The conduct issue aside, the other question of how Linux survives without Linus is certainly important.

Over the years, he has set up a highly hierarchical power structure based on trust and loyalty with him at the top. Sort of dictatorial. That is not necessarily a bad thing as long as he manages it with the right goals in mind, and he seems to have done that fairly well.
(It was often said the best leadership is a benevolent monarchy.)
I think this speaks to strong focused goals and the ability to exclude trying to manage things that are not part of his focus. This would include trying to manage culture as part of the development community. He said as much in his letter. When the single leader tries to manage culture, it will invariably go wrong somewhere.There are too many opinions and to much incompatibility to succeed in this alone. Some amount of exclusion is almost inevitable. But avoiding managing it can also lead to some level of chaos and the culture we see now.

Going forward, we probably should consider two paths for Linux development without Linus.
The first is to maintain the hierarchical structure by putting someone else in that place. It could work for a while, if you can find someone who is properly focused like Linus was. If you find someone focused on software first and culture second (or not at all) you probably will end up with a quality OS and similar environment. If you end up with someone who is not quite as well focused as Linus and who does end up trying to manage culture, then it is highly likely the quality of the software will go down.

The other option is to change the leadership structure completely to something more community based and/or democratic. This could be able to handle both software quality and culture, but will very likely lower efficiency. Many distributions have done this with varying degrees of success.

Managing culture is hard enough under any circumstances. There will always be differences in opinion, incompatibility and preferences, and usually some conflict about what the priorities should be. If there is a single leader, then there will be a single point for focusing conflict. If there is a broader community and some democracy, then at least the blame for certain priorities can be spread out and excused with "majority rules". It is more about defusing incompatibility than curing it. A single person simply cannot do that by the design of the hierarchy, even if they have the support of the majority. And we don't really know if Linus had that.

We're talking about humans here, so ... The Expanse.

I've gone through this. Here's how you do it.

Start gathering a few popular science books on subjects directly on and also near to your goal. Some people reject popular science books as too light weight, but it does have value. This exposes you to the variety of subjects in and around your interest. You might not have been aware of some aspects of your topic and you are introduced to them here without too much effort. You also learn to associate detailed technical topics to the wider areas where they are used.

Read the whole book. Books are better than random google searches and videos because they will guide you into areas you might not have considered relevant. Broadening your base knowledge will allow you to make a more informed decision about your favorite topics. Once you have a broader and more informed understanding of the topics and areas involved, you are better able to identify your interests, or even switch interests.

That is when you start going into a more detailed dive into your target topic. Follow through and read the whole thing. Again, pick one or more text books or deeper science books. The purpose again is to guide you into areas you might not have considered before.

This time, you will hit lots of technical subjects that you might not know. That is when you go searching for online information, wikipedia, online course videos, Youtube content or other textbooks. For these, you will only need to cover enough to support your primary interest, and you will have a fairly good idea how much that is.

You are not going to go professional with this, but it will be more than enough to keep your interest up and curiosity satisfied.

Are the pulses from pulsars visible from all directions, or just from the plane of rotation? If you move far enough, will some disappear and others appear?

No, "Sick" is not easy to define in humans. In fact it's even harder than it is on computers. Plenty of people get misdiagnosed and held when they don't need to. Plenty of people miss getting diagnosed and go out and spread it around. There are also plenty of cases of political manipulations for nationalistic purposes. (China deported a lot of foreign nationals during the swine flu scare when there was no evidence of flu.)

But all that does not mean that quarantine is not a good practice. It is usually the best practice available given the knowledge at hand. Don't confuse principle with implementation. If you don't like the implementation, then go fix that. But it would be a mistake to think that poor implementation invalidates the whole principle.

You missed the point. It's not punishment.

It's quarantine. If a person gets sick with a contagious disease, it may not be their fault and you probably don't want to punish them. But for public safety, you do need to contain them until they are no longer dangerous to others.

The same applies to sick computers. If it is spewing viruses and malware then stop it, whether the person who owns it was doing it intentionally or not. You can forward all traffic to a local ISP web sight that informs them of the problem and directs them to appropriate ISP approved scanning software or other solutions available within the quarantine zone. If the user does not trust the ISP, fine. They can go clean their machine themselves.

Whether you trust the ISP/Government to have the right motive is a separate issue. But quarantine is an established procedure for humans, and it's not that different here.

If you are comparing AOL to the internet and modern ISPs, then you are completely correct.

The thing with AOL is that it was around *before* the internet and those other ISPs. AOL came around in the age of the BBS.
Everything was dial-up. Mail was tossed and copied around node to node. It was almost all local due to phone charges. What AOL did was make a national BBS, and put in local dial-up access points in most local calling areas. It was bigger than any other BBS of the time. It offered mail to any other AOL user, and mail bridges to most other networks (like compuserv). They had a GUI when everyone else was text based. You can't call them stupid for being the biggest provider in their market. Their problem was that the market changed.

When the internet finally did grow up, AOL was already big. The problem is that the internet changed the online equation. Access became commodity. AOL had to rely on content. (That's why the TW deal). But eventually, the internet had more content too. So AOL is a leftover giant.

I guess we could just expect them to rollover and die because they are outdated. But it's funny how many people don't want to do that, regardless of how outdated they are.

Hell yes.
Whenever we do anything on this large a scale, it's always completely by accident and totally without a plan and with no facts at all. How could anyone suggest that we actually start applying a few facts and a plan to something we are already doing?

This reminds me a little of Pierre Menard, Borges' character who set out to perfectly re-create (not just copy) Don Quixote...

It's a good (and short) read:

http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html