So, today we learned that it takes the Internet 3 minutes to offend.

My friends, I am ashamed. Three minutes? We must try harder!

That's an extreme, though, kicking someone off because they made a mistake.

It's clear (to me) that Linus cares enough to engage and teach by expressing what he cares about and why?

Is he rough? Sure.

But ultimately who cares? This is between Linus, Mauro, and the core maintainers. Everything else is sterile conjecture.

But I stand by what I said as "empirically true." Linus was nice to someone once and they committed suicide over it. That's empirical evidence that "being nice" doesn't always help. That's horrible.

It's better to be straight with people so that problems get resolved NOW rather than become lingering issues down the road. Sometimes this means writing an e-mail that says: shut the fuck up.

(by "that" I meant what you wrote, not what Linus wrote, btw).

Curse words are funny. Emotion is a strange concept to me, but I get when people are angry and go into my "there, there, dear" mode.

If my employer ever sent me something like that, I'd quit on the spot.

I don't like being coddled, I like being handled even less. Tell me what you really think and drop the fucking corporate baby speak.

I'm an adult. I drink and sometimes curse and make mistakes, but I also do great things. My skin is thick enough to understand the difference between being upset over technical choices and personal attacks.

IMO, the worst punishment is someone cutting off communication and ignoring anything you say or do.

Anything else is just the colourful blend of frustration, emotion, and artful expression that is pervasive in our industry.

The kitchen is hot, and "professional" means we keep talking.

It's more insidious than that.

If Linus coddles people, they get a false sense of approval. His brash, direct, and overtly emotional tone is intentional. It's to let the other party know exactly how he feels without accidentally leading them into a false sense of "oh, keep working on it and I'll approve it."

Watch that video where he flips off Nvidia.

He describes how being nice to people is the wrong approach, and makes things worse when the other side gets the wrong view, is rejected after months of effort in the wrong direction, and then Linus gets the blame for their suicide.

If he was paying them, he could fire them. He doesn't have that luxury, so he has to be clear and direct.

Don't like it? too bad. That's Linus, and he makes no excuses for how he behaves.

Yep. Google doesn't show the entire article, they show enough content to drive viewers to the article. It's up to the individual sites to retain those visitors, not Google.

Newspapers should be paying Google for the service of indexing and driving customers to them.

The things I post on the Internet are not private?

Oh, shii....

I will happily admit that my "If Europeans..." line was both incomplete and merely a ruse to poke fun at the

Facts are not libel, the truth is an absolute defense.

Free speech implies that you have a backbone and are willing to accept speech that makes you uncomfortable.

If Google can show that people frequently combine those terms, then there is no libel. To prevent such factual statements as a matter of law is a hinderance to the very essence of free speech.

If it's libel to say that "when searching for X, people have commonly searched for X+Y" where Y is unkind towards X, then you may want to rethink your notion of libel. If Europeans don't like free speech, then they absolutely

I think, in his time, he was under-appreciated. But he certainly is appreciated now, if not a cherished part of the science-fiction canon. We are fortunate, as science-fiction readers, that he did not move on to other genres as he originally had intended (or, maybe not, I don't know. In some other reality, PKD was a furnature saleman who never had the inkling to write at all).

I don't get this. Most of the good American content online exists behind paywalls (that require a US address) or foreign blacklists. Sure, we can circumvent many of these measures, but the average user doesn't (I assume). My point is that American advertisers will happily take over from the CRTC in denying Canadians access to American content.

Personally, I don't get the point -- since many American shows are produced in Canada, doesn't that inherently make them "Canadian content?"

Sue for what?

If they re-sealed the box and represented it as unopened, I can see the case. But if you willingly purchase an opened box and expect the contents of the box to be unmolested then you've got a screw loose somewhere.

*shrug*

This doesn't bother me at all.

Unless they are re-sealing the boxes and are representing them as unopened, I don't see the problem.

Caveat emptor used to mean something.