Why didn't he just stash the seat at his mothers' so he could get it back later if/when he needed it
His mother was hassling him about cluttering the place up.
easiest of all, just put it at the curb-side garbage pickup so that either the city or someone driving by would take it?
I don't know what garbage pick-up is like in the East Bay, but over here in SF you can't just toss a large piece of junk
out on the street and hope they'll be nice and take it away for you. If it doesn't fit in the can, you have to schedule a
special pick-up, and there have been occasions when I've done things like sneak an old rolled-up carpet into someone's dumpster
rather than hassle with disposing of it "properly".
(You know: you're sounding like a bit of a nut on this subject....)
Just answer this one question - why did he, in the middle of an acrimonious divorce that he was about to be judicially sanctioned for his foot-dragging, pick up the kids from school when it was Nina's turn to do so?
A reasonable person would conclude that he knew Nina wouldn't be picking them up.
Okay, so if this one point is answered, you will drop your opinion that Reiser is absolutely, positively, proven guilty?
This single point is what you're basing your opinion on?
So, for example, if it turns out someone called Reiser that day and said "Have you seen Nina? We don't know what happened to her",
then Reiser will be completely in the clear, wouldn't he?
But then, if Reiser just says "Before Nina took off she asked me if I could get the kids that day", then that would cover it too, wouldn't it? Wouldn't that raise a "reasonable doubt"?
Maybe XEmacs and GNU Emacs can finally merge. (Yes I know jwz isn't the XEmacs maintainer anymore).
The stumbling block there is (supposedly) that the FSF is fussy about having copyright assigned to them so that they'll have legal standing to attack violations of the license. The xemacs crew seems to believe one or all of the following: (1) this is a power grab by FSF control freaks; (2) distributed ownership can be a check on institutional corruption; (3) they just like hanging loose and think this is all crazy to worry about.
In any case, even if you could convince the xemacs maintainers it's a good idea to assign copyright to the FSF, then you've got a pretty big job of tracking down every author of every piece elisp code in xemacs, and getting them to sign-off on some paperwork. And then on top of this, there's the problem of merging together two code architectures that have been drifting apart (e.g. the xemacs guys apparently like object oriented interfaces, and RMS likes exposing complex data structures and letting the user figure it out).
Repetitive Stress Injuries due to chronic use of emacs leads developer to use vim? Inconceivable!
RMS wrote incredibly quantities of code at a time when no-one knew anything about repetitive stress disorders. It's hardly fair to blame his problems on emacs.
Myself, I don't think emacs is so much a problem as emacs combined with crappy keyboards with the control key moved off to Sibera... I recommend a Kinesis contoured model for serious emacs abusers, myself.
(And if you really want to save your hands, stay away from the goddamn mouse.)
I don't care that he's "different." I would want to know why he picked the kids up at school when it wasn't his turn, and when nobody knew that Nina was missing.
You want me to make up some reasons for you? Here's one: he wanted to spend some more time with them, so he decided to try to kidnap them for a day or so and see if he could get away with it.
And you can turn this point around you know... Why would Reiser behave as though he knew Nina was dead? Isn't that a remarkably stupid thing to do?
And if we were judging a physical theory, instead of a complicated situation involving human behavior, that would be a really good point.
I hadn't really been following the case, but the more I look at it today, the more it looks to me like a reasonable person would conclude that Reiser is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Strangely enough, a bunch of us who are following the case can't believe how thing the prosecutions evidence is... the best they can do is "that guy Hans is pretty weird, isn't he folks?"
Oh, by the way, you skipped some possibilites:
5. Nina decided to skip town and head back to Russia.
a. This was a long-standing plan.
b. She did it on impulse for some reason.
The prosecution has spent 3 whole months spouting a cloud of largely irrelevant waffle.
Yeah, it seems irrelevant to you and me, but there's a purpose to it: he wants to convince the jury that Hans is Not Normal. America is the land of the free, but
if you end up in court, you can expect to be hassled for every single little point where deviate from middle class expectations.
Yup, he's an annoying, egocentric bastard all right. Off with his head.
(I actually find the continual problem of convincing Reiser to shut-up to be incredibly funny, myself... you just know that he wants to take the stand and start ranting about the virtues of playing video games or some damn thing...).
By the way: what's so silly about using ReiserFS as a VFS layer?
Only Reiser knew all of the code in there and there certainly cannot be as many good programmers as he was.
Hell, there's a dozen guys here on slashdot who think they can just dash off a file system any time they feel like it.
The code is Open Source, so other programmers can learn it, given time. Also, it doesn't take a genius to support it, now that the hard part (writing it in the first place) is done. Also, just because he's not here to maintain it doesn't mean it will stop working; it just won't advance until somebody else can take over.
More to the point, there's a some programmers at NameSys already doing support programming for both Reiser 3 and 4. Hans didn't write all of the code: there already programmers who are up to speed on it.
There is, however, at a minimum a problem with public perception on these things, and it's an open question how long NameSys will be able to keep going, and so on.
Which is all too bad, I'm a big fan of ReiserFS myself -- these days there are a number of serious file systems available for Linux, but ReiserFS is the only one (as far as I can tell) that's actually designed to scale down as well as up.
In general, I think we've all gotten used to the idea of dancing around limitations in the filesystem (e.g. the slogan "don't treat the file system as a database!"), so for example, the unix world shifted away from things like MH mail directories (one file per message) to the mbox format (entire folders of mail shoveled into one file)... it didn't have to be this way, and I suspect that in
a ReiserFS dominated world we would all just get used to working our filesystems harder and look askance at any oddball offering that couldn't deal efficiently with a million tiny files...
this is one case where i would expect it to warrant further investigation as A) Nina Reiser was a physician
You've made this statement a couple of times. Why? I don't see the relevance.
I don't know why he won't spell it out, but it appears that he like the idea that Nina might be intentionally framing Hans, and that she smeared some of her own blood around.
This is a cute thought, but I have to say it strikes me as a little fantastic...
The kind of thing I would believe is that she decided to skip, and was suprised but not upset when the cops went after Reiser for murder.
In the same breath, they say naming something after ones own name is unusual, and refer to the OS written by a guy named Linus. Hows that for irony.
Linus named it FreakOS I believe. It was someone else who convinced him to rename it to Linux.
This is one of the silliest things in the world to argue about in my opinion -- I can't imagine why you shouldn't name something after yourself if you feel like it -- but the case with ReiserFS is that Reiser spent years hassling around in a Russian court with some scammers who were claiming they had written all his code.
Afterwards he named the project using his name, to make it clear where the code came from... it'd be a little hard to go into court claiming that you were really the author of "ReiserFS", not that Hans Reiser guy.
And not incidentally, after this Reiser became a fanatic about giving credit where credit is due -- there were some complaints about the code spitting out messages naming the people who had worked on it, rather than hiding this stuff away in an AUTHORS file in the source, as some people prefer).
Incidentally, killing someone in your car, or killing them somewhere and transporting them in such a way that they bleed on your car's front seat, is incredibly stupid and and incredibly easy to avoid. Hans actually sounds like a smart guy, so I'm having trouble connecting 'Oh, I'll carry this bloody corpse in my car's front seat' with him.
Yeah, and if I remember right, the Defense has pointed out that there were other things he could've done that would've made more sense. Again, if I remember right: his wife's van was sitting right there. Wouldn't it have been better to conceal the body in the van, and then get rid of both of them at the same time?
The trouble with that kind of reasoning, I would say, is that if you've just committed murder -- possibly a spontaneous, first degree, crime of passion, sort of thing -- the odds are good you're not going to be thinking very clearly.
OTOH, the fact there were blood spatters doesn't look good for them,
The blood splatters sound impressive in a newspaper report -- and the cops did their best to milk it for all it's worth, didn't they? One wonders what that was about -- but it doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that they just don't mean anything. Human beings -- particularly women -- leak blood now and then. Wouldn't you expect to find a couple of blood stains of indeterminate age around a place where someone has been living for years?
as does the fact he can't produce the seat. (Whereas I can, even now, produce the center console of my car complete with broken tape deck.)
Supposedly, Reiser's mother was hassling him about being a slob. In general, chicks have problems with filling up the back yard with dead car parts.
He purchased them 'surreptitiously', whatever that means,
It doesn't mean anything, in this case. Didn't he use a card to buy them?
It doesn't take a lot of brains to realize you should use cash if you want
to hide a purchase.
You forgot to mention the other guy, Sean Sturgeon, who was also close to the victim.
That's certainly an odd wrinkle to the case, but the alternate explanation that I like is simply that Nina Reiser isn't dead. Having swindled Namesys for what she could, she skipped back to Russian, leaving her mother to handle the problem of bringing the kids over. She presumably knows that Hans Reiser is up on trial for her murder, but has chosen to lie low, and let him take the heat, for reasons of
her own.
I'm not saying that there's any evidence for this theory either, it's just one of a number of things that might have happened.
Correct. The analogy fails in other ways also: Dan White got
a reduced conviction because he was connected (an ex-cop,
ex-member of the board of supes, who happens to have assasinated a
very liberal mayor). If the Twinkie Defense means anything at all,
it means that if they want to let you off, they'll seize on
any nonsense as an excuse.
The Hans Reiser case is completely the opposite: he's an eccentric outsider,
being put on trial for Not Being Normal ("Did you ever think about a church wedding?" Ha. Ha.)... This supposed "geek defense" is just a reminder that
people have a right to be eccentric.
That's surely plausible. But the notion that Reiser then threw out the seat? No way. Every geek I know has a giant collection of old parts that they will use "someday".
That's a point, but his Moms was yelling at him to clean up. It's hard to stash a car seat under the bed and get away with it.
Chill out. I mean, the man just stated an opinion, it's not like he's in a position of authority or that he's vehemently arguing the case.
Yeah, and what the fuck, it's only Hans Reiser's life and reputation we're talking about here. Against that, we have the right, nay the duty, of every American to shoot their mouths off about any damn thing that strikes their fancy.
So, do you think Britney has started wearing underwear yet?
I read somewhere that he said he removed the seat and threw it in a dumpster because he was sleeping in the car.
Yeah, it barely needs an "explanation". I knew a guy who drove a beat up car with no passenger seat. It wasn't because he used it to transport a corpse.
It's the books about killing someone in the car that bothers me... who would leave something so incredibly incriminating in their car?
He bought the books after it was clear the cops regarded him as a suspect.
Reiser is indeed the kind of person who would go "If I'm the subject of a murder
investigation, I should learn something about them." He didn't exactly leave the books lying around, he left them in his car, and I remember right he was making at least a minimal effort of concealing the car (parking it in a weird place...
remember, in addition to the cops, he may have had the Russian mob to worry about).
Got it? All of this stuff is public record at this point. If you're so interested, you can just go read about it for awhile, you know?
Do I believe he did it? I can't say - I'm not on the jury. However, I definitely don't buy into the defense tactic of 'geek nerds are "special" and "hard to understand"' as a "get out of jail" card.
I think you misunderstand completely. The actual evidence against Reiser is pretty weak -- he did some weird things, but then the circumstances were weird, and he's a weird guy, so?
If he's actually convicted, it won't be so much that the evidence was against him, but because he's an odd character, and the Jury went against him because of that.
The prosecutor is not shy about putting him on trial for Being Weird, the defense
can not possibly hide the fact that he's Weird, so it's almost the only option:
don't discriminate against my client because he's Weird.
I was *almost* doing this in the 1990s. I could have showed you a coloured image at atomic resolution with colours based on EELS spectra, but IIRC the contrast was mainly from electron-channeling and therefore bullshit. I'm confident that these guys have eliminated such effects.
Actually, you want to be very careful about getting involved with STEM work, because almost all of it is sample preparation, which is on the order of placing samples in a solvent and staring at them until you can start to see a light shining through them. This sort of thing gets old pretty fast.
Which is not to say that they aren't pretty damn cool gadgets, even given their limitations. Atomic scale resolution combined with some ability to characterize the atoms and the chemical bonds? This is the sort of thing you can use to look at a heterojunction and see what you've really got there.
(What I'd like to know is how good is it on lighter elements? If you can get an idea of, say, the Oxygen concentration, this would be just the thing for high-Tc superconductors.)
Lynx really does have a "several screens of cruft" problem--agreed. Part of this is due in part, I believe, to the fact that a lot of the "tables
for layout" sites really suffer when Lynx just plops down text in the order it's received. It's not a huge hassle, but it can be a minor annoyance.
w3m understands tables, which seems to help the layout a lot. It isn't perfect, but you do avoid a lot of the "long page" issues you see in Lynx.
I realize that it's often more fun to talk than it is to read what it is you're nominally replying to, but my point is that I don't particularly care about the several screens of cruft: I at least sometimes like the way lynx tosses the layout and presents content one-bit-at-a-time.
There are some cases that lynx would display incoherently (e.g. if someone were to use an html table to present acutal tabular data for example),
but it's interesting how often the "layout" just doesn't matter at all.
Similarly the lack of javascript handling is often as much an advantage as a disadvantage, and nothing stops you
from using a different browser now and then: you're not forced to make one choice and stick to it.
As far as graphics goes, lynx can be configured to spin off an external image viewer if you want to look at an image, but this is only
mildly useful, because most images on webpages are really stupid things like blank areas used for layout tweaks.
Much of this really depends on your browsing habits, I am sure. If you're looking for rather dull, text-heavy (with occassional images) material
most of the day, you really don't need 500MB of RAM dedicated to your web browser!
And here we run into some irreconcilable differences: you think text-heavy pages are "dull".
So, you demolish the good design of the good sites, so you can avoid the bad design on the bad sites? Why don't you just skip the poorly designed sites entirely and stick to the good ones?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here -- I suspect you're yet another "designer" who resents the fact that you're fabuloso designs are irritating the hell out of a large chunk of the populus -- but you're logic is totally whacked. Why blame the author of some text for the
decisions made by other people in the organization?
Consider the way the world looks when I use Firefox. I go to read a column by Robert Fisk in the Independant, and a bar appears at the edge of the screen telling me that the execution of some script has been blocked. I habitually use custom colors with light text on black -- my opinion is this minimizes eye-strain, by the way: computer screens are not paper and should not try to mimic paper -- and the various little graphics they've
squeezed in on the page are glaringly bright in comparison, because they presume I'm using a white background. Then I come to the dread Flashing GIG advertisement, and it's once again time to right click and use Adblock to make it go away.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Lynx (or w3m) is not without it's annoyances, but using Firefox is not without it's annoyances either:
I need to constantly fuss with it to fight the faddish nonsense that the web is always infested with.
What's so crazy about using a text-mode browser if what you want to do is read some text?
Slashdot Mirror
(You know: you're sounding like a bit of a nut on this subject....)
I thought it was supposed to be to make room to sleep in the car.
But in any case, he doesn't have to offer an explanation for it, certainly not to us.
tomhudson wrote:
Okay, so if this one point is answered, you will drop your opinion that Reiser is absolutely, positively, proven guilty? This single point is what you're basing your opinion on?
So, for example, if it turns out someone called Reiser that day and said "Have you seen Nina? We don't know what happened to her", then Reiser will be completely in the clear, wouldn't he?
But then, if Reiser just says "Before Nina took off she asked me if I could get the kids that day", then that would cover it too, wouldn't it? Wouldn't that raise a "reasonable doubt"?
shasta mcnasty wrote:
The stumbling block there is (supposedly) that the FSF is fussy about having copyright assigned to them so that they'll have legal standing to attack violations of the license. The xemacs crew seems to believe one or all of the following: (1) this is a power grab by FSF control freaks; (2) distributed ownership can be a check on institutional corruption; (3) they just like hanging loose and think this is all crazy to worry about.
In any case, even if you could convince the xemacs maintainers it's a good idea to assign copyright to the FSF, then you've got a pretty big job of tracking down every author of every piece elisp code in xemacs, and getting them to sign-off on some paperwork. And then on top of this, there's the problem of merging together two code architectures that have been drifting apart (e.g. the xemacs guys apparently like object oriented interfaces, and RMS likes exposing complex data structures and letting the user figure it out).
So: don't hold your breath.
Tikkun wrote:
RMS wrote incredibly quantities of code at a time when no-one knew anything about repetitive stress disorders. It's hardly fair to blame his problems on emacs.
Myself, I don't think emacs is so much a problem as emacs combined with crappy keyboards with the control key moved off to Sibera... I recommend a Kinesis contoured model for serious emacs abusers, myself.
(And if you really want to save your hands, stay away from the goddamn mouse.)
You want me to make up some reasons for you? Here's one: he wanted to spend some more time with them, so he decided to try to kidnap them for a day or so and see if he could get away with it.
And you can turn this point around you know... Why would Reiser behave as though he knew Nina was dead? Isn't that a remarkably stupid thing to do?
And if we were judging a physical theory, instead of a complicated situation involving human behavior, that would be a really good point.
Strangely enough, a bunch of us who are following the case can't believe how thing the prosecutions evidence is... the best they can do is "that guy Hans is pretty weird, isn't he folks?"
Oh, by the way, you skipped some possibilites:
5. Nina decided to skip town and head back to Russia.
a. This was a long-standing plan.
b. She did it on impulse for some reason.
Yeah, it seems irrelevant to you and me, but there's a purpose to it: he wants to convince the jury that Hans is Not Normal. America is the land of the free, but if you end up in court, you can expect to be hassled for every single little point where deviate from middle class expectations.
Yup, he's an annoying, egocentric bastard all right. Off with his head.
(I actually find the continual problem of convincing Reiser to shut-up to be incredibly funny, myself... you just know that he wants to take the stand and start ranting about the virtues of playing video games or some damn thing...).
By the way: what's so silly about using ReiserFS as a VFS layer?
techno-vampire wrote:
Hell, there's a dozen guys here on slashdot who think they can just dash off a file system any time they feel like it.
More to the point, there's a some programmers at NameSys already doing support programming for both Reiser 3 and 4. Hans didn't write all of the code: there already programmers who are up to speed on it.
There is, however, at a minimum a problem with public perception on these things, and it's an open question how long NameSys will be able to keep going, and so on.
Which is all too bad, I'm a big fan of ReiserFS myself -- these days there are a number of serious file systems available for Linux, but ReiserFS is the only one (as far as I can tell) that's actually designed to scale down as well as up. In general, I think we've all gotten used to the idea of dancing around limitations in the filesystem (e.g. the slogan "don't treat the file system as a database!"), so for example, the unix world shifted away from things like MH mail directories (one file per message) to the mbox format (entire folders of mail shoveled into one file)... it didn't have to be this way, and I suspect that in a ReiserFS dominated world we would all just get used to working our filesystems harder and look askance at any oddball offering that couldn't deal efficiently with a million tiny files...
RedWizzard wrote:
I don't know why he won't spell it out, but it appears that he like the idea that Nina might be intentionally framing Hans, and that she smeared some of her own blood around.
This is a cute thought, but I have to say it strikes me as a little fantastic... The kind of thing I would believe is that she decided to skip, and was suprised but not upset when the cops went after Reiser for murder.
mccalli wrote:
This is one of the silliest things in the world to argue about in my opinion -- I can't imagine why you shouldn't name something after yourself if you feel like it -- but the case with ReiserFS is that Reiser spent years hassling around in a Russian court with some scammers who were claiming they had written all his code. Afterwards he named the project using his name, to make it clear where the code came from... it'd be a little hard to go into court claiming that you were really the author of "ReiserFS", not that Hans Reiser guy.And not incidentally, after this Reiser became a fanatic about giving credit where credit is due -- there were some complaints about the code spitting out messages naming the people who had worked on it, rather than hiding this stuff away in an AUTHORS file in the source, as some people prefer).
Yeah, and if I remember right, the Defense has pointed out that there were other things he could've done that would've made more sense. Again, if I remember right: his wife's van was sitting right there. Wouldn't it have been better to conceal the body in the van, and then get rid of both of them at the same time?
The trouble with that kind of reasoning, I would say, is that if you've just committed murder -- possibly a spontaneous, first degree, crime of passion, sort of thing -- the odds are good you're not going to be thinking very clearly.
The blood splatters sound impressive in a newspaper report -- and the cops did their best to milk it for all it's worth, didn't they? One wonders what that was about -- but it doesn't take a lot of thought to realize that they just don't mean anything. Human beings -- particularly women -- leak blood now and then. Wouldn't you expect to find a couple of blood stains of indeterminate age around a place where someone has been living for years?
Supposedly, Reiser's mother was hassling him about being a slob. In general, chicks have problems with filling up the back yard with dead car parts.
It doesn't mean anything, in this case. Didn't he use a card to buy them? It doesn't take a lot of brains to realize you should use cash if you want to hide a purchase.
BiggerIsBetter wrote:
That's certainly an odd wrinkle to the case, but the alternate explanation that I like is simply that Nina Reiser isn't dead. Having swindled Namesys for what she could, she skipped back to Russian, leaving her mother to handle the problem of bringing the kids over. She presumably knows that Hans Reiser is up on trial for her murder, but has chosen to lie low, and let him take the heat, for reasons of her own.
I'm not saying that there's any evidence for this theory either, it's just one of a number of things that might have happened.
Correct. The analogy fails in other ways also: Dan White got a reduced conviction because he was connected (an ex-cop, ex-member of the board of supes, who happens to have assasinated a very liberal mayor). If the Twinkie Defense means anything at all, it means that if they want to let you off, they'll seize on any nonsense as an excuse.
The Hans Reiser case is completely the opposite: he's an eccentric outsider, being put on trial for Not Being Normal ("Did you ever think about a church wedding?" Ha. Ha.)... This supposed "geek defense" is just a reminder that people have a right to be eccentric.
That's a point, but his Moms was yelling at him to clean up. It's hard to stash a car seat under the bed and get away with it.
Yeah, and what the fuck, it's only Hans Reiser's life and reputation we're talking about here. Against that, we have the right, nay the duty, of every American to shoot their mouths off about any damn thing that strikes their fancy.
So, do you think Britney has started wearing underwear yet?
Yeah, it barely needs an "explanation". I knew a guy who drove a beat up car with no passenger seat. It wasn't because he used it to transport a corpse.
He bought the books after it was clear the cops regarded him as a suspect. Reiser is indeed the kind of person who would go "If I'm the subject of a murder investigation, I should learn something about them." He didn't exactly leave the books lying around, he left them in his car, and I remember right he was making at least a minimal effort of concealing the car (parking it in a weird place... remember, in addition to the cops, he may have had the Russian mob to worry about).
Got it? All of this stuff is public record at this point. If you're so interested, you can just go read about it for awhile, you know?
I think you misunderstand completely. The actual evidence against Reiser is pretty weak -- he did some weird things, but then the circumstances were weird, and he's a weird guy, so?
If he's actually convicted, it won't be so much that the evidence was against him, but because he's an odd character, and the Jury went against him because of that.
The prosecutor is not shy about putting him on trial for Being Weird, the defense can not possibly hide the fact that he's Weird, so it's almost the only option: don't discriminate against my client because he's Weird.
davros-too wrote:
Actually, you want to be very careful about getting involved with STEM work, because almost all of it is sample preparation, which is on the order of placing samples in a solvent and staring at them until you can start to see a light shining through them. This sort of thing gets old pretty fast.
Which is not to say that they aren't pretty damn cool gadgets, even given their limitations. Atomic scale resolution combined with some ability to characterize the atoms and the chemical bonds? This is the sort of thing you can use to look at a heterojunction and see what you've really got there.
(What I'd like to know is how good is it on lighter elements? If you can get an idea of, say, the Oxygen concentration, this would be just the thing for high-Tc superconductors.)
All right, already. Stop hitting me over the head with your subtlety.
I realize that it's often more fun to talk than it is to read what it is you're nominally replying to, but my point is that I don't particularly care about the several screens of cruft: I at least sometimes like the way lynx tosses the layout and presents content one-bit-at-a-time. There are some cases that lynx would display incoherently (e.g. if someone were to use an html table to present acutal tabular data for example), but it's interesting how often the "layout" just doesn't matter at all.
Similarly the lack of javascript handling is often as much an advantage as a disadvantage, and nothing stops you from using a different browser now and then: you're not forced to make one choice and stick to it.
As far as graphics goes, lynx can be configured to spin off an external image viewer if you want to look at an image, but this is only mildly useful, because most images on webpages are really stupid things like blank areas used for layout tweaks.
And here we run into some irreconcilable differences: you think text-heavy pages are "dull".
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here -- I suspect you're yet another "designer" who resents the fact that you're fabuloso designs are irritating the hell out of a large chunk of the populus -- but you're logic is totally whacked. Why blame the author of some text for the decisions made by other people in the organization?
Consider the way the world looks when I use Firefox. I go to read a column by Robert Fisk in the Independant, and a bar appears at the edge of the screen telling me that the execution of some script has been blocked. I habitually use custom colors with light text on black -- my opinion is this minimizes eye-strain, by the way: computer screens are not paper and should not try to mimic paper -- and the various little graphics they've squeezed in on the page are glaringly bright in comparison, because they presume I'm using a white background. Then I come to the dread Flashing GIG advertisement, and it's once again time to right click and use Adblock to make it go away.
Do you see what I'm getting at? Lynx (or w3m) is not without it's annoyances, but using Firefox is not without it's annoyances either: I need to constantly fuss with it to fight the faddish nonsense that the web is always infested with.
What's so crazy about using a text-mode browser if what you want to do is read some text?