Every time I read ESR's stuff, I get the impression that he believes all hackers think exactly like him. Even worse, I can't imagine anyone, hacker or otherwise, wanting to be around a person that was anywhere near his conception of hacker. There's some good information here, but a lot of stuff that's him pushing his belief system and claiming it represents an entire community.<p>The most absurd:<p>> Don't send e-mail in which entire paragraphs are single multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply to just part of the message.) Assume that your respondents will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text displays and set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.<p>Sure. People still use 80 line characters. Riiiight.<p>I think it's more important to stress that people can't(and probobly won't)help you if you can't communicate your problem clearly, not that some person is going to rip you a one for disturbing the sancticty of their forum. I don't think very many people spend time berating stupid questions unless they like doing so, and most of those people are going to do so regardless of what you wrote.<p>RMS can be odd and backwards, but he basically founded FOSS, the community, and done a lot for the world. I really can't think of much ESR has really done for FOSS, and mostly just makes hacking look bad by claiming to hackers. If only he didn't come up so high on a google search for hacker.