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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?"
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
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
... 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.
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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.
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').
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.
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.