hobbyhacker

See 'namecoin'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin

It's hamsters all the way down. Not blaming any hamsters for wrongdoing is implicitly agreeing with the system.

happy reading:

http://kspaink.home.xs4all.nl/fishman/home.html

Just one little anecdote for old times' sake. I used a sequential dialer to scan for interesting numbers in the country capital. After hitting one particular number the phone to which the modem was connected rang. This was before the days of anr indicating that whoever backtracked that number in less than a minute had quite a bit of pull. The guy on the other side asked me what we were doing calling that particular number. The phone actually felt hot in my hand and I realized: Busted. So on the spur of the moment I said I was trying to connect to a bbs and he said 'don't call this number again' and hung up. I was still shaking an hour later.

This still side-steps the question of the use of discretionary powers in deciding to prosecute this case in the first place.

> Harvard fellow uses MIT's network surreptitiously to violate the terms of service to download a nonprofit's entire database and then give it away for free, putting them out of business.

Do you notice the contradiction in 'non profit' and 'putting them out of business'?

I've read the piece carefully and the thing that stands out for me most is the bit about the data being 'property'.

It is argued that since JSTOR claims property rights with a tangential link to another case where someone downloaded a chunk of software that was in wide distribution and used that to their defense which was invalidated is reason enough to establish that this data was the property of JSTOR and that any unauthorized download is therefore a breach of the law.

This is interesting because as far as I can see the whole of Aaron's argument revolved around this data being public property all along by virtue of the research being publicly funded and the fact that many authors of these papers can't legally distribute their own work.

If the law can't distinguish between unjust claims of property and a complete lack of public interest on the one side and the good intentions of an individual on the other then you can stick to the 'letter of the law' but that means the law is no longer functional.

I also keep reading about 13 counts, and here there are only 4, is there any reason for the discrepancy or is this commentary based on the pre-September expansion of the charges?

People will respond differently when faced with the same challenges. Just because one guy can spend 14 years in prison and 2 in solitary confinement is no reason to assume that we'd all fare that well. Plenty of people commit suicide in prison and never make it to the outside, let alone to become president of their countries.

Nobody called for her imprisonment or hounding her to the point where she's going to hang herself. Just a corrective measure to a system that has clearly spun out of control. A change of career.

Because in todays legal climate most of the things that were 'gray' back then are forbidden explicitly now. Things that as a kid in my days you'd be receiving a stern talking to for will now cause you to go to jail for very long periods in addition to likely resulting in you filing for bankruptcy.

The problem with Guantanamo is that it exists at all as an extra-judiciary area specifically designed to deny inmates certain rights.

Aaron was also a vocal critic of the Obama administration, specifically the 'kill lists'.

> If others are going to follow in Aaron's footsteps, they will have to make one particular change: be better at remaining unidentified.

Either that or be fully aware of the consequences and do it anyway but in such a way that the genie can never be put back into the bottle. Aaron paid an extremely high price for something that eventually did not succeed.

The fact that it was 'perfectly legal' definitely does not make it right.

It is as relevant, if not more relevant today than when it was written.

I support them, as long as they do the right thing afterwards and make the owners aware and do not do anything destructive or that violates someone's privacy.

Because if the sellers would have found out about the HN thread it might have negatively impacted their ability to negotiate a good deal, they showed quite clearly how weak their negotiation position was.

Patents definitely foster progress by the looks of it.

Everybody that will be born between now and 67.5 years from now will have exactly that same life expectancy, half of those will die as well.

That's just a fig leaf. If Apple gets to corner the smartphone market it will make them trillions. When you want to know about a motive for some act the easiest way is to follow the money.

Without competition your Computer would cost $10K, it would be made by IBM and nobody else in the world. Compaq would have never gotten of the ground. Competition, especially on price, is a good thing.

Listing lego as an example of a company defending themselves against copycats is a pretty dumb move, it is well established that lego originally copied the brick idea from the English company kiddicraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lego

Cheaper but otherwise the same is better.

As well they should, just having lots of users and no plan for monetization is a bad recipe most of them time.