Erm, firstly he didn't say Peter's Samuelson's CS education was bad. He said "your CS courses were bad" and then follows up with "...(or just didn't cover much about concurrency, which is fairly common) ..." . I think, you might have been trying very hard to find some of the Linus you imagined in there.
Can you blame Linus for saying that? I can't speak with precision about 1999, but someone assumed to have a CS education should know the difference between semaphore and spinlock.
Whether they did or didn't know about the definitions, they should have at least looked it up to confirm before posting to the Linux Kernel Dev list or taking on Linus on the matter.
