<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10048173/why-is-it-bad-style-to-rescue-exception-e-in-ruby">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10048173/why-is-it-bad-style-to-rescue-exception-e-in-ruby</a> has a good explanation. In summary, a plain <code>rescue</code> rescues all <code>StandardError</code>s, whereas rescuing <code>Exception</code> rescues a whole bunch of extra things that you don't want to rescue. For example, <code>Timeout::Error < RuntimeError < StandardError < Exception</code>, and all Net::HTTP errors are subclassed from <code>StandardError</code> too.</p>

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