6 ms·

He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much. He genuinely put his heart into what he believed in. Without him (and Lessig), SOPA easily co

by xiaoma 11y ago

He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much. He genuinely put his heart into what he believed in. Without him (and Lessig), SOPA easily could have gone the other way. He didn't deserve what the justice system did to him. Let's be honest. Almost no one does. Aaron is definitely missed.

kragen 11y ago
I argued with Aaron a lot. He changed his mind a lot. When he didn't change his mind, it was almost always because I was wrong. In that way, he was the humblest person I have ever met.
andrepd 11y ago
>Almost no one does. That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...
- quanticle 11y ago
  There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just. Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice.
  - an_account 11y ago
    Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      > I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case? Why punish jaywalking?
      - andrepd 11y ago
        That's beside the point here, really.
        wolfgke 11y ago
        I don't think so (and it shows that you really didn't understand my argument). You claimed: > Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial With my sentence I wanted to point out that perhaps the problem is perhaps that part of the problem is that there are too many criminal offences - thus the judicial system is much too expense, which leads to the problem that most cases have to be regulated in the dubious way of plea bargaining.
        mindslight 11y ago
        It certainly shows the proliferation of ridiculous criminal laws. How many of these "99.9 percent" of "just" cases are simply just persecuting someone for an invented victimless "crime"? If the questionable legality of walking across an empty street doesn't perfectly illustrate how our minds have been warped by a draconian sense of "justice", I don't know what could.
        mason240 11y ago
        You stepping in front of my car, going through my windshield, and hurting me, is not victimless.
        mindslight 11y ago
        This is exactly the type of knee-jerk reaction that perpetuates the status quo of immoral laws. In your scenario, there is a civil case for the accident. There can still be a criminal sanction if a pedestrian fails to avoid vehicles (that are obeying traffic laws). This does not change my example, which is an empty street.
  - andrepd 11y ago
    That is a very good point. It's indeed a good indicator of how wrong things are. I don't live in the US, though. I was referring to the judicial system in the western world in general, not the US in particular.
  - foobarian 11y ago
    This topic came up with a friend's uncle once, who was an older Sicilian fellow with lots of first hand underworld exposure. He laughed at us as naive and claimed that the main purpose of the US justice system is to prevent vigilanteism.
  - rubberstamp 11y ago
    and private arbitration clause included in most TOS agreements now a days. It doesn't work to provide justice as lawyers on company payroll will favor the company.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - _yosefk 11y ago
    Generally, however funny or bad this sounds, justice isn't the only objective of a justice system - various kinds of impact on behavior are other reasonable goals (you might believe three strike laws to be just but oppose them because it incentivizes to murder witnesses), as is lowering the cost of the justice system itself (a treatment of every case that is just in isolation might not be a good or even a just deal for society if it costs taxpayers $100M to process each case, even if it's relatively trivial.) (I'm not saying that any specific justice system is good or bad, just that justice shouldn't be its only goal, which I think is an intuitively obvious point for most but a very contentious point for some.)
- songshu 11y ago
  I'm not sure what the original commenter meant, but some of us (a minority I'm sure) believe that no person deserves arrest, prosecution and jail in the forms they exist today even if that person is guilty of a crime. Things can go "smoothly" but still result in people being subjected to intimidation, cruelty and violence.
  - andrepd 11y ago
    By smoothly I mean not "nice and quiet" even if unjust, I meant lawfully and justly. I'm sad as everyone should when intimidation, cruelty and violence happen under law enforcement and/or the judicial system. Yet I can still recognised that this is not always the case. And that the silent majority of cases happen with no incident, but we don't hear of those. We do hear about the scandals, though.
    - aljones 11y ago
      It is very effective at locking up a huge number of people.
    - id 11y ago
      There are literally thousands of cases that: .) no one ever hears about .) are never reported by the media .) aren't "scandals" (to me they are) .) aren't just, as I (and probably others) see it I am talking about petty crimes that shouldn't even end up in court (Aaron is a good example), drug offences, more serious crimes with way too harsh sentences, juvenile offenders tried as adults, mental illness treated as a crime, things like the felony murder rule and so on and so forth. Mind you, I'm not talking about downright wrong verdicts (of which there are enough) here.
- crypto5 11y ago
  > The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice... Or just don't care if it really goes smoothly.
- ericd 11y ago
  I don't think 99.9% is accurate at all, unless you're including really routine things like traffic tickets.
- rhizome 11y ago
  Just to incorporate both of yours' points, I hope we all can agree that the CFAA is rank garbage.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Ironically the biggest supporters of the current iteration of the CFAA are those you'd least expect. The currently-extant grey area allows them to target little guys and threaten them with spectacular, life-destroying threats, while also allowing them to abuse and/or ignore the law because they know that it's very unlikely another big entity will care enough to choose to litigate the issue to a conclusion (a process which often takes the better part of the decade). If the CFAA were not selectively enforced, the internet landscape would look very different. Search engines like Google never would've been able to exist. Who can quantify what we've lost because a big corporate interest threatened a small innovator with jail time and financial ruin if they didn't stop causing a problem for BigCorp's business, which actually turns out being a pretty good summary of Aaron's case.
bootload 11y ago
"He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much." Not just in person, Aaron argued by email. When webpy came out I emailed the webpy mailing list asking Aaron a few questions, made a comment on a trivial bug. I got a response and rebuke. Looking back now I see someone constantly underestimated and who probably had to fight to be heard. Is he missed, absolutely.

by xiaoma 11y ago

kragen 11y ago

I argued with Aaron a lot. He changed his mind a lot. When he didn't change his mind, it was almost always because I was wrong. In that way, he was the humblest person I have ever met.

andrepd 11y ago

>Almost no one does. That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...

quanticle 11y ago
There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just. Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice.
- an_account 11y ago
  Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case? Why punish jaywalking?
    - andrepd 11y ago
      That's beside the point here, really.
      - wolfgke 11y ago
        I don't think so (and it shows that you really didn't understand my argument). You claimed: > Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial With my sentence I wanted to point out that perhaps the problem is perhaps that part of the problem is that there are too many criminal offences - thus the judicial system is much too expense, which leads to the problem that most cases have to be regulated in the dubious way of plea bargaining.
      - mindslight 11y ago
        It certainly shows the proliferation of ridiculous criminal laws. How many of these "99.9 percent" of "just" cases are simply just persecuting someone for an invented victimless "crime"? If the questionable legality of walking across an empty street doesn't perfectly illustrate how our minds have been warped by a draconian sense of "justice", I don't know what could.
        mason240 11y ago
        You stepping in front of my car, going through my windshield, and hurting me, is not victimless.
        mindslight 11y ago
        This is exactly the type of knee-jerk reaction that perpetuates the status quo of immoral laws. In your scenario, there is a civil case for the accident. There can still be a criminal sanction if a pedestrian fails to avoid vehicles (that are obeying traffic laws). This does not change my example, which is an empty street.
- andrepd 11y ago
  That is a very good point. It's indeed a good indicator of how wrong things are. I don't live in the US, though. I was referring to the judicial system in the western world in general, not the US in particular.
- foobarian 11y ago
  This topic came up with a friend's uncle once, who was an older Sicilian fellow with lots of first hand underworld exposure. He laughed at us as naive and claimed that the main purpose of the US justice system is to prevent vigilanteism.
- rubberstamp 11y ago
  and private arbitration clause included in most TOS agreements now a days. It doesn't work to provide justice as lawyers on company payroll will favor the company.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- _yosefk 11y ago
  Generally, however funny or bad this sounds, justice isn't the only objective of a justice system - various kinds of impact on behavior are other reasonable goals (you might believe three strike laws to be just but oppose them because it incentivizes to murder witnesses), as is lowering the cost of the justice system itself (a treatment of every case that is just in isolation might not be a good or even a just deal for society if it costs taxpayers $100M to process each case, even if it's relatively trivial.) (I'm not saying that any specific justice system is good or bad, just that justice shouldn't be its only goal, which I think is an intuitively obvious point for most but a very contentious point for some.)
songshu 11y ago
I'm not sure what the original commenter meant, but some of us (a minority I'm sure) believe that no person deserves arrest, prosecution and jail in the forms they exist today even if that person is guilty of a crime. Things can go "smoothly" but still result in people being subjected to intimidation, cruelty and violence.
- andrepd 11y ago
  By smoothly I mean not "nice and quiet" even if unjust, I meant lawfully and justly. I'm sad as everyone should when intimidation, cruelty and violence happen under law enforcement and/or the judicial system. Yet I can still recognised that this is not always the case. And that the silent majority of cases happen with no incident, but we don't hear of those. We do hear about the scandals, though.
  - aljones 11y ago
    It is very effective at locking up a huge number of people.
  - id 11y ago
    There are literally thousands of cases that: .) no one ever hears about .) are never reported by the media .) aren't "scandals" (to me they are) .) aren't just, as I (and probably others) see it I am talking about petty crimes that shouldn't even end up in court (Aaron is a good example), drug offences, more serious crimes with way too harsh sentences, juvenile offenders tried as adults, mental illness treated as a crime, things like the felony murder rule and so on and so forth. Mind you, I'm not talking about downright wrong verdicts (of which there are enough) here.
crypto5 11y ago
> The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice... Or just don't care if it really goes smoothly.
ericd 11y ago
I don't think 99.9% is accurate at all, unless you're including really routine things like traffic tickets.
rhizome 11y ago
Just to incorporate both of yours' points, I hope we all can agree that the CFAA is rank garbage.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Ironically the biggest supporters of the current iteration of the CFAA are those you'd least expect. The currently-extant grey area allows them to target little guys and threaten them with spectacular, life-destroying threats, while also allowing them to abuse and/or ignore the law because they know that it's very unlikely another big entity will care enough to choose to litigate the issue to a conclusion (a process which often takes the better part of the decade). If the CFAA were not selectively enforced, the internet landscape would look very different. Search engines like Google never would've been able to exist. Who can quantify what we've lost because a big corporate interest threatened a small innovator with jail time and financial ruin if they didn't stop causing a problem for BigCorp's business, which actually turns out being a pretty good summary of Aaron's case.

bootload 11y ago

"He was a pretty argumentative guy, but he was right about so much." Not just in person, Aaron argued by email. When webpy came out I emailed the webpy mailing list asking Aaron a few questions, made a comment on a trivial bug. I got a response and rebuke. Looking back now I see someone constantly underestimated and who probably had to fight to be heard. Is he missed, absolutely.