While I suspect I disagree with Linus on this topic, I think the journalist did not do a good job of portraying Linus's views in a way that best brings out his argument and that argument's strongpoints. Though of course, if I know that Linus did not get a fair opportunity to project his arguments at their best, then maybe I know that I don't know whether I would agree with Linus.....

Another useful trick when creating an address to register for a site is adding the site's name in the address, if you start to receive email from that address, you know who sold it to spammers.

Having your own domain makes this really nice. Any time I question a site's usage policy, I use companyname@mydomain. To-date, I've only had 3 companies sell my address.

Interestingly, I get 5-10 spam messages a day to those 3 addresses, which is the bulk of my spam, so having auto-delete rules on those addresses makes it a lot easier to deal with spam.

We need to legalize drugs.

• Legalizing drugs makes it economically infeasable for drug dealers to operate. Legalizing all drugs would eliminate drug wars and the violent gangs and drug lords that plague America's cities.
  
• You would not have to worry about methamphetamine labs in your neighborhood. There is no fucking way a small meth lab would be able to compete with a pharmaseutical company's prices and quality.
  
• You really don't want any fucking meth labs exploding in your neighborhood.
  
• The USA has the largest number of convicted drug users in prisons in the world. Legalizing drugs would save millions of dollars in taxes (it costs about $60,000 per year to incarcerate an individual). These people would be humanely treated as addicts, not criminals.
  
• In the 1920's, alcohol was made illegal by Prohibition. The result: Organized Crime. Criminals jumped at the chance to supply the demand for liquor. The streets became battlegrounds. The criminals bought off law enforcement and judges. Adulterated booze blinded and killed people. Civil rights were trampled in the hopeless attempt to keep people from drinking. [lp.org]
  
• Civil liberties suffer. We are all "suspects", subject to random urine tests, highway check points and spying into our personal finances. Your property can be seized without trial, if the police merely claim you got it with drug profits. Doing business with cash makes you a suspect. America is becoming a police state because of the war on drugs. [lp.org]
  
  Also check out http://www.lp.org/issues/relegalize.html