They shouldn't, and they don't.
However, let's use this analogy for a second.
A jaywalking ticket is about $40-$100 in NYC (let's assume it's about the same in Brooklyn, where Aaron lived). If he had purposefully jaywalked a few thousand times because he was fighting jaywalking legislation and was hit with fines for each instance when he finally got caught, should he not be punished for each offense?

What punishment? He killed himself before he was punished, so we'll never know.
What we do know is that he was offered a plea deal that would have him in jail for 6 months in a low security prison, which him and his lawyers rejected because they wanted to go to court to fight the charges. The prosecutors then proceeded to throw the book at him, and then he offed himself when he realized shit got real.

If you believe in something strongly enough, you should be willing to accept the repercussions and be prepared to become an example. Using your previous reference to racial segregation laws, Rosa Parks was arrested and went to court for her refusal to follow the bus segregation laws. She was tried for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance, and she lost. She paid her fine and court costs, then appealed. The rest is history.

Aaron is not an example of anything, stop putting him on a pedestal.

That's a false equivalency and you know it. Murder and filesharing are prosecuted differently, because the law handles them differently.
You are prosecuted based on the number of offenses committed; i.e. you murdered one person, you get one murder charge (plus whatever other charges apply, like conspiracy to commit murder, whatever).
Of course, if you're 'sharing' 1000 files, you could be looking at 1000 charges (one per file) if you run into a DA that has an ax to grind (or political ambitions, or whatever).
And you can negotiate a plea in both cases (which Aaron refused to do in his case, btw).

That's condescending, and also irrelevant. Comparing punishments from religious-based idiologies and secular law is like comparing apples to oranges, because they're disproportionate by their very nature. They were intended to be so.
Please stop that.

And now we go into the 'evil corporations' bit. Was wondering when we'd get to that.

It's a stupid comparison.
If the submitter wanted to be honest, he'd compare this guy's conviction to others that comitted similar crimes, like David Ray Camez, who ran carder.su, or the LulzSec guy.

Aaron Swartz was a man-child that couldn't handle the fact the I'm famous on the interwebz defense wasn't going to fly, and his actions would have repercussions.
I'd say there's no comparison whatsoever.

Yes, let's contrast the behavior of a teenager to that of adult men and women who are well-aware of any legal repercussions yet engage willingly and knowingly in criminal activity...

Really?

My desktop is currently a refurbished HP Z800 workstation with some upgrades:

- 2x Intel Xeon X5675 @ 3.07 GHz
- 48GB DDR3 SDRAM
- NVidia Quadro 5000 (waiting for a EVGA GTX980Ti to arrive)
- 5x Samsung EVO 500GB SSDs (RAID-5)

The SSDs were an upgrade, it came with a single 300GB SAS disk. Also upgrading the video card, since the Quadro is ancient.
Had been using a older Dell XPS720 since 2006 or so, figured it was time to upgrade to something better that won't need any significant upgrades for another 5+ years.

I have other boxes in my home lab, but this is my gaming+everything else box.

So after you go through the bullshit in the link, what they're trying to come up with is a MacBook Air-equivalent with 'custom developer profiles'?
They already have a number of laptops that are essentially perfect for 'web development'. Some of the others here commented on the Latitude series, etc. I'd like to offer my own personal example.
I have a Dell Precision M6400. I bought it 2 years ago off the Dell outlet site for about $2k. Shortly afterwards, I bumped up the specs a little, so here are the current specs:

- 17" screen with 1920x1200 resolution
- Core 2 Due T9800 @2.93GHz
- 16GB DDR3 RAM
- Nvidia Quadro FX 2700M
- 2x Samsung 256GB SSD drives in RAID-1

I run Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on it as my main OS. It's the perfect foundation for VMware Workstation 7.1, which I use to run my virtual machines. I have one the following VMs running daily:

- Ubuntu 10.04LTS server - for testing
- Ubuntu 10.04LST desktop - my main work environment
- CentOS 5.8 - for testing
- "Unnamed storage" vendor virtual cluster with 3 virtual nodes - also for testing

I run *everything* on this one box. VMware gives me the flexibility to try new releases, test against newer packages, etc. Need to test something else? Fire up another VM.
What better self-contained development environment could you ask for? No MacBook Pro or Air could beat that, except for weight (~8lbs on the Dell vs ~6.5lbs on the Macbook, and almost nothing on the Air).

This Project Sputnik is a waste of time for Dell, and they should fire the gullible idiots that fell for the bullshit fed to them by Stephen O'Grady.
Dell would be better off by just focusing on either standardizing the hardware they use across their laptop lines, or providing updated drives for the hardware they use.

The work laptop is maxed out, Precision M6400 with 16GB DDR3 and dual 256GB Samsung SSDs.

The home box is also maxed out by 2002 standards...

System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000 (2 X UltraSPARC-III+)
System clock frequency: 145 MHZ
Memory size: 8GB

Love this beast, even if it's noisy.

Your degrees in Geology are not exactly that useful, unless you actively try to market yourself to companies such as the oil & gas business. Have you tried that?

If not, the first thing I'd suggest is to fix your resume. That 'Jr Indiana Jones' pose is not helping you. Familiarize yourself with both MS-Word and PDF formats, and make an effort to make your resume presentable, rather than 'spending lots of time organizing your photos'.

You're obviously doing OK, if you're visiting places like Bangkok, London, etc., so if you haven't been able to find a job, I'm just going to blame you.

Physics is not Climatology. And Nobel Laureaute status is nice, but you'd be surprised at how many Nobel Laureates fly off into cloud-cuckoo land.

Kinda like Al Gore, who's a Nobel Peace Prize recipient but isn't exactly an expert in Climatology... oh wait.

It's all good but can you clarify this point, please.

A 100W replacement LED bulb is about 10-15W or so draw for home use, so I would imagine that the LED traffic lights are already putting out that kind of heat already. You'll probably need a larger heater than 5W.

I think the original claim of QC went something like this:
zomg Quantum Computing will be done eventually and then they'll be able to trivially break most/all modern ciphers, even if implemented in a perfect way! There will not even be theoretical security! I know, lets take this old, unbreakable cipher and invent a method of key distribution that is perfectly secure in theory! That way, by the time QComputing is invented, QCrypto will have rendered it moot.

Executive summary: "provable security using real world hardware" was never a goal.

The FS linked to a site that had everything to do with WiFi and nothing to do with 3G, so I was just mirroring their own confusion.

Really beautiful solution, and 100% justifiable. I had a little tear of joy when I read it :'-)

Ikea sells the pots for $10.