My Brother color laser printer is great, but it does not print photos as well as an ink jet. Instead of maintaining an ink jet printer, now I just print them at Walgreens or CVS.
It can't print photos well (at least I assume, I haven't tried) but I'm generally not doing that at home anyway. For printng a large amount of simple flyers it's cheaper and faster than an inkjet and perfectly passable. I sometimes print labels and other things that are fine as long as I use laser media.
It has no problem accepting third party toner cartridges I buy on Amazon. Works great over Wi-Fi from pretty much all my devices.
Never buying HP again, even if it weren't for this.
Brother has color lasers FWIW. If you're talking about photo printing IMO you go up to the professional class of printer or you just send out your printing to a photo printing establishment and let them deal with the mess.
> my brother laser printer is such a piece of shit.
Mine has been going for nearly a decade with no issues to report and almost no one has anything bad to say about them, so I'm curious what issues you had?
One day it just stopped working on the network. Tried to use it direct via usb and that didn’t work either. Tried to factory reset it and that didn’t work either. It’s just a brick now.
It was great when it worked, though. Got two years out of it.
Owing to the laws of the country, they rarely call for outright bans or describe themselves as evangelical religious organisations. Due to the first amendment, that won't fly. The modern tactic is instead to campaign against sex trafficking, revenge porn, child porn, and children having access to porn, aiming to create rules onerous enough that they knock out the regular porn industry at the same time.
This particular law may not turn out to be constitutional - but passing it, fighting over the matter and then getting it declared unconstitutional could be a vote winner. And there are other laws that could be constitutional that could replace it.
Is the anti-porn lobby large enough that politicians will benefit from supporting it? Difficult to say, but as we've seen on abortion issues, there's a surprisingly big religious lobby. I guess we'll find out next time Oklahoma state senator Dusty Deevers is up for re-election.
It wouldn’t be, unless they can get the Supreme Court to narrow the first amendment on obscenity again, which may be possible. Which would then just be the beginning of a new game about where that line is in a predictable way.
I said in another comment before I read yours: homeschooling, having more outcomes at the extremes, lead to many people to have observational biases (and strong opinions) in both directions.
I think the only conclusion I've been able to draw from anecdotes about homeschooling (having experienced it myself) is that outcomes are more varied than traditional education, whether there's a bias in that variance is not something anyone can speak to (as of yet).
A very smart student has the opportunity to get much farther ahead whereas a poorly crafted education plan and/or an unmotivated student has the potential for negative outcomes.
I has to disagree about the "education plan". I did not plan very much, and my kids have done very well academically. The advantage is you can try stuff and do what works.
It is also more motivating.
It is possible to mess it up, but schools mess up too. On the whole kids seem to usually do better than comparable kids at school (at least in the UK) and there are studies that back that up.
The data is biased by many things that need to be corrected for. For example (at least in the UK) a lot of kids with SEN or mental health problems are home educated because in many areas schools do not have adequate provision. On the other hand if you have a home that encourages academic achievement (i.e. the sort background that leads kids to do better in school) they will probably do a lot better than at school
Maybe 'educational plan' is a misnomer. How about 'strategy and tactics'. Both knowing what the child should eventually learn and adapting so that they learn it.
I have a family member who was hired as an Emergency teacher over 20 years ago. They've since become fully credentialed, obtained their masters in education, taught masters students, and organized a particular program/subject at the district level.
Speaking with them, their experience has been the core driver of a successful teacher is primarily whether they want to be there and care about the students success.
Of course, when they were first hired they spent all of their free time crafting lessons plans for a subject they basically failed in high school. Studying the textbook and relevant material so they could teach it.
I swear there's a patent incentive company that's selling into these programs. everybody was doing patent cubes for a while. I've got a patent light (from Facebook), which I'm guessing must have been a thing too.
About the only thing my patent was useful for was when a PM came around asking about a new vendor with a creative way of doing something, I could defer with "I have a patent on that, it didn't really work when we tried it"
I am not going to touch on your other points as you clearly have decided your mind.
> why a mistake he committed in personal life would make his file system a taboo to touch.
He is no longer here to fix bugs or improve the file system, it is not that it's Taboo to touch per se. The benefits of ReiserFS are no longer clear compared to alternatives, there's a cost to including ReiserFS (which Reiser acknowledges), no other FS is associated with the name of a premeditated murderer.
Before entering a post-verdict deal for a reduced charge to give up the location of his victim’s body, Reiser was convicted by the jury of first-degree (specifically premeditated, even though there alternative ways to get that charge in California) murder, meaning that the trial jury found that the evidence presented at trial eatablished that beyond a reasonable doubt. The facts supporting that conclusion are public. It may be possible to reasonably disagree with the jury’s conclusion, but it is beyond silly to describe it as opinion supported by no known facts.
> As of 2020, Reiser was housed at the Correctional Training Facility near Soledad, California, with a tentative parole eligibility date of August 2027 after parole was denied in 2022.
15 years to life means his sentence is life with a possibility of parole after 15 years if the parole board thinks it would be better for society that he's out of prison. The parole board did not think so at 15 years. He'll get more chances in the future.
I suspect many are aware of this but for those uninformed:
Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.
I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.
I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
He was far less of a mastermind than he fancied himself at the time.
If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.
He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.
The wildest part was the friend who had an affair with his wife who blurted out unprompted on the stand that he had killed 7 people. They let that guy go!
The 'weird nerds' defending Reiser brought this up time and again during the trial. But Reiser showed them all up by leading the authorities to where he had buried the body afterwards so I guess that that particular angle is now settled.
Apparently it's a moderately common enough phenomena that cops intentionally keep aspects of a murder scene out of news and reports, so that they can check if someone knows them or not. People are sick enough for fame that they'll murder, and being sick enough for fame to confess to someone else's murder isn't nearly as bad.
I've read the same Wired article you have, it's confusing but it does not actually say that Sturgeon testified during the trial. Read it again.
Sean Sturgeon was not called by the prosecution or the defense. He did not testify at the trial. The defense hinted several times during the trial that the police had not adequately investigated Sturgeon for the murder.
Before the trial, Sturgeon called the Oakland police and said "I've killed 8 and half people, but I didn't kill Nina." The police didn't know what to do with the 'half' part, and discounted him as a crank.
I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
I think it was my first experience with absolute egregious fanboism.
That /. thread was amazing. So many people trying to justify behavior that cleanly pointed to murder. Not every action by itself, but the combination of all of them: buying crime books, removing the seat, cleaning his car and there were more actions. But the slashdot technical community defended him until the moment he confessed.
It wasn't fanboism, it was something else entirely: solidarity of the ingroup.
Hard to believe for the younger folks around here, who grew up in a culture that praised and valued technical skills, but Slashdot was a place for the prior generation, for whom technical skills were mocked and ridiculed.
Hans was "one of us", and it's a very human thing to believe that a member of your specific outcast group would ever be one of the baddies.
Best comment on that thread, calling out their ridiculous takes:
> I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.
Hans Reiser gives a jailhouse interview to Salon, and when he comes off as unremosrseful murderer, the peanut gallery says:
> I find it to be just another case of math envy, the imbecile KNOWS that he could never in a million years achieve 1% of what Reiser has achieved, however Reiser is now a convicted murderer, thus the idiot can now feel better about himself, and hurl contempt and scorn on Reiser.
Like anyone gives a shit about some computer filesystem.
> I will always remember the Slashdot comment that said that removing the passenger seat of your car so you could sleep in your car was a reasonable thing to do, and everyone saying it was suspicious was a hater. (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
Do you dig it ? A car floor is not fucking flat. That's why it's suspicious to remove the passenger seat without installing a flat surface over it. That's why the instagram poster did install a flat surface. Because they didn't want to sleep on the car floor. Because it's not flat. It's not comfortable. And because it's not comfortable it's not reasonable.
> As investigators follow Hans, they discover the missing CRX, but something is missing, says prosecutor Paul Hora. "He removed the front passenger seat. Then he completely disassembled, removed the rear cargo area of the car, threw away the carpeting that covered the spare tire and the cover that covered the spare tire."
> When it was Hora's turn, he asked Hans why he had removed the front passenger seat from his car. "He said he removed the passenger seat in order to make a Honda CRX a more comfortable place to sleep," Hora recalls. "His explanations were ridiculous. I mean, they were lies. A Honda CRX is an awfully small car that wouldn't be comfortable no matter what you did to sleep in it."
> On October 11, 2006, law enforcement officials said that blood spatter had been found in Hans Reiser's house and car. Forensic testing (including DNA analysis) could neither confirm nor rule out Nina Reiser as the source of the blood. Officials had not located the missing passenger seat of his car. They also indicated that they had found in the car two books on homicide investigation purchased by Reiser on September 8 — five days after Nina Reiser's disappearance: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, and Masterpieces of Murder by Jonathan Goldman.[28] Daniel Horowitz, a high-profile defense attorney, joined the defense team[6] but dropped the case on November 28, citing Reiser's inability to pay for his services.[29]
It has never been mentioned that the car was modified to accommodate for sleeping on the floor in a comfortable and reasonable way. The passenger seat, carpeting were removed but that doesn't make the floor flat.
Of course! Who doesn’t decide that they would rather sleep in a car the moment their significant other goes missing? It’s just to get away from the press and the house where you had all those memories! And of course you’ll start researching crime scene analysis and cleaning methods right after she goes missing as well, because you know you’re the number one suspect, and you just want to help find the guy that did this.
The real killer is out there! And Hans and O.J. are on the case!
Seriously though. If this isn’t suspicious behavior, what would characterize as obviously suspicious behavior from a suspected murder?
>
Of course! Who doesn’t decide that they would rather sleep in a car the moment their significant other goes missing? It’s just to get away from the press and the house where you had all those memories!
Well, this depends a lot on what kind of people you spend your time with. I know at least two people in my circles (let me put it this way: they both slightly schizophrenic traits) about whom I would not be surprised if they came up with such ideas.
I guess I have a light tendency to gravitate towards smart mavericks in my social life. :-)
> Well, this depends a lot on what kind of people you spend your time with. I know at least two people in my circles (let me put it this way: they both slightly schizophrenic traits) about whom I would not be surprised if they came up with such ideas.
That argument is self contradictory since you justify their behavior by invoking their specific and out of ordinary mental traits, which reinforces the idea that removing a passenger seat car to sleep directly on the floor is not reasonable, normal or expected.
You're being very unfair to my argument and implying that I think the poster is innocent.
Maybe I was unfair to you as well; if so, I apologize.
The reason I brought up that he might've been in the process of installing a flat surface was that your comment mentioned that attempting to sleep in your car without installing a flat surface would be too uncomfortable.
It's completely reasonable for me to, for example, want to convert my car and be in process of determining:
1. Is it reasonable to sleep on a bumpy surface? Let me try it out for a couple of night first.
2. Know that a bumpy surface is uncomfortable, and be in the process of figuring out a solution, e.g. what to buy.
Of course, in this specific case, those are irrelevant because Hans Reiser never intended to sleep in his car. But, they are perfectly valid reasons why one might remove a car seat without then immediately having converted it to a comfortable bed.
One could imagine a lot of counterfactual things! But that doesn't make them true or plausible. Do people really think it's worthwhile to argue, after he led police to the body, that removing the seat was a camping project? What is the point you are trying to make?
It's certainly not common, but I had a friend in highschool that took out the front passenger seat of his VW bug, to make it easier to get surfboards into the car. He normally just had a folding chair for passengers.
Here's a 16 year old Hackernews thread from the day after the conviction, you'll see lots of even to this day prolific HN commenters writing that well we don't know if he REALLY did it, and even if he did, he has definitely down a net good for humanity with his contributions to software (and then tptacek reliably shoots them down)
I briefly worked with Hans around 2005. My impression at the time was that he declined the manslaughter plea because he thought he was smarter than everyone around him.
You can get the details from the contemporary coverage linked in the sibling comments but it seemed like he felt he'd go to trial and be acquitted. If I had to guess, having to admit he'd been lying to everyone through the whole process was probably also a factor - the deal was something like plead to a manslaughter charge and reveal the location of the victim's body.
> If I had to guess, having to admit he'd been lying to everyone through the whole process was probably also a factor - the deal was something like plead to a manslaughter charge and reveal the location of the victim's body.
I fully believe there is a layer of Reiser that was convinced he did not murder his wife.
I didn't realise this when I was younger, but I'm pretty sure everybody lies to themselves. Like not about grey issues, but simple cases of black and white.
Yes, even most people reading this lie to themselves about facts. We might not be murderers, but we do.
I have an important conversation once where I told someone what they'd done wrong, and how to make things better, in a very mature way. I *remember this conversation.
Years later I took a drug that is known for causing an 'ego-death' and realised what actually happened was that I was angry and tried to hurt the person as much as possible with my words.
There's a book on this topic called "Night of the Gun".
It really depends on what you're looking to get away with.
If you're looking to get away with orchestrating the murder of someone you know, it can be difficult.
However, if you're just looking to get away with murdering someone in general, that's surprisingly easy. Just go a town or two over and knife a random someone in a random parking lot. Police success rates are comically low.
Police success rates on completely random murders are insanely low partially because they're insanely rare.
Complete success is something like 50% overall, but in general in many of those cases that "aren't solved" they know who did it, they also know they can't prove it.
Considering the number of people in prison who get exonerated, I'm glad that the ones "they know" did it aren't actually in jail. Because that seems like random chance that they're actually right.
But it's also why I qualified my statements. That if you're looking to kill a particular person, that's way harder than "getting away with murder" in general.
Police only have so many tools at their disposal. And if there is no link between victim and perpetrator, the job becomes way harder.
This is why I'm against the death penalty. I don't think that executing 95(97?) actual murderers is worth the chance of killing 5(3?) completely innocent people. That's not justice, that's just good odds, and it shouldn't apply to human life. Lock them up for life. Give an option for execution if they want to take that way out.
High levels of calculation in times when high levels of calculation are required to keep you out of prison are not a sign of anything.
Humans are amazing at compartmentalizing things like this away, even while they are happening.
It is impossible to know from this single datapoint if he is remorseful or not, but it is not at all outside of the realm of possibility.
As a child I merely punched my brother and I tried to kill myself afterwards because of the guilt. In the moment I could not have been more prescient about what I was about to do and what I was doing. I recalled how I had observed him fighting others, how he threw punches, how he swung his arm based on how angry he was, and I planned an arc that took advantage of his habits and clocked him. Knocked him out in one punch.
The instant he hit the floor I felt remorse like I had never felt before. Who the hell am I to take an action like that?!
Anyway, how someone feels while doing something like that does not necessarily reflect how they feel at any other time in their lives. It also may reflect how they are at all times, or anywhere in between.
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I think it would be ridiculous for me to presume that I can possibly have any view into whether or not someone has sincerely changed, but why should the fact that someone was calculating once affect whether they have changed? I could see doubting the apparent demonstration of change, because they might have calculated the appropriate words to say, but I don't see any reason that a calculating person is less able sincerely to change than any other.
I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.
So, someone who is demonstrated to be calculating has higher odds of faking a behavior if it is beneficial to them (e.g. leaving prison).
It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.
> It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.
My reference to ridiculous was to the ridiculousness of my thinking that I have any insight into Reiser's character—a disclaimer at the beginning that I was not presuming to offer any. I was in no way meaning to call you or your statement ridiculous.
> I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.
Yes, that was exactly what I was meaning to say. Someone being known to be calculating should create a higher evidentiary bar—they need to do more to convince me that they have changed. But I don't think that it offers any evidence against their having changed. And maybe this is what you were saying:
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?
Great comment. For me that fact means that I don't just read it with 'a higher bar' but with the possibility that what I'm looking at is created with the express purpose of deceiving me so some of it reverses in meaning.
Hans is probably high on the psychopath scale, and if you do any reading about psychopaths, the main takeaway is that you can never believe what they are saying. From Google:
What is a psychopathic person?
Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder characterized by interpersonal deceptiveness and calloused, remorseless use of others, as well as behavioral recklessness, impulsivity, and overt antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, violence). From: Encyclopedia of Mental Health (Third Edition), 2023.
A "higher bar" is basically "evidence against" because you're saying you need more evidence for.
Then again, everything I've read leads me to believe he's impulsive at times (even says so in the letter!) and the calculating part was afterwards not before or during (if it was, he was notoriously bad at it).
Thank you for the well-reasoned reply, I misunderstood the thrust of your commentary.
> I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?
That's a fair point. I need to reflect more on that. It is not my place to proclaim absolutely likelihood, you're correct. I think the latter statement is closer to the thrust that I'm getting at. My burden of proof for redemption is higher than a less calculating criminal/crime.
I'm with you on that one. I read the whole thing closely and my conclusion is that some of what's there is playing to an invisible audience. And some of the rest of what's there feels like 'the real Hans' shining through because he hasn't really changed, but is actively trying to change how he is perceived. I could try to enumerate those bits but it doesn't matter all that much, it's just the feeling that I get from reading the text.
Same. Pretty much any instance where he mentions prison groups or classes, it is very specific and emphasizes strongly that they have changed him. And he knows his mail will be read by the prison staff anyhow. The only benefit of the doubt I have here is maybe the groups/classes promote discussing topics like this precisely because they know a parole board gives them consideration. In which case, he'd be an idiot to not play along if he's angling for parole. (And if that is the case, it wouldn't surprise me if the prison system is being duplicitous in telling prisoners that so they can be demoralized when denied, ie. "I followed the rules and did what you tell me, but you still won't let me go?")
> my conclusion is that some of what's there is playing to an invisible audience
My impression was that he got an assignment in class to write a letter where he reflects on bad interactions in the past, apologize, and try to put them behind him.
I also got the impression that he really wants people to write/call him and discuss computer stuff, so this might be part of the motivation for writing it.
But I don't know him, so who knows what's going on in his head?
I've not done it, so I don't know, but I suspect you can never fully get to "I completely regret what I did because it was wrong" without having somewhat of "I completely regret what I did because I got caught".
I do think we wants to discuss computer stuff; he seemed entirely unaware of SSDs and how that has (and should) change filesystems, and still thinks Slashdot is a place to post things.
Yeah, I don't think the murder itself was premeditated, but he did treat the event with a sort of self-serving callousness that gave the perception that he did not care about Nina's life beyond how it affected his.
that's not what premeditated murder is though. That's trying to cover up the murder which is also a crime, but a far cry from premeditated murder which is one of the most heinous crimes recognized by the legal system.
Which is why I said I don't believe the murder was premeditated.
He was able to plea to second degree in exchange for the location of the body and essentially a confession.
They convicted him of first degree because without the body, there was no evidence that he didn't plan on the murder as well. Ironic in a way. He hid the body to try and hide the evidence that she was dead, but turns out that only made things worse for him.
If he had called the authorities and copped to it as an "accident of passion", he'd probably be out by now.
Elsewhere in this thread (or maybe it was another thread I followed on it), didn't someone mention he suspiciously left his phone at home the day he committed the murder, whereas he would normally have the phone with him?
Seems like it was probably premeditated to me if so
one funny thing is when Nina disappeared, everyone she knew called her cell phone... except for Hans, who knew there was no way she would answer and probably didn't want to waste the minutes (this was in the days before common infinite minutes cell plans)
* He testified on the stand that Nina was a terrible person and a danger to their children. A bold strategy when you're on trial for murdering your wife.
* He was angry that Nina preferred that one of his sons not play violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, because he believed his son was special and might learn something about how violence really works.
* Right before he was arrested, he handed the hard drives from his computer to his lawyer. His lawyer gave the drives to the court about 3/4 through the trial. The judge was extremely displeased. The court had the county's forensic investigators go through the drives. The drives were formatted with NTFS, NOT ReiserFS. One insane email chain discovered in it was Nina mailing Hans about the logistics of planning for new clothes and school supplies for the 2 kids for the upcoming new school year, Hans response was "It is Moscow 1942, you are the Germans, I will prevail".
Anyone happen to know Brendan Quinn?
Separately, a great role playing resource