The following is being preserved in its original form as a reminder that I need to think before I publicly post something that I might regret later. You'd think I would have learned this by now:
As has been described multiple times on countless websites and various texts regarding the nature of the internet, its biggest strength and biggest weakness is anonymity. People should be permitted to access the internet without being tracked. Unfortunately this also means that people can anonymously be dicks, thus breaking Wil Wheaton's law with little to no reprisal.
Yesterday I ranted about Adobe's crappy response to a critical bug in various software products they sell, including the heinously priced Adobe Photoshop CS6 which carries a whopping $699 full price-tag. A certain gentleman who goes by the name "andy" felt compelled to explain how wrong I was, listing each error numerically.
Okay, so everyone's entitled to free speech, I exercised mine by ranting in the first place, and he exercised his by telling me I was wrong. Fair enough.
However, he was still being a dick. Why?
Because even though this site is public, it's still my personal space. I leave comments open with some bot-preventions in place, but the understanding is that if I leave the comments open, you won't come in and leave a big steaming pile on my floor. Otherwise I have the right to follow up with a post along these lines. See what I did there, "andy"?
My initial response was to (as politely as I could muster under the circumstances) let him know his retort wasn't about to change my mind about how Adobe does business. When I got home and was able to look at the database, it turned out that "andy" had supplied an email address of "andy@mailinator.com" which is a throwaway email address used to prevent spam when you have to supply an email address to fill out a form.
It's also a pussy way to remain anonymous; I require that form to prevent dickage, and he circumvented that. I don't send emails of any kind to comment submitters, least of all spam.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that "andy" is a hired marketing shill working for Adobe, and his sad little job now consists of looking for blog posts critical of Adobe and undermining their authenticity by leaving counter-arguments in the comments section. I hope it pays well, "andy".
I apologize for the continued usage of quotation marks around the dick's name, but since he/she was operating anonymously on this site, I felt they were appropriate.
Oh yeah, and I still think Adobe is a terrible company. So there.
