This is ridicukous

[LastActionHero]

Some one (Mr Mcowen) is facing trial for downloading a distributed computer software on to a school's computers without permission. He could face up to 30 years in jail!!!

He was just trying to help by utilising the untapped processing power of the computers!!
Click here for details (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6740797.html?tag=tp_pr)

Don't visit his site. That guy is trying to make a fast buck by putting pop-unders on his personal site!

[lucifer]

how else will he pay his legal costs?

[Coolin]

Well... It is against the rules...
But 30 years? :eek:

I'm guessing he won't be sentenced to jail...

[Giancarlo]

30 years? The only reason why he should be sentenced to thirty years is if he committed murder which he did not, but he committed piracy - certainly doesn't even deserve even three years in prision. I would suspect that the judge would order him not to be near computer for the next two, with no prision time but thirty years!

[roblev]

hmmm, i hope my school board does not look on the computers at my school...... :eek: :eek: :eek:

[Archbob]

I refuse such demoralizing things such as pirate software at school! Instead I do it at home under protection of a firewall.

[Giancarlo]

People say to me that the feds don't go after individuals pirating software, after reading that news article, that is a load of hogwash.

[LastActionHero]

He wasn't pirating software just installing a piece of software that enabled distributed computing on the school's computers. In all probablity that software was freeware as most distributed computing products are.

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by lastactionhero
He wasn't pirating software just installing a piece of software that enabled distributed computing on the school's computers. In all probablity that software was freeware as most distributed computing products are.

If that is the case then why such a hefty threat for a sentence?

[roblev]

We want the truth and nothing but the truth!

[Giancarlo]

You can't handle the truth. :D

[Coolin]

Who said that?

[robin]

Umm... how did he commit piracy by installing freeware?

[Dusty]

When I first read Lastactionhero's post I thought it was about piracy too, but after reading that article he posted a link to I realized I was wrong. He didn't pirate anything, he installed software on computers when he not only wasn't allowed to, he was strictly forbade from.

Thirty years is a bit much, but maybe it would be better if the sentence were hefty. If an example is made of him, it will dissuade others from following in his footsteps. Like they saying goes, a public execution is good for morale (or something like that).

I'd like an example to be made of pirates. Too few people don't even consider it a crime anymore, picking one of them and sending them up the river for the majority of the rest of their life and fining them more than they'll ever possibly have would set the rest straight.

[Coolin]

Originally posted by Dusty
If an example is made of him, it will dissuade others from following in his footsteps. Like they saying goes, a public execution is good for morale (or something like that).
So we have to unfairly punish a man to stop others from doing the same crime?

I don't think the person being punished should have 30 years in jail just because some people want to prove a point...

[Todd]

I think a better punishment is taking away his vacation days and making him pay for the extra power bill. Distributed computing does run the processor at 100% so your power usage goes up so that is their only real loss in my opinion.

Any reasonable employer would have realized what he was doing shortly after he started and if SETI@Home was running as a screensaver how could you miss it? I think the employer was clueless and thought he was using those computers for more serious illegal usage and hence he called in the big guns and now everything is blown out of proportion and the state doesn't want to step down from their case.

Did he do something wrong? Yes, he shouldn't have installed the software. Was it a serious offense? In this case no, he didn't install a trojan horse it was a simple distributed computing application. Did it cause the employer any harm? Yes, higher power bills due to the extra power needed by the CPU. Should he be punished? Yes, make him pay for the increased amount in the power bill and make him uninstall the software at every console.

[Dusty]

So we have to unfairly punish a man to stop others from doing the same crime?
Essentially, yes.


I don't think the person being punished should have 30 years in jail just because some people want to prove a point...Is it cruel? Yes. Is it unfair? Of course it is. But it does get the job done, a pretty effectively too. If you want to stop something from happening again, the punishment shouldn't be a slap on the wrists. Do I think what he did was all that bad? No, it wasn't, but it was wrong of him to do it, even if it didn't cause any harm.