Keep it polite!

As I had had to delete several comments, some of them extremely insulting personal attacks, on my previous post, here are some necessary reminders:

• Comments on this blog are moderated. If you use words like "fuck" in your comment and make disparaging remarks about my intelligence, your comment will simply disappear without ever having been seen by anyone but me.
• Thus if you actually have a point to make, keep it polite, and your comment will be posted
• I am not the pope. Therefore I am fallible. Pointing out when I make a mistake is good. Attacking me for making mistakes is not.
• I have the right to rant on my own blog, even if by definition a rant isn't terribly rational. Who doesn't rant if a specific piece of software can't be installed on a specific computer? That it runs well on other computers under other conditions isn't really relevant for such a rant.
• If in a rant I say something negative about your favorite company, I have the right to that opinion, and you have the right to disagree with that opinion, and to post that you disagree.
• If you feel the need to criticize me, you should read carefully what I actually wrote. If you only read my posts diagonally, pick up a vaguely negative tenor, and react by complaining about things I never said, I will not take you seriously at all.
• If a large enough number of you try hard enough to keep me from expressing my opinions by shouting me down, you might succeed in that. Have you considered the various possible consequences of that?
• In summary: I think it is best for everyone involved to keep the discussion polite.