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Aaron Swartz commits suicide

tech.mit.edu

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Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#531

Post by SadMama »

beadmomsw wrote: post #252

Thank 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

So very sorry that Aaron was in so much pain. He was truly an amazing person and in such a short life had a significant impact. The world is diminished without him. http://www.scoop.it/t/grief-and-loss

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#532

Post by jlgreco »

nullc wrote: post #506
rprasad wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSTOR is a non-profit created to store scholarly articles and maintain archives of scholarly work for future access. JSTOR is and was a driving force behind the digitalization of scholarly works and most academic journals. JSTOR's sole function is to maintain these archives, even if/when it is not commercially viable to do so. All of this costs money. Universities and companies pay for JSTOR so that it can keep doing…

Except that the access fees paid by any single large university would be enough to completely fund an open digital archive. Yes, the fees are paid to the publishers— who themselves do not pay the authors, reviewers, and even (sometimes) the editors of the journals. As part of the NYC non-profit high society Jstor is far from the most efficient non profit— but their fault is not their inefficient spending and high sal…

> Except that the access fees paid by any single large university would be enough to completely fund an open digital archive.

Exactly. Just imagine what archive.org could do if all those universities were donating all of that money to them instead.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#533

Post by toyg »

empthought wrote: post #475
toyg wrote: post #32

Every single person employed by the US Attorney Office involved in this tragedy should be sued to hell by the family. Have some goddamn responsibility for once. This is utterly disgraceful, I feel for his family.

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

Eh, I said should, not will. We live in an imperfect world.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#534

Post by toyg »

DennisP wrote: post #400
doktrin wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide." Haunting. edit : It's an insightful piece of writing purely in its own right, as are the rest of his works that I have come across.

I'm going to just imagine that he staged it and is now sitting at a cafe in the south of France.

In the movie, it was actually Florence.

The EuroPython conference took place in Florence in 2011 and 2012, and again will be there in 2013.

Aaron was a Python über-hacker.

I know it's incredibly unlikely, but it would be the stuff of legend.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#535

Post by bdelachapelle »

beadmomsw wrote: post #252

Thank 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

My heart is warmly with you now, as are thousands around the world who mourn Aaron, even those who had never met him. Few things can really alleviate your pain now but I hope you will find some solace in our expressions of sympathy. They show that his values and contributions will live on and continue to inspire many. However brief his presence among us has been, you can be proud of what your son fought for - as we all are.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#536

Post by betterunix »

rprasad wrote: post #481
betterunix wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone with access to a university network has access to those documents. I have access to JSTOR also. What moral issue can you possibly raise with someone using their access to download these documents? It's OK to download 10, but not 1000000? Do you have a moral issue with automated downloads -- and if so, how can you justify JSTOR itself? It is worth noting that JSTOR did not want to press charges in this case. Af…

It's not a matter of restricting access to public knowledge; it's a matter of Aaron draining the village pool. Information shares all of the downsides of the public commons: because it is freely available, no one wants to pay for the maintenance costs. JSTOR charges fees for access to cover the ongoing maintenance costs associated with storing access to thousands of journals and millions of articles published over se…

So according to your argument, the risk is not that we will be unable to access such articles without JSTOR, but that we will be unable to search for articles? That's basically saying that a document search system is too costly to create or maintain for a university library to deal with, and so JSTOR is necessary for queries. Which sounds like an unfounded assumption to me, considering how widely deployed CiteSeerX is.

Even if your argument were true, what exactly was Aaron draining? If JSTOR is providing this valuable search service, wouldn't that alone fund their operation? If having millions of documents is useless because we have no way to search those documents, what difference does it make if Aaron really had been sharing the documents with others? Would it not have been a good thing if Aaron had amassed these articles and made them available using a better search service -- wouldn't we have benefited (and isn't that the whole point of copyright anyway?)?

Had Aaron been accused of hacking into JSTOR to download the source code of their search system, you might have a point. Instead, he was accused of copyright infringement and of violating a network use agreement (because he was trying to evade the ban of his laptop's IP address); at no point was JSTOR's valuable search service even an issue in this case.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#537

Post by SCAQTony »

rdtsc wrote: post #92
krzyk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any of the employees of US Attorney Office forced him (like putting a gun to a head of one of his loved ones) to do it? It was his own choice to end his life.

> Did any of the employees of US Attorney Office forced him No, but they absolutely chose to prosecute him to the fullest. They also I am guessing didn't do it randomly. Some decision went into it. If you look at a post above, even the original journal (at least "officially") lost interest, someone, a cog in the DOJ, for whatever reason (I assume, political) must have said "pedal to the metal with this one". Here is…

I agree, the DOJ, they selectively enforce those crimes that render political gain rather than for public benefit.

Example, Wall Street Securitized Mortgages whereas tens-of-thousands of mortgage deeds were scanned into a database, then destroyed despite state laws stating otherwise so the loans on people's homes could be traded on Wall Street like they were pork bellies. Did the DOJ do anything? NOPE!!!

But they sure went after Aaron, the bastards

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#538

Post by foldr »

madaxe wrote: post #528
aquateen wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would prosecutors go about that? Going through all his blog posts to look for depression? And that would be standard procedure for everyone they prosecute?

Psychiatric assessment is a routine element of any criminal case. At any rate, it is in the UK.

So you're saying that in the UK they don't prosecute people who are depressed? As a Brit, that's news to me.

Come on. This prosecution may be unjust for other reasons, but it's just daft to claim that they should not have prosecuted him because he was depressed.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#539

Post by Tichy »

alan_cx wrote: post #245
rohamg wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right. I'm shocked at the "suicide apologists" in this thread.

I'm shocked at "life bullies". Which lets face it is a Christian rule, and not applicable to all people. I would like to die right now. I'm just too cowardly. There is no simple switch to do it quickly and painlessly. No way to stop others being upset. No way to stop others discovering something that may scar them. I do not wish to mess up others. Why? I simply do not belong. I don't understand the human race at all,…

So you don't understand humans. But what are your emotions, where does your pain come from? What do you miss?

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#540

Post by Quixote2 »

beadmomsw wrote: post #252

Thank 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

The abominable human beings who chose to victimize Aaron, as well as the irresponsible academics who shrugged their shoulders in indifference and the various media outlets that casually reported on his arrest, should think carefully about the lack of proportion in our criminal justice system, and the devastating impact it can have on the lives of talented people. There is such a thing as collective guilt.

Authorities in New York have undertaken a similarly disproportionate and arrogant assault on Internet freedom, spending what must be close to a million dollars of taxpayers' money on the aggressive criminal prosecution of a blogger who sent out satirical “Gmail confessions” in which a well-known New York University department chairman appeared to be foolishly accusing himself of plagiarism. And again, there appears to be nothing but silence from the relevant communities. For further information on the case, see:

http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/

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