[jbooth]

Oh come on, you think the taxpayer dollars are the biggest issue on the judge's mind? So he throws 10x the taxpayer dollars at the problem by putting him on probation for 3 years?

Have you ever met real people? Ever seen someone make decisions because they're pissed off? The guy basically took a shit all over the (immoral) way the justice system works, that's why he was singled out and made an example of.

[EpicEng]

Not sure how you got the inside scoop into the judge's thought process, but yeah, I assume he was pissed for exactly the reasons I listed; his time wasted, police time wasted, money wasted. Who knows, maybe the judge is just a big jerk who is happy with the unfairness in the justice system, but you don't know that any more than I do and there are plenty of good judges and cops out there.

You also don't know how this guy interacted with the police and the judge. He may have been a jerk himself. No one knows, but I do know that the legal system is not run by robots, and if your intention is to piss people off who have the power to screw with your life then, well... prepare to be screwed.

This is in no way a commentary on the substance of the article, nor am I defending the judge's decision. There's plenty of unfairness in the legal system (I've been on the receiving end a couple of times in my youth) and it's not right.

[pessimizer]

The point was that putting someone on probation is expensive. If the judge was upset about tax money being wasted, and their response to that was to waste more tax money, then the judge

>wasted our tax dollars to prove a point

[EpicEng]

Ok, and your point is...? I never defended what the judge did, I just said that he should have expected the hammer to be brought down upon him.

[VLM]

"piss people off who have the power to screw with your life"

Silly me, I thought the whole point of a formal professional justice system was to fix that, not make it worse.

[EpicEng]

...Again, for the I don't know how manyith time... it's not about what should be, it's about what is. If you want to live your life in la-la-land then don't be shocked when things don't go how you thought they would. Did anyone actually read what I said without adding in their own assumptions about why I would post it?

Let me put it this way; I'm your boss, and you go out of your way to screw with me and make me look bad. Would you not expect retaliation? Would you expect the same treatment as every other employee? If you do then you're naive. Judges and cops aren't robots, they're human. You piss them off and, as most people would, they are going to cause you as much pain as possible.

Like it or not, these people have a lot of power, for better or worse. If you want to make a stand and expose those who may be abusing their power then great, but don't expect that they will sit idly by while you do it.

[VLM]

And also for the n-th time these are people who's sole professional purpose is to be be fair judges and protect us from abuse, and they are apparently worse at it than J random hacker off the street.

Thats the core of what makes it shocking.

Lets say we had a business division of people focused intensely and solely on the job of applying computer science principles to practical net positive business applications. Shockingly there might exist a regional dysfunctional group where no one knows how to plug in a mouse or fizzbuzz. You can't rationalize away the incompetence of that particular IT department by making comparisons to the proverbial grandma can't be expected to run Ubuntu and pro football players shouldn't be expected to hack Clojure because that misses the point of why those specific societal positions exist in the first place.

Maybe even more on topic for HN, say someone wrote a garbage collector that actually stuffed the heap more full of garbage than when it started, and then when bugs are filed, rather than fixing the bugs, we get spin and rationalization that 99% of non-garbage collection code also put trash in the heap so its not really a bug that the garbage collector generates more garbage than it removes, etc.