The difference is measurable as decibels measured at some distance from the event. Most people are consistently against being woken by loud amplified music, no matter what the genre. The cellos playing at the lawn party down the street could not wake me up, unless they were amped and cranked, in which case I'd be disturbed. This kind of argument has fueled a generational divide for more than half a century, with the old people saying "turn it down," and the youngsters taking that as a sleight to their favorite band, musical genre, or lifestyle. My (now grown) children went through this, I did it when I was a younger, and my father did too. Before that, I guess there wasn't a lot of amplification, so I assume they had different issues.

This comment should be modded up. Impromptu concerts / house parties are very disruptive in residential areas, and the disruption is caused not just by the music, it's caused by the people and cars and the drugs. It's easy to forget, there are first responders sleeping, and people who have invested time and money to keep their neighborhood tidy and safe, who are very averse to getting woken up, having their lawns dug up by bad drivers, and having deal with the litter and general mayhem that accompanies any large crowd. If concerts are actually being closed down, that means the undercover work is at least partially successful, the egregious examples cited in the TFA notwithstanding. No matter how one feels about freedom and the police state, the fact is the police's job is to address this kind of disruption. This method seems low cost, and not too invasive. And much more cost effective than a massive turnout of force (in all their new TSA regalia) to shut down an event in progress.

Tell that to Aaron Swartz. Even if the protection mechanism doesn't work, or isn't implemented, it's still hacking in the eyes of law enforcement. And also note, even if you win you'll spend every cent you have on lawyers.

You are right. The man also speaks with caring, integrity, truth, and righteous outrage. Thanks for pointing that out.

Oh, the SDS guy. OK then. And no one has explained how Mr. Ayers was not interested in the violent overthrow of the government, he was interested in resistance to specific injustices, specifically the draft and the Viet Nam war in general. Then as now the arms were nearly always in the hands of the police. He was never charged or convicted of any crime-- his only crime was thinking (and writing and speaking) against the status quo. He's now dragged out as a symbol of violent insurrection by the right because the media knows almost no one will bother to look him up to find out the real story anyway. Besides, no one is interested in Ayers-- he's been a college professor for 30 years-- only in his relationship to Obama, which was slight, and the opportunity to use an unfair and incorrect innuendo to besmirch the President.

Sorry to nit-pick, but it's important to be informed.

Are you referring to the right Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Because Rev. Wright is an honorable, articulate, educated, honest, and forthright man, who is at least second generation military, served as a Marine and a Navy corpsman, has more academic degrees than most Tea-Baggers have fingers on their right hand, is a college professor and runs a church. The fact that the fucktard-right-- errr, I mean mainstream media-- in this country can't tell the difference between an intelligent man's hyperbole (used to illustrate a point about the history of racial oppression) and violent insurrection-- does not condemn the man.

And if not Rev. Wright, then who are you talking about?

Ms. Rand would have had a better time of it in the USA if she hadn't insisted on writing children's books. Eventually her audience grew up. Oh wait, a few stayed back.

Thank you for proving definitively that my experience has been wrong for all these years. I never got to enjoy that online world of the past, blessed with all that lovely non-shitty and bloat-free "user created content," when browsers could cope with whatever was posted, and search engines only returned relevant results. For so long, my experience was just the opposite. It's a relief to finally realize I was living in an alternate universe.

I was entertained that Larry Ellison attached crapware to their security updates, which have to be specifically turned off in the installation, and their stupid toolbar turns off popup windows, but that disables Oracle's Discoverer product, and it works differently than the IE popup blocker, by not looking for user configurable exceptions. So for pennies per user, Oracle collects from the toolbar makers for every installation. And they're alienating IT departments. I hate working with them-- they're more mafia-like every year. End of complaint.

The closet was not locked. Hence, no break-in.

If JSTORE didn't want to make the archives available to scripts, it would have been easy to tighten the access. When a service publishes their data in an openly accessible way-- with an API, or with a query front end, or just the file-system shell interface, this is an indicator the data is OK to access in a script or batch job.

No password was required on the MIT network (hence no hacking on Swartz's part), and the JSTORE documents were available in a shell, which indicates JSTORE didn't do much to establish their value-add to legitimize their ownership of this IP. Just saying.

You're right, but it shouldn't require establishing sterling bona fides to protect Swartz from 35 years in prison, or even the threat. One thing he most complained about was the lawyers absorbing all his money, and then moving in on his parents home. In the US judicial system we're innocent until proven guilty if the defendant continues to pay in to the legal system. And defense lawyers are the only profession to have arranged that non-payment of their bills is a criminal matter and not a civil matter, as it would be with not paying your surgeon, roofer, or computer consultant.

No, sorry, there was no hacking. He plugged in a CAT5 cable because it was faster and the WiFi connection would reset periodically. Done. That's not hacking.

Good, lets brand him a felon and then throw him in federal prison for 35 years. That will teach him to cut out the "petty unpleasantness" he was spreading, and stop inconveniencing the People on campus.

Thank you sir, you are completely correct. Corps have convinced government at every level that their needs-- for protection of future profits, for protection of trade secrets, for maintaining their own security rubrics, for protecting their IP)-- make it necessary they be able to interpret and prosecute their own lines of inquiry, sanctions, and punishments against citizens. Government at every level (and on both sides of the aisle) is jumping at the chance to hand them anything they ask for, from SOPA passed in secret, to pepper spray for college protesters, to absurd prison terms for the unregenerate such as Aaron Swartz. It's shocking and unsustainable, but it's happening.