Slashdot Mirror
Auto Accident at SANE Conference Kills One
Several people have submitted news from SANE 2004 that a car crash involving several Free Software developers has killed one and injured two others. Richard Stallman was in the car earlier but apparently had been dropped off prior to the accident.
My deepest sympathy to the family and friends of the loved one they lost.
..and the first 3 posts I see are jokes about it.
Condolances to the family and friends of the individual killed. Good luck on a quick recovery to the injured individuals.
/. crowd that needs to try making a joke out of it (Gates/MS jokes), try and imagine if the individual who died was your father, or brother. If you can still make a joke about it, you're sick.
It's always sad when people die, but when they're connected to you in some way (even an abstract way), it hits a little harder. Any Christians (or other faiths, for that matter) should say a quick prayer for everyone involved.
As for the
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Never put RMS & Alan Cox & Linus in the very same car/plane or even building (just for sure ;-))). If you are paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't after you.
P.S.
Deepest condolences...
Please do not make any snarky comments about RMS getting out of the car before the accident. Regardless of your personal feelings, a person escaping potential serious injury or death should not be joke fodder - contrary to the first several posts.
Condolences to the family of the deceased.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
It's always tough to lose someone so young. May you find some peace in this time of sorrow.
Of course you should have heard about .
But anyway, this article isn't about him. Someone of our community just passed away, and we mourn him as one of us.
Slashdot has a strange focus on issues of free software, an accident that killed one developer and could have potentially killed one of the founding fathers of the movement (Stallman aka Mr. GNU, Mr. GPL) makes it news. Even though Slashdot isn't generally an obituary site, I'd like to question why the person would have to be "important" for you to mourn them, a man with a girlfriend and a family passed away tragically. Do you need to know anymore to feel a pang of sorrow? Does he have to be a celebrity to make it important?
Sorry for the moral/ethical tirade, but maybe it'll give the moderators of this post and the poster himself something to think about.
The report says that the accident occured after dropping off Richard, this trip was specifically to bring him to Paris. I know in his place, I'd be blaming myself, that's my nature.
For what it's worth : It wasn't your fault Mr. Stallman, so don't blame yourself. And my sympathies to the families involved.
BTW, does anyone know whether they were wearing seatbelts? Just just curious.
Seriously. Someone is dead. Two others are injured.
/.
People die every day. Seriously. Many of them children. Many of them after living lives of such desperate poverty that most of us cannot even imagine it except in vague abstract terms.
In my mind crocodile tears over people who you do not know, and whom you only care about because they're linked to a famous person are far more patronising and -frankly- downright insulting to the very real, very person suffering and grief that they are going through than if I had made a beowulf cluster of first post jokes about how the OSS movment will start wearing tin-foil hats and start looking for MS-assasins behind every grassy knoll.
Their suffering is real.
But your outrage is contrived and your "grief" is a grief of convience.
If Dick Stallman's name wasn't linked to this; no-one would give a shit --and that's the only reason this is on
This is what I love about the OSS community; it's a community! People drive each other from and to places, stay at each others', and when something unfortunate like this happens you truly feel that it's a community where people care about their own.
Here's what I feel we need to do; we need to put up a fund (donations) and a website to commemorate the OSS community members, and part (if not the vast majority of it, deservedly) of the mission/website fund ought keep their personal homepages and accounts on notable community portals (e.g. slashdot) alive, and be linked to from the website. Hans' personal homepage should **never** disappear due to lack of payment or activity, and it should not be left to his family members, hit by grief and possible loss of income, to do ensure that. Possibly too, condolences may be posted to one list that can be sent to his surviving folks. OSS members make personal sacrifices to be active members of the community and it'd be a nice tough to let their family members, who have likely been compromized financially by the opporutnity cost of their breadwinner being an active OSS member, ought to be let known that many many others care and are thankful for their contribution, whether it was code, logistical (hey, driving RMS is a big deal!), or even in spirit and enthausiasm.
For those of us who are not as religous:
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
-Isaac Asimov
In this case his transition was swift and for that I am happy. My condolances to his family and the community for our loss.
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But it's ok, as the Slashdot story states that Stallman wasn't killed. It's a sad world when a story tells me who wasn't killed and not who was (killed or injured). It's obvious that the poster thinks Stallman living is more important than someone dying. Shame on you!
fame != importance
I'm hoping that at least one of my friends or family can find the courage and heart to make a joke. Mind you, it should be made at the appropriate time. At the only funeral we went to, we talked a lot about my friend's life, and made quips about how "Adults Only Video" would probably go bankrupt without his business. He would have appreciated the joke... we made much the same remarks when he was with us.
Now, for people who don't really know the deceased to make such comments, it just isn't appropriate. It also depends on the character of the person involved in the tragedy. A joke should bring light smiles and help offer some balm to the wounds of those affected, not simply be the attention-seeking acts of immaturity we unfortunately tend to see online.
To state that "Richard Stallman was in the car earlier but apparently had been dropped off prior to the accident" is so incredibly RUDE and DISTASTEFUL and INSULTING, especially when the names of the dead and injured are left out. To even insinuate that we are all so lucky that Stallman wasn't hurt even tho these nameless folks got pasted infuriates me to no end. Heaps of SHAME and DISHONOR to the poster "michael" for his horrid thoughtlessness.
I found out about it when jet fuel and plane wreckage started falling from the fucking sky and me and the bagel vendor guy took off running.
To everyone who is using 9/11 as some kind of emotional excuse I say, "Fuck you!"
Unless you were actually there or lost someone close please shut the fuck up about it scarring you mentally or some bullshit like that. I lost friends and co-workers and damn near fucking died.
Find some other buzzword to cling to and stop using others pain for your own personal ends.
Recently we had a story about a camera technology that could see even through smoke and there are places online where we can work on an open source solution to this problem that would be more likely implemented than if some company sold them exclusively.
A majority of people on the planet live near water and a cheap enough technology or system that could help people drive safer could save hundreds of lives per year.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
"... every live comes to an end, when time demands it. Loss of life is to be morned, but only if the life was wasted."
-Volcan Proverb
Hans Bakker's Life was not a waste. My sympathies.
We're quick to jump into camps here. There are the "ha ha, man fall down and die" nervous humor camp. Then there's the "don't make fun of death" camp. Still another camp comes in next to say "lighten up, people are coping in different ways"
Not many clue in to this pattern, even as they help to shape it. Go look at the stories from 9/11. Same threads, different (in some cases) posters. Slashdot is a COMMUNITY of people, not a uniform voice. I see people on all sides of every controversy here deriding the "slashdotters" or "slashbots" or whatever term they can think of. But, if you're posting here, THAT'S YOU you're talking about (hi, I'm in camp #4, good to meet you).
Some of us are flamers and trolls. Some of us are the innapropriate joke-makers. Some of us are suits with pointy hair. Some of us are late-night coders. And today, one of us is no more. If you're a regular, come in, sit down and have a drink. We'll toast the honored dead, maybe share a story or two, and the guy over in the corner will spout an embarassingly rude comment every few minutes. I just hope that when my time comes, he thinks of something really funny to say about me, and that (behind the masks of indignation), my friends smile just a little bit and remember me....
Peace and long life.
Tens of thousands of people die daily to starvation, accidents and so forth.
Do you cry for each one? I doubt you do - don't act like a hypocrite.
And do you crack wise at every one? That's what the poster was talking about after all. There was no false grief, just asking why some people can't have the decency to show some minimal measure of respect.
I don't think you know what hypocrisy really is.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
If a person's mindstream ceases when he or she dies, then anything you do after that moment has no relevance to that person - it can't offend them, because they no longer have the capacity to be offended. If it does not, then praying for that person may be beneficial, whether or not they would have approved of it in life.
:')
The problem with exhorting people to prayer in a public forum like this is that (1) it's pointless, and (2) some people who are still alive here find it offensive. It's pointless because if we think that prayer will help, and we have the capacity to do a sincere prayer on behalf of Hans, then we will do it whether or not we are exhorted.
It's offensive to some people for a variety of reasons - I will say for myself that I used to be offended by overt mentions of Christianity because I felt very judged by people who had blind faith and felt that I was defective because I didn't have the capacity to have blind faith. It doesn't offend me anymore, because I understand the problem better, but I think it's worth being understanding toward those who do have this problem, and examining ones' own actions to see if one is doing anything that would tend to engender this sort of feeling.
The job of a religious practitioner is to succeed in his or her practice, and it is through this that they may help others - any activity that projects one's religious beliefs outward is very risky, and needs to be undertaken with great seriousness, and probably not on a forum as public as slashdot.
This is not to say that you should shut up entirely, but I do urge you to consider your audience!
Forget putting fancy cameras in cars. Just put a damn divider down the middle of the highway so that vehicles can't cross over and hit on-coming traffic.