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Comment by ivankirigin | Hacker News Reader

  The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than
  eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million.

Ha! Just because they charge $0.08 a page doesn't mean millions of page views online cost the same amount.

This reminds of big drug catches that bring in tons of a controlled substance. The value is always given in street value, to make the efforts seem more substantial. Too bad they never publicize stats that show the police and FBI catch an infinitesimally small percentage of narcotics.

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This is what made me laugh:

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported that the PACER system was being inundated with requests. One request was being made every three seconds.

Inundated by one request every three seconds? That's pretty pathetic if you ask me. They must not have planned for the PACER system to be used very much by very many people.

That's fair, but remember that if you scrape HN with a 'sleep 3' your IP gets throttled quickly and then eventually blocked ...

What would be an appropriate delay for HN?

It depends on what you're using it for. Unless you need the bleeding edge of new stories, 30-45 minutes between each scrape is probably fine. If you're looking to stay on top of 'new', your best bet is about every 10 minutes.

More frequent than that, and you're just causing trouble for the server with no real benefit for yourself.

Paul already provides data dumps. Searchyc for it.

I wonder if that is pretty standard? Do most services throttle at 3 seconds or is that being overly strict?

Most are only throttled by the bandwidth at either end.

Source?

It is becoming common knowledge that the drug war is a total failure. I'll try to find some stats on the rates of apprehending supplies.

Penn and Teller covered it pretty well on their Bullshit! program: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3025396475247394113

Numbers are higher than I thought, but still do nothing to stop traffickers, given their high margins http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#Assorted_arguments...

Thanks!

yeah, but I thought that's how judicial system in the US works - they add listed value of every single stolen/smuggled/whatever piece without any respect of mark-to-market for the whole batch?

and that's kind of understandable - court has no time/expertise/willingness to figure out what "market" value of stuff should be.

Yes, but if they determine punishment based on the value of 'goods' 'stolen', then hopefully they would get an accurate estimate of their value, not values inflated by law enforcement.

The value of the 'stolen goods' here is easy to peg - it would have cost $.08 per page to obtain it legally. Whether or not the item is "worth" the price charged is not a matter for the court to decide.

But in another way you're right - piracy is closer to counterfeit than theft. The original item is still available to its rightful owner to sell, although the copy arguably dilutes its value.

(An old roommate of mine got busted by the FBI for large-scale piracy, so I'm more familiar with it than I want to be.)

No, it would have (and did) cost $0 to access legally since it was accessed during a free trial.

The two accounts were responsible for downloading more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $12. and estimated profit loss of $1.499988 million.

there. fixed it for ya.

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