I had to help an art archive owner deal with that very issue last week where one artist started flaming another artist's works and techniques in public. It was starting to turn to a nasty brawl and the archive owner asked me to step in and help calm things down.

In my long experience, you always come up as a winner if you're polite, don't retreat, and don't get angry. The other person eventually starts to look like a loopy jerk and everyone discounts anything they say.

It's particularly true when there's a big difference in percieved power in the two people. A powerful person (or corporation) giving a well-deserved slap to a person with almost no power always seems to get everyone up in arms. But a person with almost no power giving the same well-deserved slap to a corporation or person in power is cheered as a hero.

Someone once said that the pie-in-the-face is not intrinsically funny. If you take a starving child and push a pie into their face, you'll get lynched by the onlookers. Do it to Bill Gates and you'll get your 15 minutes of fame.

Anyway... in all the battles I've seen over the years, the polite ones come out ahead. Posts have a way of lingering on for years in search engines. You never know who will read that.