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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byHangtime ( 19526 ) writes:
Between Fast and Furious, Swartz, and now giving the OK on drone strikes against US citizens in America - he doesn't have a friend in the world, he has ticked off everyone.
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bymkiwi ( 585287 ) writes:
Between Fast and Furious, Swartz, and now giving the OK on drone strikes against US citizens in America - he doesn't have a friend in the world, he has ticked off everyone.
Don't worry, there are still plenty of people drinking the Kool-aid. People tend to chain themselves to a particular ideology because it makes life easier to absorb. The "us vs. them" mentality is a basic human survival mechanism.
What will be interesting to find out is how Obama is perceived after the "not so nice" parts of his healthcare law take effect in a couple years––then scholars truly can debate who was worse, Bush II or Obama.
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byhermitdev ( 2792385 ) writes:
Having only read part of the law and listening to the repeated propaganda and "your taxes will not go up" under "Obamacare": I can tell you one thing: my taxes immediately went up $6K/yr after the very first parts of that law took effect. And that's not even counting my increased health care contributions my employers takes out of my check, or the increased copay (copay went up 50% the very first year, is now up 250% from year previous to Obamacare's passing).
I said it then, and I'll say it now: If you hav
●nt threshold.
bySeumas ( 6865 ) writes:
Who cares which president was worse? They were both fucking incredibly detrimental to the country and the next guy will be, too. We have crossed a threshold and we won't ever be back to pre 9-11 days. Things will only become more restrictive and absurd and the justification for them more ludicrous. The things we've lost in the last dozen years are things which you don't get back without starting over from a clean slate and that will never ever happen in this country.
●nt threshold.
byfustakrakich ( 1673220 ) writes:
Not so. Obama worship goes way beyond the props given to Reagan during his time.
bythe eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) writes:
Election and popularity poll results provide evidence that your idea is baloney.
byfustakrakich ( 1673220 ) writes:
You gotta show some proof of that, bub. The elections, then and now, showed just exactly how popular both of them really are. All the other media polls are completely irrelevant. Both of them are the most charismatic people since Kennedy, despite all the abuses they have committed, and it shows. And if the republicans really didn't like Obama, they would have put up a real candidate with a chance of winning. But they didn't need to because their policies are not being challenged by anybody. The crimes again
●ent threshold.
byhermitdev ( 2792385 ) writes:
You forget, we (the American populace), not I, reelected this administration already knowing about Fast & Furious and the drone strikes.
But, Swartz *did* break the law as it stands now. And, it appears he did so knowingly. And, rather than work to change the law, he decided he was above it and broke it. As such, he deserved to be prosecuted. He didn't work to change the law, he just wantonly broke it. As such, they brought down the hammer on him. He wanted access to a system he didn't have legal acces
byRashkae ( 59673 ) writes:
Not exactly correct. He *did* have legal access to Jstore. Where his mistepped is creating a automatic "spider" to fetch the articles for him, against terms and service.
byJWW ( 79176 ) writes:
Just to pile on the, with all due respect, horseshit prosecutor that handled Aaron's case.
She's also responsible for trying to seize a hotel from its owners because a couple of drug deals happened there. It didn't matter to her that the owners helped the police and were not at all involved other than renting out rooms.
Again with all due respect, this prosecutor shold have already resigned in disgrace for this.
Our legal system has no honor when the officers of the court behave worse than the supposed crimin
byhermitdev ( 2792385 ) writes:
I was commenting irrespective of the prosecutor. I understand there are/have been other shady things. In the perfect world of my mind, a prosecutor should execute all violations of law to their fullest extent. Unjust/illegal/unconstitutional/improper laws ought either be overturned by the judiciary or rewritten by the legislature. It's not the job or role of the executive branch to decide what laws should be enforced.
bySeumas ( 6865 ) writes:
My understanding of the case is that Swartz "broke the law" int he same way that Slashdot telling me "you can't mass download content from Slashdot" when I create my account here and then writing a spider that ignores robots.txt and the terms of service when I signed up and just crawls and downloads all the Slashdot content.
Hell, plenty of companies and web services are guilty of that, due to poor writing of their spiders that go nuts (sometimes even crushing their victims, by accident) until they catch on
byHatta ( 162192 ) writes:
Were the criminal penalties Swartz was facing just? I'm not sure.
What the fuck is wrong with you. There is no ambiguity here. Years in federal prison for downloading something is unjust. There is absolutely no concievable justification for that. How can you not be sure that this was unjust?
byhermitdev ( 2792385 ) writes:
What the fuck is wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Years in federal prison for downloading something is unjust.
What did he download, what methods did employ to do so? You "information should be free" types are living in a la-la land. What if the information was your banking codes? What if he then used that to bankrupt you? What if he downloaded nuclear launch codes, then used that or gave it to someone that launched one or more? Should that info be free?
Understandably, in this context, he downloaded research papers. Where's the harm in that? While I'm
byphantomfive ( 622387 ) writes:
Except Obama?
byslick7 ( 1703596 ) writes:
Between Fast and Furious, Swartz, and now giving the OK on drone strikes against US citizens in America - he doesn't have a friend in the world, he has ticked off everyone.
But he does have some very strong neck muscles from looking over his shoulder every minute or so.
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