Hans Reiser to Sell Company 583
DVega writes "Due to increasing legal costs, murder suspect Hans Reiser is seeking to sell his company. His lawyer William DuBois said he is running out of money to pay for his defense. DuBois added, 'This is a unique opportunity for someone to buy the company for pennies on the dollar. We welcome all vultures.' This is a good opportunity to own a filesystem and rename it after your own."
Re:Nice quote (Score:5, Insightful)
This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Truly this is sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Novell have just switched from reiser to ex3 at opensuse 10.1 or 10.2, I can't remember well, and this was the last "mayor" distribution supporting it. Any way, his company was loosing value, even more, his company is more like a one man company that a group of people. I doubt Namesys has CMMI, or follows any structured development strategy, so, buying a company whos best product is the sole creation of his owner is a very, very bad move.
I hope he gets some money for his company.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:sounds fishy (Score:2, Insightful)
Out here in the Rest Of the World it is considered one of the first pure Hot Hatches. People race them, you know.
I thought it was a bit strange when mythbusters needed a small old car to trash and a viewer gave them a Fiat X1/9 which he described as "that piece of euro shit which has been cluttering up my drive way for five years". Where I live people pay big money for that exact car to do up and drive around in. Maybe Americans should just ban foreign cars on the basis of job protection.
Re:sounds fishy (Score:1, Insightful)
The CRX is a fun old toy but as cars go, it's a piece of shit, in Europe and elsewhere. Get over it. (Posting anon to save my karma from the ricer mods.)
Prosecute murder with no body? (Score:4, Insightful)
What would happen if he were convicted, and then Ms. Reiser shows up?
How can you claim someone is guilty of murder before you have declared the
victim is dead? Or if the victim is dead, has life insurance been collected, for instance?
I really don't see how you can have "murder" without a body, remains of a body, or some specific claim as to how the body was disposed of.
On the other hand, I *can* see how you could justify holding such a suspect without bail, sort of.
He should, at a minimum, explain where the seat from his Honda can be found. Seems like that might clear up a few things. (They locate that seat, find it isn't covered with blood and bone fragments or whatever they expect to find... That sort of thing would be pretty embarrassing to the prosecution, I'd guess.)
Of course, if I were a betting man, my money would not exactly be riding on Hans' innocence. The car seat bothers me a lot. (The State of California is required to presume his innocence, but I am not, unless I happen to get called on his jury...)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Its especially interesting because hes supposed to be a smart guy. You'd think the last thing you want to do is purchase a book about homicide investigations when you think you're the main suspect in a homicide investigation.
Yeah yeah, maybe he wanted to know how to procede and was honestly curious in a non-sinister way. It still looks extremely suspicious.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be sad if he buys his way out of the conviction when he's guilty, but we don't know that he's guilty yet.
It's saddest for you to assume that he's guilty and if he'd need to buy his way out of a murder conviction if he's innocent.
Re:Give the money to his kids (Score:3, Insightful)
Things don't look well for him at this point anyway....
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
>murder conviction and walk away a free man.
Well, money can't buy you anything more than a fair trial, but lack of money pretty much guarantees that you are screwed, even if the evidence against you is minimal. All that money does, is guarantee that your lawyers are competent, and that you have the resources to dig up evidence on your behalf.
Now, there are other things you can do to get out of a murder conviction, like be a loved celebrity, or have political power.
Funny... (Score:3, Insightful)
The finding of this book (I'm not talking about other findings) and supposing any connection of this book to the murdering is therefore kind of not-Slashdot like : he could just have been generally interested in murder, perhaps a big CSI fan or something ?
It's supporting evidence at most.
Re:Funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Funny... (Score:1, Insightful)
You've got it a little confused. The police didn't name him as a suspect because of the books. They didn't even start investigating him because of the books. He already had a motive and a bunch of evidence pointing at him. The books just make it that much more suspicious.
With the patriot act, the government would be able to search for all the people who had bought the books or checked them out from the library, name all of them as suspects, and then investigate all of them at their leisure.
It's a pretty big difference, really.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's sadder to see a innocent person goto prison.
Can you sue justice? (Score:0, Insightful)
GD
How much is it worth? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:2, Insightful)
What is so difficult about this that nobody seems able to use the correct word anymore?
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are lots of reasons to get a dedicated lawyer. There is however no reason why this should be such an expensive (as in have to sell all your assets and go live under a bridge) proposition.
Re:WinFS (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides the grammar problems.. i use reiser 3.6 as my home partition's filesystem and although i'm not a power user
(i didn't nor i have investigated how to tweak the filesystem to squeeze the most out of it) i haven't any problem with it.
I don't think MS would be a good buyer for this technology (and as stated in some other comments, MS tend to prefer *stealing* the technology instead of buying it) both because they already have a fairly decent one (ntfs is _closed source_ but not _bad_) and because its PR like to let people think that they own the technology they sell, they always have and always will (i may be the average ignorant guy but i never heard of the companies that originally developed hyper terminal or MS anti-spyware before MS bought those).
My 0.2$
Re:wife would be no loss (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:sounds fishy (Score:3, Insightful)
While the X1/9 is probably a good car to do up or to own as an enthusiast, it's no good for a daily drive because it's so unreliable. Many European cars built at around that time were also pretty terrible, reliability wise - even if they WERE very stylish and nice to drive. I loved my old Mini - good fun, timeless design - but reliable it was not. It needed constant maintenance. The vast majority of Americans aren't prepared to put up with cars that need constant maintenance.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Locking up an innocent man, however, clearly violates the rights of a human being, and therefore is not merely incompetant but outright oppressive.
There is no comparison between the two, and I can't believe people would actually try to make that comparison. It is a greater tragedy to lock up one innocent man than to let 1000 guilty men slip. When your government locks up innocent men, you are dealing with a much greater force of evil than all the "private" criminals in the world put together. Why? The criminal, although willing to employ coercion against others, is equal to you and me in terms of power: no criminal posesses the special "right" to employ coercion; that is why they are criminals. Government, on the other hand, is founded on that "right" to employ coercion as its means -- clearly, government is the most dangerous force that could possibly exist. (What force could possibly be more dangerous than a special "right" to employ coercion?)
Re:This is sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's one of those things that's always seemed so obvious to me (even before I learned the term for it), that I don't really know why more people never realized it. The judge deals with the law for a living. On the other hand, as a normal citizen, I'm only familiar with a few laws, and then the rest just comes from my "common sense".
So, why would it make any sense to bring in a panel full of people who are (likely) LESS educated on matters of law than the judge, and then let THEM be the ones to follow the law to the letter? That makes no sense. In most cases, the judge is the person in the courtroom who is best suited to be the issuing judgements bases solely on the letter of the law.
So what point does bringing in a jury serve? Well, it could serve either of 3 purposes:
1) A dog and pony show (which is what the whole 'follow the judges instructions' thing seems like to me)
2) A chance to get a verdict based on the jury's misunderstanding of law
3) A chance to get a verdict based on what (a small sampling of) society feels is right.
Now seriously...which of those 3 seems most likely to be the founding fathers' intent?
Re:WinFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, welcome to linux. Windows has One File System(tm) because... it's easier. Linux has 129 filesystems because 129 different people think each one is the best at what it does.
I love linux, but sometimes too much choice is a bad thing. If linux was a car, there'd be 18 steering wheels and no air conditioning, but you'd be able to change the radio stations from the hubcaps.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now seriously...which of those 3 seems most likely to be the founding fathers' intent?
None of the above. Seriously. "The jury of your peers" is about keeping a ruling class from passing judgment on the masses. It's one of the last lines of defense against corruption in the legal system.
Also, the judge explains to the jury the law involved, and the jury is allowed to ask questions about it. The jury is there to decide the truth, not the law.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if he had a book titled "How to murder your wife and get away with it" it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean he was planning anything, or even thinking about doing anything -- I agree, notes in margins, highlighting/underlining pieces, etc might mean something, but that is different than just having the books.
This type of thinking is EXACTLY why library staff get pissed about the patriot act allowing law enforcement access to their records of who borrowed what, and when.
Re:Prosecute murder with no body? (Score:3, Insightful)
That is ridiculous. Murder is a physical act, and if you murder somebody after you've already been convicted of killing them, clearly the murder that occurred after your trial already ended, it is a different criminal act than what you were originally convicted for. Don't worry though, they'd reverse your prior conviction before throwing you back in jail; even though technically they wouldn't have to.
You don't get convicted for murder. You get convicted for murder of person x at time y in location z. Making x y and z the same for the 'second' killing is a big job.
Re:This is sad ... (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, the main problem with jury nullification is that for a good chunk of our nation's history, the opposite of the above situation was true, especially in the deep south. The law said it's not ok for anyone to kill anyone else; white juries wouldn't convict white killers of black people, however.
Re:WinFS (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, sometimes file system types can make a performance difference. Using ReiserFS is going to help out when you're doing stuff with lots of little files, yes. How much? I dunno. Will most people be happy with ext3? Yes, absolutely. ext3 will do pretty much everything you need it to do. However, when you choose a filesystem type in the fdisk menu on linux, there are literally this many: I'm not saying there aren't holes in my arguement, but... it's hard to deny that's a crapoload of filesystem types. Now, it's not Linux's fault (or GNU or whoever wrote fdisk) that there are that many options.
But this is a symptom of a greater problem in Linux - it's desire to be every thing to every one. And not in a "get on my bandwagon or get the fuck out" type scenario, like you have with Windows - but a location for everyone to dump any pet project that they have ever made, and eventually we have 43 window managers, 2 Xservers, 18 mail dameons, 97 web browsers, 9 different sets of wireless networking tools (none of which work for more than 3 chipsets), 812 shells, 14 IM clients, 84 Mp3 players, and four office suites. Boy, if you like choice, linux is the place to be. But, some of us find it a bit overwhelming at times (mainly, when "some of us" have to do desktop support for linux).
I can't help but wonder if all the people who are working on different, paralell projects pooled their efforts where Linux would be today.
And as I've been saying for 4 or 5 years now on Slashdot, all I ever wanted out of linux was a universal clipboard with a universal API for cutting and pasting. We now have windows that wobble with hardware accelerated graphics (FC6). Great. I'd like to be able to cut and paste.
~Wx
Re:WinFS (Score:2, Insightful)