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ALTERNATE_REALITIES_REISING

                                                         February 24, 2006
Part of the "beyond a reasonable doubt"
game has to do with the range of scenarios
that seem plausible.  The prosecution tries
to narrow it down to one, the defense tries
to open up possibilities, and suggest
alternatives.

In the case of the Hans Reiser trial,
the scenario where he murdered his wife
and then went into action trying to
hide it and cover for himself, that's
reasonably straight-forward... the           It covers a multitude
likelihood that it was done on impulse       of apparent anomalies:
actually makes it *easier* to explain
little glitches in the story.                  Q: But why would he have
                                                  done *that*, if he
                                                  wanted to hide
                                                  something, surely he
                                                  would've --

                                               A: Well, maybe he wasn't
                                                  thinking clearly.
There was another scenario that I
suspect sounded fanciful to many:
Reiser's wife was part of a
conspiracy to defraud him and his
company, and once she got what she
needed she left the country and         While Reiser was on
returned to Russia.  The                trial, Nina's mother
impression that she had been            took the Reiser
murdered was either an accident,        children and moved
or something she had cultivated         them to Russia.
(Maybe to throw off suspicion? Or
create blackmail material?)                  That sounded consistent
                                             with this scenario, to me:
    This struck me as plausible,             Nina didn't have to abandon
    because post-soviet Russia               the kids when she left the
    strikes me as dominated by some          country.
    rather nasty organized crime,
    and Reiser had already been
    the victim of some Russian
    scammers (they claimed they were
    the actual authors of his code--
    he wasted some time and resources
    fighting them off in court, and       Viewed through this lens,
    then changed the name of the          some of Hans Reiser's odd
    project to "ReiserFS", to make        movements might indeed have
    ownership even clearer).              been intentionally evasive,
                                          but it wasn't necessarily
                                          necessarily the police he
                                          was trying to evade.

Then there were some other very odd
factors: There was this guy Sean
Surgeon, a (former?) friend of Hans
Reiser (and reportedly, one of Nina's
lovers)... he was going around claiming
to be a serial killer-- though he
insisted he had not killed Nina.

    Like they say, "it's complicated".


           But for a lot of people these stories
           seemed too complicated-- someone on
           slashdot was ranting about how they
           "fail Occam's Razor".
                                                   RAZING_CONSPIRACY

               They didn't seem all
               that excessive to me:        Though indeed, we learned
               I reserved judgement         later that the simple story
               throughout the trial         was correct in this case.
               (or tried to).


   I was saying things like this:

      "... 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."





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