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Hans Reiser Interview from Prison
JLester writes "Wired Magazine has an interview this month with Hans Reiser (of the ReiserFS journaling file system for Linux) from prison. It contains more details about the murder case against him. Some of the questions still go unanswered though."
My theory is this: Nina went back to russia, and is now living there. The fact that the kids are in russia, and were supposed to return weeks ago, but haven't, makes me think that maybe they were reunited with their mother there. Just a thought.
"The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?"
Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.
I couldn't be arsed to read more than a couple of pages of the article with its silly format, but what's so surprising about finding traces of your SO's blood, or in washing your car?
Maybe he is guilty, I have no idea; but it's up to the police to prove that he is, not for him to prove that he's innocent.
Nonsense. It shows that the interviewer cared about the guy's work and accomplishments, not just his alleged crimes. For someone who has been sitting in prison, going to court hearings and meetings with lawyers and talking about nothing else, it was probably nice to talk filesystems for a change. I imagine the interviewer was the first person he'd seen in months who knew what a filesystem even was.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
"It's also one of those concepts which looks great on paper, but is sadly shown as so much idealistic BS in the real world."
Only if you believe it's better to send innocent people to jail than let guilty people go free.
Ugh. OK, this is a crowd that makes rough jokes, etc. In this case I am having a bit of a problem taking it. I've met Hans and have spoken with Nina on the phone. Oh shit, I found that interview very unsettling and while reading it in the audience at a conference in Norway I got upset enough by page three that I did not continue it for fear of getting too visibly upset in front of the audience.
Maybe we should have a bit more respect this time.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I've listened to Hans over the years in lkml. He's an odd one. He might be a genius, it's possible, if he played well with others he'd almost certainly be a community hero. It's also possible he has some severe emotional or mental problems, maybe mild autism, I'm no psychiatrist but I'd say that this is more than possible and probably likely. He also has this incredible quality to completely ignore what someone says and just focus on what he wants. It's like he's incapable of comprehending English (or any human to human language) when he's in this sort of fit. That's why rfs4 isn't in the kernel, all he had to do was play nice with others and answer their concerns, it'd be done by now if he did but every question was always answered with some fear or something completely unrelated. You can ask him a question and he hears something else, he'll respond but it's like he didn't see or hear your question. Then at other times he's remarkably lucid.
Now this is crappy journalism. It sounds like Hans to me though. This doesn't bode well for his case. He's going to prison when this is done. His lawyers should have kept him from saying anything. He's looking down the barrel of a long stay in prison, everything looks like he did it and was prepared to flee. An article on a popular magazine with "if( node->parent == NULL) printk("parent not found")" isn't what you want.
Hans Reiser has to be at least paranoid, which he apparently inherited from his father:Why would the FSB be interested in him? Don't they know that ReiserFS is open source?
Another nugget is his insistence on playing violent video games with his six year old son. He defended this practise in a "32-page filing" on the "culture of manhood" during his divorce trial. That alone has nutjob written all over it.Well, I don't see much of manhood in Hans Reiser's behaviour. He comes of as whiny and paranoid, accusing everybody but himself for his mistakes. And he appears even to be proud of conceiving a child in the first night with his mail order bride. That's both pathetic and idiotic!
And don't even get me started on this Sturgeon guy. It seems like lunatics come in packs. I for one wouldn't take Hans Reisers advice on anything but file systems serious.
There are two problems with machine-assisted lie detection: People who train to control their responses on a polygraph, and people who believe what they say, even though it isn't true. The brain activity monitoring method only attacks the first problem, not the second.
Part of this is a philosophical problem: Someone with a false grip on reality (to a greater or lesser extent, all of us have some false perceptions or memories) may make a factual statement that is not consistent with objective reality, but if that person *believes* in the truth of the statement, should we even consider them to be lying? I think that the common definition of lying implies intent--you have to know that what you're saying is false. Otherwise, you're merely wrong or delusional.
It doesn't take a complete nutter to believe in false things, either. Most people believe they are more attractive, more competent, and smarter than the rest of us would rate them. A fair number of people have body image or confidence issues that cause them to vastly underestimate their charms. Sometimes, people just ignore the unpleasant realities of life by not thinking about them. Even better examples come up in looking at objective assessments of eyewitness identification in criminal cases--people can fool themselves into believing all sorts of things.
I mean, just look at the two different stories that Reiser's son told regarding the last argument between his mother and father: He had to have been making false statements in one of the two interviews, since they contain mutually contradictory statements of fact. But did he believe in the truth of what he said at the time? If you don't think this is possible, try to imagine the terrific psychological pressures on the boy's head over the last few years.
Hence the problem with using brain activity as an indicator of truth: It can only tell you about the subjective truth of a person's statements, not the objective truth. There's a great potential for difference between the two.
Yeah, this was the first I'd read that his best friend has admitted to committing several murders in the past, and had been having an affair with his wife too. This has turned from a geek-commits-murder into a *really* crazy love triangle story.
Sort of complicates the case for the prosecution. Though the missing passenger seat and condition of Reiser's car and his refusal to explain it certainly makes him sound guilty to a juror (or anyone else).
After reading this article I did understand a bit better how a man could be driven to do something... drastic. If your wife started doing drugs with and fucking your tattoed, bi-sexual, BDSM-obsessed best friend, and then dumped you for him, and was exposing your children to that (at least until the judge forced her not to), well, I could see that pushing a guy who wasn't fully mentally grounded in the first place over the edge.
> Maybe we should have a bit more respect this time.
/. as source material you're going to get some wildly inappropriate reactions.
Well, the original quote itself was from the article. Which is one of the... oddest articles I've read from Wired. When you give something like that to
For an article which is supposed to show the more "personal" side of things, the main thing I'm taking away from this is that the author is seriously fucked up. It's like the worst tabloid journalism combined with a Dvorak column. It certainly didn't do much to help Hans...
c.
Log in or piss off.
It's going to happen every time someone dies, is killed or whatnot. It will happen when you die, when RMS dies, when Linus dies and when any celebrity dies. It might be hard to take for those who knew the person, but the vast majority of the world didn't and shouldn't be expected to act as if they had.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The thing is: For every innocent person in jail, there's a criminal that got away with the crime. Having an innocent person in jail isn't just bad for that person, but bad for society as a whole.
The kids are currently known to be in Russia, and the Russian mom is conveniently nowhere to be found.
I'm
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Even if Hans is guilty, he would serve society better if he can work on his filesystem instead of idling in prison.
And that did not get on Slashdot, because it wasn't anyone we know. Reiser is interesting to Slashdot readers because he was connected with the kernel developers, and some of us here identify ourselve as being connected with that community.
Bruce Perens.