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Comment by Google234 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think Aaron Schwartz is the best example... he DDOSed a site. And I don’t accept that his final reaction to the charges was proportional to what he was facing.

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It wasn't distributed, wasn't an attempt to disrupt the service, and the affected service didn't see it as a sanctionable issue. Describing it in those terms is implicit support of the outrageous charges against him and implicit approval of the way they were prosecuted.

You're taking an incredibly insensitive and naive stance on that. Sure you dont want to reconsider that just maybe proportionality is one of the first things lost during depressionary states of mind?

You also lack the personal understanding of his personal circumstance.

I know nothing but any idiot can see whatever the case, this was the thing that broke the camels back.

Please stop assuming everyones state of mind and the way it works is the same as yours.

Governments, when using threat of violence against people, at least have a responsibility to ensure that they are not committing undue harm, and certainly not before a conviction - we can argue all day about exactly how much harm is ok, but given the amount of untreated mental illness in our society they have a responsibility to ensure that what they are doing isn't overly harmful to people suffering from such.

This is the first time in my hn lurking moment that I felt a desire to downvote something. And I don’t even have enough karma for that. So let me be unequivocal when I say this: you are being naive, and downright insensitive to the case in point. I am truly saddened by reading your comment.

Are you talking about JSTOR? Of all the possible takes on the issue, calling it a DDOS is really the most retarded one. It wasn't distributed and it wasn't intended as a denial of service. I'm not even aware that it caused any availability issue, but even if that was the case that was not why that got him into trouble.

Since you've concluded that suicide wasn't a propotional act, as if suicide is ever a rational act, what would be a propotional reaction?

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