Yeah, it's just a shame that you can't opt for a non-jury trial.
It wouldn't have helped that much. If you were following the sfgate coverate, you could pretty much tell that the judge did not exactly have a high-regard for Reiser -- and I think there's on point where he made it clear he had convicted Reiser in his mind long before the trial was over.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine he would be so incompetent as to buy the idea that it was a "premeditated" crime.
Menstrual blood is easy to tell as different from normal blood.
You got a reference on that?
Remember we're talking a blood stain of indefinite age, not a fresh sample or anything like that.
The next question would be, whether or not it's easy to identify, did the cops bother to do the test? If you were following the trial, the prosecution's technical folks didn't exactly come off as supremely competent.
The books were books on police investigations into Murders. Some bloody murders too. As a true crime fanatic, I've read both the books in question. Trust me.
And if you're ever arrested, just imagine the fun the prosecution will have with your library, eh?
Odd thing to buy when your wife's still "missing", don't you think?
Well yes indeed. Unless you're a rather paranoid fellow,with a high regard for your intelligence and self-reliance, who knows the police has you under suspicion, then it's entirely in character, isn't it?
(And by the way, can you tell me what books you think Hans should have bought? Are there oodles of books out there specifically about missing persons investigations? I must've missed that section of the bookstore.)
Nina sleeping with this guy in itself is fair game (defense wanted to prove she was a dirty slut I guess) but what this guy did outside of that doesn't matter.
Look, the prosecution was trying to get away with portraying Nina as a little angel of motherhood who would never skip out on her kids. You can't blame the defense for trying to puncture that one a bit.
I read an interview with him about a year before his wife's disappearance. He claimed to have made nothing at all out of ReiserFS, and to be heavily in debt.
If you've really been following the story, you'd know that Nina Reiser and Sean Sturgeon were embezzling money from the company. It's difficult to say how much precisely: I believe during the trial Hans estimated it at hundreds of thousands.
Myself, I have an admittedly paranoid theory that Nina was planted on Hans for that purpose, and was later killed by her handlers over some dispute about the money involved.
The Reiser operating system must've seemed like an interesting phenomena in certain circles -- who is this odd guy with defense department funding hiring programmers in Russia? And Reiser did indeed have to deal with Russian scam artists -- he wasted a year or so in a Russian court, because some bastards were claiming that they'd written all of his code.
My personal opinion is that trying to do business in Russia was the dumbest thing that Reiser has ever done -- everything I've ever heard suggests that at this point the Russians regard Americans as these incredibly naive fools, suckers waiting to be taken.
(Obviously, there's no way I could've made it on to that jury: "Is there any reason you have for prejudice against the alleged victim?"; "Um....")
Yeah, Reiser was involved in so many flamewars it's just weird that he has/had such a following among the munchkins on Slashdot.
Which slashdot have you been reading? My impression is the slash-kids think Linus is god, and anyone who argues with him must a raving loon.
He even once accused Linus of being part of some RedHat-masterminded conspiracy against him.
Yeah, real computer geeks never indulge in crazed conspiracy theories. No one like that could ever write code that was worth anything.
Anyway he never struck me as a "typical linux programmer" as posters here are trying to portray him. He certainly didn't play well with the other alpha-geeks.
I hate to break the news to you, but Linus has kind of blown his reputation as being a mellow, supremely rational, diplomatic leader after that bitkeeper affair...
We're all a pretty cranky bunch, when you come down to it.
Hans Reiser may be a little crankier than most, but not by all that much.
It does not mean the defendant had to have a lot of time to think, it just means there was a logical sequence of actions: reflection, decision to act, and act, all of which can happen in the course of a few seconds
So your contention is that Hans stopped, reflected, and thought to himself. Nina is at my house on a day when she's scheduled to be here, and the kids are down in the basement. Now would be a great time to get rid of her!
He paid a $5,000 retainer to a criminal defense attorney just days after Nina disappeared, while the investigation was still a missing person's case.
Hans Reiser was someone who was already feeling screwed-over by the justice system because of his divorce case. There was that accusing phone-call from Doreen where he appears to have realized he was a suspect.
He didn't even bother to try calling her to find out if she was alive before he shelled out for the retainer.
He was not allowed to call her: restraining order. That divorce case, remember?
(People talk incredible amounts of crap about this case.)
If I knew I was a suspect in a crime, and I was not guilty, I would make absolutely sure the police could find me whenever they wanted to.
That's a good strategy if you're reasonably sure you can prove your innocence. If things are more ambiguous, for whatever reason, you might have second thoughts about that. Remember that Hans was already feeling screwed-over by the divorce courts, he didn't have any warm regard for the justice system.
One of the things he claimed in court was that he was taking evasive action one weekend because if he was going to be arrested he wanted it to be on a weekday when he could reach his lawyer.
That might not be a genuinely smart move, but it sounds like it's at least half-smart, which definitely makes it sound plausible for Hans (he's a really smart guy concerning file systems, in my opinion, but he over-rates himself in all other areas).
Since the seat was never found, the evidence upon closer examination points fairly strongly towards somebody setting him up, rather than towards him being a murderer. After all, if he had to move a body, the seat would have gotten blood on it--
I'm inclined to agree that Hans Reiser got a raw deal here,
but I don't follow your reasoning here. If Hans killed Nina, and then, (let's say) bagged the body and tossed it in his car, he might very well have been worried later about minor invisible traces that might've leaked out onto the seat.
A better question would be, what was the body doing in the car at all? Why would you try to move a body in a little CRX when there's a van sitting right there that you need to get rid of also? The only answer I can think of is he was acting in a panic, which kind of shoots down the "premeditated" notion.
Not if he purchased the books after the murder. Then it just looks like he was looking for ideas to help him get away with a murder already committed, which may or may not have been premeditated.
These books would also help inform you about police investigation techniques, if you had been tipped off that you were a murder suspect.
Which is to say, they don't actually work very well to indicate a guilty state of mind... They do help to confirm that Hans is the kind of guy who thinks that he can do the research himself and figure it all out better than anyone...
It could be the folks here all know one or two people like that, eh?
You forgot the 6-inch patch of Nina's dried blood that was
found on a sleeping bag cover in his car.
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say it was a "6-inch patch", and at a guess you've got this wrong. (People have been talking an awful lot of crap about this case...)
In any case, there was also a little bit of blood (or at least, some biological substance with genetic material in it) on a post on the front porch.
I have not researched these blood smears in any great detail, but my experience is that the closer you get to authoritative sources, the less impressive this evidence sounds. The newspapers originally made it sound like hanging evidence, if you talk to random guys on the internet (e.g. the sfgate boards) they make it sound like hanging evidence, if you look a little closer you find out that there's no way to know how old the blood smears are, and if you think about it a minute you'll realize that everyone bleeds now and then, and a couple of little smears is interesting, but not conclusive.
All it takes is one tampon on a camping trip to explain even a "six-inch" blood stain on a sleeping bag stuff sack.
(Just as an aside: does anyone have a picture in their minds as to how Hans was supposed to have pulled off this "premeditated" murder? Needless to say, the prosecution produced no murder weapon... they did however, suggest that he could have done it with his ninja martial arts skills.
But if he just strangled her, why is there any blood at all?
If he stabbed her, why isn't there more?)
I've heard several lawyers talk about how juries are surprisingly competent at detecting liars.
Which is to say that the juries the lawyers select agree with what the lawyers think...
In any case: the question in my mind would be what kind of lies. Reiser might have been innocent and still felt the need to lie about all sorts of things. They kept asking him to explain his peculiar behavior, and just at a guess he was trying to simplify his mental processes to make it sound more coherent -- for example, he'll admit to being worried about the police seizing his car, but downplayed the possibility that a Russian mob was interested in him (except at one point).
I suspect that if Reiser had really been honest about what he was thinking at every stage, he would've sounded like a total lunatic to most of the jury.
(The trouble with being paranoid is no one will believe you have real enemies.)
I can only conclude that both sides prefer to exclude jurors who can think, who evaluate the evidence presented and are not swayed by emotional arguments beyond the evidence itself.
If you want my cynical opinion: I would guess that both sides
dislike having juries that will sit down and think things through, because they'll probably deliberate for weeks and then just hang anyway. Much better to get a panel of knee-jerks, then you can get it over with and move on to the next fee.
That said, sounds to me like some pretty good questions were raised in this case and Hans couldn't explain them away nor could his lawyer.
Well there's they "lady macbeth syndrome" and dropping by school (rather late in the day) when his kids were stranded there by the absence of Nina. I haven't really heard of much else that impressed me...
The thing is, I could be persuaded that Hans killed Nina in a "fit of passion" and then had to scramble to cover it up, but the jury decided that it was "premeditated" which suggests that they're complete morons. I mean, he killed her in his own house, on a day when she was scheduled to be there, while the kids were down in the basement. Then he had to hide the body temporarily and get rid of both it and her van that night -- and he had to hope that no one noticed the van sitting there while he was biding his time -- and what does he use to move the body? He chooses his little CRX... and then only belatedly remembers that the van is sitting there, and he has to do something with that, too.
I mean, okay, Hans is weird, okay, smart people can be stupid... but he's just not that stupid. What kind of nut would look at that scenario and conclude that it was premeditated?
All they saw was a smart man telling them they were idiots. And that, they don't like. So they voted for the lynching.
I was following the discussion board attached to the sfgate live blogging of the case, and it seemed like every single person posting there was convinced that the jury was reading what they were writing.
Needless to say that would be illegal, and the jury was instructed not to read anything about the case... but what are the odds that they really followed those instructions?
The attitude of the people on the sfgate board was peculiar, if you ask me... with few exceptions, they were all hostile to Reiser, many of them really hostile, and I'm still not sure what that was about. Were they working for the prosecution? Were they still pissed off that OJ walked?
I'm still puzzling over it.
Americans -- at least the present generation of Americans -- do indeed seem to be very challenged as far as civic virtue goes. I can't imagine why saying that would be regarded as merely "trolling" -- we're discussing the jury system and it's flaws, which would seem to be on topic.
Actually, come to think of it it, it kind of proves the point.
So, feel free to mod this as a troll, also.
(It's not like anyone in their right mind cares about slashdot moderation at this point.)
Typical geek who thinks he's smarter or better than the average person on the street.
Yes, correct. And in this case when he thought the cops were after him, he dithered around in all sorts of strange ways instead of either cutting and running or turning himself in and acting angelic. Half-smart.
In this case he thought he was smart enough (and everyone else dumb enough) to explain away a killing.
Or alternately, he thought he could explain his peculiar behavior, despite his poor luck with the divorce courts
(not to mention the kernel-hackers).
By the way, if any of you nerds are interested in learning how to deal with the physical world: you don't pick up water off of the floor with a pump, you pick it up with a mop or a sponge.
By the way: if Reiser had more cash, I don't doubt he could buy himself a successful appeal -- the judge struck me as a prejudiced asshole throughout the case.
Maybe not produce a "body" per se, but at least prove there was a murder?
But she was a good mother! She'd never abandon her kids like that. It was churlish of Reiser to suggest such a thing.
You think I'm kidding? That was the line of argument.
(Some women do abandon their kids, and it isn't clear that Nina abandoned hers: her Mom absconded with them to Russia, where they may very well be hanging out with Nina for all anyone knows. And even if she's dead, it isn't certain that Reiser killed her -- a hot option in my mind would be the Russian mob that planted her on him, but what do I know, I'm one of them paranoid computer geeks.)
Anyway, what ever you do, don't live in the 'burbs... you may end up facing a jury like that one of these days -- even if Reiser really did kill her, the idea that it was premeditated is completely bug nuts crazy. I sincerely thought that the prosecution was engaged in this sleazy "bargaining" maneuver, asking for murder one when really he expected manslaughter.
The idea of an "open source terrorist" is pretty crazy, needless to say: terrorists have to act in secrecy, open source software works out in the open; free software relies on the cooperation of communities, "terrorists" (when not government agents in disguise [1]) are a fraction of a percent of the population.
Anyone who really wanted to nail the script kiddies would spike their stashes of freeware with tracers that phone home,
and if the NSA hasn't done this for some reason, well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
[1] By the way: no, I'm not a believer in the "9/11 Truth Movement".
He's not saying that the character in the movie is going to blow people up in the name of free software (which sounds a lot like RMS to me)
You, are a near complete fool. To me you "sound a lot like" a nitwit who isn't fit to tie Richard Stallman's shoelaces, let alone accuse him of being a mad bomber (Why, because he has a fucking beard? What is the deal with you morons?).
When they throw you in jail because "all those linux guys are hackers" or some such, I hope you'll remember this idiocy.
The reason for using light backgrounds is that it keeps the bright more constant, and is more similar to what you can find in nature. Close bright stuff on black background does not really happen a lot in nature, so our eyes don't like it that much.
Do you know this for a fact, or are you just making shit up?
To answer the original poster, who wanted to know if we knew of any
scientific studies: the last time I looked around for some justification
for the ubiquitous white backgrounds (which I hate), the one study I heard
about was a really old one that showed you could reduce error rates in
industrial settings by using a light background: in essence, they found that
you could compensate for problems with glare on the screen by giving the
user the third-degree with a bright, shining background.
But this of course, has nothing to do with the problem of long-term eyestrain
among computer professionals. For one thing, most of us have enough control
over our environments that we would just change anything that was creating glare on the screen
(e.g. heavy curtains over windows, etc.).
In any case, I'm a firm believer in light on dark color schemes, and I mostly use light green
for text, but off-white, white, pale blue and so on are all good choices. (In emacs, I use the color
they call "thistle", which is a pale purple/dull pink color). But this is just my personal
preference, from my own experience: I have no studies at hand to back this up, and I'm acutely
aware of the fact that when I use they colors on a web page they look weird to someone who's
used to staring at white backgrounds (and may even have their screen brightness turned down to compensate,
and so on).
Blogging is just another form of published media - it can be used for any reason. People have just been lured into believing blogs are personal posts from individuals.
They were "lured" into this because it used to be almost exclusively true, but once the medium became popular,
it became infested (note: it could be I'm editorializing here) with pseudo-human beings, hired to push different
products and causes.
The question, I would say, is how is the on-line community going to react to this?
Are you happy with the state of affairs where hundreds of "slashdot users" could be
sock puppet accounts run by Karl Rove and/or Microsoft?
And still another question, of course involves the dubious (at best) legality and ethics of this
practice. You're marketing department may think it's cute to pretend it's a horde of sincere fans of your
products ("guerrilla marketing"), but your customers may not enjoy being deceived. What exactly is
the difference between this behavior and "fraud", eh?
And when it's the government involved, there are additional legal restrictions in-play (e.g The Hatch Act).
The incumbent has a big enough advantage already without being able to treat government agencies as publicly-funded
campaign organizations.
(A reminder to the kids in the audience: there are rules the government is supposed to follow.
I admit it often doesn't seem like that under the Bush regime and it's enablers in congress.)
Correct.
Practically the first time I ever even heard Microsoft's name, someone was telling me they didn't like the company (circa 1980, a geek kid was explaining to me why he had no compunction about pirating Microsoft Basic).
Just last night I was listening to the Mark Shuttleworth presentation at BALUG, and -- since he seems to be a guy who has trouble saying anything negative about anyone -- he gave us the line "Remember, Microsoft made software cheap!"
But this just isn't true... if you wanted to give that crown to any one company, I would pick Borland: Microsoft was just one of a number of companies trying to undersell each other. (And for that matter, was MS-DOS such a better deal than CP/M?).
(Oh and by the way... moderators? Why is this man labeled "Troll"? He's actually on-topic. Try RTFM, you know?)
Slashdot Mirror
It wouldn't have helped that much. If you were following the sfgate coverate, you could pretty much tell that the judge did not exactly have a high-regard for Reiser -- and I think there's on point where he made it clear he had convicted Reiser in his mind long before the trial was over.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine he would be so incompetent as to buy the idea that it was a "premeditated" crime.
You got a reference on that?
Remember we're talking a blood stain of indefinite age, not a fresh sample or anything like that.
The next question would be, whether or not it's easy to identify, did the cops bother to do the test? If you were following the trial, the prosecution's technical folks didn't exactly come off as supremely competent.
And if you're ever arrested, just imagine the fun the prosecution will have with your library, eh?
Well yes indeed. Unless you're a rather paranoid fellow,with a high regard for your intelligence and self-reliance, who knows the police has you under suspicion, then it's entirely in character, isn't it?
(And by the way, can you tell me what books you think Hans should have bought? Are there oodles of books out there specifically about missing persons investigations? I must've missed that section of the bookstore.)
Look, the prosecution was trying to get away with portraying Nina as a little angel of motherhood who would never skip out on her kids. You can't blame the defense for trying to puncture that one a bit.
If you've really been following the story, you'd know that Nina Reiser and Sean Sturgeon were embezzling money from the company. It's difficult to say how much precisely: I believe during the trial Hans estimated it at hundreds of thousands.
Myself, I have an admittedly paranoid theory that Nina was planted on Hans for that purpose, and was later killed by her handlers over some dispute about the money involved.
The Reiser operating system must've seemed like an interesting phenomena in certain circles -- who is this odd guy with defense department funding hiring programmers in Russia? And Reiser did indeed have to deal with Russian scam artists -- he wasted a year or so in a Russian court, because some bastards were claiming that they'd written all of his code.
My personal opinion is that trying to do business in Russia was the dumbest thing that Reiser has ever done -- everything I've ever heard suggests that at this point the Russians regard Americans as these incredibly naive fools, suckers waiting to be taken.
(Obviously, there's no way I could've made it on to that jury: "Is there any reason you have for prejudice against the alleged victim?"; "Um....")
Which slashdot have you been reading? My impression is the slash-kids think Linus is god, and anyone who argues with him must a raving loon.
Yeah, real computer geeks never indulge in crazed conspiracy theories. No one like that could ever write code that was worth anything.
I hate to break the news to you, but Linus has kind of blown his reputation as being a mellow, supremely rational, diplomatic leader after that bitkeeper affair...
We're all a pretty cranky bunch, when you come down to it. Hans Reiser may be a little crankier than most, but not by all that much.
So your contention is that Hans stopped, reflected, and thought to himself. Nina is at my house on a day when she's scheduled to be here, and the kids are down in the basement. Now would be a great time to get rid of her!
Something like that?
Hans Reiser was someone who was already feeling screwed-over by the justice system because of his divorce case. There was that accusing phone-call from Doreen where he appears to have realized he was a suspect.
He was not allowed to call her: restraining order. That divorce case, remember?
(People talk incredible amounts of crap about this case.)
That's a good strategy if you're reasonably sure you can prove your innocence. If things are more ambiguous, for whatever reason, you might have second thoughts about that. Remember that Hans was already feeling screwed-over by the divorce courts, he didn't have any warm regard for the justice system.
One of the things he claimed in court was that he was taking evasive action one weekend because if he was going to be arrested he wanted it to be on a weekday when he could reach his lawyer.
That might not be a genuinely smart move, but it sounds like it's at least half-smart, which definitely makes it sound plausible for Hans (he's a really smart guy concerning file systems, in my opinion, but he over-rates himself in all other areas).
I'm inclined to agree that Hans Reiser got a raw deal here, but I don't follow your reasoning here. If Hans killed Nina, and then, (let's say) bagged the body and tossed it in his car, he might very well have been worried later about minor invisible traces that might've leaked out onto the seat.
A better question would be, what was the body doing in the car at all? Why would you try to move a body in a little CRX when there's a van sitting right there that you need to get rid of also? The only answer I can think of is he was acting in a panic, which kind of shoots down the "premeditated" notion.
These books would also help inform you about police investigation techniques, if you had been tipped off that you were a murder suspect.
Which is to say, they don't actually work very well to indicate a guilty state of mind... They do help to confirm that Hans is the kind of guy who thinks that he can do the research himself and figure it all out better than anyone...
It could be the folks here all know one or two people like that, eh?
This is the first time I've ever heard anyone say it was a "6-inch patch", and at a guess you've got this wrong. (People have been talking an awful lot of crap about this case...)
In any case, there was also a little bit of blood (or at least, some biological substance with genetic material in it) on a post on the front porch.
I have not researched these blood smears in any great detail, but my experience is that the closer you get to authoritative sources, the less impressive this evidence sounds. The newspapers originally made it sound like hanging evidence, if you talk to random guys on the internet (e.g. the sfgate boards) they make it sound like hanging evidence, if you look a little closer you find out that there's no way to know how old the blood smears are, and if you think about it a minute you'll realize that everyone bleeds now and then, and a couple of little smears is interesting, but not conclusive. All it takes is one tampon on a camping trip to explain even a "six-inch" blood stain on a sleeping bag stuff sack.
(Just as an aside: does anyone have a picture in their minds as to how Hans was supposed to have pulled off this "premeditated" murder? Needless to say, the prosecution produced no murder weapon... they did however, suggest that he could have done it with his ninja martial arts skills. But if he just strangled her, why is there any blood at all? If he stabbed her, why isn't there more?)
Which is to say that the juries the lawyers select agree with what the lawyers think...
In any case: the question in my mind would be what kind of lies. Reiser might have been innocent and still felt the need to lie about all sorts of things. They kept asking him to explain his peculiar behavior, and just at a guess he was trying to simplify his mental processes to make it sound more coherent -- for example, he'll admit to being worried about the police seizing his car, but downplayed the possibility that a Russian mob was interested in him (except at one point).
I suspect that if Reiser had really been honest about what he was thinking at every stage, he would've sounded like a total lunatic to most of the jury.
(The trouble with being paranoid is no one will believe you have real enemies.)
If you want my cynical opinion: I would guess that both sides dislike having juries that will sit down and think things through, because they'll probably deliberate for weeks and then just hang anyway. Much better to get a panel of knee-jerks, then you can get it over with and move on to the next fee.
Well there's they "lady macbeth syndrome" and dropping by school (rather late in the day) when his kids were stranded there by the absence of Nina. I haven't really heard of much else that impressed me...
The thing is, I could be persuaded that Hans killed Nina in a "fit of passion" and then had to scramble to cover it up, but the jury decided that it was "premeditated" which suggests that they're complete morons. I mean, he killed her in his own house, on a day when she was scheduled to be there, while the kids were down in the basement. Then he had to hide the body temporarily and get rid of both it and her van that night -- and he had to hope that no one noticed the van sitting there while he was biding his time -- and what does he use to move the body? He chooses his little CRX... and then only belatedly remembers that the van is sitting there, and he has to do something with that, too.
I mean, okay, Hans is weird, okay, smart people can be stupid... but he's just not that stupid. What kind of nut would look at that scenario and conclude that it was premeditated?
I was following the discussion board attached to the sfgate live blogging of the case, and it seemed like every single person posting there was convinced that the jury was reading what they were writing.
Needless to say that would be illegal, and the jury was instructed not to read anything about the case... but what are the odds that they really followed those instructions?
The attitude of the people on the sfgate board was peculiar, if you ask me... with few exceptions, they were all hostile to Reiser, many of them really hostile, and I'm still not sure what that was about. Were they working for the prosecution? Were they still pissed off that OJ walked? I'm still puzzling over it.
Americans -- at least the present generation of Americans -- do indeed seem to be very challenged as far as civic virtue goes. I can't imagine why saying that would be regarded as merely "trolling" -- we're discussing the jury system and it's flaws, which would seem to be on topic.
Actually, come to think of it it, it kind of proves the point. So, feel free to mod this as a troll, also.
(It's not like anyone in their right mind cares about slashdot moderation at this point.)
No, no, that defense only works in LA.
Yes, correct. And in this case when he thought the cops were after him, he dithered around in all sorts of strange ways instead of either cutting and running or turning himself in and acting angelic. Half-smart.
Or alternately, he thought he could explain his peculiar behavior, despite his poor luck with the divorce courts (not to mention the kernel-hackers).
By the way, if any of you nerds are interested in learning how to deal with the physical world: you don't pick up water off of the floor with a pump, you pick it up with a mop or a sponge.
By the way: if Reiser had more cash, I don't doubt he could buy himself a successful appeal -- the judge struck me as a prejudiced asshole throughout the case.
But she was a good mother! She'd never abandon her kids like that. It was churlish of Reiser to suggest such a thing.
You think I'm kidding? That was the line of argument.
(Some women do abandon their kids, and it isn't clear that Nina abandoned hers: her Mom absconded with them to Russia, where they may very well be hanging out with Nina for all anyone knows. And even if she's dead, it isn't certain that Reiser killed her -- a hot option in my mind would be the Russian mob that planted her on him, but what do I know, I'm one of them paranoid computer geeks.)
Anyway, what ever you do, don't live in the 'burbs... you may end up facing a jury like that one of these days -- even if Reiser really did kill her, the idea that it was premeditated is completely bug nuts crazy. I sincerely thought that the prosecution was engaged in this sleazy "bargaining" maneuver, asking for murder one when really he expected manslaughter.
The idea of an "open source terrorist" is pretty crazy, needless to say: terrorists have to act in secrecy, open source software works out in the open; free software relies on the cooperation of communities, "terrorists" (when not government agents in disguise [1]) are a fraction of a percent of the population.
Anyone who really wanted to nail the script kiddies would spike their stashes of freeware with tracers that phone home, and if the NSA hasn't done this for some reason, well, I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
[1] By the way: no, I'm not a believer in the "9/11 Truth Movement".
You, are a near complete fool. To me you "sound a lot like" a nitwit who isn't fit to tie Richard Stallman's shoelaces, let alone accuse him of being a mad bomber (Why, because he has a fucking beard? What is the deal with you morons?).
When they throw you in jail because "all those linux guys are hackers" or some such, I hope you'll remember this idiocy.
Do you know this for a fact, or are you just making shit up?
To answer the original poster, who wanted to know if we knew of any scientific studies: the last time I looked around for some justification for the ubiquitous white backgrounds (which I hate), the one study I heard about was a really old one that showed you could reduce error rates in industrial settings by using a light background: in essence, they found that you could compensate for problems with glare on the screen by giving the user the third-degree with a bright, shining background.
But this of course, has nothing to do with the problem of long-term eyestrain among computer professionals. For one thing, most of us have enough control over our environments that we would just change anything that was creating glare on the screen (e.g. heavy curtains over windows, etc.).
In any case, I'm a firm believer in light on dark color schemes, and I mostly use light green for text, but off-white, white, pale blue and so on are all good choices. (In emacs, I use the color they call "thistle", which is a pale purple/dull pink color). But this is just my personal preference, from my own experience: I have no studies at hand to back this up, and I'm acutely aware of the fact that when I use they colors on a web page they look weird to someone who's used to staring at white backgrounds (and may even have their screen brightness turned down to compensate, and so on).
binaryspiral wrote:
They were "lured" into this because it used to be almost exclusively true, but once the medium became popular, it became infested (note: it could be I'm editorializing here) with pseudo-human beings, hired to push different products and causes.
The question, I would say, is how is the on-line community going to react to this? Are you happy with the state of affairs where hundreds of "slashdot users" could be sock puppet accounts run by Karl Rove and/or Microsoft?
And still another question, of course involves the dubious (at best) legality and ethics of this practice. You're marketing department may think it's cute to pretend it's a horde of sincere fans of your products ("guerrilla marketing"), but your customers may not enjoy being deceived. What exactly is the difference between this behavior and "fraud", eh?
And when it's the government involved, there are additional legal restrictions in-play (e.g The Hatch Act). The incumbent has a big enough advantage already without being able to treat government agencies as publicly-funded campaign organizations.
(A reminder to the kids in the audience: there are rules the government is supposed to follow. I admit it often doesn't seem like that under the Bush regime and it's enablers in congress.)
Correct. Practically the first time I ever even heard Microsoft's name, someone was telling me they didn't like the company (circa 1980, a geek kid was explaining to me why he had no compunction about pirating Microsoft Basic).
Just last night I was listening to the Mark Shuttleworth presentation at BALUG, and -- since he seems to be a guy who has trouble saying anything negative about anyone -- he gave us the line "Remember, Microsoft made software cheap!"
But this just isn't true... if you wanted to give that crown to any one company, I would pick Borland: Microsoft was just one of a number of companies trying to undersell each other. (And for that matter, was MS-DOS such a better deal than CP/M?).
(Oh and by the way... moderators? Why is this man labeled "Troll"? He's actually on-topic. Try RTFM, you know?)