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Hans Reiser Arrested On Suspicion of Murder
Many readers wrote about the arrest today of Hans Reiser, author of ReiserFS, by Oakland, CA police on suspicion of murdering his estranged wife. From the San Francisco Chronicle: "Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive... Police made the arrest based on circumstantial evidence and have not found Nina Reiser's body, [Hans Reiser's attorney] Du Bois said. 'I have no idea what the circumstantial evidence is,' he said. 'When I hear what the evidence is against him, I'll make a decision as to whether he'll talk to them.'" kimvette writes, "While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?"
In California, sports and TV stars can murder their wives with impunity. Can OSS gurus? Perhaps this is the bellweather case.
Oddly enough, Andrew Morton included Reiser4 in his -mm kernel series today.
t ches/2.6/2.6.19-rc1/2.6.19-rc1-mm1/announce.txt
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/pa
I think the original poster had a case of "everyone thinks it, but we shouldn't say it out loud".
If she went grocery shopping after she dropped off the kids with him, doesn't he have a good alibi? They did find her car with grocery bags inside abandoned somewhere. It appears that the investigators were presumptuous unless there is some additional information they have that they did not release.
Just my $0.02
This isn't meant to be funny or insensitive ... but if he did do it and is found guilty it seems like he'll have a bunch of time on his hand. You know, with the long jail sentence and all. Is their a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail? Also, working on a OSS with your free time in jail seems like it might get you some good behavior points.
A very important question.
A coworker of mine uses an indicator he calls the "bus factor" to determine the likelihood of discontinued support for a particular tool or library.
The "bus factor" is simply defined as "the number of people who have to be hit by a bus before the fundamental understanding of the underlying codebase is lost."
garethw
I hope that at least the first one will come about.
When Jason Haas was in a car acciedent linux PowerPC suffered. But eventually others pick up and run with it. He was alright
/ 089246&mode=thread
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/24
Interesting to note the different temperment of slashdot articles 6 years ago. No jokes..
Other than his aptitude for coding, and the fact that his filesystem is one of my favorites, I don't know a whole lot about Reiserfs.
I'm extrapolating greatly here, but if he's a common geek-type, perhaps she left or ran away because he was paying too much attention to work and not the relationship - though that doesn't explain leaving the child behind. There's a comment from her divorce lawyer, so I'm assuming they were breaking up, and there is mention of physical abuse (though in divorce cases it isn't uncommon to have such accusations).
What about Hans himself, had he filed a missing-persons report? Why and how are they preventing his lawyer from reaching him? Innocent until proven guilty, but I would like to know more of the history on this.
so let me get this straight. You want to murder someone for commiting a murder? That makes you (or the state, rather) just as bad.
You know, even murderers can be rehabilitated. I've met a guy who killed his wife. He spend 8 years in prison and now he's out being a productive member of society. So long as he has a community of support, he won't commit another.
I agree. Natural enough for people (as people) to ponder that, but a woman is (presumed) dead. Asking how this will affect anything so ephemeral as a piece of software is absurd. That should never have been written.
I mean, besides being crass, it's also obvious -- so why point it out? Sure, we all naturally wonder what might happen to the software, but is it worth actually discussing?
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
People need to remember that there are human lives involved here. There are also children in the mix. This is NOT a tragedy for the Reiser filesystem.
One does not preclude the other.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It just means that the FBI needs a high level Linux hacker.
Even weirder, it's posted in the "Your Rights Online" section. How are my rights being affected here?
"Sufferin' succotash."
From TFA:
Du Bois complained today that police had not allowed him to meet with his client after the arrest. He said investigators were keeping Reiser in isolation.
Did the whole "everybody is an Enemy Combatant if we say so" thing start already and no one told me? What exactly is this "isolation" where you can't contact your laywer?
sic transit gloria mundi
Hey moron, before trying to pass capital punishment as 'normal value system', maybe you should stick your head out of your ass and realize that there's actually people living outside of the US...and the ENORMOUS majority of them are against capital punishment.
But honestly, how many people would think that even if it wasn't posted on the front page?
I wouldn't. The state of the filesystem is secondary and I know that some enterprising developer will pick it up if need be.
I was wondering why some guy smart enough and sane enough to develop a filesystem would go and murder his wife.
Thats the funny thing about punishments for serious crimes...
All the evidence suggests that the severity of punishments have little to NO impact on the number of those crimes perpetrated. So why do you want to do this again? Revenge? An eye for an eye? Is that it?
I say lock em up forever if the situation warrants it but capital punishment is always wrong as far as Im concerned.
And why is that exactly? People should get credit for their contributions to society, just as they are punished for causing harm to the same. Nobody is suggesting letting convicted murderers go free, but perhaps someone who led an exemplarily life - volunteer work, good parenting, clean record - until the age of 40 shouldn't spend the rest of his/her life in prison for a single murder. Certainly a person who still have a high potential to contribute shouldn't be denied this opportunity even in jail. Think of a PC/broadband setup in a cell, parole to work in a science lab, canvas and paint and so on. Would you deny pen and paper to a jailed poet?
Extreme stress can do it.
Every person has a breaking point. Not everyone breaks in the same manner, but eventually everyone will break.
I know that financial problems and a dissolving marriage are huge source of stress. Who knows what else he is dealing with? (who knows if he even did it)
You know...for someone that is so well known...it's not really that nice of a neighborhood he is in. Surprising.
If your sentence is "life" then yes. I do think our system needs revamped in that a person who served their FULL sentence (not on parole / probation) honorably should, after a short time (say 5 years), have that issue expunged from their record. It is IMO unfair to continue to punish a person for things they did 20-30 years ago.
Let me give you a true story that I think is tragic. I have a co-worker that was convicted of felony possession in Florida 25 years ago. He served his entire sentence without ever looking at another drug and in fact is so anti-drug today it is nauseating. The reason he is anti-drug isn't because of the drugs but because of his experiences to this day of the conviction and continued punishment. He applied for a job at one of the counties in my state that is identical to the one he holds now that he has been doing for 6 years. They dug up that 25 year old conviction because it was the only distinguishing detail between him and the other person applying for the job. Guess who got the job. He is also barred from participating in elections because of it. His conviction happened in another state 25 years ago and he is barred from elections in this state!
Having said that, if you have not served your full sentence honorably, then you still owe that to society as deemed by the courts. OTOH, if you did serve your time then you should be allowed to move on.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Well, point me at a peer reviewed scientific study that shows that most killers aren't wracked with guilt. Come on. You said you had evidence.
A person like Hans, who has the intelligence and persistence (no pun intended) to put together a complicated and successful OSS project is smart enough to know that there's no way in hell he's going to get away with murdering his wife with whom he is waging a custody battle. He is immediately flagged as the prime suspect. If he had time to plan, he had time to come to this realization. Ergo, he did not premeditate this murder. If it were a crime of passion, the cops would have a much better case against Hans already as he would have made more mistakes and left behind more evidence. Ergo, he did not commit this crime on a whim. No premediation, no crime of passion, not guilty.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
People need to remember that there are human lives involved here. There are also children in the mix.
I do hope she's alright, and that the legal system treats Mr. Reiser fairly.
This is NOT a tragedy for the Reiser filesystem.
"Think of the children!" If Hans Reiser were arrested for embezzling millions of dollars from WalMart, it would be just as much a tragedy for the Reiser filesystem as this is, regardless of whether there are human lives involved. We haven't forgotten about the lives of Hans and Nina Reiser and their children - in fact, we never knew any of them in the first place. ReiserFS, though, is personally significant to many Slashdotters.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I read that and i started thinking wtf are they going after hans for? Sure, she's been fuckin him over for a while, but there seems to be plenty enough evidence to prove what they [Sturgeon & the wife] were doing was extortion. She probably threatened Sturgeon too get more from him or she's tell the truth about things and it backfired on her.
Hans getting rid of his x-wife, it would be irrational for him to do since it would destroy his company and any other goals he may have had. Based on his history, he is waaaaaaaaaaaay to smart and knows what would happen if his wife dissapeared.
I follow the SDK and GDN principles.. Spelling Dont Kount, Grammer Dont Neither
That's actually the problem. Your average PHB indeed doesn't know jack shit about the difference between ReiserFS or FAT, or between Java and Visual Basic. So he'll take that kind of decisions not based on their actual merits, but based on rumours, over-simplified half-truths they half-understood from some IT-for-managers ragazines, fashion, and what the nice MS/IBM/whatever salesman filled their head with during a round of golf.
I've seen people actually take such stupid decisions as "let's use a single-user database and just copy the database file on the department's file server", in that case MS Visual Fox Pro for a reason as stupid as "Visual Fox Pro is more visual than Java". Once the nice MS salesman showed them some dragging and dropping buttons around (and, as everyone knows, there's nothing else to programming an app than dragging and dropping the buttons on forms), any other considerations like concurrent access, transactions, available tools and libraries, etc, went right over their head.
So the danger is precisely that at some point a nice salesman shop drops by and goes "whoa, you guys run SuSE? Did you know they paid a convicted murderer to develop their filesystem? Every time you save your powerpoint presentations on that file server, you have an innocent's blood on your hands, not to mention all over your neatly formatted presentation. Now if you upgraded to Vista Super-Professional Snake-Oil Edition, you'd show your support for the Bill and Melinda Gates Charity and be _much_ more fashionable among your peers."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Note that this guy is very smart and very cockey. This isn't Scott Peterson making anchor weights in his garage. The standard interview isn't going to do the trick with this guy. If he did do it I bet he thought of a special way to get rid of the body. And now we have OJ going to LUG meetings. Same deal even if he didn't do it.
It also means that murderers are far more likely to commit murder than the average person.
It's all about your perspective.
... many of the Amish actually attended his funeral and mourned his death./ 10/07/national/a191914D02.DTL
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006
I can't preach to anyone here about hate and revenge myself, due to my past reactions to things, but what those Amish people did really impressed me. Any members of the phoney religions of peace on here(you christians, muslims, jews, etc...) might want to take some notes from the Amish. I realize they are a christian sect, but their EXAMPLE spoke to me louder than the millions of words I've heard come from christians(or the other two "religions of peace"). If all religions did their preaching that way, they'd make the world a better place, instead of the shithole they seem bent on turning it into in the name of their "faith".
My son became a person, to me, somewhere around 5 or 6 months gestation. By that time he was reactive to light and sound (he would squirm away from bright light shining on my partner's belly, and would "jump" at loud noise nearby), demonstrated preferences in music (kicked and squirmed around for Bach cello suites, became still for Miles), and knew the sound of my voice and, of course, my partner's.
*I* had a relationship with him long before he was born. I can only guess, now, at how intimate the relationship must be for the mother whose own body has been shared with the child.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
It is the general consensus in the psychological community that a conscience is something to be trained.
Don't let the gravity of the accusations prevent you from running the classic experiment with this. Ask a 5 or a 6 year old child to kill his brother/sister/pet/... (Be prepared for the situation that he might actually try to do it). You will obviously need to stop the interaction between the "killer" and his "victim" shortly after. Then ask the kid what happened. Why it did/did not do what you asked. You will be very surprised by the answers.
Child soldiers are a very clear illustration of what can happen if a child's conscience is badly trained. These children are trained to kill at an age of 5 or 6 (12 at the most) and they kill. They don't stop, they don't pause. They don't think they've done anything wrong.
Lots of people think this is related to the motivations of terrorists, where violent religious conviction takes precedence over rationality.
FTA: "Nina Reiser filed for divorce three months later, citing irreconcilable differences and saying their children "hardly know their father" because he was out of the country on business for most of the year, according to court records."
That's no reason to file for divorce - that's reason to stay even closer together.
ReiserFS - because wives should stay at home!
No. Kids do NOT know right from wrong. It's not builtin, it's not part of the character. Unfortunately the nicest child, the gentlest 3-year-old can be indoctrinated to be a ruthless killer (without losing his character by the way, someone like this will remain gentle in other situations).
... conscience.
... it makes no sense to go looking for it, cleaning up a room can be done by leaving that room, etc ...). A child does not know that killing is wrong, for starters it is not capable of understanding what it means to kill, or to die for that matter. It does not know that other persons exists, so how would it learn that it's wrong to harm them ?
You ONLY know right from wrong through experience. There is no "innate" "in-born" or
And that's completely true what you say about teaching right and wrong. But it's even more true of a child. A 2 year old does not know (as in really does not know) that an outside world exist. A 2 year old litterally thinks that he can grab something with his mother's hand as if it was his own. That the whole world is completely at his command. He's also incapable of comprehending that something exists outside of his direct perception. If he cannot see a person (or an object) it doesn't exist (so for example
Remember that humans are, and always have been, hunters. It is "in-born" to every human to be capable to kill other species. It is also "in-born" to every human to battle other humans for geographical area, just as it is in-born to thousands of other species. "If necessary" you too will kill (by this I mean that there are defineately ways to make you kill someone, for example, if you thought greater good would come of it, say in a hostage situation, or in self-defense). It's just your definition of "if necessary" that's different. That's something you were taught.
I think I've maybe met 2 people who killed people. One felt guilty (and should) and one claimed not to (and probably was correct in not feeling guilty, long story). And I always thought I knew a hell of a lot of fucked up people. But clearly the slashdot crowd routinely socializes with large numbers of killers.
Unless of course they are pulling their opinions out of their ass or based on what they see in movies and on the TV (always fantastic sources of unbiased, unfiltered, statistically representative sources of information!)...
Sorry for interrupting here....
It has not been proved that he did anything.
When a wife goes missing, they always suspect the husband first.
I have no idea about the facts of the case, but the way the police work is scientifically incorrect. They come up with a theory and build a case to support it. It is an adversarial system in which the proof of "real" guilt is secondary to winning the case. The CSI nonsense of evidence indicating the killer is fiction. Real police have no idea about scientific method or clear thinking.
I know a lot of police, and the more police I know, the more I dislike police.
so, unless and until I hear some real evidence against the guy, I think the police are wrong.
Once you have been declared "not guilty" there is an entirely separate process (that most people don't bother going through) to get yourself declared innocent.
What process is that? (I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious).
In Scotland (but not England) an alternative verdict of 'not proven' (in place of 'guilty' or 'not guilty') can be delivered - I'm not sure what the exact criteria are, but it's essencially where the individual on trial is widely regarded as guilty as charged, but there isn't enough solid evidence to convict them entirely beyond reasonable doubt. If a 'not proven' verdict is returned then you are free to go, but the it remains on record (and may be used against you un future, for example if you were later charged with a smilar crime).
That's quite a good distinction I think - as it emphasises the value of a 'not guilty' verdict (helping to combat the problem of public perception of their being 'no smoke without fire').
Here's a link with more info. Personally, I doubt the committment of many American states, especially southern ones, to the principles of democracy. And my own personal opinion on voting rights for criminals, is that they are one of the groups in society for whom the right to vote is most important.
May the Maths Be with you!
That said, he's pretty much of an arrogant asshole and Reiser4 is crap. Why would IBM pick it up when they sponsor the totally superior JFS?
.. transparent encryption and compression as a mount option on a filesystem (once again taxing CPU).
Arrogant probably, but let's focus on the quality of the work not the personality type please. I agree that IBM wouldn't pick it up as they have a vested interest in JFS. Novell would be more likely, but they seem more focused on NSS for Linux then resuming Reiser support (which they stopped after 3.6 release).
I say Reiser4 is crap from experience. It ran our system load through the roof and paralyzed us for 3 days until we pulled an all night session to move 1Tb of data to JFS, which has yet to cause a system freeze.
First, lets get some things clear. Reiser4 is unlike any other filesystem out right now. It does have high cpu utilization because it believes that most processors are minimally used these days with I/O as the major system bottleneck. This is true in most workloads. Reiser4 delivers remarkable performance in using more cpu cycles then other filesystems. This is nice, but for me the true selling point is atomic transactions (read NO MORE CORRUPTION EVER).
There are some sticking points, however. JFS has a pretty nice repacker and Reisers kind of sucks at the moment. Also, Reiser kind of reinvented the wheel in some respects to the Kernel and pissed off some of the devs. It also implements extended attributes but in a way that doesn't match other filesystem implementations, and hence breaks things like Beagle (possibly Samba).
The plugin architecture is neat too
It has its issues no doubt, but was one of the most innovative and interesting ideas in the filesystem space. I really hope the project stays alive. One last thing. JFS is nice and definitely a step above EXT3, but XFS I think trumps JFS and Reiser4 trumps both (assuming you have spare CPU capacity). I am interested in playing with Sun's ZFS a bit.. that seems promising. Calling Reiser4 crap is flamebait, and should have been modded as such. Sorry you had a bad experience.. did you file a bug report?
Letting someone do something s/he loves while in prison, will sort of defeat the purpose of prison, i.e. make them wish they hadn't committed a crime.
That's assuming you think that's the purpose of prison.
Personally I'm more of the school of thought where prison is where you put people that are just too dangerous to be allowed out and running around. Might as well let them do something useful while they're there.
Even if Reiser did kill his wife, it's a bit ridiculous to compound that loss to society by then not letting him do what he's apparently very good at (designing file systems) just because we don't want him to "enjoy it." Who cares whether he enjoys it or not, the point it that society gets more from him this way than if we just locked him up and threw away the key.
Obviously, this assumes he's guilty, which I have no reason to think one way or the other about.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
LOL, sorry, took me a few minutes to stop laughing at that.
You will never deter 100% of murders through the death penalty. To think that you can crosses from nieve to insane. Check your statistics, there is a temporary decrease in the number of murders following the implimentation of the death penalty in a state - followed by a continuation of the general upward trend. The murder rate for the US is now higher than it was before the death penalty was reinstated. So, no, the death penalty does not significantly deter murderers.
An interesting post overall. I take issue with only one statement, however:
I am not a psychologist, but my hunch is that a psychopath may actually be less likely to kill in that situation (but would not feel guilt if they did). My reasoning is that a psychopath doesn't feel emotions the same way a "healthy" person does. The jealousy and anger that may drive a person to kill in that situation may very well not be the emotional response of a psychopath in that situation, even though a "healthy" person would be jealous and angry in that situation
Bradley Holt
Does anyone else find it strange that she dropped off the kids and THEN disapears? The kids are little. I doubt that Hans would or could leave little kids alone long enough to follow her, kill her and dispose of the body. Even if he grabbed her at the door, the kids would see it. You can't have witnesses to something like this and expect to stay out of jail. And for him to do something like this requires planning (premeditation). From my experience as a divorced dad, dropp-offs are too unpredictable. Even a few minutes different in planned drop-off time, which happens frequently, can throw off a plan. He'd have to get rid of a body, murder weapon, CAR, remove evidence from his house of altercation and al kinds of stuff.
Hell, Scott Peterson had his wife alone in the house, no kids, no relatives around, no one knew of his affair at the time and he had a holiday weekend and no work to go to. He was also way to dumb to get away with it.
Just theorizing here, but suppose she is into something else (bondage, drugs, cheating, what ever), it is more likely that someone from that world committed the act of violence against her. She just got caught in the downward spiral of that lifestyle. I'd be looking at Hans' old business partner to start with and questioning Hans' kids for confirmation of getting dropped off, etc.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
It takes a threshold of evidence and a D.A. who's convinced they have a case when the police make a murder arrest like this, so it's not like there aren't good reasons to have suspicions.
That threshold of evidence doesn't mean much when you're talking about spouses. If my wife turned up murdered, I would probably be arrested because I'm the beneficiary on her life insurance, we've been known to fight, and likely as not, she would have been last seen with me. Throw in a contentious divorce, especially with infidelity, and you have enough for a conviction.
In murder cases, the most important witness is unavailable, it's high enough profile that the police can't let it go unsolved, and the jury doesn't want the family thinking the death went unpunished. I wouldn't be surprised to find that half of all murder convictions where the victim was the spouse are mistaken. I would be surprised to find that it's less than a quarter.
A woman may be dead and all you can worry about is whether the project will continue?!