Fen-hsiung Hsu's letter (the original post) has a ring of truth to me: it sounds like a sincere story of someone who doesn't know how to continue with a project that's personally important without the corporate backing that he started with.
This reply is pure mockery -- it could have been written by anyone, there's no personal feel at all.
How much faith should we put in our truth-identifying heuristics?
I agree, Owen's arrogance is quite startling to me...
What I don't understand is how Hsu wanted to challenge Kasparov for "title match"... World Title matches are managed by chess federation (FIDE), so it's not up to Kasparov or Hsu to decide. All in all, I would take both letters with a big grain of salt.
This reply is pure mockery -- it could have been written by anyone, there's no personal feel at all.
How much faith should we put in our truth-identifying heuristics?