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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?"
I hope they let him code in prison.
He's arrested for killing his wife and this post asks what's the deal with Reiser 4? Classy kdawson, very classy.
The filesystem with killer performance.
This brings up an interesting line of questioning. Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use? OSS and Linux zealots scream the advantages of using that kind of software, but is it a smart business decision to deploy something that could potentially lose all support if its project manager is in a fatal car accident? I'm the first to admit my own ignorance on a lot of the heirarchy of OSS projects. Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
Four roommates. No microwave. You do the math.
What if he's found guilty, and the project is continued by other people, and renamed to avoid infamy, and Reiser loses his first appeal because his lawyer fails to subpoena critical records from the medical examiner's office, and Reiser 4 is finally completed and included in Linux 5.0, but develops stability issues, and around that time Hans is acquitted in a later appeal based on new evidence, and he rejoins the project? Will they change the name back?
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
In the case of ReiserFS, the code doesn't get into the mainline kernel without it being reviewed by enough people that there is some hope of maintainability in the absence of one key person.
The problem comes in when no one else wants to maintain a piece of code, but then that's why people pay Red Hat or SuSE cash for their otherwise freely distributable distributions.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
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.
Okay, so I'm not a good person.
All Reiser has to do is roll back the journal on his wife's deletion. Problem solved by superior software!
There. How's that for tasteless?
In California, sports and TV stars can murder their wives with impunity. Can OSS gurus? Perhaps this is the bellweather case.
The answer is no. When an OSS maintainer gives up, you can still maintain the software precisely because you have the source so that there are ways of maintaining the software. There is no danger that reiserfs will break in Linux in the forseeable future, because the kernel maintainers will keep looking after it. If Hans Reiser and Namesys had kept the source code to themselves, then his users should be worried.
Really!
Well, that's what they tell us, anyway.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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'm not sure I'd categorize him as unstable, just brusque.
The ReiserFS, while still not the "default" FS of most distros was really an innovative one, and one that could eventually be the standard. While his work and his personal life should not be intertwined, I can't help but wonder how much his work affected his family.
Some things are just so shocking, and yet there aren't too many details yet, so I guess we just have to wait.
. o O ( TwO hEaDs ArE mOrE tHaN oNe... )
If Hans Reiser wasn't the author of a somewhat well known filesystem, but instead some other random guy who was uninvolved in free software, his being arrested wouldn't be on Slashdot in the first place.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You'd be surprised the amount of proprietary projects out there that "rely" on one person, or perhaps 1 person per major section.
I've heard from enough managers some conventional wisdom, that if a programmer becomes irreplaceable, fire him/her immediately.
Often, but not always, this refers to bad programming style. But there is a certain truth in it the industry must have learned from experience.
Still, I think in private industry it happens enough to this day.
A website aimed at helping to find her, Help Find Nina Reiser
Common sense is not so common
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 $0.02
This isn't meant to be funny or insensitive ... but if he did do it and is found guilty it seems like he'll have a bunch of time on his hand. You know, with the long jail sentence and all. Is their a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail? Also, working on a OSS with your free time in jail seems like it might get you some good behavior points.
Are OSS projects that rely so heavily on a single person able to be trusted for widespread use?
Compared to a closed source project that relies so heavily on a single person, the open source project is a much safer bet.
Are concerns like this valid or is the community able to pick up where someone left off with minimal interruption to clients?
You should very much take those considerations into account. With open source, you have two advantages compared to the same project when it's closed: (1) you know who the project relies on, and (2) it is clear under what conditions the project can be continued.
A very important question.
A coworker of mine uses an indicator he calls the "bus factor" to determine the likelihood of discontinued support for a particular tool or library.
The "bus factor" is simply defined as "the number of people who have to be hit by a bus before the fundamental understanding of the underlying codebase is lost."
garethw
I hope that at least the first one will come about.
I know, Microsoft have paid the police to do this, to discredit a Linux FS?
Totally, dude. Like, this one time, Micro$uxx paid this chick to be this like hardcore open-source dude's girlfriend, and like, she made him chili with peanuts in it, which he like would like totally have died if he ate it? Way of the world, man *massssssivvvee toooooke* way of the fuckin' world.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
We've all seen enough crappy investigative work to know that it's best not to speculate wildly and say things we'll all regret later and wait and see what unfolds. So for once, let's do that.
Reiser's past contributions and notoreity are why it's here. Not because of his involvement in Reiser 4.
Do doctors who use information gleaned through Nazi human tolerance testing (i.e. most of them) support Nazis?
There are lives at stake here!
I don't know. If you ask me using a filesystem associated with a murder would be WAY METAL . . . . .
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.
On this particular project, I'll have to disagree. Mr. Reiser is not just a coder/developer. He has built the ReiserFS/4 code from the ground up based on advanced mathematical theory, with full test case scenarios, and thorough benchmarking. He is a high-end designer/engineer and chief architect and visionary of a very complex project. This project represents the cornerstone of, arguably, the most critical piece in any successful OS, the file system. His is not the only solution, but it is an incredibly good one. Though it can, and will, be picked up if the worst comes to pass, it will be hard to replace his vision and tenacity to excelence. These are not minor consequences in regards to the Reiser4 project.
XFS doesn't really use less space than ext3. Try setting up two 512MB filesystem, 512 byte block size -- one xfs, one ext3, then fill it with tiny files. Guess which can hold the most files? Guess which creates the most files faster.
/usr/portage (gentoo) from ext3 to xfs to get some performance improvements, but I was in for a pleasant surprise when xfs actually ran slower and used more space. (This was on Linux 2.6.18)
I was going to move my
So please, quit spreading FUD.
Ext3 isn't the best filesystem around, but it certainly isn't crap, and it's *very* stable, which makes it an excellent choice.
As for resierfs, I have no idea. Every time I've used it, it has crashed on me. And you know what? That makes it a piss poor filesystem.
http://linuxgazette.net/122/TWDT.html#piszcz
Looks like you'll be able to choose either, if he shows up in this game...
(Some of us remember it when it was called Phoenix...)
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It just means that the FBI needs a high level Linux hacker.
but that is rarely the case after a month...
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?
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.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Better than supporting Microsoft.
[kidding! kidding!]
Up until posting this, hansreiser(6963) had two foes, and 375 fans. And my honest guess is that most of those 375 fans were fans because he was the ReiserFS creator, and knew very little about the man.
(I never found the man palatable, so he's been on my "foe" list for years.)
I wonder how long that fan list will be in the future, no matter how this case turns out.
That it
Regards,
--
*Art
Actually no.
I can not maintain the code.
Even if I had the skills, I don't have the time. And I can't afford to pay someone who can. So no - I can NOT maintain the code if it is intimately tied to a single developer. To suggest that I can is as farcical as suggesting that OSS is more secure because many eyes are critiquing the code - when in actual practice very few eyes are involved in most of the code on sourceforge etc.
Really, I don't get it. The guy can be the best coder in the world _and_ be a murderer. Why does it have to be a XOR? From what I read from kernel mailing lists, Torvalds isn't the finest person to deal with. Perhaps the problem is putting people on pedestals to start with. One should respect them for their abilities, but that doesn't mean they are nice people. I mean, suppose he is proven guilty beyond doubt. Would it be right to dump ReiserFS from my machines because the writer is a murderer? The code is fine, the code has nothing to do with the murder. It seems just stupid to me thinking there is or ther should be any relationship between the two things. Am I not really trying to troll here; in my mind there is a clear separation between ReiserFS and Hans Reiser's personality, whatever it may be.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Well, generally when somebody gets accused under an unjust law or accused of something many of us don't consider a crime, lots of folks will rally to the cause and suggest donating for their defense.
When somebody gets accused of something we can all agree is unequivocally bad, like murdering the mother of his children, my reaction is "let justice take its course." This seems fair to me, especially when we have no idea what the evidence is against him. Lots of people get accused of lots of crimes all the time and I don't generally donate money to their legal defense unless I think the law under which they are being prosecuted is terribly unjust.
Good god. Hans Reiser sounds insane.
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
People are complex. There brains are complex. Sometimes there is no amount of love and support that can turn a guy around.
Secondly..Prison is the worst rehabilitation... Constant contact with other violent people usually is a negative influence.
Lastly, your logic is horrible. I'll use your line of argument in another situation:
I know a smoker who is 95 years old, therefore smoking is safe.
??? Well--Are you ready to say, "point conceded?"
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
What, you don't think proprietary code projects often rely heavily on a single person? I've certainly worked on projects where if a critical team member (or even a less-critical guy with poor documentation habits) got hit by a bus, the whole thing would have tanked.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
it might at first seem a bit strange to put the fate of some software ahead of the fate of a women, but this is a technical forum. People who might be planning to use the next Rev or use the current Rev. of the software might need to rethink that, and maybe some other group will pick up the pieces.
At least for me it seems perfectly natural to discuss the technical aspects of an issue in this forum, even when the human life/death aspect of the story is more univeral and appropriate as a topic for any other random 'chat board.'
http://www.hawknest.com/
Long ramble short? Within a week or two no executive is going to remember who this Reiser guy is, let alone that his filesystem may be powering their systems... and that's ASSUMING someone points them to this news article and they make the connection in the first place.
Ya, who wants to use a filesystem designed by an accussed murderer! :(
WTF? Who cares? The source code is open, you can inspect it yourself to ensure that it won't murder you. Yeesh. The sad thing is that you're probably right
I don't know if it's all that sad... I'd never really heard anything of the guy before this, other than his name attached to his FS, and the wikipedia article was rather sparse, so I google'd around to get an idea of who he is.
You call for sympathy for the man, but as far as I can tell from this interview, and a few random forum threads around the internet, he seems like a really smart and clever, well-educated guy, a really good programmer, but kind of an arrogant douche. I mean, he talks about how he hates homework and wishes you could just study and then discuss to prove your knowledge, but then he stresses the importance of code review and benchmarking (which seem, to me, the "homework" of programming tasks) and belittles his own employees for not doing it well enough.
I'm not trying to flame the guy out or anything. Like I said, I knew nothing about him before my last 15 minutes of searching, but from what I saw in that little sliver (and I know that doesn't provice me a fully developed mental image of the man) it seems like he might deserve some of the jokes.
I'd say if you have sympathy or money to donate - give it to the kids.
And watch, I bet I get bad karma for just trying to point out that it seems (to the untrained eye) that he might have bad karma.
According to this Reiser lost custody of his children based on "secret information" the police have. How can you defend your rights when the evidence against you is kept secret?
The name is not tainted. Whatever one's opinion of Hans Reiser (I personally have none), ReiserFS is pretty much universally accepted as a very fine filesystem, and there's no reason why that should change.
;-)
However, having said that, it might in fact be a plus to describe it as a killer filesystem...
*ducks*
/lost+found ofcourse. No wait!
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?
http://cbs5.com/localwire/localfsnews/bcn/2006/09/ 13/n/HeadlineNews/HOME-SEARCHED/resources_bcn_html
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
I don't think there is any need to be pedantic here. Can you afford to run closed source applications knowing that the vendor could drop support? From a risk assessment standpoint, is it better to have access to the source code even if you could not personally do anything with it? At the very least, if the program is worth something to you, you have the option to drop some spare change into a bounty to have your problem fixed. And if the program is worth nothing to you, what difference does it make if it doesn't work for you?
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
I realize that this isn't a "news for nerds" kind of comment, but since we're into bashing each other tonight regarding each others' reactions to the news: I just feel for the kids.
Think about it: two little (?) kids just had their world collapse. Their mother may be dead. Their father may be in prison. Aside from these two unimaginable losses, the kids probably also face the uncertainty of who will raise them at this point. They're scared, and can't turn to either parent for comfort perhaps for the first time in their short lives. IMHO the status of ReiserFS inclusion is completely insignificant compared to this issue.
now that you mention it, anyone notice how the friends in the guestbook say support her family and her boyfriend, but don't say support Hans, too?
They must either already believe him to be guilty, or there's enough spite involved among her friends that if he's innocent, they still don't think he should get support, just because he's the ex.
Just a SUSE developer's (Jeff Mahoney from SUSE Labs) opinion and suggestion. http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-dit ching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/
Note that it's not "dropping support for reiserfs", it's "not using reiserfs as default". You're still free to use ext3/reiserfs/xfs if you know they perform well for your workload.
...to ext3 until this is all resolved.
You are all going to hell, everyone who posted in this thread is going straight to hell, and also I will for laughing so fucking hard.
In fact, it's probably a bad idea to tell your CEO that his filesystems are FAT. You may lose your job.
Filesystems don't kill people...people kill people.
You know...for someone that is so well known...it's not really that nice of a neighborhood he is in. Surprising.
ReiserFS will now be known as the killer app for Linux.
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=1095355 06122706&w=2
1 78128079&w=27 5720520&w=2
Hans Reiser:
Well, I am going to try being honest and see what happens.
I am more than 170k in debt, and Namesys is doing badly fiscally. A
technical great success being stabilized now, but then there is my
ongoing fiscal disaster. Once again, we are missing payroll. My wife
is divorcing me in part because I keep going deeper into debt, and I
thank her for divorcing me now rather than later. Unfortunately she is
making the divorce messy enough to keep me from pulling Namesys out of
the fiscal tailspin by consuming all my time with things like proving I
am not making the fantastic amounts of money she claims I am. I hope
next month is better."
Others
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=108353
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=984246
Why does everyone forget this cornerstone of the legal system, an accused person is innocent unless proven guilty. It is very easy to accuse someone of something bad, but the accusation alone causes a lot of damage to reputation.
This doesn't change what I think of Hans Reiser at all. If he's convicted of murder, that's different, but nothing like that has happened. A husband is a natural suspect in such a case. I hope that his wife is OK, but I have no reason to believe that Hans is responsible.
When I was in highschool, our principal was accused of sexual misconduct due to some activities that allegedly took place with a student. This shocking accusation made the news, and all the parents were horrified. But very few people went to the actual trial, and when the man was acquitted it did not make the news. Give everyone their chance and let the legal system do its job.
My problem with capital punishment is that it implies 100% faith in the system. For a government based on checks and balances (i.e. the lack of 100% faith in the system) this seems contradictory to me.
Do you really think societies money is better spent to keep such a person behind bars than to spend it in more productive ways?
It costs more to execute someone than to imprison them for life...just keep that in mind.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Apparently Reiser not only deletes files, but wives, too.
-R
As a person who helped Hans Reiser get some sponsorship in his early days and an early adopter of his filesystem in major corporate use I never would have expected something like this. It's a disaster for him but there isn't much we can do about it at this point aside from debate his innocence based on zero information. So what about Linux? Even if he turns out to be innocent (and I hope he is) the name is tarnished and the filesystem will probably languish. I was expecting reiserfs4 to be an important part of the future of Linux and Free Software's answer to WinFS. Now what will we do? We all know it takes ages, years even, to design, implement, and test a filesystem. XFS, JFS, ext3, etc. are nothing like reiser4 and lack it's capabilities. WinFS will someday be ready and will someday ship. And with this setback for Free Software the proprietary world has a huge head start over us.
:(
This is certainly a disaster for everyone involved.
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."
It wouldn't be the first time that ReiserFS has been under suspicion because data went missing, presumed corrupted.
I am SO glad I use XFS!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
Isn't there some kind of immunity for authors of large open source projects?
Another disturbing thing is you'll see in many of these articles that the police claim Reiser was the last one to see his wife. However, the facts of the state that she went shopping after she left his house; her car was found with the groceries she bought. Clearly then, he was not the last person his wife, as the checker at the supermarket obviously interacted with her.
I dont see how the story works: she drops the kids at his house, she goes shopping, and then..how does he end up killing her? He has the kids with him..at home..she's on the road. When does he have the opportunity to kill her?
If he is found guilty, the name of the filesystem will have to be changed, too. Otherwise it will fall into obscurity along with MansonFS, OswaldFS and the great-but-forgotten object-based, journalling OJSimpsonFS.
Free as in mason.
Not to be, uh, yeah, what the heck. Aside from the fact that (as a previous poster said) most folks wouldn't know Reiser from raisins, why would the name hurt the project? I could see where it might actually help.
Admin: "And it's using the Reiser filesystem."
User: "Oh, that's nice."
A: "Reiser killed his wife, but people liked the filesystem so much, they kept it going when he went to jail."
U: "Wow, it must be good! Reiser, huh?"
The user then shares this tiny twig of information with his friends, who share it with their friends, because all of them want to feel like they have a clue about computers, and the IT world.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
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".
WTF has this got to do with my rights on line?
DalmerOS failed to gain ground due to unwanted eating of data.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
... Murder is an illegal killing, the preceding are legal. The State does have the right to kill, individuals do not except in self defense. Bad, or more accurately moral, only comes into play with respect to when the State decides to use such power. If everyone convicted of murder was executed, I'd lean heavily towards the immoral label. There are erroneous convictions and an execution can not be undone, it might be cheaper to warehouse the MF'er, the MF'er might suffer more by living, ... However, if it is an extreme case and the circumstances remove the doubt (caught in the act, DNA versus picked from a lineup, etc.) then I would lean towards the moral label.
Execution is not murder, self defense is not murder, military combat is not murder,
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.
That is a highly defective appraisal, "so long as he has a community of support." Rehabilitated is when someone won't murder, regardless of a community of support. I had a Psych professor who used to believe as you seem to. His opinion changed after spending years volunteering at a state prison. He learned that many criminals simply adapt to their environment. When in prison where there is a much greater likelihood of being caught and harsher punishment they behave, when returned to a society where they are likely to get away with it they revert. Predator -> Model Prisoner -> Predator, repeat. Actual rehabilitation is rare. The problem with a murderer is that the cost of finding out if they are truly rehabilitated can be quite high. Society may be better off with murderers being permanently removed, life with no parole.
Yes you can say that a lot of people would murder, but some people would NEVER murder because they have empathy. It's that simple, if this story is true, Mr. Reiser had no empathy at all, and this was his wife.
Why do you believe it's normal to murder? Most people would never even consider murdering their wife, and of people who think about it, most people quickly feel guilty for even thinking about it. If a person planned it and went through with it, it's safe to say they werent feeling empathy or guilt.
Tell me why do you defend a person who could just as easily do this to you?
And if you go to the more cold-blooded end of the murder spectrum, the killers actually get smarter, and outright sociopaths are often pretty bright. However, I base that on nothing more substantial than a hunch I get from what I've read, heard, and seen over the years, so don't bet any vital organs on it.
Hans described his situation in some mails. His advanced filesystems are a great success technically, but his private life suffered a lot. He was divorced, his children taken away from him, he is in debt and Namesys is in a financial tailspin. Read it yourself:
5 06122706&w=28 35707976&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=109535
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=reiserfs&m=110443
Can you ever really be sure anyone is 100% guilty. Putting someone in prison or even just marking their record as guilty is not a fair thing for someone who is innocent. ...and I would say giving someone a life sentance is at least as bad as execution. Sure, they may get out of prison sometime, however what kind of life will they be able to lead?
There are worse things than prison. Because I was over 25 and single, the local taliban essentially made it so I would have all sorts of problems, including being poisoned. I will have kidney failure and the damage from 2 strokes for the rest of my life. I have to be chained to a dialysis machine for 9 hrs/day, and because of the strokes, I can't be active (meaning doing things like walking) for more than 2 or so hrs/day. Much less if I carry something heavy, and now anything over 10 lbs is "heavy." I didn't even do anything wrong--just tried to live my life. So I didn't go to their church. Is that and the constant harrasment they gave me fair "punishment"? Is it not worse than prison or death?
Now the US justice system is supposed to make things fair, or at least reasonable. It is designed to let people go if there is any excuse to do so, because holding or punishing someone when they are innocent is a crime in itself. So I think the question should be: If someone has gone through all the stringent requirements for being declared guilty, should they not be punished for their apparent crime? At least so long as the punishment is resonable for said crime and it is a real crime?
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.
It's funny, because I was thinking of Godwining this thread with Nazi research. Would someone really turn down a treatment if they learned the doctor came up with it using Nazi reasearch? I doubt it. Likewise, I don't see why someone would throw away a filesystem because of an incident completely unrelated to its development.
Now, that isn't to say there aren't violent psychopathic criminals. Most serial killers, and violent sex offenders who target adult women, would qualify. And it is true that they are extremely hard to rehabilitate (some would say impossible). But they aren't the only ones behind bars. In fact, I'm not even convinced they represent a signifigant fraction of violent criminals - the numbers I've seen vary wildly, which suggest to me that nobody knows how many of them exist with any certainty.
To give them as an example of the futility of rehabilitation is utterly ridiculous. It's like taking a rabid dog as a typical example of what most strays are like.
The "average" person is quite capable of murder, given the right incentive, or the right lapse in judgement. Most "crimes of passion" would qualify. Do you really think somebody who, to give an example, kills their wife after catching her in bed with another person is automatically psycho? Granted a psychopath put in that position is more likely to commit violence than an average person, but that doesn't make the average person incapable of murder, it merely makes him statistically less likely to commit it.
To presume all who commit crimes are suffering from mental illness, or are in some way less human, is a common error. We wish to distance ourselves from those we consider evil, by claiming that we could never do such a thing. But make no mistake; this is denial, plain and simple.
That's not to say that there aren't criminal psychopaths in the world; rather it is to admit that average, mentally healthy people, under the right conditions, can do things we as a society consider monsterous. For every psycho killing people at random, there are a dozen "average" people killing for revenge, for profit, for ideology, or for any number of other reasons.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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.
This has got to be the stupidest goddamn argument I have ever heard.
So how many people should this paragon of virtue be allowed to murder before we lock them up for life? And are you saying you're willing to allow your hypothetical murderer get off with a slap on the wrist, as long as he or she is really this great guy?
And how do we decide who gets the benefit of being let off easy for murder? Does being able to write a great filesystem rank higher than, say, being a pediatrician? How about a minister?
If Hans Reiser did in fact kill his wife, then I don't care how great Reiser4 is, or how great Reiser5 might have been. He should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. I'm sorry if the reality of that situation inconveniences your overprivileged ass, but you'll get over it eventually.
Search the code. I was always joking you could hide a corpse in the ReiserFS code, but jeez...
Could be worse. Could be raining.
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!
Yes you can teach morality, to strengthen conscience, however conscience is something based on natural intuition that people are born with, or not. Some of us are born with the ability to be good at having a conscience just as some of us are born to be good at math, or born to be good at reading or not.
So you can teach someone without a conscience to behave, and to develop a rational conscience, it's just far more difficult to teach a person who lacks the innate ability. It's like anything else really, some people have the conscience talent and some don't. Child soldiers, you are acting as if every child would equally be a good child soldier. Most child soldiers, are damaged
and feel a lot of remorse, just later. Children generally can be trained into killing machines not because they lack remorse, or conscience, but because their conscience is not complex enough or firm enough to avoid being molded by religion.
Adults on the other hand, they know right from wrong based on experience, because they know what is rational and or irrational and it matches up with their conscience. Ethics are rational, but you don't really understand this as a kid even if you have the natural ability, you wont really know what you are doing at 5. So I agree, that we must spend more time training children in ethics, and do a better job teaching reasoning ability.
Censorship does not work, as censoring words, or violence, it does not really influence conscience at all, however it can keep your kid from being violent if they lack a conscience. At the same time when you make something forbidden you risk making it "cool" to be violent too. This is actually true, it's a big debate now in the psychology world as to how to teach conscience, and the tests have been done on prisoners with moderate success. Prisoners can be taught right from wrong, but their concept of right and wrong is narrow and based on the influence it has on themself, not the influence it has on anyone else, as they are the center of their world and you are the guest, you have to explain how it's in their best interest to act ethical and stop being a criminal. Most people CAN learn to not be a criminal because they fear going to jail. Most criminals want to stay out of jail and enjoy their lives,
problem is, it's so simple to just take whatever you want simply because you can, and it's so simple to just do whatever you want simply because you can, that you have to actually explain to people why it's RATIONAL to limit their freedoms. Easier said than done.
Moreover, you're asking me to prove things while you are, by your own admission, presenting your wild aproximate guesses as fact. You prove it.
Would this be another one of your wild guesses?
There is a high suicide rate in prison, and for people awaiting trial. And there are plenty of murder-suicides. But that's a hell of a long way from "average people almost always kill themselves after commiting violent acts". And moreover, most of the murder suicides aren't exactly average either.
Regardless of whether someone has commited a crime, most suicides are born of depression. This means that murderers who off themselve either planned suicide and decided in advance to take someone else with them (as in murder suicide, like the Columbine massacre), or else commited the crime, were driven to depression by guilt, and later killed themselves, which is not "immediately commiting suicide" as you phrased it. The impetus for self-preservation is stronger than guilt.
A killer who does not also take their own life is not a de facto psychopath, which is what you seem to be claiming.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
He caught his wife using ext3.
Is is possible for filesystems to inherit personality traits from their programmers?
I always wondered why ReiserFS was so damn unstable
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.
...when using the OJSImpsonFS, or you might get fstab'ed to death!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Funny how things can take on a whole new meaning.
Try: /root/recovery.log /dev/path/to/wife
r ecovery_howto.comments
reiserfsck --rebuild-tree -S -l
http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/reiserfs_data_
Please stop stalking me, bro.
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."
I would be interested to know how many of the people commenting have been personally acquainted with a murder suspect. I was, once. Air Force guy, he was deployed, his wife fooled around on him. She ended up shot one night. He had taken the kids to a party that night, but I don't think he had any witnesses to account for how he was spending his time at the time of the murder.
Luckily, he had good enough luck/lawyer/whatever that he remained free. I was at a cafe near the base one time and I heard a couple of deputies/cops discussing the case. Their take? They knew it was him, they just couldn't get enough evidence together to convict.
Fast forward a year later, they found the guy that really did it.
Moral of the story--if she's sleeping around, her husband is likely not the only person she's pissed off. Oh, and cop "instinct" is why we need very picky, painstakingly applied laws about collection and use of evidence.
Liberty uber alles.
> Fortunately, I don't believe in a second life.
You missed the spirit of his comment, pun intended. His comment is that the angry person's life is the second one wasted, after the loss of the first (the victim, assuming the victim and the angry person aren't the same, which would be the case in a murder).
Virg
Rename the file system to "Kimble".
The Reisers were married in 1999 and frequently traveled to Russia, where she was born. They separated in May 2004.
Just long enough to get her green card
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.
"Verbal statements made in court" BECOMES "Court Transcript" BECOMES "Court Records". There is not anything here saying whether or not it was proven or not.
Nina Reiser was granted a temporary restraining order against her husband in December 2004 after she reported that he had pushed her and was abusive to her. A year later, she agreed not to seek a permanent order.
Temporary Restraining Orders are easy to get, and hard to keep. In a divorce, one of the favorite tactics (of both sides) is to file for a TRO. Usually these get thrown out of court some months later. Judges typically grant TROs because nobody wants to be the judge who denied a TRO against an abusive spouse. But most of the time, TROs are just stupid games that people play.
Hans Reiser was accused earlier this year of failing to pay medical and child-care expenses as ordered by a judge, records show. He pleaded not guilty Aug. 25 to a civil contempt charge and was scheduled for trial in October.
Again, it is very easy to "accuse" somebody. One of the games spouses play is to not send bills to the other spouse, and then file a civil suit against them for "failure to pay". This is usually yet another game in custody and visitation battles.
Not that I am defending this guy, but the "evidence" in the article that he was a "bad man", just isn't any evidence at all.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
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.
Modern software is complex enough that simply having the source code for a component does not necessarily mean a person (even a skilled coder) can maintain that component.
Such ideas made more sense 15 years ago, but not today.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Not justifiable ones though. Is it really ok to kill someone who is no threat to you (or anyone else), in cold blood, just because it will make you feel better? Even if that person might go on to do great works for society? No, it is not, and if you think that it is then you are worse than they are, because at least they accept the responsibility for their actions.
Santa's suicide mission go!
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.
that isn't to say there aren't violent psychopathic criminals. Most serial killers, and violent sex offenders who target adult women, would qualify.
So are you saying violent sex offenders who target children aren't psychopaths? What about psychopathic people who target men? (sorry to nitpick, but as someone who works in that field, some comments like that catch my attention)
In fact, I'm not even convinced they represent a signifigant fraction of violent criminals - the numbers I've seen vary wildly, which suggest to me that nobody knows how many of them exist with any certainty.
That's because it takes time to measure, and gather evidence. This isn't easy to do without the money/staff/training/desire of state and federal prison systems, and even that is only identifying psychopaths who have been caught for whatever they have done. And psychopaths don't make it any easier to identify themselves by doing what they do well - lying.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
A woman may be dead and all you can worry about is whether the project will continue?!