Maybe what he said was mean, maybe imprudent, rude, crude, etc., but also: Maybe he was mostly just trying to get his point across -- with what he said, it wo

Maybe what he said was mean, maybe imprudent, rude, crude, etc., but also: Maybe he was mostly just trying to get his point across -- with what he said, it would be tough not to get his point! And maybe clearly it was important for him to get that point across, to have people consider it; or, of course, reading one byte at a time via a system call is dumb: Since that practice had been going on for a long time, apparently he felt he needed to work hard actually to get the real and meaningful attention of people. Another way to put it might have been, "What needs to be done, to go around with a 20 gallon barrel of ice water and one person at a time dump it on them to see if they are just asleep or really dead?". When seeing something clearly bad going on for a long time and still little or no outrage, or even effective attention, to improving the situation, can get frustrated and then be crude, rude, etc. if only just to get people shocked enough actually to pay attention. Maybe I'm not the only one to "feel his pain", and maybe such a statement, under such a circumstance, does not make someone "mean".