In Memoriam: Ian Murdock

I'm having trouble understanding this comment, but I'll assume you mean that drawing attention to the person who mocked Ian prior to his death is unethical.

I don't believe people deserve witch hunts for accidents-- surely this man didn't want to kill Ian, just hurt Ian while he was already feeling suicidal. At the same time, I believe that we shouldn't ignore cruelty[1], especially when lives are/were at stake.

In support of this, I only posted links that lack identifying information: no names, no phone numbers, no email address, not even a link to his myriad of other accounts on the internet. I thought it would be useful for people to see that 1) harassment, not coddling, happened and 2) the persona (not the IRL person) responsible for said harassment.

To reply to your edit: "jackstorm" is a pseudonym, not the person's name. I don't see a full name in any of my posts, do you? Since you haven't read my posts, are conflating me with someone else, and have decided to insinuate that I'm a troll[2], I'll assume you're not interested in constructive discourse.

[1] "awfully insensitive" seems like a euphemism for cruel.

[2] "you can help the cause of online harassment by not harassing people online." I believe you mean the cause against online harassment.

> Personally I don't think you can be "unhinged" without being mentally ill

I consider that attitude to be deeply unfortunate and to be unfair both to the temporarily unhinged and to the long term mentally ill. If you had a term that was an alternative to unhinged that didn't make your socially conditioned prejudices twitch, I'd have preferred you shared it rather than simply attack both groups for using language that they consider to be accurate (because then you wouldn't've managed to insult most of my friends in one tone deaf unconstructive reply)

> Cops think twice when they know there's an equalizer in the equation.

What exactly do you mean by that?

The reason I'm asking is that everything I've read or heard from law enforcement acquaintances is that cops are much more likely to draw their weapon in situations where they think guns are present. That is, they might be less likely to "beat the shit [out] of you", but they are much more likely to shoot you. If a cop is bent on subduing me or doing me harm, I'd much rather they rough me up than shoot me.

Also, I just have to say that if you feel the only thing standing between you and police brutality is your gun, you must inhabit a very different mental space than I do. I grew up with guns (in rural Alabama), and I'd probably have one now, if my wife weren't against having one with a child in the house. I can think of many reasons to own a gun. Protecting myself from the police is not one of them.

I really don't get people who think their guns will protect them from the government. Ultimately we, the people, are the government. What protects us from overreach and abuse of power these days is strong encryption and better transparency laws.

Debian and Slackware are the two oldest distros still around, beating out Red Hat by roughly a year. They form the inspiration and, in some key ways, the basis of many modern distros, and Debian especially created apt-get and greatly increased the number of people familiar with dependency-tracking package management.

(I honestly can't find anything saying the Debian people invented dependency-tracking package management. FreeBSD's ports system might predate it. However, Debian brought the idea to more people than FreeBSD was able to.)

Ubuntu still uses Debian packages, like a number of other distros, and Debian has seen other distros rise and fall. Ian Murdock therefore had a direct hand in creating core infrastructure we rely on to this day, whether we know it or not.

I'm mixed posting on this topic as it has degenerated. RIP Ian, God bless you and your family. I pray that they have peace.

The register reports that he was intoxicated and attempting to break in to a house when the police confronted him and he fought back. He got some medical attention and then something similar happened at a neighboring house on the block and he was detained. I think with someone of this much notoriety, the whole story will come out and I suspect it will be sad. In the mean time, he had kids, his family asked for privacy, I think the conspiracy talk is ghoulish.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/30/ian_murdock_debian_f...