On Sun, 1 Jun 2008, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > Anyway, regardless of how you may feel about someone asking a "stupid" 
> > question,  NO ONE is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to 
> > respond.
> 
> True, but neither is anyone holding a gun to anyone's head and forcing 
> him to read Olin's (or any other) reply!

That is true of an onlooker but the person getting berated feels compelled 
to read the reply and in many cases defend him/herself.

> 
> That's what I don't understand about both sides (does not include the 
> admins): Olin, why grumble about ill-formatted emails? Others: why 
> grumble about emails you consider rude? Are your (both sides) delete 
> buttons worn out and unusable?

No but many people feel obligated to protect those that are being 
attacked. Some people empathise with the victim because of personal 
experiences in their own past.

> 
> But I do understand
> - the admins urge to keep the list manageable, whatever their 
> interpretation of that (those who have a different interpretation are 
> free to join)
> - Olins urge to point out where and how a poster could have found the 
> answers to his questions himself

Yes but Olin doesn't just point things out, he is hostile with it.

> 
> > No, you can't say that. You're assuming that these people are as bright as 
> > you and that they could do what you do as easily as you.
> 
> No, the assumption is that they put in a minimum amount of work.

Please quantify minimum. Does this mean spending an hour researching with 
books and google. Is an hour of your expert time going to be equivalent to 
a novice's? Does the person (asking for help) have access to the same 
books as you, will he be using the same search phrases as you, will he get 
side tracked looking at erronious circuits and software examples. Someone 
with your experience can quickly see when some part of an example is wrong 
and will quickly move onto another example - looking for something that is 
less wrong. Many people are not able to do this, they just get more 
confused by contradicting info.

Some time ago I was looking for a circuit on the web. I was surprised to 
find that about half of the ones I found had the symbol for the LED in 
backwards.

> 
> > If that's the case, why aren't you jumping in and doing it before Olin? 
> > Probably because you know it's wrong.
> 

> and I don't have the fluency in English.

Sure :-)


Regards
Sergio Masci
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