::mock horror face:: I never thought I'd see the day!

between a site that sells stolen copyrighted works and a site that sells legitimate licensed copies of the same works. Hence a bunch of idiots get their panties in a bunch when they hear that all the traffic is being redirected to a "competing" service...

The clear purpose and intent of using the name "Hacker Scouts" is to borrow on the name recognition of the Boy Scouts. The airlines "example" is dumb on its face for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that there is roughly zero likelihood that anybody would be confused by commercial airlines having the word "airline" in their name. All they need to do is stop using the name that was deliberately chosen to borrow off of the BSA name recognition. This is exactly what they've wisely decided to do. The only sad part is that oceans of dumb nerd tears are being cried due to nerd ignorance. We get it. Techies don't understand legal reasoning or the law. News at 11.

he wouldn't go nuts trying to construct an oh-so-clever metaphor while remaining stupidly ignorant of the fact that Hades is, by design, already a very cold place -- thereby utterly ruining what was supposed to be the force of the metaphor, for anyone who actually knows the underlying subject matter.

...convenience wins every time." What a breathtakingly dumb statementâ"but then, I'd expect no less from someone trying to drum up interest in his awesome blog post.

set of people replying to emails re: Earn $5000/mo working from home

You are painfully delusional. There are six hundred billion ways he could have brought this information to light without jeopardizing US intelligence programs and lives and giving free ammunition to worthless authoritarian regimes. You and the mindless idiots posting below you, such as the fuckwit who tells us that of course Snowden would be "tortured" by the US government "like Bradley Manning" deserve neither the protection that keeps you alive nor the air you breathe. Fuck off and die.

In case knowing what you are talking about is of any concern, there are a variety of federal statutes that protect people from retaliation if they are actually "whistleblowers" in any reasonable sense of the word. Spoiler: ignoring the multitude of intra-governmental ways he could have addressed this, including taking it to literally hundreds of politicians and bureaucrats who could have initiated an inquiry, and instead fleeing the country, essentially orchestrating a PR campaign against the United States, and arguably now selling secrets to the Russians IS NOT "WHISTLEBLOWING".

is what I usually say

....by referring to the "Missionary Church of Kopimism" as "a religion steeped in file sharing as a philosophical concept" -- instead of what it really is: "a group formed to attempt to invoke the protection of religious-freedom laws as a supposedly clever way of avoiding liability for violations of copyright law"

Manning also released over 500,000 classified army reports.

Then you will have wasted your money when our new technology becomes the standard! (Seriously, though, I like optical discs.)

They allegedly caused hundreds of of millions of dollars of theft and damages, including $300 million in theft/damages by just three of the corporate victims. They stole 160 million credit card numbers. They stole freaking Diners Club cards. So it is difficult to make any sense whatsoever of your suggestion that the "punishment" does not "fit the crime" given a possible 30+ year sentence.

Perhaps you are missing the point that such attacks can cause many times more $$$ damages than the crime rings take in profits, and that even if the responsible parties or some fraction thereof are somehow identified and brought to justice, often there will be nothing to "confiscate", the assets having been effectively laundered or simply spent already on things that can't be seized and sold. Altogether it's immensely destructive of real people's money and livelihoods, and it's not as if the victims can be somehow made whole just by "confiscating profits".

You seem to be under the illusion that since it was done via computer the crime wasn't "real"; perhaps this is misplaced pushback towards the idea of seeing theft of entertainment media as a crime. To remind you: that's not what was going on here. We're talking about people stealing money in extremely large quantities. That is one of the very essences of illegality that we punish people for.

At any rate, sentence are chosen only upon conviction and based on the facts as developed at trial, so there is no way to know without quite a bit of further analysis whether any of them could actually see such a sentence. Federal criminal sentencing is intended to serve a variety of purposes, including punishing the wrongful act and deterring its future commission, providing a sense of justice to the victims of crime, and impressing upon the defendant (and society) the seriousness of the crimes committed.

Ask yourself whether a man who has stolen 160 million credit cards is really going to be "reformed" after 5 years in prison, or whether that's just a quick trip back to Moscow with some sweet new tattoos and a new network of Russian American mafia/criminal friends with which to further his underworld career.

And then please, for the love of God, question your motives.

...that computer programming skills often do not go hand-in-hand with critical thinking skills, perspective, or even the most basic grounding in the real world.

They *are* written into the law. Enjoy ignorance, friend.