You're being too reasonable about it all. Some people on this thread can't possibly countenance the idea that everything that happened to Swartz was a direct result of his own actions, and that at most he was most likely looking at a few years if found guilty, probably less even if he pleaded it down. No, we must all assume he was going to be locked away for the rest of his natural life and anyone who tries to inject reason into the discussion should be told to fuck off.

I didn't say it would be okay. That would be a straw man of your own concoction. Seriously there are some morons around here.

Read the indictment. They had him on 4 counts and none of them or the circumstances of his arrest seem unreasonable.

Better judgement would have been to not do it at all, or to at least do it so slowly from a machine in a public area that it didn't DOS the server and set in motion events that ultimately lead to his arrest. If MIT / JSTOR had noticed at all in those circumstance then perhaps they would have done nothing more than tell him to knock it off.

Thanks but I won't "fuck off" and my comment was entirely legitimate in the context of a discussion thread where a range of views may be expressed directly or indirectly related to the subject. If you don't like it, tough.

Seems like you've just described an easy workaround for US copyright holders - release movies and music with copyright from any other country but the US.

That's the potential length of sentence if he was sentenced to the maximum terms possible for all offences, to be served consecutively. I don't think anyone believes he would have served that or anywhere close. More likely it would have been pleaded down or the judge would have set a more reasonable sentence. And even if it did happen there is an appeal process.

All of which is by the by. The best way to ensure you're not looking at jail time, long or short, is not to commit felony offences in the first place.

No. That would be called a straw man.

Swartz abused MIT's terms of service, abused services they had subscribed to, effectively managed to DOS that service, actively evaded attempts to block his IP and MAC addresses, hid computers in University property to hide what he was up to and intended to disseminate content to non subscribers of that service.

He did something clearly illegal and then had the book thrown at him. Perhaps the DOJ was heavy handed and perhaps his subsequent state of mind should have been a red flag to all parties to drop the charges or let him cop a lesser plea. But I don't believe it was inappropriate to prosecute him for what he did regardless of what his intentions may have been at the time.

It's not hard to find 100% meat burgers in the UK / Ireland / Europe. It's just the cheap ones which are usually padded out. Sausages are as bad and most UK / Irish ones contain rusk. Probably not as revolting as hot dogs though. Check out this. I expect burger manufacturing is pretty similar, tipping in trimmings and sacks of stuff and stamping out discs of burger. It's easy to see how if a consignment or "beef fat" for example contained horse dna the whole lot would be contaminated.

Not much use for complex projects expecting something as straightforward a migration path away from MySQL as possible.

Most installers are wizards which each step asks a different thing and when all pages are done installation happens. After installation another page comes up to ask for a user account and it's done.

The Fedora 18 installer isn't so linear. It's more like a control panel where before installation there is a hub of icons for things that can be configured. The user doesn't have to click on them at all unless there is an exclamation against the icon. When all the exclamations are cleared the install can proceed.

While installation is in progress, the user can also set the login account info immediately and walk away which means as soon as installation is done the process is complete.

I think metaphor of a hub is quite confusing and tools such as the disk partitioner really feel clunky. I think the hub needs to be done away with something which can be used like a wizard in a linear fashion but also randomly - the obvious solution would be to stick all the tasks into a shelf and put Next / Prev buttons on the display. User can hit next to go through them or explicitly click an icon to jump straight to that page. When all exclamation points are cleared the install button at the end of the shelf lights up and the user can kick it off by clicking that.

I think the account setup which is available during installation is useful. I imagine that its common enough for sysadmins to kick off an install, forget about it, come back hours later and realise it's not done yet because of some extra questions it needs. This way they can fill them out before they leave and it will be complete whenever they return.

Here are the ingredients for Tesco Everyday Value Burgers (the ones found with 29% horse in them) - Irish Beef (58%), Onion (12%), Beef Fat, Rusk (Wheat Flour; Salt), Water, Soya Protein Isolate, Salt, Onion Powder, Yeast, Sugar, Pepper Extract, Barley Malt Extract, Garlic Powder, Onion Extract.

Since the beef is explicitly Irish where the burgers are manufactured, and the contamination occurred in a Dutch supplier, the most likely cause of contamination is the beef fat.

58% beef is a shockingly low amount of actual meat so clearly the water, rusk, onion and fat are used to bulk it out and make it "juicy".

Cheap beef burgers are never 100% beef. They contain binders, protein, fat, rusk, onion and other ingredients. So horse DNA might come in through one of those routes. Doesn't mean it was deliberate, at least from the manufacturer's end - they might be mixing stuff up to a recipe and believe in good faith that their suppliers are delivering what they've been contracted to deliver.

Trace amounts of pork / horse are hardly surprising in a meat processing plant. But when the % is nearly 1/3 it suggests some idiot put a consignment in the wrong box or the plant itself has been deliberately palming off horse as beef because it's cheaper. Then that product ends up in Ireland and is mixed into burgers which end up in the UK. Some sources suggest the Netherlands where the contamination originated from has such lax penalties for passing horse off as beef that it's worth the risk to the supplier. But on the flip side, nobody in the food industry would ever trust a supplier like that again, as it would be a commercial death warrant.

So it could be human error or a deliberate scam. Who knows what the answer is yet and the victims are the consumers and the manufacturers further up the supply chain. What is important is that countries have the tools to identify these sorts of issues. Ireland caught it because they do DNA testing which is something they should be commended for. I doubt every country does it.

It's not just a EU problem either stories come out of the US especially for seafood of a cheap species being palmed off as an expensive one and the like. Everywhere that expects food quality has to start doing DNA testing to ensure what arrives on the plate is what's on the label / menu.

No you haven't. Your argument is nonsensical. To understand why consider sarin gas was legal and someone advocated banning it because of its extreme lethality. Someone proclaims that more people are killed by knives than sarin so therefore sarin shouldn't be banned. It's a nonsensical argument and it's your argument right here. It may be the case that more people are killed by handguns than assault weapons but the fact is irrelevant when considering if assault weapons should be banned or restricted.