The police found inside Hans's car "found a blood stain on a sleeping
bag stuff sack that measured one inch by three inches". After
testing, "Nina Reiser could not be excluded as its donor."
The end of the article is deliberately ambiguous. You're reading way too much into it.
The end of the article is a piece of sensationalistic garbage... it makes
it sound like there's something peculiar about Reiser not talking about the details
of defense, when in reality he was almost certainly ordered not to talk about it by
his lawyer.
And trying to make it sound like Reiser was giving him a hint to look for the answers in
a code comment checked in a year ago? This is just crap. It's embarassingly bad.
As for the question about the car.... it seems weird and will to a jury, but what did he do "wrong"? There is nothing he did there that was illegal, and nothing found in or on the car can reasonably be used to demonstrate guilt other than through a very loose "circumstantial evidence". Not even the blood found supposedly in the carpet of the car in trace amounts that seems to match Nina's DNA. That just means she was in the car sometime in the past, and that point is not in dispute. There are photos of her next to the car.
My understanding is that the blood stain in the car wasn't on the carpet, but inside of a sleeping
bag stuff sack. Do you know different?
The police seem to be focusing only on Reiser, which is probably a mistake. Reiser could be guilty. There certainly is a lot of evidence that points towards him, and he doesn't have answers for big questions like his car.
You're a very careful, thought reader, so can you explain to me why you assume that Reiser doesn't have answers
to these big questions?
What I would say is that we don't have answers to these questions, largely because we've only heard the prosecution's side thus far.
He wanted to change cars for ahwile because he thought the Russian Mob was after him.
He stashed it some distance from his house, because if they spotted it at the curb-side,
they'd know he was using a different vehicle. The passenger seat was missing because it fell
apart, and he yanked it out planning on replacing it, but never got around to it. Or he wanted
to use his car to move some 2x4s around, and it was easier without the passenger seat.
Or something.
We haven't heard his story yet, because he has not gone to trial.
(This business about how he needs to "come clean" about this is totally insanse.
How dare Hans Reiser keep slashdot readers in suspense just because he's up
on a murder charge?)
As for putting the author's name on a project like this, it tends to show the ego of the author. They want people to know 'I did this,' and I think it is tacky. There is a reason that IBM isn't called Hollerith, Inc. and Apple is called J&W Computing.
Hans Reiser once had to spend a lot of time in court, defending against some guys who claimed that they had
written all of his code. Putting his own name into the project name was a reaction to those problems.
Afterwards he got very fussy about making the attributions clear about who had written all of the code...
It's one of those little quirks that some people like to complain about, e.g.if you run mkreiserfs, you
get spammed with a message telling you the names of the current maintainers.
The story about Hans Reiser gets weirder every time I read about it. It's like you're reading some surrealistic novel, or maybe a plot by Grisham.
There are actually even more oddities to Hans Reiser's life that could be brought out...
one of the reasons he re-named the project "ReiserFS" is to make it extremely clear that
it's his project, because he had to waste about a year of his life in a Russian court defending against
some slimey characters who were claiming that they had really written all of the code.
The "Russian Mob" theory actually isn't all that crazy...
Probably someone could write an interesting novel based on this story as well. It's getting so weird, you just can't make such stuff up.
It would make an interesting book, certainly, but it would actually be difficult to work it up into a novel:
there's too much going on. Novels have to be plotted under restrictions that reality doesn't have...
Hans' mom was at Burning Man when Nina first went missing? Yea...the kids are probably better off in Russia
Just in case anyone thinks that's a joke, I know a guy who lost a custody battle, and one of the things that was used in court against him is that he went to Burning Man.
This is a free country you see, and you're free to do all sorts of things, but if you end up in court,
you can expect to be put on trial for Not Being Normal.
According to an article I read, probably in Time, supposedly you're more likely to get convicted if you don't provide explanations for the evidence against you. Bad strategy then, regardless of the philosophy.
But it does not make sense that Hans Reiser would be spouting all this nonsense,
Spouting what nonsense? Are you talking about his opinions about video games?
That was back during a custody battle, not the same case at all.
unless he's really no longer mentally competent. Or, he's concealing a secret that is more important to him than his own freedom. Clamming up about what happened to the car, and the seat, does not make him guilty - of course. He has that right under the 5th Amendment. But it makes him look bad.
When you're accused of murder, clamming up about it is not unusual. When you're
accused of anything the first thing your lawyer tells you is to shut the hell up about it (it's actually somewhat remarkable that Reiser was talking to this Wired reporter at all).
We don't have Hans Reiser's defense yet because he hasn't gone to trial yet. What we
do have is the police and the prosecution vigorously trying to make their case to the press,
and it might be reasonable to ask why they would do that -- it isn't their job to provide us with a nice
sordid media circus.
If that article is anything to go by he needs to learn some social skills fast. A jury of ordinary people may not be too keen on someone who goes on about
As I remember it, It's extremely rare for the defendant to take the stand in a murder trial.
I believe, it's at the option of the defense, which will almost certainly recommend that
Reiser shave, put on a suit, and sit still quietly, looking very solemn.
Hans killed her. The strongest indication is the missing passenger's seat, and the blood in the car. The rest (his geekiness, lover of death literature, alledged row) is completely circumstancial and not very relevant.
Actually, the car gymnastics and the blood stains are the cirumstantial part.
The other stuff just has to do with attempts at establishing character (convincting him for being "wierd").
The "blood in the car" is much less impressive than it sounds: a smear inside a sleeping bag stuff sack of indeterminate age.
The business about shuffling cars around is actually the best evidence against Reiser that we've heard thus far.
(By the way: I've knew a guy who drove a car without a passenger seat. We computer geeks drive beat up cars on occassion, you know?)
Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence.
If you guys want to argue about a hypothetical case, feel free, but try not to confuse reality with the chain of events described by a rather sloppy, idiot writer working for Wired.
We're talking about a custody battle. They're pointing fingers at each other, going "you're not normal!"
Hans Reiser has been hassled for letting kids play video games, imagine that... and the treatise he submitted to the court, nutty or not, is apparently a defense of letting boys play video games. Try reading the article closely: the suggestion that Rieser is trying to justify beating up his wife is not borne out by anything Reiser actually says.
As the article says, the missing front seat is a big whole in the defense's argument. To have come out with a story professing Hans' innocence a this point would not have sat well with a lot of people.
It's not a hole in his defence because we haven't heard his defense, because he hasn't gone to trial yet.
You're trying to decide whether he's innocent or guilty solely based on the information the prosecution has given you, before the judge imposed a gag order and told them to knock it off.
By the way: can someone explain to me what reason the cops would have for shooting their mouths off to the press about a case where they know the courts are going to have to scrape up an "impartial jury" somehow?
The gag order is hardly a suprise...
You are quite possibly the only person on Slashdot (Or at least, the only person who posts under their real name) who has a personal connection to Hans & Nina Reiser. You shouldn't be too surprised that the vast majority of posters arn't going to take it as seriously.
Try this idea on for size: suppose that Hans Reiser is an odd, cantankerous computer programmer, who really didn't kill his wife, and is now rotting in jail largely because he's an odd, cantankerous fellow.
There are a lot of odd, cantankerous folks in these parts. You might think they'd be worried about being tossed in jail for it.
As far as evidence goes: the strongest thing they've got is the car gymnastics. The blood smears sound impressive but aren't really, e.g. the blood-in-the-car as I understand it was inside an old sleeping bag stuff sack. It's
not at all hard to explain things like this, e.g. it was used to stash a tampon on a camping trip at one point.
And the behavior of the cops on this one seems pretty funny to me, actually: they're doing their best to get the man convicted in the court of public opinion... what for? How do you get an impartial jury after this circus?
Although these stories are used as political ammunition by Democrats, this has nothing to do with them.
What planet do you live on? The Democrats wouldn't know political ammunition if you dumped it on their heads -- certainly that's happened often enough in recent years, and they still don't seem to be catching on.
The democratic Grand Strategy at present is "keep your head down, maybe the Republicans will keep screwing up".
In many ways, I think that's my objection to the whole FOSS thing. In a commercial company, there's an invisible hand of the market to slap you across the back of your head if you get too rude, or arrogant or fanboyish.
And it's owned by Bill Gates.
As long as we're trotting out these tedious accusations, do you mind if I complain about Windows fan-boys whose
definition of "working correctly" is doing it exactly the way windows does it, despite the fact that this state of perfections changes with every release?
In fact, in the early 70s they had a thing called "quadrophonic", a silly idea where you had speakers both in front of you and behind you (sound familiar?).
Well, yeah, it sounds familiar to me. But then I've got an 8-track player.
"Quadrophonic" sound wasn't really that silly an idea -- it was a lot like movie-theater "SurroundSound" -- but there weren't a lot of records recorded that really used it to any advantage. A notable exception was the Who album
"Quadrophenia", where they did a lot of interesting things with directional sound. For example, on the line "Can you see the real me- me- me- me- me-..." the word "me" was originally bouncing around rapidly on all sides of the listener.
I don't get this prevalent urge to be able to "easily switch to another RDBMS". Each RDBMS has its own quirks and moer importantly its own strengths and weaknesses in terms of performance and available features. If you use MySQL and need performance you'll probably do without transactions and referential integrity, do atomic single table updates and try to avoid deletes. If you use Oracle you may try to avoid autocommitting minimal updates and instead collect them into a bit larger transactions. How can you then easily switch from one to the other? Oracle is wasted if you run it with a database designed for mysql and MySQL lacks the features to run a database designed for oracle.
Pick a database suitable for your task and use it as optimally as possible; easy portability be damned.
A few scenarios where on might worry about portability: (1) you're working on a system that you're hoping to get to work with whatever database the user has access to already, (2) you've gotten tired of being raped by Oracle's licensing, and you'd like to hold the door open to switching to another database, if only as a bargaining maneuver to push for discounts/reduced prices.
On the other hand, if you actually trust the culture of the developers working on the database you're interested in, you might very well choose to embrace the special features of that database,
because the need to switch to another one at some point in the future seems very unlikely to occur.
(And if you ask me, this means "Postgresql". Trusting to Mysql culture does not sound like a great move to me.)
What it should be is the end of proprietary data formats,
but that would require the sudden development of the ability to
look beyond the end of our noses...
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise, a brilliant move, I have to say. I should write a bot that posts that line once a day and see how much karma it racks up.
The end of the article is a piece of sensationalistic garbage... it makes it sound like there's something peculiar about Reiser not talking about the details of defense, when in reality he was almost certainly ordered not to talk about it by his lawyer.
And trying to make it sound like Reiser was giving him a hint to look for the answers in a code comment checked in a year ago? This is just crap. It's embarassingly bad.
My understanding is that the blood stain in the car wasn't on the carpet, but inside of a sleeping bag stuff sack. Do you know different?
You're a very careful, thought reader, so can you explain to me why you assume that Reiser doesn't have answers to these big questions?
What I would say is that we don't have answers to these questions, largely because we've only heard the prosecution's side thus far.
He wanted to change cars for ahwile because he thought the Russian Mob was after him. He stashed it some distance from his house, because if they spotted it at the curb-side, they'd know he was using a different vehicle. The passenger seat was missing because it fell apart, and he yanked it out planning on replacing it, but never got around to it. Or he wanted to use his car to move some 2x4s around, and it was easier without the passenger seat.
Or something.
We haven't heard his story yet, because he has not gone to trial.
(This business about how he needs to "come clean" about this is totally insanse. How dare Hans Reiser keep slashdot readers in suspense just because he's up on a murder charge?)
Yup, he's a weird guy all right.
Off with his head.
(No more weird guys allowed in free software! From now on, all kernel contributors must present psychiatric certificates.)
Hans Reiser once had to spend a lot of time in court, defending against some guys who claimed that they had written all of his code. Putting his own name into the project name was a reaction to those problems. Afterwards he got very fussy about making the attributions clear about who had written all of the code... It's one of those little quirks that some people like to complain about, e.g.if you run mkreiserfs, you get spammed with a message telling you the names of the current maintainers.
There are actually even more oddities to Hans Reiser's life that could be brought out... one of the reasons he re-named the project "ReiserFS" is to make it extremely clear that it's his project, because he had to waste about a year of his life in a Russian court defending against some slimey characters who were claiming that they had really written all of the code.
The "Russian Mob" theory actually isn't all that crazy...
Probably someone could write an interesting novel based on this story as well. It's getting so weird, you just can't make such stuff up.It would make an interesting book, certainly, but it would actually be difficult to work it up into a novel: there's too much going on. Novels have to be plotted under restrictions that reality doesn't have...
Just in case anyone thinks that's a joke, I know a guy who lost a custody battle, and one of the things that was used in court against him is that he went to Burning Man.
This is a free country you see, and you're free to do all sorts of things, but if you end up in court, you can expect to be put on trial for Not Being Normal.
He has not gone to trial yet.
Spouting what nonsense? Are you talking about his opinions about video games? That was back during a custody battle, not the same case at all.
When you're accused of murder, clamming up about it is not unusual. When you're accused of anything the first thing your lawyer tells you is to shut the hell up about it (it's actually somewhat remarkable that Reiser was talking to this Wired reporter at all). We don't have Hans Reiser's defense yet because he hasn't gone to trial yet. What we do have is the police and the prosecution vigorously trying to make their case to the press, and it might be reasonable to ask why they would do that -- it isn't their job to provide us with a nice sordid media circus.
And apparently you're a complete idiot.
As I remember it, It's extremely rare for the defendant to take the stand in a murder trial. I believe, it's at the option of the defense, which will almost certainly recommend that Reiser shave, put on a suit, and sit still quietly, looking very solemn.
Actually, the car gymnastics and the blood stains are the cirumstantial part. The other stuff just has to do with attempts at establishing character (convincting him for being "wierd").
The "blood in the car" is much less impressive than it sounds: a smear inside a sleeping bag stuff sack of indeterminate age.
The business about shuffling cars around is actually the best evidence against Reiser that we've heard thus far.
(By the way: I've knew a guy who drove a car without a passenger seat. We computer geeks drive beat up cars on occassion, you know?)
If you guys want to argue about a hypothetical case, feel free, but try not to confuse reality with the chain of events described by a rather sloppy, idiot writer working for Wired.
We're talking about a custody battle. They're pointing fingers at each other, going "you're not normal!" Hans Reiser has been hassled for letting kids play video games, imagine that... and the treatise he submitted to the court, nutty or not, is apparently a defense of letting boys play video games. Try reading the article closely: the suggestion that Rieser is trying to justify beating up his wife is not borne out by anything Reiser actually says.
It's not a hole in his defence because we haven't heard his defense, because he hasn't gone to trial yet.
You're trying to decide whether he's innocent or guilty solely based on the information the prosecution has given you, before the judge imposed a gag order and told them to knock it off.
By the way: can someone explain to me what reason the cops would have for shooting their mouths off to the press about a case where they know the courts are going to have to scrape up an "impartial jury" somehow? The gag order is hardly a suprise...
Try this idea on for size: suppose that Hans Reiser is an odd, cantankerous computer programmer, who really didn't kill his wife, and is now rotting in jail largely because he's an odd, cantankerous fellow.
There are a lot of odd, cantankerous folks in these parts. You might think they'd be worried about being tossed in jail for it.
As far as evidence goes: the strongest thing they've got is the car gymnastics. The blood smears sound impressive but aren't really, e.g. the blood-in-the-car as I understand it was inside an old sleeping bag stuff sack. It's not at all hard to explain things like this, e.g. it was used to stash a tampon on a camping trip at one point. And the behavior of the cops on this one seems pretty funny to me, actually: they're doing their best to get the man convicted in the court of public opinion... what for? How do you get an impartial jury after this circus?
What planet do you live on? The Democrats wouldn't know political ammunition if you dumped it on their heads -- certainly that's happened often enough in recent years, and they still don't seem to be catching on.
The democratic Grand Strategy at present is "keep your head down, maybe the Republicans will keep screwing up".
But have we had enough Rights, yet?
Or to put it another way, do we have any rights left?
And it's owned by Bill Gates.
As long as we're trotting out these tedious accusations, do you mind if I complain about Windows fan-boys whose definition of "working correctly" is doing it exactly the way windows does it, despite the fact that this state of perfections changes with every release?
Well, yeah, it sounds familiar to me. But then I've got an 8-track player.
"Quadrophonic" sound wasn't really that silly an idea -- it was a lot like movie-theater "SurroundSound" -- but there weren't a lot of records recorded that really used it to any advantage. A notable exception was the Who album "Quadrophenia", where they did a lot of interesting things with directional sound. For example, on the line "Can you see the real me- me- me- me- me- ..." the word "me" was originally bouncing around rapidly on all sides of the listener.
A few scenarios where on might worry about portability: (1) you're working on a system that you're hoping to get to work with whatever database the user has access to already, (2) you've gotten tired of being raped by Oracle's licensing, and you'd like to hold the door open to switching to another database, if only as a bargaining maneuver to push for discounts/reduced prices.
On the other hand, if you actually trust the culture of the developers working on the database you're interested in, you might very well choose to embrace the special features of that database, because the need to switch to another one at some point in the future seems very unlikely to occur.
(And if you ask me, this means "Postgresql". Trusting to Mysql culture does not sound like a great move to me.)
We can only hope.
What it should be is the end of proprietary data formats, but that would require the sudden development of the ability to look beyond the end of our noses...