Very good (not so little) article written by Eric Raymond and Rick Moen about How to ask questions the smart way.

It’s aimed at people asking questions about software, but really it could apply to anything which has a good deal of information available online (and that list is rapidly shrinking).

What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, and they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

On a side note… anyone remember using the Oasis Library system back in the late 80s, early 90s? The default lookup account was “luser” at
one of the schools I went to. It supposedly stood for “Library User” — but it does make me wonder