I'm very sad. A piece of my hope is gone.
Aaron Swartz commits suicide
491–500 of 583 posts
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#492This is awful news.
I haven't been in touch with Aaron for several years, but I had a brief encounter with him in 2008. I was between jobs and decided to help out with his watchdog.net project of the time. He was always incredibly kinda and once tracked down my number and called to check that I was OK after I was unexpectedly offline for a several days.
Great guy; will be missed.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#493Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#494RIP Aaron.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone on Reddit explained this better than I can, but JSTOR is basically a scam. It pockets the money that it receives and doesn't pay anything back to the authors. As an author, you yourself have to pay for access to your own work (or your university does, via a subscription). JSTOR has scholarly articles dating back centuries - when you consider that that information deserves to be free, and the societal cost of…
In the copyright wars, JSTOR is hardly a bad actor compared to the publishers. It's a nonprofit formed by libraries so that there would be a single entity to negotiate with publishers and digitize journals. I'm not saying they've always moved as quickly and aggressively as I'd like, but calling their existence "practically a crime" strikes me as very wrong. If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to…
>If they didn't exist, most libraries wouldn't have access to the journals JSTOR archives.
This isn't true. Something else would be in its place. The only question is whether it would be better. I believe that society has already paid a number of times for the benefit of most of the knowledge in this archive. This should be freely available to anyone with access to the internet.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you are faced with 35 years of jail and $1Mln fine - i guess you start thinking out of the box...
What about being in jail with a laptop and internet ? That kind of prison seems more human in this case.
A lot of prisoners have no access to the outside world, including the internet. Many prisons lack even a basic library. Inmates working with The Last Mile (http://thelastmile.org/) tweet by passing their tweets written on paper to volunteers who actually enter them.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#497I was very saddened to hear this news. I posted my thoughts to my blog. http://benatkin.com/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz/ He accomplished a lot, and taught us a lot, and I think most of us can still learn from him. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/archive
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#498Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful. Aaron was a terrific young man. He contributed a lot to the world in his short life and I regret the loss of all the things he had yet to accomplish. As you can imagine, we all miss him dearly. The grief is unfathomable. Aaron's mother
:( I'm so sorry for your loss. Aaron was a great man.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#499Man this so sucks. If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself. For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't han…
If anyone is still in doubt about how the DOJ impacted Aaron's life, it may be interesting to have a look at his last published blog post ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/tdk , discussion on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047421 ). Aaron makes a parallel between the Batman movie and his own struggles, highlighting the corruption of the system and how the Joker was actually the only "sane" person in an insane wor…
This whole case really makes me wonder. A lot of people are blaming the DOJ for leveling so many charges against him. Yet when you read the case, it would seem the only entity who wanted to punish him was the government.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but with the sum total of evidence, I would have thought he had a better than 70-80% chance of winning outright. The other possibility is he would get a lighter sentence, or simply cop a plea for lesser time. The fact he may or may not felt compelled to take his own life based on what he perceived was going to happen to him is shocking. Instead of playing the hand he was dealt, he simply folded and ended the game.
It makes me wonder what advice people were giving him where he truly believed he was going to jail for the rest of his life. His case could've been a huge landmark case against this sort of unlawful litigation. Sad, really sad.
Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called activism. Sometimes bad laws must be resisted, by breaking them deliberately. The best among us do it in public, under their own names, daring the state to make good on their threats. The law is not a unitary piece. Were Aaron's case to proceed to its natural conclusion, the courts might have found that higher principles override the civil agreements that he was charged with breaking. And even when the co…
The parent is narrow, but you beat him up with a position which is also contestable. For some people, obedience to the law and its flaws, is itself a virtue because of the net win we all have by having a strong rule of law. Others are outraged at abusive exercises of power and find virtue in any struggle against it, even obligation. Others are indifferent to the system and focus on practical experiences. I think when…
No problem. You go on being not heated about this.