That's definitely fair response.

First: While he may have some assaults on his record, he wasn't arrested for doing some kind of violent hacking. In fact, with the exception of the insulin and pacemaker hacks, it's hard to see what a violent hack would actually be.

Second: He actually did uncover some government wrongdoing.

Third: I agree that a second offense should be punished more harshly. That being said, 10 years is way too harsh even for a second offense. His first sentence was also too harsh. You don't see these kinds of punishments for other white collar crimes, do you?

You might want to read my post a little more carefully. I realize that it's easy to skip over the first sentence, where I stated that "I don't see anyone saying that hackers aren't criminals or that Jeremy Hammond doesn't deserve to go to prison."

The claim that I was making was that the prison sentence was excessive (probably because the Judge's husband was a victim of the crime). Somewhere in the 2-4 year range would probably make more sense.

I'm certainly no expert in the history of South Africa, but didn't Mandela consistently deny ever being a part of the organization involved in those bombing and violent acts? Of course, I'm sure the 1960s South African government would never have dreamed of fabricating evidence.

I don't see anyone saying that hackers aren't criminals or that Jeremy Hammond didn't deserve to go to prison. What they're saying is that criminals and dangerous people are sets that overlap, but that don't totally overlap. Or, another way to put it: Criminals aren't dangerous. Dangerous criminals are dangerous. Some hackers might be dangerous. Some hackers might not be dangerous. For hackers that are dangerous, 10 years in prison might be appropriate. For hackers that aren't dangerous, like those engaged in political protest, 10 years in prison is overkill.

Tyranny? No way. This is 'murica, the land of the free. The government was just exercising the freedom it has to seize his stuff.

As a CompSci academic, I am consistently shocked by the fact that we don't really consider the ethics our research. Some of the research, like the folks that are still interested in Chess playing algorithms, is pretty benign. Other research, like facial recognition, data mining, etc.... not so much. Case and point, there's a great Ted Talk by a researcher from Carnegie Mellon in which he demos an iPhone app (paired with some server-side software) his team wrote for using facial recognition to predict social security numbers in seconds. For those with experience on the academic side, how often have you or your colleagues stopped to consider that your research may be used unethically? Unless you're working in security, I suspect that it's probably infrequently despite the fact that advances in just about every major CS research area could be misused.

To be fair, I don't really know what to do about this problem. Someone is going to do the research. If it isn't me, or you, it'll be someone working in a government research facility... perhaps working for a government that isn't so friendly. All I suppose I'm really saying is that we really need to start thinking about the fact that there's a digital arms race going on... and we're the ones making the weapons.

It'd be nice if we could have advice from some of the researchers from the dawn of the last arms race, like Oppenheimer. This time, the race isn't about becoming omnipotent, it's about becoming omniscient.

This is a comment that I hear frequently from my friends that are teachers; most standardized tests don't actually test the skill they're intending to evaluate.

I'm *GUESSING* here, but they might be trying to focus on the relationship between mathematics and language. Since you can't exactly teach context-free grammars to young children, this might be the first step (comparing mathematical expressions to sentences) of a half-assed attempt at going down that route.

On the other hand, the authors of the curriculum may also just be idiots.

Wouldn't the NSA design a system where they already knew how the student would do by observing classroom behavior? This kind of responsive ("predictive") system was exactly the sort of thing that researchers wanted to develop when I was at EDM 2013 in July, by the way.

This sounds like a pretty cool video game. I've always an RTS where you can drop drones with lasers into the battlefield... and they're probably stealthed, too! Thankfully, no military in the world would ever make something this crazy, though.

Why are you telling me that I need to reread the original post?

We're not torturing anyone anymore? I'm pretty sure the United Nations disagrees.