From the way you describe your beef with him, it sounds as if you're making up a personality for him-- that you're projecting onto him your bitterness about "Web 2.0 greed culture." You're wrong about that too, incidentally.

I think you need to stop and reconsider whether this is the appropriate attitude to take toward someone who really does nothing more than write articles and speak at conferences.

I'd also argue that a culture of tolerance, civility and diversity of views does far more to foster the open exchange of ideas than the silencing of those with whom we disagree.

I do agree somewhat with some of the criticisms that you and others have put forth about Techcrunch as a publication, in particular that it was prone to hype. But otherwise I think he performed a valuable service to our industry, and I think his willingness to speak his mind is both rare and laudable.

It saddens me that the animosity and intolerance that have shadowed Techcrunch have boiled over to something as despicable as this.

Yes, spitting on someone is illegal.

Fun game: stand on a busy street corner and spit on everyone who walks by. If you're arrested before you're crippled, you win.

I desperately want Michael Arrington to cover my startup as well, but I still can't understand those that threatened or spat on him. Michael, I hope you return to regular writing after Feb, but if you don't, thanks for all the great work so far.

"I desperately want Michael Arrington to cover my startup as well"

I don't really get this... startups don't fall or succeed based on tc coverage. It might spike traffic for a day with some geeks. That's all at the end of the day.

Seems like some of this is TC's own doing - they have made people believe you have to get techcrunched, or you won't succeed - which is completely false.

I think they do a great job in the main though.

When your company goes public, a decision Steve himself made long ago, you know that from then on, what you disclose to owners of the company you effectively disclose to everyone. He knew what he was getting.

Speculating as to his health doesn't worsen it or harm him in any way. If anything is immoral, it's Steve's purposely hiding it and even, this year, lying about it.

1. Answering questions fairly literally.

a. "Did you like the salad?" "No, I did not."

b. "Would you like to go to the fine art museum with me and 4 of my friends on Friday night?" "No, I would not like that."

c. Note that I can escape from this pattern only when it's extremely obvious the truthful answer is a bad one.

"Do these jeans make my ass look fat?" "I don't think it's the jeans..." I can avoid those at least...

2. Intentionally filtering out mundane trivia from my brain. "Do you know so-and-so's phone number?" "No, but it's in my phone." "When you left this morning, did you notice if my black gloves were on the counter?" "I would never notice them unless they were on fire or something..."

Always always keep control over your DNS. If this guy was hosting with Slicehost or Linode, he would've had the option to point the MMX records anywhere he liked, and problem solved (or at least, temporarily contained.)

Lastly, I can say from personal experience that Google's support is shockingly bad. It is a deep and twisted warren of blind alleys, misinformation, and a million different paths that all end in "fuck you". You will not contact a human. There are no humans. Thousands of genius engineers engineered teh googelz to be perfect and human free for your utopian pleasure, and then they spent all day riding around on bikes and playing ping pong and eating free food and getting massages and inventing world-changing things. They're better than you. Google doesn't have problems. Ever. You must have done something wrong.

Please wait 5 days, and try again. If you continue getting this error, please contact support. Sorry, support is only available to Premium customers. Would you like to purchase Premium service? To purchase Premium service, simply log into your domain. Sorry, that domain is no longer active; if you have recently changed that domain, please wait 5 days, and try again. Contact support if you have any questions.

Their approach to customer service is to send their customers in circles until they give up. It's evil. Very extremely cruel and evil.

I use google apps for two of my domains. What can I say, their software is very well designed, and on the net balance, it's easier to manage than postfix. But the lack of support is a major down side, certainly. I wouldn't even consider paying a dime for any of their services without seeing some huge changes in their approach.

In my group, Arrington symbolises everything we hate about the "Web 2.0" greed culture. He's relentlessly promoted himself as the gatekeeper to this bullshit world of easy VC money, now crashing down around him. Good riddance.

If it hadn't been something as revolting as spitting, and instead say a nice cream pie to the face, I'd be delighted.