Agree with you if the offices are geographically co-located. But otherwise, it is necessary, mostly because there are people working in time zones that are ahead of ours and occasionally forget the exact time difference(The DST is adding to all the time zone confusions) The general suggestion in my office is that they still get the auto-reply until the time we are back in office after a vacation, lest the sender thinks that their mails are being ignored :).

about what Out-Of-Office responses are meant for. The primary reason you have them is :
You *want* to convey something to a bunch of people and you expect some response. The Out-Of-Office just says don't expect a response from that person. But that person is still expected to read the emails.

Also, there are numerous occasions where people have been assigned tasks that need to be handled later, but the assignment was done when they are out-of-office. My own manager comes in at 8:00 am, while the official work hours start at 9:00 am. So, I get mails just within an hour before the out-of-office period ends. I definitely don't want those emails deleted.

The whole problem is because of lack of a tolerance to criticism. The actual reason is most probably someone wrote something really harsh about the policies adopted by his political party. And that is something the he couldn't take in his stride. Anyone who wants to have a public life, should also be ready to face the criticism. Curbing freedom and there by the criticism of the very people who elected you is something very cheap. And in addition to that, he had probably assumed that a large user base from India implied control of the industry. Imagine using humans to track each of those millions of posts on G+, FB, Twitter combined together. Absolutely foolish. If anything, he is tarnishing the image of the country. Hailing from India, what I sense is, he is anticipating a huge wave of protests from the people vis-a-vis the Jan Lokpal bill(a bill to fight corruption). His party is proposing a version which not really liked by a a lot of people. That bill is likely to be tabled sometime soon. And to get away from such criticism, he is going all out.

Not throwing tantrums. The problem is that, there are people who will eagerly take that as a flame bait and start a useless war :(. Emacs and Vi are both great editors. Let's use what ever we feel like using, but let's not throw sarcastic jokes. A few people do have attachments to editors :)

Ah, So the editor wars haven't died yet. Meaning, people with maturity levels of nursery kids are on slashdot. Grow up!

Hi, Well, saying no need is agreeable. But if you say you have no interest, it just means, you must stick to windows,as you openly say you are not interested in Great technology. Please create a 128 bit FS and I agree you are a great and also that I will never make a post in slashdot. Can you do that ? Not only that it is a 128-bit fs, it just made a few decades of FS obsolete. Be patient and have the heart to accept technology And, by the way, i mentioned three, you didn't read it fully, I presume. The third was mdb. I can give a bigger list, which include _more_ stability than Linux(My primary OS is Debian GNU/Linux).