated against in 3rd world countries access to 1st world research.
I don't think it was worth dying over, though his public suicide does seem to have ended up as a particularly effective form of public disobedience. (Still, it's not going to have much impact on hiding research behind pay-walls. More likely it will end up working against our current draconian computer crime laws, if anything, which was not the actual issue Aaron Swartz was originally trying to address. This is what people are missing, he didn't "win" on the original political issue he was trying to fight though it does seem like JSTOR has given him a partial victory. Rather, the prosecution was so harsh and out of proportion is opened up a whole new set of civil liberty issues related to the case.)
I understand (and support) the desire for the ending of the careers of every prosecutor involved in this fiasco. But the prosecutors were doing what you expect prosecutors to do, so they are probably not much worse than other prosecutors. (Sure they are still bad... but prosecutors are a bad bunch. It's a systemic problem.)
I'm more interested in what happens to MIT over this. They should be losing students, alumni grants and be torn down brick by brick and the ground sewed with salt so nothing can ever grow their again. There's a reason why Dante gave hypocrites a particularly nasty sentence in Hell.
"Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured 'appropriate' out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. " (emphasis mine)-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig
I'm actually sad if JSTOR gets tarred by anything here. They may not have agreed with Swartz's actions, but they didn't want him sent to prison over them, and they were the supposed harmed party.
MIT, however, decided to betray its core principles, and they had status as a "secondary victim."
"MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the 'criminal' who we who loved him knew as Aaron."-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig
The irony here is that people who know about "the MIT way" would not have expected this out of MIT, but might have expected it out of JSTOR, However, JSTOR deserves a complete pardon here. They refused to play ball with a politically ambitious Fed, and basically should have no blame in any of this.
Meanwhile, MIT should have offered to turn this over to the Federal Prosecutors:
Why settle for one hacker when you can capture an entire gang? So much evidence, I'm surprised Carmen Ortiz wasn't drooling. I mean, someone stole a police car and placed on the Great Dome! Surely she could have gotten someone prison time for that. Probably every student at MIT has done something that Ortiz and Heymann would find "Juicy," so really they should go hog wild!
[snark]Frankly, shouldn't administrators who allow such a museum, a celebration of criminality and, even worse, disrespect for the rules do some time themselves? They are misleading their students into a life of crime![/end snark]
Frankly, if I were a student at MIT with any talent, I'd be looking to transfer. MIT is over.
They must be going after rifles because they know they'll have an easier time banning them than they will with handguns. It has nothing to do with whether or not it will help anyone or not.
It sounds like it was an unauthorized access problem. Most companies you aren't allowed to let non-vetted people use their equipment or access their network.
Of course, if he had brought his idea to the company and they had liked it, they'd have said, "Oh, ok, we'll fire you and hire him for a lower salary. Thanks for the idea."
This is why I've always been very opposed to all the macho "work till you drop" garbage that often accompanies tech jobs. If you give up your entire life to the job, how can you get a business going on the side?
If you can't get a business going on the side, how do you eat when you are too old to be employed by a tech company?
When you are young and single, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. Since you are always at work, you don't have time to spend your money and it just stacks up in your bank account. The minute you get a wife and kid though, expect that money to get spent even if you never see the outside of your cube much for months at a time.
Most of the older techies I know have some sort of business on the side. When they finally get "retired" these businesses help support them in addition to what they managed to save while they had regular employment. Often times these are not hugely lucrative, but a little money coming in can make a huge difference. (Also, it keeps your mind in shape and alert.)
Oh, by the way, it's not 100% necessary to speak an Asian language to move to Asia, all of my friends in Asia speak English with a certain amount of proficiency, and they are always at me to move over there to go into business with them. (That was the plan before I got ensnared by a woman, who would never even consider leaving the United States for Asia even if we were starving in the gutter. C'est la vie.)
Still, with the Net I get part time work from my friends in Asia now and then, mostly looking over documents to fix the English grammar and idioms.
Partly this is because no one in any part of our government wants to do anything useful in solving any real problems, because it would interfere with the flow of graft.
However, if people see that the government is useless, then they might act to change it. So they do that Wizard of Oz thing where you have the giant fake head making lots of scary noise, while saying "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain." Tragedies like Newtown are godsends, because they cause a great emotional reaction and the fact that stopping one truly deranged person from acting on his derangement is more or less impossible if he is allowed to walk around free in society. Adam Lanza could have been blocked from guns, in which case he'd likely have used gasoline or an automobile. (I know of a few cases of mentally ill people committing arson. Trust me, the kids murdered by arson are just as dead as those killed by guns. In fact, childhood pyromania is often seen as an indicator of deep seated emotional problems, so we already know that crazy folk like setting fires.)
(By the way, this is separate from whether there are "good gun control" laws. I'm skeptical about gun control, but even if there are "sensible gun laws," they are likely aimed at stopping armed robbery and not kamikaze lunatics. It's the kamikaze part that makes these guys ridiculously dangerous. I read that the Brady Campaign wants to make bayonet mounts on rifles illegal. Um... that should stop all the bayonet massacres we've been seeing!)
As to video games? Please, it's absurd. A recycled moral panic from the Columbine days. I mean, seriously, Mortal Kombat? Splatterhouse?
Has no one figured out that Mortal Kombat is about as scary and "violent" as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail?" Or do they want to ban that too?
Andrew Good, a Boston attorney who represented Swartz in the case last year, said he told federal prosecutors in Massachusetts that Swartz was a suicide risk.
"Their response was, put him in jail, he'll be safe there," Good said.
Oh, Ortiz, Heymann, and Garland, they're such kidders!
What women actually want (if you are lucky, the alternative is even worse) is for you to spend lots of time with them (when it's convenient for them) but still also make a good living. If you aren't making enough money, you'll have a hard time starting a relationship, since it's one of the things women filter for. You don't have to be rich, she just wants to know you can take care of yourself and your kids (and maybe her too, if she's old fashioned).
On the other hand, if you make a good living but put in tons of overtime, then she gets upset with you for never being around. It will cause friction. (I've been getting this from the missus lately since I'm putting in a lot of extra hours these days. We've been together 14 years though so I'm not too worried.) It also leaves her open to approaches by other men, and if she's lonely that's a real temptation.
It's one of the reasons why I get so frustrated with guys who take a perverse pride in the long hours in many IT jobs. I want to tell them, "Enjoy being a monk in the service of the Machine God, because this will wreak Hell on your marriage."
Oh, and for God's sake, avoid most women who call themselves Feminist unless you've checked them out carefully. In fact, there's tons of strong belief systems that can be problematic (if you are atheist and she's religious, for example) but certain types of Feminism are all about trashing men, and it's best to consider that label a warning sign if a woman cops to it. Actually, though, I think most non-desperate men will not choose a Feminist as their first choice on a dating site unless she looks like Barbarella or something.
Oh, and one last note. I really think it's divorce that's the crummy deal for men, rather than marriage. I don't know many old married couples where the man is too unhappy, but I've never met a divorced man who didn't have some horror story to tell.
It might be possible to do better with Online Dating then what is currently out there. However, currently online dating is the equivalent of drive through fast food. It's not the best option for finding someone, it is simply the most convenient. For example, if you are killing yourself on some project, you may find yourself browsing profiles at 3 AM. Or on your lunch break. Or while you are waiting for some code to compile, etc. (Or the equivalent for other highly time consuming jobs.)
You aren't doing it because it's the best way to find someone, you are doing it because you might find someone and it's highly convenient.
Real dating takes time. It requires you to go places, and do things. You have to get out there and meet people in person. It's a slow, miserable process.
With online dating it turns the slow, miserable process into a fast process but one which is even more miserable. You have far less chance of finding someone good, and far less chance of getting their attention enough for them to go out on a real life date with you. However, much like eating whatever pseudo-food you get from a fast food drive in fills up your stomach and let's you feel like you've actually eaten, online dating let's you feel like you are doing something to meet someone so you won't end up dying alone or spending every night for the rest of your life without companionship and sex.
Of course, all the female profiles that look really good are getting a huge number of responses, and are having a hard time filtering them. Yours is likely getting lost in the shuffle. On the other hand, the men who are best at getting and keeping female attention are often going to be the best pick up artists, and are often just out for sex and a good time. (The men who are both good at this and looking for a real relationship won't be on the online dating service for long.)
Frankly, when I hear stories about online dating from my friends (both the men and the women) I am so glad I settled down 14 years ago. If I ever found myself single again, and wanted to date again, I think I try travel if I could afford it rather than online dating.
In America, you get to be an adult when you are 18. In Asia, you get to be an adult, as far as your elder relatives are concerned, when your elder relatives are dead. (Provided they can't figure out a way to haunt you from beyond the grave.. mwahahaha...)
The advantage of the American system, is that your parents can no longer tell you how to live your life or who you can date or any of the other stuff they did when you were a teenager. I mean they can try, but unless you are living off them, they've got no leverage. Honestly, if you've lived within the Asian system for any period of time, this can be quite refreshing and even intoxicating. 'Wait, you mean here in America I don't have to do what my Dad says?"
Asian parents, on the other hand, expect to be able to boss you around for your entire life, due to the Confucian obligation system that almost all Asian countries have in some form or another. However, that same obligation system means that they don't get to just throw you into the street. You owe them obedience, they have parental responsibility, till death do you part.
The correct approach, therefore, for an Asian parent is, "How can I correct my son's improper behavior?" not, "How can I make my son homeless so he will hopefully freeze to death this winter and no longer be a burden to me?" (the Western approach). From a purely selfish approach, a son is also your retirement plan in China and if you only get to have one well, you better make sure he's a success since he's required by law to support you in your old age (daughter's have traditionally not had this role which is why male children are favored.)
Now, we may think that Dad's approach was ineffectual here, but it's obvious that his concern was that his son wasn't seeking employment because of a gaming compulsion (a big phobia for modern Chinese parents) rather then that he was simply being picky. (This story probably isn't over. Dad was convinced by his son, but I'm not so convinced. Expect there to be a round two if Dad decides he's a compulsive gamer again.)
If the story is accurate, Dad is willing to indulge his son being picky and finding a good job (for a while, anyway), but will not tolerate compulsive gaming that interferes with his success. (Hell in some ways it's reflecting badly on Dad here that he didn't have a good enough guanxi to help his son get a good job. He may lose some face because of that. Son working in some garbage job for years might definitely cause a loss of face, and also a pretty bleak prospect for Dad after he retires and son has to support him.)
Basically, every single person you know who might be able to get you a foot in the door in a tech job needs to be on your speed dial. Did you make any friends at school? Maybe you had some science classes with people going for Computer Science type degrees. Don't be ashamed to hit up you relatives, either.
A wise philosopher once said related to a particular job that it is a, "valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing." This is why the best people to ask are people who owe you favors, or people who you can owe a favor. Getting a job is part of the favor economy.
Prosecutors said phone and computer records showed he had been building a database of women -- complete with personal information and physical descriptions -- as part of a plot to kidnap, torture, cook and eat them.
"This case is all the more disturbing when you consider Valle's position as a New York City police officer and his sworn duty to serve and protect," the U.S. attorney, Preet Bharara, said in a statement at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Trials are an extremely important part of the American legal system. The right to a fair trial by a jury of your peers is the bedrock of the American legal system. I'm not convinced the practice of plea bargaining, which is deliberately intended to short circuit this system, was ever a good idea.
Even if a plea bargain is a good idea in some cases, the way its used these days to create "Trial by Prosecutor" is absolutely ghastly. In other words, the prosecutor uses certain flaws of our legal system that are unrelated to Constitutional requirements (the costs, for example, that will bankrupt an ordinary person, and the fact that public defenders are often unqualified and routinely mishandle cases) to dispense with Trial by Jury altogether, even if the option still technically exists (violating the spirit of the law if not the letter of the law).
Besides this, we now have a similar situation in Civil Trials, where binding arbitration agreements are forced on parties as soon as they try to get involved in any commercial transaction.
What all this ends up being is an end run around the Constitution. If the Constitution had intended Trial by Jury to be rare, and most cases to be decided by a single appointed official, they would have set up the Constitution that way. In fact, many of the people involved in setting up the United States had bad memories of the Court of Star Chamber, in which no one was allowed to argue their cases and arbitrary rulings were the norm.
If one thing should come out of the Aaron Swartz case, and one thing only, it is this: The rules for civil disobedience in this country have changed. With juries out of the picture, stunts like what Swartz pulled at MIT are far more difficult ways to create legal precedent. Which is important because Civil Disobedience against unjust laws has a long history of moving change in this country when the legislative process was moving slowly or not at all (or in the wrong direction, as it is now).
Now, there were other periods in history where civil disobedience was extremely dangerous, which led to more extreme forms of civil disobedience than peaceful protests. The political movements in previous centuries knew what kind of justice awaited them in the courts, so they used the gun or the bomb to make their points, rather than sit ins or other forms of peaceful protest. Returning to those bad old days is honestly not something I'm looking forward to.
The article continues:
And, finally:
What imbecile appointed Carmen Ortiz as a prosecutor, anyway?
Oh, he did, but they decided to go ahead with the launch anyway.
Have you ever tried her on the Sims? I've been married 14 years and the only game I ever saw her get into was something called Mafia Wars for iPhone.
She and I have similar tastes in movies and Tv, though she was more upset when they killed a major character in season 2 of Boardwalk Empire than I was...
I do know a few women obsessed with Facebook gaming. One of my lady friends has built this gargantuan metropolis in Sim City Social.
However, I don't expect her to start playing Bioshock or Portal any time soon...
-- Former Convict Reveals How Hard It Is To Be Targeted By One Of Aaron Swartz's Prosecutors
I'd like to know if people are actually guilty or not, and this business of forcing plea bargains seems guaranteed to put the innocent away along with the guilty.
It's another data point for Heymann and Ortiz, and with enough of them, you'll eventually get a pattern.
"On Thursday, Ortiz insisted Swartz â" who she now characterizes as 'mentally ill' â" "
Yeah, they used to say that about dissidents in the Soviet Union, too.
Yes, but the people who hid Jews in Nazi Germany and operated the Underground Railroad in the American South did so in secret. It's not always about open disobedience.
In a predatory police state, like the one we now live in, there are different rules for civil disobedience.
"Information isn't a sentient thing, and thus has no 'want' associated with it. YOU want information to be free, even information that other people spent money creating. That's an entirely different thing."
People misunderstand this because of the "too cute" way it is phrased. It is more akin to the old saying "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." In this modern, networked age keeping information secret requires a tremendous effort, while spreading information is trivial. (And that's what it comes down to, secrecy. Preventing people from knowing the information without jumping through whatever financial or institutional hoops they are supposed to jump through to view, read or listen to the information.) Because of this, nasty, draconian laws with out-sized police state penalties are the approach used by most copyright holders:
If Aaron Swartz is guilty of breaking the laws he was accused of breaking, MIT's administration is also guilty because they left the doors to JSTOR's vault open on purpose so that pretty much anyone could come in off the street and "steal" JSTOR's "crown jewels." If I were a "creative" prosecutor like Heymann, I'm sure I could come up with tons of crimes to charge the MIT staff with... but MIT has the political clout to fight back. They could have extended that clout to protect Aaron Swartz, but preferred to see him prosecuted. Why, I'm not sure. Heymann and Ortiz may suffer political setbacks from this (though powerful parts of the establishment are cheering them, never doubt it), but MIT as an institution has permanently tarnished its reputation, which was built on a "Wild West" approach to technology. No reason to treat them as a haven for eccentric techies any more... in fact you are probably better off attending a more obscure school if you don't want to be under Big Brother-esque surveillance these days. No techie who isn't a stickler for "respect for the rules" (what creative minds such sticklers have, too!) should even consider MIT as a school of choice any more.
You wouldn't have expected that from MIT, which prior to the Swartz suicide was a kind of Hacker Mecca. Now, of course, that reputation should be permanently tarnished, and talented people shouldn't put any stock in it.
If you break the law you are committing a crime, this includes hiding Jews in Nazi Germany or smuggling slaves out of the Antebellum South via the Underground Railway. Yes, breaking bad laws still make you a criminal. I've read commentary saying Aaron Swartz was no Robin Hood, but Robin Hood was considered an extremely vile criminal by law enforcement in his day, if the legend is to be believed.
Civil Disobedience is one way of disobeying unjust laws. It's where you show open, public contempt for a bad law in the hope that people will see how bad it is. However, it's not the only form of legitimate resistance to unjust laws. In a police state, resisting bad laws anonymously might be the only viable way to protest them. Sometimes that can be civil disobedience too (see "'Repent Harlequin' said the Tick-Tock Man," for a fictional example or some of the plots against Hitler for real life examples).
Sometimes the purpose of disobeying an unjust law isn't a political protest, but to reduce the harm caused by the law. People who hid Jews under Nazi regimes had no illusions that Der Fuehrer was going to change his mind, they just wanted those particular Jews to be able to avoid being murdered by the State.
So, some forms of "Hactivism" are public disobedience, some are Anonymous, and some are based on the concept of harm reduction. I'm not sure which version Aaron Swartz was going for, but I don't think it was public disobedience. Some of the rationale I've read from him suggests it was more in the "harm reduction" category, allowing scholars who were being discriminated against in 3rd world countries access to 1st world research.
I don't think it was worth dying over, though his public suicide does seem to have ended up as a particularly effective form of public disobedience. (Still, it's not going to have much impact on hiding research behind pay-walls. More likely it will end up working against our current draconian computer crime laws, if anything, which was not the actual issue Aaron Swartz was originally trying to address. This is what people are missing, he didn't "win" on the original political issue he was trying to fight though it does seem like JSTOR has given him a partial victory. Rather, the prosecution was so harsh and out of proportion is opened up a whole new set of civil liberty issues related to the case.)
I understand (and support) the desire for the ending of the careers of every prosecutor involved in this fiasco. But the prosecutors were doing what you expect prosecutors to do, so they are probably not much worse than other prosecutors. (Sure they are still bad... but prosecutors are a bad bunch. It's a systemic problem.)
I'm more interested in what happens to MIT over this. They should be losing students, alumni grants and be torn down brick by brick and the ground sewed with salt so nothing can ever grow their again. There's a reason why Dante gave hypocrites a particularly nasty sentence in Hell.
Important fact, JSTOR a private company:
"Early on, and to its great credit, JSTOR figured 'appropriate' out: They declined to pursue their own action against Aaron, and they asked the government to drop its. " (emphasis mine)-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig
I'm actually sad if JSTOR gets tarred by anything here. They may not have agreed with Swartz's actions, but they didn't want him sent to prison over them, and they were the supposed harmed party.
MIT, however, decided to betray its core principles, and they had status as a "secondary victim."
"MIT, to its great shame, was not as clear, and so the prosecutor had the excuse he needed to continue his war against the 'criminal' who we who loved him knew as Aaron."-- Prosecutor as Bully, Lessig
The irony here is that people who know about "the MIT way" would not have expected this out of MIT, but might have expected it out of JSTOR, However, JSTOR deserves a complete pardon here. They refused to play ball with a politically ambitious Fed, and basically should have no blame in any of this.
Meanwhile, MIT should have offered to turn this over to the Federal Prosecutors:
MIT Hall of Hacks.
Why settle for one hacker when you can capture an entire gang? So much evidence, I'm surprised Carmen Ortiz wasn't drooling. I mean, someone stole a police car and placed on the Great Dome! Surely she could have gotten someone prison time for that. Probably every student at MIT has done something that Ortiz and Heymann would find "Juicy," so really they should go hog wild!
[snark]Frankly, shouldn't administrators who allow such a museum, a celebration of criminality and, even worse, disrespect for the rules do some time themselves? They are misleading their students into a life of crime![/end snark]
Frankly, if I were a student at MIT with any talent, I'd be looking to transfer. MIT is over.
I bought a Blackberry Playbook that I am really enjoying for the princely sum of $131.00, so this is good news.
They must be going after rifles because they know they'll have an easier time banning them than they will with handguns. It has nothing to do with whether or not it will help anyone or not.
Adam Lanza stole his guns from his Mom.
He was stopped from buying his own gun by a gun law, but he wasn't hindered in his massacre in any way.
It sounds like it was an unauthorized access problem. Most companies you aren't allowed to let non-vetted people use their equipment or access their network.
Of course, if he had brought his idea to the company and they had liked it, they'd have said, "Oh, ok, we'll fire you and hire him for a lower salary. Thanks for the idea."
This is why I've always been very opposed to all the macho "work till you drop" garbage that often accompanies tech jobs. If you give up your entire life to the job, how can you get a business going on the side?
If you can't get a business going on the side, how do you eat when you are too old to be employed by a tech company?
When you are young and single, it doesn't seem like such a big deal. Since you are always at work, you don't have time to spend your money and it just stacks up in your bank account. The minute you get a wife and kid though, expect that money to get spent even if you never see the outside of your cube much for months at a time.
Most of the older techies I know have some sort of business on the side. When they finally get "retired" these businesses help support them in addition to what they managed to save while they had regular employment. Often times these are not hugely lucrative, but a little money coming in can make a huge difference. (Also, it keeps your mind in shape and alert.)
Oh, by the way, it's not 100% necessary to speak an Asian language to move to Asia, all of my friends in Asia speak English with a certain amount of proficiency, and they are always at me to move over there to go into business with them. (That was the plan before I got ensnared by a woman, who would never even consider leaving the United States for Asia even if we were starving in the gutter. C'est la vie.)
Still, with the Net I get part time work from my friends in Asia now and then, mostly looking over documents to fix the English grammar and idioms.
Partly this is because no one in any part of our government wants to do anything useful in solving any real problems, because it would interfere with the flow of graft.
However, if people see that the government is useless, then they might act to change it. So they do that Wizard of Oz thing where you have the giant fake head making lots of scary noise, while saying "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain." Tragedies like Newtown are godsends, because they cause a great emotional reaction and the fact that stopping one truly deranged person from acting on his derangement is more or less impossible if he is allowed to walk around free in society. Adam Lanza could have been blocked from guns, in which case he'd likely have used gasoline or an automobile. (I know of a few cases of mentally ill people committing arson. Trust me, the kids murdered by arson are just as dead as those killed by guns. In fact, childhood pyromania is often seen as an indicator of deep seated emotional problems, so we already know that crazy folk like setting fires.)
(By the way, this is separate from whether there are "good gun control" laws. I'm skeptical about gun control, but even if there are "sensible gun laws," they are likely aimed at stopping armed robbery and not kamikaze lunatics. It's the kamikaze part that makes these guys ridiculously dangerous. I read that the Brady Campaign wants to make bayonet mounts on rifles illegal. Um... that should stop all the bayonet massacres we've been seeing!)
As to video games? Please, it's absurd. A recycled moral panic from the Columbine days. I mean, seriously, Mortal Kombat? Splatterhouse?
Has no one figured out that Mortal Kombat is about as scary and "violent" as "Monty Python and the Holy Grail?" Or do they want to ban that too?
Massachusetts lawyer: Told prosecutor Aaron Swartz was suicidal
Oh, Ortiz, Heymann, and Garland, they're such kidders!
What women actually want (if you are lucky, the alternative is even worse) is for you to spend lots of time with them (when it's convenient for them) but still also make a good living. If you aren't making enough money, you'll have a hard time starting a relationship, since it's one of the things women filter for. You don't have to be rich, she just wants to know you can take care of yourself and your kids (and maybe her too, if she's old fashioned).
On the other hand, if you make a good living but put in tons of overtime, then she gets upset with you for never being around. It will cause friction. (I've been getting this from the missus lately since I'm putting in a lot of extra hours these days. We've been together 14 years though so I'm not too worried.) It also leaves her open to approaches by other men, and if she's lonely that's a real temptation.
It's one of the reasons why I get so frustrated with guys who take a perverse pride in the long hours in many IT jobs. I want to tell them, "Enjoy being a monk in the service of the Machine God, because this will wreak Hell on your marriage."
Oh, and for God's sake, avoid most women who call themselves Feminist unless you've checked them out carefully. In fact, there's tons of strong belief systems that can be problematic (if you are atheist and she's religious, for example) but certain types of Feminism are all about trashing men, and it's best to consider that label a warning sign if a woman cops to it. Actually, though, I think most non-desperate men will not choose a Feminist as their first choice on a dating site unless she looks like Barbarella or something.
Oh, and one last note. I really think it's divorce that's the crummy deal for men, rather than marriage. I don't know many old married couples where the man is too unhappy, but I've never met a divorced man who didn't have some horror story to tell.
It might be possible to do better with Online Dating then what is currently out there. However, currently online dating is the equivalent of drive through fast food. It's not the best option for finding someone, it is simply the most convenient. For example, if you are killing yourself on some project, you may find yourself browsing profiles at 3 AM. Or on your lunch break. Or while you are waiting for some code to compile, etc. (Or the equivalent for other highly time consuming jobs.)
You aren't doing it because it's the best way to find someone, you are doing it because you might find someone and it's highly convenient.
Real dating takes time. It requires you to go places, and do things. You have to get out there and meet people in person. It's a slow, miserable process.
With online dating it turns the slow, miserable process into a fast process but one which is even more miserable. You have far less chance of finding someone good, and far less chance of getting their attention enough for them to go out on a real life date with you. However, much like eating whatever pseudo-food you get from a fast food drive in fills up your stomach and let's you feel like you've actually eaten, online dating let's you feel like you are doing something to meet someone so you won't end up dying alone or spending every night for the rest of your life without companionship and sex.
Of course, all the female profiles that look really good are getting a huge number of responses, and are having a hard time filtering them. Yours is likely getting lost in the shuffle. On the other hand, the men who are best at getting and keeping female attention are often going to be the best pick up artists, and are often just out for sex and a good time. (The men who are both good at this and looking for a real relationship won't be on the online dating service for long.)
Frankly, when I hear stories about online dating from my friends (both the men and the women) I am so glad I settled down 14 years ago. If I ever found myself single again, and wanted to date again, I think I try travel if I could afford it rather than online dating.
In America, you get to be an adult when you are 18. In Asia, you get to be an adult, as far as your elder relatives are concerned, when your elder relatives are dead. (Provided they can't figure out a way to haunt you from beyond the grave.. mwahahaha...)
The advantage of the American system, is that your parents can no longer tell you how to live your life or who you can date or any of the other stuff they did when you were a teenager. I mean they can try, but unless you are living off them, they've got no leverage. Honestly, if you've lived within the Asian system for any period of time, this can be quite refreshing and even intoxicating. 'Wait, you mean here in America I don't have to do what my Dad says?"
Asian parents, on the other hand, expect to be able to boss you around for your entire life, due to the Confucian obligation system that almost all Asian countries have in some form or another. However, that same obligation system means that they don't get to just throw you into the street. You owe them obedience, they have parental responsibility, till death do you part.
The correct approach, therefore, for an Asian parent is, "How can I correct my son's improper behavior?" not, "How can I make my son homeless so he will hopefully freeze to death this winter and no longer be a burden to me?" (the Western approach). From a purely selfish approach, a son is also your retirement plan in China and if you only get to have one well, you better make sure he's a success since he's required by law to support you in your old age (daughter's have traditionally not had this role which is why male children are favored.)
Now, we may think that Dad's approach was ineffectual here, but it's obvious that his concern was that his son wasn't seeking employment because of a gaming compulsion (a big phobia for modern Chinese parents) rather then that he was simply being picky. (This story probably isn't over. Dad was convinced by his son, but I'm not so convinced. Expect there to be a round two if Dad decides he's a compulsive gamer again.)
If the story is accurate, Dad is willing to indulge his son being picky and finding a good job (for a while, anyway), but will not tolerate compulsive gaming that interferes with his success. (Hell in some ways it's reflecting badly on Dad here that he didn't have a good enough guanxi to help his son get a good job. He may lose some face because of that. Son working in some garbage job for years might definitely cause a loss of face, and also a pretty bleak prospect for Dad after he retires and son has to support him.)
Osuofia - I Go Chop Your Dollar
Basically, every single person you know who might be able to get you a foot in the door in a tech job needs to be on your speed dial. Did you make any friends at school? Maybe you had some science classes with people going for Computer Science type degrees. Don't be ashamed to hit up you relatives, either.
A wise philosopher once said related to a particular job that it is a, "valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing." This is why the best people to ask are people who owe you favors, or people who you can owe a favor. Getting a job is part of the favor economy.
But people in uniform are always perfectly sane:
'Cannibal cop' allegedly wanted to cook woman for Thanksgiving