Aaron Swartz Case Highlights Our Unbalanced Scales Of Justice

clipart of justice scales

I didn’t know who Aaron Swartz was before hearing about his death this weekend. I realized I had heard of him once his biography was reported when the story of his death spread across the Internet. It seems Swartz committed suicide and that action might have been the result of stress due to his upcoming trial for computer fraud and abuse. If convicted he was looking at least 35 to 50 years in federal prison. What crime did he commit with his computer? He “stole” information from behind a paywall that he believed should be free to the public since we paid for the creation of the information. While his death is tragic for his friends and family, his case shows how unbalanced our justice system can be.

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Problems with the website

If you are a regular visitor you might have noticed an issue with accessing this blog. The web host I had been using was moving to a new server provider. Well needless to say I had to move to a different one instead.

They sent an e-mail telling me I had 48 hours to back up my data before the move. So I started doing just that. Unfortunately everytime I got to a certain point I would lose connection and have to wait an hour or more to pick back up. Probably a throttle to prevent hacking or DDoS attacks. I only got half way through the back up when I lost connection for good it seems. Even the host’s main website has not been reachable for more than a day now.

This isn’t the first time my website has been down. About once a month it has gone down for a day or two. Since it was a free host I can’t really name them or complain. I finally was able to work out my budget to go to a paid host so I know it will be up more than 90% of the time.

I am still checking systems to make sure everything is working right so please forgive any errors you might get for a short while.

Haters please do something else

The Internet is a good thing when all things are considered. It has done a lot to improve the world and to make it smaller for all of us. The Internet also has a dark side especially if people attack something you like. Those kind of people I call “haters”. They don’t like something so much they spend their time online letting everyone know it. I can’t understand why they must tell me they are a hater. I just wish they would go do something else.

I was watching the Cleveland Browns vs the Baltimore Ravens on Monday Night Football and decided to do something different and read tweets during the game. I had to stop. I know the Browns suck this season (oh man do I KNOW) and MNF games are usually boring but this game was better than some of the others this season for the Browns. Tweet after tweet cracked on the Browns and the game. I understand tweets complaining about certain plays or ref calls but most were just mean toward the team itself. One person tweeted that the Browns shouldn’t be allowed to play on Monday night.

Why waste time typing a tweet to tell all of us you hate the team? Shut up and do something else.

The haters also seem to show up in comment sections of web site articles.

I am a fan of Saturday Night Live and have been since the 1st season in 1976. There are times the jokes are flat, the host stinks, and other times when it is laugh out loud funny. For a live show the cast and crew do a good job overall.

There was an article this week complaining about the previous week’s host and to be honest the show was flatter than usual. Fine, offer some complaints and others will defend or support those comments. Instead there were many who posted comments along the lines of:

Is that show still on? I stopped watching in 1988. Thanks for the recap letting me know it still sucks.

or

Mad TV did the same thing in season 8 and it was funny

Basically if you are not a fan or have never watched the show why waste time posting a comment.

I can think of many things to do if I don’t like something. One is to avoid it. Telling everyone how much I hated it would be wasting time.

What Happened?

Well the old saying to back up back up back came true for me. Due to an unforeseen situation I had to change web hosts this past week. While I had backed up my blog entries on a regular basis I found I forgot to back up my other files enough.

I am still trying to recover what I can from various off computer files I might have in storage so the blog will look funny for awhile. There will be missing images and text files.

Sorry