Uhm... segmenting didn't sandbox shit. It just made it annoying to get in between, not impossible as shown by the many different libraries that help programmers do exactly tha
In 16 bit, it surely didn't, but you could set up a 386 to have a segmented memory model where each segment within a process got its own permissions. So basically, within a process, you could make sure that data from two different pointers, aka segments, would not overwrite each other.
Jesus Christ, it's just a clone of Flash that attempts to make Vista's.Net as a binary substitute for the open web.
Clone of Flash? Hardly? If you would have actually tried to implement something in Silverlight, you might have noticed that Microsoft actually blew off matching Flash in visual effects in order to have better server side connectivity and more developer features.
Besides, I'd take C# over ActionScript, any day of the fricking week.
And yes, Microsoft is desperately trying to compete with Chrome/Chrome OS/HTML 5, just like the company successfully killed Client-side Java and non-IE browsers as a threat to the Win32 monopoly, then sat back and let IE go rotten once it ruled the roost.
First off, let me know when an HTML 5 browser actually -ships- that works. The best we have right now is a handful of -moz and -webkit extra tags for things like rounded corners and multicolumn text, which is cool, but, even rounded corners do not concurrently work with drop shadows in the latest Chrome.
Microsoft might be all you know, but it's time to start learning about alternatives or you'll be stuck with the dinosaurs.
I program on both Linux and Windows. I have both, and use both, and while Linux has many strengths, I wouldn't be one to say that Windows is a dinosaur..
Let me know when Gnome or KDE have file dialogs that don't suck:
That's not to say Linux doesn't have its merits, it does, but if you want to see a dinosaur, go ahead and invoke FileOpenASuarus-Sux on any Linux box.
Besides, if Linux is so great from stem to stern, why on earth did Google go out of their way to tell everyone that they got rid of the windowing system in Linux and wrote their own? Have you even thought that ChromeOS, if open, really means that X-Windows is dead, and every Linux will be using Google Desktop?
That's going to be the Linux of the future, an FOSS of sorts but not exactly its ok Chrome OS gradually replacing woefully obsolete X windows with a stack that will likely be increasingly proprietary.
Well, we were so eager to get rid of segments that by the time 80386 more or less perfected them, we dumped them for flat mode. Now they are gone in x86-64, likely never to return. What a terrible mistake! If we had different segments, we could have a lightweight browser process with user space threads assigning segments to different domains on the page. Instead of trying to get protection by wrapping software sandboxes around everything like Java, C# or something else does, we could have the CPU actually doing it. If only I could go back in time and say to myself, as I fumed over the likes of ES:CX... and say, no no, this will actually turn about to be a good thing in the future!
Silverlight is interesting because it provides a markup that can be thought of us as a sort of an HTML 5. If Silverlight is widely adopted in the Windows world, then there's not going to be much of an impetus to have browsers other than to download applications for Windows with. So Microsoft is not competing against Flash per se, as much as they are competing against Google Chrome and ChromeOS.
Pilots experienced in the area report that those winds can rip the wings off aircraft; and Mark Twain remarked that they could roll up a tin house 'like sheet music
Just thought I'd ask.. me thinks Mark Twain died before the aircraft age.
If we estimate that world wide, only 8 million dollars was stolen out of ALL of the ATMs that are out there, I would think that that's actually a success, more than a liability.
I mean, people steal more than that in cars, in what, every few hours?
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
So, really, the old conservative argument that we could not possibly screw up the planet is contradicted by our own God, in our own Bible. The Almighty evidently has more faith in our abilities than we!
This is where I think NASA is fairly criticized. They want manned missions because they are cool and sexy...science to justify the outrageous costs involved
The science is actually the art of keeping people alive in space. But, I agree that proponents of manned space flight, such as myself, need to do come up with a better story than just sending people out into space.
One of the stories that I plan on writing for my site is going to be a call for a doubling of NASA's budget, and map out political and human interest reasons to be on other planets to appeal to my more right wing audience. It's about spreading humanity out to preserve freedom, and so I'm going to replace the simple technocratic science argument with a priceless reason.
Stealing is the crime that causes victims, drugs use is not
No, its not just that. It's the emotional neglect that comes from being the party impaired all the time. It's the random behavior because their body chemistry is all whacked. To be fair, all of this happens with booze as well, but, to say that drug or drink abuse is victimless is simply not true. When you are getting your buzz out of a bottle and not your family, you are shortchanging your family.
Good luck with your model, but you'll need entire think tanks just to define some of your parameters.
I figure I'll proceed in internet trolling fashion, which would be to build the code, take a best guess at the parameters, release it with my own counts of how many people will be made homeless, have cars repossessed, get rich, etc, from the legislation, and then let everyone else argue about the parameters....
I just watched the video - and while it definitely is a cool concept, what immediately came to mind is the increased complexity of the system
I guess the question is, what does the complexity buy them? Complexity for complexities sake is foolish, for sure, but if they get something useful out of the complexity,then it might be worth it. I wonder what the gain is they perceive to be getting, and how much its worth relative to the complexity.
NOTHING man can do on this planet can even begin to compare to the scale of energies involved in natural phenomena
Thermonuclear weapons do not naturally occur on earth. The only E=MC^2 that occurs in nature is in a start. Man can do it anywhere he chooses. And, even in chemical reactions, we have figured out all the good ones.
This would require at least 2.1 * 10^12 Joules of energy.
Well, first off, you have to assume that he would not be extracting the energy from the ocean and in some clever way use the ocean to pump itself. But, be that as it may... remember that we can say that a joule is a watt in a second, and we can use time to reduce our peak energy needs. If you run the process continuously, you'd find that you'd need only about 20MW of peak power applied to get her done in a day. You figure, a nuclear submarine by itself has a 40-50MW reactor on board, and we have on land 1000MW nukes under construction. If you had a big nuke on board an ocean going vessel, you could do all sorts of ocean processing with it, at least from an energy perspective.
I have never heard anything so stupid come from someone so smart.
A lot of Gate's rivals said the same thing... Phillipe Kahn, are you there? I would not be so quick to dismiss Gates on this issue.
But then again we live in an era where politicians would have us believe that we humans are responsible for global warming, too...
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one
My stupid Javascript global warming calculator estimates that Americans will spend probably somewhere around 8 trillion dollars to reduce emissions down to 20% of what they are today, and that's going to be with a pretty sharp standard of living decrees. I'm working on a more detailed economic modelling engine in C++ that I'll FOSS which I think will show the standard of living cut will actually be worse. Quite frankly its probably cheaper to just to let a few port cities go under water and be destroyed, but, since the world's great powers are essentially a coalition of port cities, global warming, we will all fight. But, if you live in Kansas, its just going to be a bigger bill.
I think a better solution would be to act a little smarter about where we build our population centers, and do not offer insurance to people who choose to build in a location where hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis
The problem is that some of the best places to put population centers are also where hurricanes tend to be. Population centers are often near ports. I would bet that, just about every one of the world's great cities began on a river or a sea port, and its certainly true for the cities along the gulf coast. There's so much economic activity around ports that it is actually profitable for our species to lose a city to storms every now and then but still have the economic gain from waterborne trade.
Hurricanes, and typhoons, are a worldwide problem too. We Americans might tend to think about hurricanes but Asian cities have been known to get pounded pretty furiously. Those typhoons are arguably more destructive than their Atlantic cousins simply because the Pacific is bigger. We might think about moving New Orleans, or Mobile, but where exactly would we move Hong Kong to?
I don't even think removing insurance would be a sufficient incentive. Shanghai is China's most important port, and its in Typhoon alley. Until recently, I doubt there was any insurance there at all. Yet, the area ultimately started and then drove China's economic turnaround.
So I can let politicians know victim-less crimes should never have been made crimes to begin wit
Seen enough families having to put up with that one guy whose stoned all the time, stealing money for dope, to say that drugs are not a victimless crime.
But, I agree with you about jury nullification as a fundamental right.
If you are one the people behind the scenes in power. But I think elitist statements like this tend to be against the truth. The fact is, most people who are concerned enough about these issues to look at them are, actually, educated about them.
I know a lot of other people might be down on NASA. They say its too much of this, or too much of that, should be privatized, etc.. but...last time I checked:
NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon, land a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, build and operate a space plane and a space station.
Everyone says NASA is expensive, but, I think the value is just tremendous.
If you are really going to try and take your technology mainstream, you may as well go and get a bunch of Shroud of Turin pictures, use your technology to reconstruct Jesus in 3d, and get yourself a guest TV spot on Fox. If your Jesus winds up looking like Peter O'Toole, so much the better!
Fox News, WSJ, other Murdoch properties are sailing along in number 1 slots and relatively profitably. NYT and other media outlets have been looking for a way to dent their rivals for years. One wonders how much of this sort of reporting they do themselves, and how motivated by the public interest this is, or their own.
It's a cheesy ASP.NET app that lets you build your own stimulus package. You can pick out all sorts of cool stuff like windmill farms, nuclear power plants, fiestaware for everybody, camaros and the country of iceland.
It's not much more than a day's labor... but, if you want to imagine what could have been done with 800 billion dollars of stimulus money, it's kinda fun. It's my own stupid page but its relevant to the discussion and besides, its almost amusing to see how hopelessly confused Google is at it serving ads when trying to match text with iceland, fiestaware, and assault rifles...
TOS clauses of most ISPs rules out the distribution of genuinely obscene content. It is censorship, and in fact, many governments actually do censor this stuff as well.
I mean, if you go by the old rules of what is obscene, sex and violence, obviously, that's not too bad these days and won't get you into trouble. But if you put together a cartoon swastika game for children that features a character running around tossing minorities into concentration camps where you can dehumanize, torture and exterminate them, all while beating the crap out of its wife until she creates babies for the fatherland and streudel for the tummy, that might get you into some trouble.
In Germany, you would go to jail, for sure. In the USA, I think you would probably be banned by most ISPs, be put on a number of terrorist watch lists by the government, get sued by the ACLU, ripped by Al Sharpton, and worst of all, you would get modded as a troll on Slashdot. In the UK, you would probably find a dozen cameras in your house, and a ton of condemnation from the BBC and parliament, unless you were islamic, in which case, it would be ok. In Iran they would probably cheer you and in Israel Mossad would probably have more than a word with you. For some reason, I think Canada would argue you had the right to host but they would probably bend over backwards to paint you as an American.
People that actually had the game would suddenly find themselves subject to any sort of hate crimes laws. So, if you punched someone in the face, without the game, it might be a simple assault. But, if you had the game and punched someone else in the face, that would likely be a hate crime and you would wind up in prison.
So.... in reality, there's still tough anti-obscenity laws out there. It's just that, liberal nations have made it taboo to hate people, just as much as conservative regimes once made it taboo to talk about gratuitous violence and sexuality. If you really wanted to make sure you covered all the bases, you could probably make the swastika concentration camp game into an ultra violent porno. That way, liberals and conservatives would be thoroughly offended, and yes, you would be obscene by anyone's definition!
The x64 versions of Windows Vista and 7 have beat the pants off of any Linux desktop that I've used. I want to try x64 Linux, but the driver support isn't there yet
Just out of curiosity, what driver is that you are missing in x64 Linux? In my case, Linux x64 supports my Silicon Image SATA controller and no 64 bit Windows does because the only driver out there is unsigned. So I installed my Win7 on an ATA drive, which is somewhat discomforting.
Oh, and by the way, who gets the copyright to your facebook content? Your yahoo email content? Social site content copyright is part of the use agreement, by the way, so its worth checking those out occasionally. Hint: it doesn't give the creators sole distribution rights.
No, no social site does.... and I think they get a weird pass. On one hand, they hold themselves as not liable for the content that they host. If I post something evil, then, that site is off the hook for the liability of it by statute. On the other hand, I can't just go and delete whatever it is I wrote. I would think that, if my posts were my property, I should be able to:
a) retrieve all of them. b) delete them. c) alter them at any time.
You can't do that. There's sort of an obsession with preserving the continuity of a thread in a discussion that trumps a sense of property rights.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm ... segmenting didn't sandbox shit. It just made it annoying to get in between, not impossible as shown by the many different libraries that help programmers do exactly tha
In 16 bit, it surely didn't, but you could set up a 386 to have a segmented memory model where each segment within a process got its own permissions. So basically, within a process, you could make sure that data from two different pointers, aka segments, would not overwrite each other.
Jesus Christ, it's just a clone of Flash that attempts to make Vista's .Net as a binary substitute for the open web.
Clone of Flash? Hardly? If you would have actually tried to implement something in Silverlight, you might have noticed that Microsoft actually blew off matching Flash in visual effects in order to have better server side connectivity and more developer features.
Besides, I'd take C# over ActionScript, any day of the fricking week.
And yes, Microsoft is desperately trying to compete with Chrome/Chrome OS/HTML 5, just like the company successfully killed Client-side Java and non-IE browsers as a threat to the Win32 monopoly, then sat back and let IE go rotten once it ruled the roost.
First off, let me know when an HTML 5 browser actually -ships- that works. The best we have right now is a handful of -moz and -webkit extra tags for things like rounded corners and multicolumn text, which is cool, but, even rounded corners do not concurrently work with drop shadows in the latest Chrome.
Microsoft might be all you know, but it's time to start learning about alternatives or you'll be stuck with the dinosaurs.
I program on both Linux and Windows. I have both, and use both, and while Linux has many strengths, I wouldn't be one to say that Windows is a dinosaur..
Let me know when Gnome or KDE have file dialogs that don't suck:
A user perspective breakdown of Windows 7 vs Ubuntu Linux, that's actually objective
That's not to say Linux doesn't have its merits, it does, but if you want to see a dinosaur, go ahead and invoke FileOpenASuarus-Sux on any Linux box.
Besides, if Linux is so great from stem to stern, why on earth did Google go out of their way to tell everyone that they got rid of the windowing system in Linux and wrote their own? Have you even thought that ChromeOS, if open, really means that X-Windows is dead, and every Linux will be using Google Desktop?
That's going to be the Linux of the future, an FOSS of sorts but not exactly its ok Chrome OS gradually replacing woefully obsolete X windows with a stack that will likely be increasingly proprietary.
Well, we were so eager to get rid of segments that by the time 80386 more or less perfected them, we dumped them for flat mode. Now they are gone in x86-64, likely never to return. What a terrible mistake! If we had different segments, we could have a lightweight browser process with user space threads assigning segments to different domains on the page. Instead of trying to get protection by wrapping software sandboxes around everything like Java, C# or something else does, we could have the CPU actually doing it. If only I could go back in time and say to myself, as I fumed over the likes of ES:CX... and say, no no, this will actually turn about to be a good thing in the future!
Silverlight is interesting because it provides a markup that can be thought of us as a sort of an HTML 5. If Silverlight is widely adopted in the Windows world, then there's not going to be much of an impetus to have browsers other than to download applications for Windows with. So Microsoft is not competing against Flash per se, as much as they are competing against Google Chrome and ChromeOS.
Pilots experienced in the area report that those winds can rip the wings off aircraft; and Mark Twain remarked that they could roll up a tin house 'like sheet music
Just thought I'd ask.. me thinks Mark Twain died before the aircraft age.
If we estimate that world wide, only 8 million dollars was stolen out of ALL of the ATMs that are out there, I would think that that's actually a success, more than a liability.
I mean, people steal more than that in cars, in what, every few hours?
Genesis 11:5 & 6
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
So, really, the old conservative argument that we could not possibly screw up the planet is contradicted by our own God, in our own Bible. The Almighty evidently has more faith in our abilities than we!
This is where I think NASA is fairly criticized. They want manned missions because they are cool and sexy...science to justify the outrageous costs involved
The science is actually the art of keeping people alive in space. But, I agree that proponents of manned space flight, such as myself, need to do come up with a better story than just sending people out into space.
One of the stories that I plan on writing for my site is going to be a call for a doubling of NASA's budget, and map out political and human interest reasons to be on other planets to appeal to my more right wing audience. It's about spreading humanity out to preserve freedom, and so I'm going to replace the simple technocratic science argument with a priceless reason.
Stealing is the crime that causes victims, drugs use is not
No, its not just that. It's the emotional neglect that comes from being the party impaired all the time. It's the random behavior because their body chemistry is all whacked. To be fair, all of this happens with booze as well, but, to say that drug or drink abuse is victimless is simply not true. When you are getting your buzz out of a bottle and not your family, you are shortchanging your family.
Good luck with your model, but you'll need entire think tanks just to define some of your parameters.
I figure I'll proceed in internet trolling fashion, which would be to build the code, take a best guess at the parameters, release it with my own counts of how many people will be made homeless, have cars repossessed, get rich, etc, from the legislation, and then let everyone else argue about the parameters....
I just watched the video - and while it definitely is a cool concept, what immediately came
to mind is the increased complexity of the system
I guess the question is, what does the complexity buy them? Complexity for complexities sake is foolish, for sure, but if they get something useful out of the complexity,then it might be worth it. I wonder what the gain is they perceive to be getting, and how much its worth relative to the complexity.
NOTHING man can do on this planet can even begin to compare to the scale of energies involved in natural phenomena
Thermonuclear weapons do not naturally occur on earth. The only E=MC^2 that occurs in nature is in a start. Man can do it anywhere he chooses. And, even in chemical reactions, we have figured out all the good ones.
This would require at least 2.1 * 10^12 Joules of energy.
Well, first off, you have to assume that he would not be extracting the energy from the ocean and in some clever way use the ocean to pump itself. But, be that as it may... remember that we can say that a joule is a watt in a second, and we can use time to reduce our peak energy needs. If you run the process continuously, you'd find that you'd need only about 20MW of peak power applied to get her done in a day. You figure, a nuclear submarine by itself has a 40-50MW reactor on board, and we have on land 1000MW nukes under construction. If you had a big nuke on board an ocean going vessel, you could do all sorts of ocean processing with it, at least from an energy perspective.
I have never heard anything so stupid come from someone so smart.
A lot of Gate's rivals said the same thing... Phillipe Kahn, are you there? I would not be so quick to dismiss Gates on this issue.
But then again we live in an era where politicians would have us believe that we humans are responsible for global warming, too...
You underestimate mankind.
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one
My stupid Javascript global warming calculator estimates that Americans will spend probably somewhere around 8 trillion dollars to reduce emissions down to 20% of what they are today, and that's going to be with a pretty sharp standard of living decrees. I'm working on a more detailed economic modelling engine in C++ that I'll FOSS which I think will show the standard of living cut will actually be worse. Quite frankly its probably cheaper to just to let a few port cities go under water and be destroyed, but, since the world's great powers are essentially a coalition of port cities, global warming, we will all fight. But, if you live in Kansas, its just going to be a bigger bill.
I think a better solution would be to act a little smarter about where we build our population centers, and do not offer insurance to people who choose to build in a location where hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis
The problem is that some of the best places to put population centers are also where hurricanes tend to be. Population centers are often near ports. I would bet that, just about every one of the world's great cities began on a river or a sea port, and its certainly true for the cities along the gulf coast. There's so much economic activity around ports that it is actually profitable for our species to lose a city to storms every now and then but still have the economic gain from waterborne trade.
Hurricanes, and typhoons, are a worldwide problem too. We Americans might tend to think about hurricanes but Asian cities have been known to get pounded pretty furiously. Those typhoons are arguably more destructive than their Atlantic cousins simply because the Pacific is bigger. We might think about moving New Orleans, or Mobile, but where exactly would we move Hong Kong to?
I don't even think removing insurance would be a sufficient incentive. Shanghai is China's most important port, and its in Typhoon alley. Until recently, I doubt there was any insurance there at all. Yet, the area ultimately started and then drove China's economic turnaround.
So I can let politicians know victim-less crimes should never have been made crimes to begin wit
Seen enough families having to put up with that one guy whose stoned all the time, stealing money for dope, to say that drugs are not a victimless crime.
But, I agree with you about jury nullification as a fundamental right.
If you are one the people behind the scenes in power. But I think elitist statements like this tend to be against the truth. The fact is, most people who are concerned enough about these issues to look at them are, actually, educated about them.
Well, actually, the russian equivalent is built and operate the ISS didn't they?
Yeah, I guess I got carried away and forgot about that whole Mir thing, didn't I?
Woops!
I know a lot of other people might be down on NASA. They say its too much of this, or too much of that, should be privatized, etc.. but...last time I checked:
NASA was the only organization to put a man on the moon, land a couple of rovers on Mars, fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, build and operate a space plane and a space station.
Everyone says NASA is expensive, but, I think the value is just tremendous.
I cannot reiterate my support for NASA, enough.
If you are really going to try and take your technology mainstream, you may as well go and get a bunch of Shroud of Turin pictures, use your technology to reconstruct Jesus in 3d, and get yourself a guest TV spot on Fox. If your Jesus winds up looking like Peter O'Toole, so much the better!
Fox News, WSJ, other Murdoch properties are sailing along in number 1 slots and relatively profitably. NYT and other media outlets have been looking for a way to dent their rivals for years. One wonders how much of this sort of reporting they do themselves, and how motivated by the public interest this is, or their own.
You can go here: http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/mystimulus.aspx
It's a cheesy ASP.NET app that lets you build your own stimulus package. You can pick out all sorts of cool stuff like windmill farms, nuclear power plants, fiestaware for everybody, camaros and the country of iceland.
It's not much more than a day's labor... but, if you want to imagine what could have been done with 800 billion dollars of stimulus money, it's kinda fun. It's my own stupid page but its relevant to the discussion and besides, its almost amusing to see how hopelessly confused Google is at it serving ads when trying to match text with iceland, fiestaware, and assault rifles...
TOS clauses of most ISPs rules out the distribution of genuinely obscene content. It is censorship, and in fact, many governments actually do censor this stuff as well.
I mean, if you go by the old rules of what is obscene, sex and violence, obviously, that's not too bad these days and won't get you into trouble. But if you put together a cartoon swastika game for children that features a character running around tossing minorities into concentration camps where you can dehumanize, torture and exterminate them, all while beating the crap out of its wife until she creates babies for the fatherland and streudel for the tummy, that might get you into some trouble.
In Germany, you would go to jail, for sure. In the USA, I think you would probably be banned by most ISPs, be put on a number of terrorist watch lists by the government, get sued by the ACLU, ripped by Al Sharpton, and worst of all, you would get modded as a troll on Slashdot. In the UK, you would probably find a dozen cameras in your house, and a ton of condemnation from the BBC and parliament, unless you were islamic, in which case, it would be ok. In Iran they would probably cheer you and in Israel Mossad would probably have more than a word with you. For some reason, I think Canada would argue you had the right to host but they would probably bend over backwards to paint you as an American.
People that actually had the game would suddenly find themselves subject to any sort of hate crimes laws. So, if you punched someone in the face, without the game, it might be a simple assault. But, if you had the game and punched someone else in the face, that would likely be a hate crime and you would wind up in prison.
So.... in reality, there's still tough anti-obscenity laws out there. It's just that, liberal nations have made it taboo to hate people, just as much as conservative regimes once made it taboo to talk about gratuitous violence and sexuality. If you really wanted to make sure you covered all the bases, you could probably make the swastika concentration camp game into an ultra violent porno. That way, liberals and conservatives would be thoroughly offended, and yes, you would be obscene by anyone's definition!
I loved Action. I'd have to say that it was probably the most advanced programming environment of the 8 bit era.
The x64 versions of Windows Vista and 7 have beat the pants off of any Linux desktop that I've used. I want to try x64 Linux, but the driver support isn't there yet
Just out of curiosity, what driver is that you are missing in x64 Linux? In my case, Linux x64 supports my Silicon Image SATA controller and no 64 bit Windows does because the only driver out there is unsigned. So I installed my Win7 on an ATA drive, which is somewhat discomforting.
Oh, and by the way, who gets the copyright to your facebook content? Your yahoo email content? Social site content copyright is part of the use agreement, by the way, so its worth checking those out occasionally. Hint: it doesn't give the creators sole distribution rights.
No, no social site does.... and I think they get a weird pass. On one hand, they hold themselves as not liable for the content that they host. If I post something evil, then, that site is off the hook for the liability of it by statute. On the other hand, I can't just go and delete whatever it is I wrote. I would think that, if my posts were my property, I should be able to:
a) retrieve all of them.
b) delete them.
c) alter them at any time.
You can't do that. There's sort of an obsession with preserving the continuity of a thread in a discussion that trumps a sense of property rights.