On Wednesday, August 04, 2010 10:57:58 am Les Mikesell wrote:
Aren't we all pretty comfortable with using thousands of man-hours of other people's work for free? And, his posts are a tiny percentage of this thread and I can't see where anyone else has added much useful content either, nor do I see much point in bringing up ethnicity.
I feel this modified thread is valid in as so far as evaluating who should be helped.
Generally I believe that one is as valuable as one helps his fellow man. At the same time helping someone who's not Willing to help himself is not good for anyone. And I'd rather err on the safe side.
Technical subjects can often put people to sleep due to lack of understanding which results in fumbling and idiotic questions. To remotely label someone troll or whatever, Correctly, is not easy.
Asking how to run a command even though there are man pages, web documents, books etc, does not in my mind make it less valid question, due to the "mind cloud" one can get engulfed in. It is far to easy to decide that people can easily find an answer themselves if they try.
I don't often follow threads as I'm simply to busy. But every now and then I have a few seconds and if I see a question I can answer, I'll do it.
Someone went as far as sending me an offline email saying that I should not help him. Again I'd rather err on giving too much help than too little. Maybe he's right in the assessment, I don't know.