Ahh, I see where they added another nine charges to the original 4. The accumulated charges after those additions still amount to only 35 years, according to the Wikipedia notes. Where is your number from.

JSTOR is still _very_ generous with its low fees, its astonishing breadth of content, and its long habit of turning a blind eye to subscription violations. The annual rate for an individual is $200, and their fees for licenses and universities are _very_ low for the content provided. Since JSTOR is purchasing and republishing copies of _all_ the journals, they really can't go lower without stealing journals themselves.

The US Attorney's office was prosecuting for more than 30 years of charges, not 130. Where are you getting that number? 130 may have been the most brutal sentencing possible for the number and variety of distinct felony counts he'd committed. A warning to others is the point of harsh sentencing, and this was the most recent of a string of cases where he'd abused access to try to copy large public repositories and had his wrist slapped. He'd insisted on continuing his crimes, he'd earned much harsher sentencing.

Leniency also presented problems. Failure to prosecute would encourage other hacktivists to also abuse JSTOR and other online publishers, believing they'd not face punishment.Federal prosecutors may have over-reached, but that's a decision for the courts to settle. There's no question that, if unpunished, Aaron would have continued his crimes.

I think you mean "access to JSTOR hosted copies of journals"? And the index, which is the invaluable tool for finding content? JSTOR was as cautious and reasonable as they could be, to avoid blocking any permitted users.

        https://docs.jstor.org/summary...

This wasn't his first such offense, and he was disabling JSTOR servers in the process. The state sought to send a warning to make an example of him: it was time for him to get a felony conviction because he kept doing this sort of abuse.

Not all of the journals are public domain. And he sought to copy the _index_, the organization of the documents. and he repeatedly crashed JSTOR servers while doing it. No, it was not "make the information free", it was "steal books off the library shelves and break the library doors on your way out" abuse of a non-profit service for millions.

His death is a tragedy, but "flipping his ex" was hardly abuse. He was caught entering the network closet where he'd connected his laptop and hard drives, there was no question of his guilt, and no one "drove him to suicide" except by insisting he except a felony conviction. He'd gotten away with his abuses before, with a slap on the wrist, and refused to accept responsibility. His death was from his own cowardice, not abuse.

He snuck past a locked door to install his laptop and hard drives. He also repeatedly hacked past the network blocks against his abuses, to access content that was available from the network drop in his office at Harvard.

He faced jail because of the extent of his abuses. He was trying to copy _all_ of JSTOR, and kept bringing down JSTOR servers doing it. This was far from the first time he'd pulled this sort of abuse stunt, so yes, it was time to convict him of a felony. He did indeed accumulate enough crimes to serve the 30 years he was threatened with due to the scale of his felonies. He refused to accept any felony charges or prison time for the scale of his abuses, he instead chose suicide. That's tragic, but not the fault of the FBI who investigated nor the prosecutors who were quite willing to accept lesser please.

Aaron Swartz death was tragic, but he was in no way abused by the FBI nor by prosecutors. He refused to accept responsibility for his actions, and he abused his privileges as a Harvard staff member to use MIT's facilities to commit his crimes. If he was so assured of his morality, he could and should have plugged his laptop into the jack in his own office and faced consequences at Harvard. Instead, he chose to effectively steal the services provided by JSTOR, a non-profit company that is extremely generous with its services and subscriptions, to try to run his own "free" service with no concrete plan to replenish or restock the content and services he stole. The thousands of journals organized by JSTOR cost money to publish, and his theft would deny them the fees they use to pay editors and publish their work. It's exactly the kind of theft that copyright was designed to prevent.

I work with different companies on different projects, as do my colleagues. Runbook generation is never automated. It is always a manual process, usually recorded by partially trained personnel to capture instructions they do not understand but have been instructed to perform. My colleagues are occasionally hired to replace the pile of runbooks with automation, which does require attention and understanding of the available options.

Not all engineers think in such terms. I'm dealing regularly with engineers who use lengthy runbooks, rather than scripting operations, because the runbooks can be handed to an off-shore call center today rather than requiring any code review or approval process, and having an off-shore team increases the head-count for middle managers who'd have to sign off on automation changes.

Please, forgive me, I meant to say companies are "reining that in".

Companies are reigning that in, apparently as a pretext to encourage staff to resign without having to admit layoffs to investors, or to pay the benefits layoffs would require.

It's not useless, except when it is. I've seen quite a few groups where incompetent engineers game the scrums to hide their lack of accomplishing anything useful, and where a weave of scrums of too small or too large a size don't permit the critical engineers to ever talk directly to each other. The damage is enhanced when the people at the scrum are never permitted to speak directly to the client, so the targets of the scrum have filtered through so many layers of management the project has become the classic "tire swing" problem.

        https://centralvacuum.typepad....

Scrums can be done well, but the manager running them is often promoted and someone far less effective inherits them, and projects stall.

They metastasize, and teach the attendees and the managers terrible habits that spread. It takes some diligence to keep them useful.

It's been tried in other states. The engineering problems combine, poorly, with the political problems of implementing the solutions, such as laying long, straight tracks through the destination cities and keeping it nearly straight for enough distance for the maximum speed to matter. The Japanese have managed it, but their society is different in a number of ways.