Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death

Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by atmosx on Friday January 03, 2014 @01:35AM (#7004451)

No, in this case it's the same. MIT is not average Joe, it's one of the top Universities in the world. I believe people on the board understand repercussions of taking and not taking action and the responsibility that comes along and if they don't they are not suited for the position.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by simpleigh on Friday January 03, 2014 @03:25AM (#7004630)

I've always thought it a nice feature of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (bear with me here...) that the general confession covers "those things which we ought to have done" before mentioning "those things which we ought not to have done".

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by pdonis on Friday January 03, 2014 @09:26AM (#7005522)

All that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

That still doesn't make doing nothing identical to doing something. You may consider them morally equivalent, but that doesn't make them identical.

My point was about how to correctly describe what MIT did. If we start muddying our language because, oh, well, it's all morally equivalent anyway so it doesn't matter how we describe it, we end up not being able to think clearly. And if we can't think clearly, we can't tell good from evil, so we end up doing even more evil.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by Ygg2 on Friday January 03, 2014 @11:39AM (#7006315)

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction. In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by pdonis on Friday January 03, 2014 @12:31PM (#7006702)

If you see a drowning man and do nothing you are guilty of inaction.

Yes. But if you take a man and throw him in the water with chains around his arms and legs so that he drowns, you are guilty of something worse. I'm not saying MIT is blameless; I'm saying that there are degrees of blame, and the prosecutors deserve more than MIT does, because MIT failed to help but the prosecutors actively sought to harm.

In this case they knew what was happening and before issuing an informal warning went for the nuclear option.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. What "informal warning" could MIT have issued? They didn't know who had broken into their network until after Swartz was arrested. As for "the nuclear option", see above.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by Ygg2 on Saturday January 04, 2014 @09:32AM (#7011127)

The article implies that MIT knew that students were downloading JSTOR files illegally.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by pdonis on Saturday January 04, 2014 @05:39PM (#7013289)

Swartz wasn't a student, so even if MIT had issued some sort of warning to students, he wouldn't have seen it.

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Re:Losing Aaron: Bob Swartz on MIT's role in his son's death by pdonis on Friday January 03, 2014 @09:22AM (#7005501)

No, in this case it's the same.

Saying that MIT didn't do something it should have done, is not the same as saying that MIT did something it should not have done. The fact that you appear to consider them morally equivalent does not make them identical.

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