Hans Reiser Interview from Prison 611
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 after reading TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If OJ can get away with it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids better of where they are (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I tend to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:First question (Score:5, Insightful)
All three of them sound psychotic to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, divorce court just makes people imagine the worst about one another.
Re:This story is going from 'weird' to 'surreal' (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I tend to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you believe it's better to send innocent people to jail than let guilty people go free.
Re:obHumor (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Kids better of where they are (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if Steve Ballmer's children and wife gone missing one day, I bet the public may not apply the same prejudice to his case.
Re:obHumor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A bunch of weirdos (I actually read TFA) (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Wow that's bizzarre (Score:4, Insightful)
So I take the hint, and that night, in my office, I start scouring the 80,496 lines of the Reiser4 source code. Eventually I stumble across a passage that starts at line 78,077. It's not part of the program itself -- it's an annotation, a piece of non-executable text in plain English. It's there for the benefit of someone who has chosen to read this far into the code. The passage explains how memory structures are born, grow, and eventually die. It concludes: "Death is a complex process."
She's in Russia (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously though... she was involved in a number of circumstances individuals or their loved ones eventually have no recourse but to take drastic and dramatic action at times involving faking your own death or disappearing (e.g. hardcore drug spirals, weird religions/cults, severe psychiatric problems, mafia involvement in any way and so many more!)
Re:It's possible to tell when someone's lying (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This story is going from 'weird' to 'surreal' (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Reasons? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your wife is in love/lust with your bi-S&M-druggie friend.
She files for divorce.
They conspire to take your company and everything you've worked for.
You know (or at least think) that after this, there's never going to be anyone else. He had to turn to a Russian bride already. I bet his social skills aren't even that great. Its easy to envision living alone forever after that, while your friend and your ex-wife run off together.
If you want to know why he looks/talks crazy..that's why. Doesn't justify murder, but might give some insight into why he looks shitty.
Re:my theory after reading TFA (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:obHumor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I think Nina is in Russia with her kids (Score:3, Insightful)
I think she's alive and well in Russia. If she was killed her body or parts of would have turned
up by now. And if she is alive, maybe this was her parents way of getting her out of the US? She
was a bright woman who started to take a pretty dark path. You could see all the classic signs here.
Hans was too rapped up into namesys. He married a hottie wife who noticed that she was getting a lot
of attention elsewhere. I think once Nina started messing around with other stuff her parents got
her out of the country. The fact that the passenger seat is missing from the CRX and the fact that car
had been washed out, casts some doubt on the belief that Hans is innocent here. He needs to come clean
with information about that.
I think the defense needs to monitor Nina's Mom and Hans' kids in Russia to see if Nina is there.
Re:Kids better of where they are (Score:2, Insightful)
When questioned by police, Rory says he and his sister went down to the basement as soon as they arrived at his grandmother's house, leaving his parents upstairs. A few minutes later, he heard them raising their voices and using "not nice words." He went back upstairs, but his father told him to go back to the basement. Rory turned and walked back downstairs. This was the last time he ever saw his mother.
and
After Nina disappeared, the Alameda County social services agency put Rory and Niorline in a foster home at the urging of police. Two weeks later, the county family court released them to Nina's mother, who took them to Russia for the holidays. It's now late January. They were supposed to return weeks ago. Instead, a letter arrived from a lawyer in Russia, explaining that the kids were terrified of the US and would not return.
as potentially implying a kidnapping conspiracy? particularly since they are now somewhat outside of the jurisdiction?
Re:A bunch of weirdos (I actually read TFA) (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an admittedly fascinating story for some reason. But when you remember that it's all real, you can't help but shed a few tears for these kids, who are going to grow up with no mother, with a twisted father who probably killed their mother and will be rotting in jail for years to come, with a paranoid, delusional grandfather and kook for a grandmother in the US.
Maybe they're better off being in Russia after all. You come away from that story sort of despairing of their chances for growing up to be reasonably mentally healthy adults.
Re:From what I've read... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ofcourse his being weird does not shed even a bit of light on how he could be a murderer.
Re:my theory after reading TFA (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:obHumor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bad Image for OSS? (Score:1, Insightful)
Of all the problems Ford has, the fact that the company is named after its Nazi founder is the least of them.
Re:obHumor (Score:3, Insightful)
The code fragments throughout the article were dumb and really added nothing but something to skip over.
But overall, the article was informative ... it had a lot of information about the case I wasn't aware of. I twas even reasonably well written, though more as a story than a new article.
Re:I tend to ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what about Sean Sturgeon (Score:5, Insightful)
The kids are currently known to be in Russia, and the Russian mom is conveniently nowhere to be found.
I'm
It's possible to tell when someone's *LYING* (Score:3, Insightful)
1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
It doesn't make any claims about determining truth. Now *that* is the philosophical question you were talking about.
Re:So what about Sean Sturgeon (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest (his geekiness, lover of death literature, alledged row) is completely circumstancial and not very relevant.
For some reason, people think circumstancial means irrelevant. Smoke is only circumstantial evidence of fire, but that doesn't mean it's irrelevant.
Re:Wow that's bizzarre (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm quite confused because the author seemed to be portraying Reiser as innocent up until that point.
Interesting that they found this passage in the program too. Death is mentioned an awful lot in computer science really. We speak of "killing" processes and the like.
Re:She's in Russia (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't have any proof either but the whole mail-order-bride knocked-up-on-the-first-date thing just reeks of a set up.
Re:obHumor (Score:2, Insightful)
Why Confine Hans? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I tend to ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I dunno.
People who've been unjustly stripped of their freedom don't tend to come out of prison with too great respect for the law. Add that to the financial ruin and social ostracism that being sent to prison entails, and you can get someone with a genuine grievance against society and nothing left to lose but their lives.
Re:obHumor (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This story is going from 'weird' to 'surreal' (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:obHumor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Guilty (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the criteria for deciding whether someone's mentally competent again?
Re:obHumor (Score:4, Insightful)
"Respect" != "being quiet." People joke about tragedies all the time--from the famine in Ethiopia to the Challenger disaster to the 9/11 attacks. It's what people do. Jay Leno's career got a huge boost by making jokes about O.J. (for a long time, Letterman didn't)--and we had a body in that case! I'm sure every slashdotter--even the ones posting the most tasteless jokes imaginable--respect Hans, the work he's done, and the contributions he's made.
Everyone is offended by something. Does that mean that no one should ever joke about anything? As it happens, this is one of the few places where a joke about this would be understood--can you imagine Leno going on the air with a filesystem joke?
Regarding the car... (Score:1, Insightful)
Put yourself in his shoes - what would you do? You come out to find your blood all over the seat of your car and put that together with the rest of what's going on. Maybe you stash it out of sight while you try to locate her - but she's disapeared. Do you really think going to the police with that story is going to hold up
Me - I'd do what he did. Clean the car and hope I could swing some reasonable doubt from the jury. Which there is plenty of in this case. My gut says he did it - but hopefully the jury votes with their heads and not their gut. My head tells me there are to many what-ifs to send a guy to prison for the rest of his life based on what we've heard so far.
Re:obHumor (Score:4, Insightful)
The question is, given these divergent framings, how do we deal with each other in a space of discourse? Some of the responses to that problem are now characterized as an excess of consideration, "political correctness." Which I think is a shame, because it leads to the collapse of the possibility of respect outside of very closed communities. At the same time, calls for "respect" are also power plays: demanding that we respect the sacrifices of (our) soldiers is a way of muting protest and deflecting the critique of their behavior. Likewise, antiwar activists can also be selective - and just as maudlin - in their selection of the space of the tragic.
Re:Guilty (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it is, as stated, a totally wrong opinion, I agree (anyone who thinks that personal_opposition_to_racism = lack_of_racism is sadly a fool). But there is some validity to the "it is considered socially acceptable to indulge in such hatred" argument. This is clearly what he's reacting too, but he just as clearly takes it too far. And I also get the feeling that he takes it too far not just in his words, but in his own mind - but I could certainly be wrong.
Not only that, but he believes in this so strongly that he has his son learn these "lessons" behind his mothers back and apparently considers them VITAL, psychologically. Also, in my personal opinion - take it or leave it - he makes FAR too much of the difference between the male and female psyche.
That's what I kept thinking too. Here's the main reason I wanted to respond to you: none of this is direct evidence of guilt. However, it is my opinion that he is fully capable of falling so far into the deep end at least long enough to believe that such drastic measures as murder are necessary long enough to follow through with it. Is that direct evidence or guilt? Of course not. You don't think so either. Anyway... I just thought that that was the clearest way to put it.
Re:obHumor (Score:3, Insightful)
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?