Well many years ago his rational (which I agree) was that you should not be vague on the mailing list or people will be confused and Linux Kernel is serious. For all those who do not like this attitude, I point you to the responses coming from Intel/AMD these days. In AMD's response to specture v2, I still cannot understand the text if they say their CPUs are exposed or not. If it wasn't because of the comments in here I would have guessed that they may not.