At the age of 14, Swartz became a co-author of the RSS specification, now a widely used method for subscribing to web content. He dropped out of Stanford after a year and became an early member of the team that built the social news site reddit. They sold to Condé Nast in 2006, making him financially independent a few days before his 20th birthday.
Swartz then threw himself into political activism. He had an astonishingly broad range of interests, from health care to political corruption. But Internet freedom and public access to information were two recurring themes in his life and work.
Swartz founded an activist organization called Demand Progress in September 2010 to oppose the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which was reintroduced the next year as the Stop Online Piracy Act. Throughout 2011, Swartz and his Demand Progress colleagues laid the groundwork for the historic January 2012 Internet protest that killed the legislation that would have brought China-style Internet blacklists to the United States.

Official statement from the family:

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable--these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We're grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron's commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

Why he was being prosecuted:

In 2011, Aaron used the MIT campus network to download millions of journal articles from the JSTOR database, allegedly changing his laptop's IP and MAC addresses when necessary to get around blocks put in place by JSTOR and MIT and sneaking into a closet to get a faster connection to the MIT network. For this purported crime, Aaron was facing criminal charges with penalties up to thirty-five years in prison, most seriously for "unauthorized access" to computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

If we believe the prosecutor's allegations against him, Aaron had hoped to liberate the millions of scientific and scholarly articles he had downloaded from JSTOR, releasing them so that anyone could read them, or analyze them as a single giant dataset, something Aaron had done before. While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for -- freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it -- is one that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes. Aaron's act was undoubtedly political activism, and taking such an act in the physical world would, at most, have a meant he faced light penalties akin to trespassing as part of a political protest. Because he used a computer, he instead faced long-term incarceration. This is a disparity that EFF has fought against for years. Yesterday, it had tragic consequences. Lawrence Lessig has called for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them. We agree.

The move, according to the NYT, shocked Congressional Democrats and dismayed Obama's liberal base." (although Nancy Pelosi climbed on board touting the idea as a strengthening one)..   Of course, we know the outcome--turned down by the House Republicans as part of the deal.  But the next in the cliff series offers another opportunity.

Here's a video of Yeager doing an interview with a local TV station. He basically starts off kind of trying to walk his statements back. Kinda. But then ... remember, he's just crazy so he just can't help himself. Soon he's back to making even more specific threats. link

Now, if all that matters to you is that there are women in the group photos, stop reading here.  If you think it matters what the women in question are all about, read on - but don't say I didn't warn you that it might not be a pleasant experience:

From Bloomberg:

President Barack Obama is considering two women for senior economic positions, weighing Ruth Porat, chief financial officer at Morgan Stanley (MS), for deputy Treasury secretary and Wal-Mart Foundation President Sylvia Mathews Burwell for budget director, according to people familiar with the matter.

    Porat is a leading candidate for the number two position at Treasury and would bring deeper market experience than Jack Lew, Obama's choice for Treasury secretary, according to one of the people. She would also provide gender balance on an economics team dominated by men, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters that haven't been announced.

So, what's the problem, you ask?  Well, DS Wright at FDL answers that for us:

In her role as CFO at Morgan Stanley Porat has been one of the leaders in killing the Dodd-Frank regulations behind closed doors. Not surprising given her job and interests. It would be odd to put someone so antagonistic to Wall Street reform in such a high profile role, or are those the real optics Obama is concerned with.

Consider, according to the Sunlight Foundation Morgan-Stanley CFO Porat met with regulators nine times on the Dodd-Frank rules.

There's a list of who she met with, and some information on what was discussed.  In case you don't feel like following the link, she apparently thinks surcharges on the TBTF banks were unnecessary, that regulating derivatives hurts liquidity, wanted more lenient disclosure requirements for Morgan Stanley, more flexibility on proprietary trading and was pushing back on the Volcker Rule.

Yeah, golly, she sure sounds like she'll be an excellent member of the economic team, doesn't she?  

The group, named Citadel, intends to purchase 2,000 to 3,000 acres for the project in western Idaho.  The community will comprise of 3,500 to 7,000 families of patriotic Americans who "voluntarily choose to live together in accordance with Thomas Jefferson's ideal of Rightful Liberty."

He must've somehow gotten washed over the reef when we had some very big southshore swells yesterday, and according to others I talked to, he's been swimming around in the shallows ever since, trying to find his mother.

Specialists from the University of Hawaii Marine Laboratory, NOAA's Marine Mammal Response Program, the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy have been trying to locate the mother humpback offshore, but without success, so there's a real possibility that she's already abandoned him.

They said he's a newborn who's probably no more than a week old, and that he'll weaken quickly without being fed by his mother, which would make him easy prey for the larger 15 ft. tiger sharks that have already picked up his distress calls and are now cruising just outside the reef offshore -- so it's a good thing I aborted surfing today after the whale encounter and came ashore.

UH and NOAA specialists will have to put him down, because he'll die anyway where he is. It's sad.