Comment: Re:wrong points (Score 5, Insightful) 201
Stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Being a newbie in a field is not an excuse to wasting the experts time by asking the same question for the 50th time or making the same mistake for the 100th.
Go to cryptography experts and tell them you've invented a new cypher and it's really great and could they please have a look. If you are lucky, you will get a few flames telling them that you're the 10th person this month and all the others have been idiots. Not just this month, but for the past 10 years.
Some newbie coming into a field that requires expertise and delivering something that is not a total waste of time to everyone is a once-in-a-decade event. It just happened in mathematics, so yes, it does happen. If you think you're that event, chances are stacked against you solidly.
That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you have a lot to learn, including the nature of the field. And all the hostility and flaming and being obnoxious actually serves a purpose: To shut down the crap as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to minimize the waste of time.
That's the price you pay for an open development model where everyone can come in and talk to the dev people directly with almost no barriers. Other fields have solved the problem by creating barriers. Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins. You'll find that you need to prove several times that you really have something worth discussing just to get there.
In Free Software development, we don't have that barrier. But that means the top people have to deal with the Sturgeon's Law stuff themselves, and they need to do it quickly, and that means skipping the niceties and telling things as they are.