Someone who has barely passed the bar has, in fact, passed the bar.
It's like complaining that your doctor didn't pass top of his class from the most prestigious medical school in the world. So what? He's still a qualified doctor.
He believed that information paid for by tax dollars should be free, not costing 10 cents a page or whatever to download.
I'm sure most people here would agree with that. That doesn't mean that any of us are entitled to break the law without repurcussions. If a law is bad, you campaign to get rid of it.
If you go down the civil disobedience route, you have to be prepared to suffer for it. And it's probably not a good idea to do that if you're prone to clinical depression as this young man seems to have been.
Even half of slashdot is willing to consign him to Hades for violating the law.
I really don't think that's the case. It's just that some of us would say that if he did break the law, he can't have expected not to receive some form of punishment. That doesn't mean we think he should have been locked up for 30 years, or whatever ridiculous punishments were being threatened.
In the UK at least, for a non violent white collar type first offence, you'd get maybe a suspended sentence or community service and a small fine. The main problem would be that you had a criminal record, but I don't see what else you could expect.
If the US punishments are extravagantly disproportionate to the crime, that is the fault of your whole legal system, not just one prosecuting attorney.
And so the tactic of civil disobedience is neutralized, simply by the other side raising the stakes.
You are quite wrong. If you do something as an act of civil disobedience, the greater the penalty the better the publicity. It makes the State look worse, especially if the penalty is disproportionate.
Once you have been caught knowingly performing an illegal act you WILL be punished. The question is whether you think your own personal suffering is worth it for the cause you believe in.
I read today an article in the nytimes about sex trafficking, and how border guards in Pakistan, are on the alert for terrorists and pirated DVDs, yet ignore blatant evidence of young girls being sold into slavery. The reasoning? They want to please the Americans whose priorities are terrorism and piracy.
I'd say it''s just as likely the reason was that the Pakistani border guards didn't give a shit about the fate of some young women they probably would just dismiss as whores anyway.
A lot of people in Pakistan have Taliban-like attitudes to many things, especially women.
If prosecutors started dropping charges or going soft on someone because they went to the same Church or supported the same football team, everyone would be rightly shocked.
If you break a shitty law, you can't blame the police and legal system for punishing you for doing so. The solution is to repeal the shitty law.
I am offended by seeing bankers working for companies that were bailed out by the government a couple of years ago back to earning huge bonuses.
The solution is to vote in a party that will (a) make this illegal or (b) tax them at 99% on excessively high earnings, and maybe (c) turn all banks into non-profit organisations under public ownership.
How many immediate family members do not recognize a suicidal condition in someone? But we expect a lawyer to see it?
First, lots of people knew about Swartz' depression, especially his family. Secondly, the US attorney's office is being criticized for not seeking justice, but for seeking unusually harsh punishment. Swartz was afraid of being sentenced to 30 years in prison. You don't think 30 years is excessive?
Of course it's excessive, but the fault is with the whole US "justice" system, not this particular case.
For instance, I find executing a murderer excessive in all circumstances. And the whole "go to prison for life for your third minor offence" thing is pretty fucking excessive too, as is the sheer number of people in your prisons.
10 years would be a long time in prison, but it's hardly unbearable to the point of suicide. In any case, as we are talking about life versus death/oblivion, I think the rational thing would be to wait until you knew the actual sentence before acting.
Imagine if you only ended up with a 6 months suspended sentence and a bit of community work or something.
My plan was to not eat while in prison. To just drink water. I was 100% serious about this and would have gone through with it. I fully realized that this probably meant I wouldn't survive
Most people on hunger strikes die somewhere around 60 days (e.g. off the top of my head Bobby Sands died at 66 days)
It's almost impossible you'd have lasted 3 months, and certainly not without the prison authorities noticing.
It's established at this point that he had bouts of depression. But it's also obvious that facing the prospect of 35 years in jail would be extremely stressful and was in all likelihood what he was depressed about when he committed suicide.
People who are clinically depressed are only depressed "about" something in the same way that a paranoid schizophrenic's illness is "caused" by the aliens sending mind-probe rays through his TV set.
Imagine if a guy named Feynman had been hounded into killing himself for his (self-admitted) "crimes" at MIT. That school has done itself a WORLD of hurt with this, and it deserves it.
If you do a "hack" and it involves your committing a crime, you had better make sure you don't get caught. Being clever and witty is not a defence in a court of law.
I doubt that by the time Feynman admitted his "crimes" at MIT (I assume they involved minor transgressions of rules rather than mass murder or anything) anyone cared anyway.
I think the GP should have chucked in "you can't handle the truth" as a lot of people know that quote, but would struggle to recognise the two whole paragraphs above.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
Really? Do you have children? If someone was holding a gun to your child's head and said they would blow their brains out if you didn't jump off of the 30 story building you were standing on, who would be blamed for that suicide? I doubt any suicide is as black and white as you make it out to be.
Congratulations on coming up with an extreme and totally implausible edge case to try to disprove a general point.
Say an evil terrorist had a young child as a hostage, and said that unless you raped and tortured that child, they (the terrorist) would explode a nuclear bomb that would kill hundreds of thousands of people. Does that mean that, because the question of child rape and torture isn't black and white, it won't always in the real world be a bad thing?
That is just an excuse made by people who can't be bothered to be minimally sociable. Most people who get married and have children, or other long term relationships, are not exactly supermodels. It's an adolescent point of view to think that only the pretty girls and good looking guys ever get a date.
Personally I think that making deals illegal in criminal process would already go a long way to make things more fair. Currently only 3% of the cases go to trial, 97% take deals. From those 97% it is very likely that a considerable part is innocent but were bullied into accepting the deal at the threat of great legal costs and absurd potential penalties.
Personally, I would never admit to a crime I hadn't done, regardless of the "deal" being offered. Once you're admitted to a crime, you've got almost no chance of convincing people later on that you're innocent, and you've still got the stigma of a criminal conviction affecting your future employment and so on.
I would make an exception if the death penalty were involved as a likely outcome of not confessing to a lesser crime. But that is an example of one of the many problems with having capital punishment.
In that situation, even facing bankruptcy I wouldn't kill myself. And even if I was definitely going to prison for 50 years (which is frankly unbelievable) I still wouldn't kill myself.
Look what happened to TVShack's Richard O'Dwyer who infringed on copyright. The US authorities blatherred about extraditing him from the UK and sending him to jail for 10 years, in the end he ended up with a slap on the wrist.
I feel sorry for people who commit suicide, but you can hardly ever say that it was an optimal outcome to their situation, unless you're talking about someone in constant severe pain with a terminal condition.
Western spin is a far cry from the propaganda pushed out by these political organizations because there is accountability and a free press and a host of voices that provide counter arguments.
Heck, look at Slashdot - It's cause for celebration once every 6 months or so when someone actually says: "Yes, good point, you've changed my opinion." Other than that, it's just contradiction.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like complaining that your doctor didn't pass top of his class from the most prestigious medical school in the world. So what? He's still a qualified doctor.
He believed that information paid for by tax dollars should be free, not costing 10 cents a page or whatever to download.
I'm sure most people here would agree with that. That doesn't mean that any of us are entitled to break the law without repurcussions. If a law is bad, you campaign to get rid of it.
If you go down the civil disobedience route, you have to be prepared to suffer for it. And it's probably not a good idea to do that if you're prone to clinical depression as this young man seems to have been.
Even half of slashdot is willing to consign him to Hades for violating the law.
I really don't think that's the case. It's just that some of us would say that if he did break the law, he can't have expected not to receive some form of punishment. That doesn't mean we think he should have been locked up for 30 years, or whatever ridiculous punishments were being threatened.
In the UK at least, for a non violent white collar type first offence, you'd get maybe a suspended sentence or community service and a small fine. The main problem would be that you had a criminal record, but I don't see what else you could expect.
If the US punishments are extravagantly disproportionate to the crime, that is the fault of your whole legal system, not just one prosecuting attorney.
And so the tactic of civil disobedience is neutralized, simply by the other side raising the stakes.
You are quite wrong. If you do something as an act of civil disobedience, the greater the penalty the better the publicity. It makes the State look worse, especially if the penalty is disproportionate.
Once you have been caught knowingly performing an illegal act you WILL be punished. The question is whether you think your own personal suffering is worth it for the cause you believe in.
I read today an article in the nytimes about sex trafficking, and how border guards in Pakistan, are on the alert for terrorists and pirated DVDs, yet ignore blatant evidence of young girls being sold into slavery. The reasoning? They want to please the Americans whose priorities are terrorism and piracy.
I'd say it''s just as likely the reason was that the Pakistani border guards didn't give a shit about the fate of some young women they probably would just dismiss as whores anyway.
A lot of people in Pakistan have Taliban-like attitudes to many things, especially women.
You think Schwartz was photogenic?
Compared to most geeks he was Brad Pitt.
If prosecutors started dropping charges or going soft on someone because they went to the same Church or supported the same football team, everyone would be rightly shocked.
If you break a shitty law, you can't blame the police and legal system for punishing you for doing so. The solution is to repeal the shitty law.
So he pirated a few documents and distributed them? Why did this end in his death?
Well, it wasn't because he was shot by a cop was it?
it was known even publicly that he suffered from depression
That makes what happened worse, not better. The prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves.
Yeah, I'm sure you'd be as sympathetic if it was some smackhead who'd just held up a grocery store.
The solution is to vote in a party that will (a) make this illegal or (b) tax them at 99% on excessively high earnings, and maybe (c) turn all banks into non-profit organisations under public ownership.
It is not to mug a banker.
First, lots of people knew about Swartz' depression, especially his family. Secondly, the US attorney's office is being criticized for not seeking justice, but for seeking unusually harsh punishment. Swartz was afraid of being sentenced to 30 years in prison. You don't think 30 years is excessive?
Of course it's excessive, but the fault is with the whole US "justice" system, not this particular case.
For instance, I find executing a murderer excessive in all circumstances. And the whole "go to prison for life for your third minor offence" thing is pretty fucking excessive too, as is the sheer number of people in your prisons.
Imagine if you only ended up with a 6 months suspended sentence and a bit of community work or something.
My plan was to not eat while in prison. To just drink water. I was 100% serious about this and would have gone through with it. I fully realized that this probably meant I wouldn't survive
Most people on hunger strikes die somewhere around 60 days (e.g. off the top of my head Bobby Sands died at 66 days)
It's almost impossible you'd have lasted 3 months, and certainly not without the prison authorities noticing.
It's established at this point that he had bouts of depression. But it's also obvious that facing the prospect of 35 years in jail would be extremely stressful and was in all likelihood what he was depressed about when he committed suicide.
People who are clinically depressed are only depressed "about" something in the same way that a paranoid schizophrenic's illness is "caused" by the aliens sending mind-probe rays through his TV set.
Imagine if a guy named Feynman had been hounded into killing himself for his (self-admitted) "crimes" at MIT. That school has done itself a WORLD of hurt with this, and it deserves it.
If you do a "hack" and it involves your committing a crime, you had better make sure you don't get caught. Being clever and witty is not a defence in a court of law.
I doubt that by the time Feynman admitted his "crimes" at MIT (I assume they involved minor transgressions of rules rather than mass murder or anything) anyone cared anyway.
I think the GP should have chucked in "you can't handle the truth" as a lot of people know that quote, but would struggle to recognise the two whole paragraphs above.
Suicide can only be blamed on the person that did it.
Really? Do you have children? If someone was holding a gun to your child's head and said they would blow their brains out if you didn't jump off of the 30 story building you were standing on, who would be blamed for that suicide? I doubt any suicide is as black and white as you make it out to be.
Congratulations on coming up with an extreme and totally implausible edge case to try to disprove a general point.
Say an evil terrorist had a young child as a hostage, and said that unless you raped and tortured that child, they (the terrorist) would explode a nuclear bomb that would kill hundreds of thousands of people. Does that mean that, because the question of child rape and torture isn't black and white, it won't always in the real world be a bad thing?
Shooting yourself in the head is by no means foolproof. There are other, more certain ways of killing yourself if you really want to.
Not everyone is born beautiful
That is just an excuse made by people who can't be bothered to be minimally sociable. Most people who get married and have children, or other long term relationships, are not exactly supermodels. It's an adolescent point of view to think that only the pretty girls and good looking guys ever get a date.
the jurors would take the "the law is the law" attitude (because anyone who doesn't, doesn't get on a jury) and convict him.
So the conviction rate for US juries is 100%? Really?
If that's the case, your society has a far wider problem than stupid copyright laws.
Personally I think that making deals illegal in criminal process would already go a long way to make things more fair. Currently only 3% of the cases go to trial, 97% take deals. From those 97% it is very likely that a considerable part is innocent but were bullied into accepting the deal at the threat of great legal costs and absurd potential penalties.
Personally, I would never admit to a crime I hadn't done, regardless of the "deal" being offered. Once you're admitted to a crime, you've got almost no chance of convincing people later on that you're innocent, and you've still got the stigma of a criminal conviction affecting your future employment and so on.
I would make an exception if the death penalty were involved as a likely outcome of not confessing to a lesser crime. But that is an example of one of the many problems with having capital punishment.
Look what happened to TVShack's Richard O'Dwyer who infringed on copyright. The US authorities blatherred about extraditing him from the UK and sending him to jail for 10 years, in the end he ended up with a slap on the wrist.
I feel sorry for people who commit suicide, but you can hardly ever say that it was an optimal outcome to their situation, unless you're talking about someone in constant severe pain with a terminal condition.
It'll be interesting to see the USA granted a late victory in this war.
Oh, for fuck's sake, give it up Rambo. You lost.
Western spin is a far cry from the propaganda pushed out by these political organizations because there is accountability and a free press and a host of voices that provide counter arguments.
LOL, you're a funny guy.
Heck, look at Slashdot - It's cause for celebration once every 6 months or so when someone actually says: "Yes, good point, you've changed my opinion." Other than that, it's just contradiction.
I agree. Wait...