Well, you seem to be making some rather positive assumptions, completely out of context.

I saw this when it was new, yesterday, and it is one pic in a in a giant series of photoshops showing Dorner is responsible, and a zillion of the other usual 4chan and reddit suspects.

So I glanced at this (or one of the numerous others very similar) and at a glance said Oh LOL very funny to photoshop Moot into the pix but Moot is going to be pissed now. At closer glance today, Moot is in fact a skinny white dude but this seems to be a different one (insert racially insensitive comment about skinny white guys all looking the same to me at long distance and low res, hey recognizing the problem is more than half way to fixing it). And its all rather tasteless humor so I scrolled past it pretty quick for better stuff (aka pretty much ANYTHING other than jokes about blown up people) I'm surprised this is still "of interest" today.

The properly journalistic way to look at this is in context, you REALLY need to look for instance at the reddit posts on the same topic immediately before and after which show the probably late mr dorner being responsible in one via some pretty amusing CSI style animated gif photoshop work, and another photoshop job doing the same with spiderman (no kidding). And some dumb anime ones, and the usual racial slurs, etc. However in a giant sea of photoshops, this one story is gaining traction. Probably because its politically correct to assume an angry white dude did it, whereas the similar photoshops of arabs in turbans are too politically incorrect (aside from also being completely ridiculous and tasteless).

Now the question of the day is who is this dude who probably got photoshopped in, and I'm not a huge Stargate fan by any means (err, well...) but I am about 95% sure this was a generic uniformed dude from SG:U or SG:Atlantis. Now it could all be real in which case SG:U or SG:Atlantis uniforms are going to be solely for the tasteless next Halloween, or its just vaguely coincidental that the the SG uniform people used some pretty much off the shelf stuff from Gander Mountain or uscav and it means pretty much nothing.

I wrote a bunch of stuff about which episode of SG:U I think this uniform and backpack comes from, but the pix is so low res and I'm working from memory, so I deleted it.

I don't know whats more embarrassing, a bunch of people getting all worked up believing one pix on a site known for "funny" photoshops is authentic, or me admitting in public that I watch syfy network sometimes, even worse I got roped into watching SG:U and I'm still kinda pissed they never had any closure to the series.

I guess if there is any "startup lesson" here for the HN community its that you can't usefully research something in total isolation of its surroundings.

That doesn't mean its absolutely false, just probably. For gods sakes whoever is doing this research for real, do us all a favor and DO NOT publish it in the funny photoshops section if you want it taken seriously, OK? Frankly anywhere else would be better.

This doesn't mean its all a waste of time. If the pix are not photoshopped, and if for example the SG:U costume department bought its backpacks and shirts and caps from Cabellas Outfitters or REI or whatever, and the dude in the pix shopped fairly recently at the same place, extensive research into that topic MIGHT help the authorities.