Technology Tidbits

Posted by Greg Laden on August 31, 2008
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From CNET:

There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain.

Meanwhile, back at the penitentiary:

Linux guru and convicted murdered Hans Reiser was handed a prison sentence of 15-to-life Friday, putting a final capstone on a case that began as a murder mystery, and ended with Reiser leading police to a makeshift grave a short distance from where he strangled his wife.

“I wish to humbly apologize to society for my crime,” Reiser said in a statement before his sentence was pronounced. “Every human life is sacred. I took the life of a human being and I’m very sorry for that.”

wired

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Comments

  1. #1 Stephanie Z
    August 31, 2008

    Yowch. “the life of a human being” Not “my wife.” Not her name. And the apology is to society. Yeah, I’m perfectly content to have him locked away.

  2. #2 AChE
    August 31, 2008

    She wasn’t his wife by then. And they hated each others guts. And she wasn’t the forgiving kind.

    If he immediately brought her corpse to police, he could have gotten only 4 years. If he obeyed his lawyer, he could have been proven innocent. He was too smart for his own good.

    And the trial was a show how society hates people who dare to be different.

  3. #3 AChE
    August 31, 2008

    She wasn’t his wife by then. And they hated each others guts. And she wasn’t the forgiving kind.

    If he immediately brought her corpse to police, he could have gotten only 4 years. If he obeyed his lawyer, he could have been proven innocent. He was too smart for his own good.

    And the trial was a show how society hates people who dare to be different.

  4. #4 M.Z.
    August 31, 2008

    Since when is strangling someone not a crime, but merely daring to be different?

    Or maybe it’s that he’s a genius and she was a woman? Perhaps geniuses could get one free wife-strangling per lifetime.

  5. #5 Andrew
    September 1, 2008

    Strangulation is not the usual method people use, I guess.

  6. #6 Stephanie Z
    September 1, 2008

    AChE, that is one of the creepiest comments I’ve seen on the web. Reiser wasn’t too smart. Smart would have covered up the evidence that was enough to get him convicted without a corpse. That kind of conviction is tough to achieve.

    He was too arrogant, too convinced of his own essential “otherness” to see anyone else as being fully as human as he is. All his behavior, including this statement, suggest that the rest of humanity are just a bunch of abstractions to him. Abstract thinking is a great thing and probably necessary for the work he’s done, but it needs to be tempered, particularly when dealing with other human beings. Based on this, I don’t think he can do that.

    That’s not daring to be different. That’s pathology.

  7. #7 Willy
    September 2, 2008

    About the first (CNET) quote: Can’t you just pull out the phone’s SIM chip and read that? If so, then what’s so kewl about that CSI stick thingy?

  8. #8 Greg Laden
    September 2, 2008

    Only some phones have sim chips.