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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.
Some people deal by making jokes. That's quite normal.
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.
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
Some people deal by making jokes. That's quite normal.
And some people are just irreverent, insensitive dorks. That's quite normal as well, but its normalcy doesn't mean we should encourage or otherwise condone their social incompetency.
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
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.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
"... 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.