If Ford or Honda can sell directly, they can get rid of the dealerships, and then charge whatever they want for a Ford, since there won't be any competition.
So... where does the dealership get a new Ford? Do multiple different manufacturers make Fords nowadays? Because if there is only one manufacturer, then the only "competition" is about which dealership takes the smallest cut, which benefits neither Ford nor the customer.
Did it not dawn on you that piecemeal comment loading is for bandwidth limited applications?
Even a large Slashdot discussion is just a few hundred kilobytes, or about the size of one small image. So no, that explanation does not make sense, especially once you factor in the size of the Javascript itself.
Well, does it matter to the heart whether it's pumping blood through fat or muscle? If anything, muscle has a higher metabolic rate and thus puts more stress on the cardiovascular system.
AFAIK one of the main problem of steroids is that they grow muscles but not heart, so you end up with a serious risk of heart attack the same way as a fatso.
It doesn't. Why would it? People act out their genes and upbringing, genes originate from evolution, which in turn reflects the laws of physics. The ultimate cause - and thus ultimate responsibility - for any given breach of ethics goes way beyond any agent that could be considered even remotely capable of them, beyond humans, beyond life, beyond matter right to the nature of reality itself. So pass the buck away, stop worrying about assigning blame, and concentrate instead on what can be done to solve the resulting problems.
Yes, but thankfully there wasn't much left to ruin after Dungeons and Dragons finished what Rock'n Roll had left.
Honestly, you'd think we wouldn't be here anymore, after all the times society has been ruined since antiquity.
These days they are teaching kids that no matter what they win, and life is always fair in their little psychotic delusion of a world!
If the world isn't fair, then why do you complain when winning or losing don't make a difference for the price one gets?
$&%$ politically correctness and the democratic ass that it rode in on!
Well, don't worry, democracy seems to be on its way out. Your tax dollars are busily building Fascism 2.0 even at the moment, so just lean back and relax.
What the fuck is it with autistic geeks, seriously?
Beyond misusing "autism" as an insult? I dunno, I'm not a psychologist.
Just because you CAN do something, it doesn't mean it's okay to do it. This creates a horrible survival-of-the-fittest arms race techno-bureaucracy where values are absent.
Currently the amount of power you wield depends on how good you are at manipulating people ("think of the children!"), or how much cash you have to bribe them with. As Information Age gets into gear, the ability to manipulate technology becomes another viable power base. All that's happening is that the fitness criteria are broadening and becoming more inclusive.
In particular, if the door is unlocked, that doesn't mean you can walk into the building and take photocopies of everything you find there, then publish the documents.
Which has nothing to do with what happened. This is a case of someone accidentally publishing documents, then complaining when someone else quotes a few snippets.
Why not go do something useful with your time, try to make money by creating actual value in the world, rather than surrounding yourself with get-rich-quick schemers, scammers, and thieves in the bitcoin world, hoping to score big?
Because you have to eat. If you aren't independently wealthy, the best you can hope is to be treated as a valuable asset in someone else's get-rich schemes. But even that severely limits your options - you'll end up inventing microsecond trading algorithms instead of medical molecule simulators, or writing propaganda instead of the next great American novel.
A quaranteed unconditional minimum income sufficient to live on would solve the problem, but is unlikely to be politically viable.
Do you really think google could have supplied every user 1Gb of mail space at launch?
Sure, why not? Hard drive space seems to have cost around 1$/GB in 2004 when GMail was launched. Add the invitation-only registration for several years and it's easy enough to keep costs under control.
You can dislike Javascript interfaces, but the war to stop them was lost more than a decade ago.
I neither like or dislike Javascript. As I stated, it has a cost, and because of this shouldn't be used where it's not needed. And no technology, including but not limited to Javascript, should be used to achieve a worse end result, such as loading comments piecemeal.
When you bitch about them now, you just look old and resistant to change.
What change would that be, if they have been a de facto standard for more than a decade, as you imply?
Dunno why you seem to think I'd care about "looking old". Do you perhaps think it's some kind of insult?
Javascript performance on a PC is a non issue for anything as simple as this site and the current UI doesn't work for shit on mobile anyway, so what's there to lose.
Javascript performance may or may not be an issue for a particular story on this particular site. It's the repeated clicking on "load more comments" button that is the problem.
The UI designers are making the decision that Dice doesn't want to maintain a mobile interface which supports touch and an outdated PC version which doesn't
Once you have bitcoins, it's not hard to transfer them to another address. Who owns that address? Consider also coin tumblers and similar schemes. This is what laundering is about after all. Moving money around to disguise its provenance.
Money laundering is not about hiding the fact that you have money - because you could just bury it in a chest somewhere, or in a case of Bitcoin receive it in a new adress - it's about providing a legitimate-looking origin for what you use. Coin tumblers don't help with that, they just make it harder to connect a particular transaction directly to another transaction.
Basically, when you buy a mansion, you can't do so with money from your cocaine sales, but must instead use money from your inexplicably succesful pet email webshop. Who buys all those pet emails, and where does their money come from? Beats you, you just get some Bitcoin and send an email to the address given. Surprised you too that it got so popular. Must be some weird hipster trend or something. Tacky, but perfectly legal. The money is yours fair and square, and so is the mansion.
But as TFA shows the sad thing is you WILL get COPD, doesn't matter how long ago you quit as you WILL get it if something else don't get you first. So if you are quitting do it because you don't want to be smelling like smoke or be out of breath, because if you have smoked more than a couple of years you might as well accept COPD is in your future regardless.
This is true of for every human and for every possible cause of death. Something will get you, sooner or later. However, quitting smoking decreases the odds of it being "COPD" and "sooner".
Think of it this way: Slashdot is going to die one day. Does that mean it should simply go ahead and switch to Beta?
There's more than enough in line to replace your oh-so-high quality comments.
Slashdot has a queue for registration now?
Well, doesn't that solve everything? Just make a Classic shard and a Beta shard and let all the cool kids who are now forced to wait in line head for the Beta (Neo?) while the grumpy old men stay on Classic (Jurassic?). Everyone's happy, and you can even make the Slashdot Jurassic and its dinosaurs viewable from Slashdot Neo as a kind of Jurassic Park.
Seriously, people, do I have to think up all the good ideas around here ?-)
We get it, Slashdotters have an irrational fear of any kind of UI change whatsoever, even to try and make the site actually usable on a mobile or capable of doing anything interesting.
No, slashdotters have a perfectly rational dislike of UI changes that make the site less usable. They also have a - perfectly rational, as you demonstrate - fear of this dislike being dismissed as mere resistance to change.
In particular they have an absolutely irrational hatred of all things Javascript even though that battle was, for better or worse, lost on the web more than a decade ago.
Javascript has its uses, but it also has a cost. All those scripts require execution time, and it's a lot easier to make a site-breaking error - for example, hang the browser - with imperative language like Javascript than a declarative one like HTML and CSS. Also, the actual use Slashdot put it - load comments a few at a time - is not an improvement from the user's point of view.
UI designers should stop assuming user's hatreds and fears are "irrational", and instead seek to understand why something is hated or feared. It would lead to better products and also reduce backlash over UI changes, because people didn't have to fear being stuck with bad ones.
Maybe all the downmods are coming from people like me, who come to/. for the articles and comments, not caring about site design, who owns what and political bullshit implications.
The implication of site design on a site where content is user-generated is whether said content - comments, in Slashdot's case - keeps being generated. The consensus seems to be that Beta is sufficiently bad in this regard to give the deathblow to Slashdot.
It's like going to a cafe to have a good coffee and overhear interesting conversation about the soft volume music playing, and when owner decides to redesign the cafe's interior, some tards start screaming in my ear whenever a new song is played, just because they don't like the new paintwork.
Beta is not paintwork. Beta is a set of sound-absorbing elements that stop those conversations from being overheard but look trendy. And, this being Slashdot, the coffee is two weeks old and has already been drunk in at least two other cafes.
Allow me to read the articles and relevant comments.
The main complaint about Beta is that it makes it difficult to read comments, and almost impossible to read them in their context.
You still have exactly the same option. Go live in the wildlands of Alaska, or Canada's Yukon.
No, you actually don't have the same option. People settle easier places first, so what's left are Alaska or Yukon - or, rather, the nastiest reaches of both. Your ancestors, on the other hand, had Midwest.
Seriously: nothing has changed in that respect. You have options. If you don't choose to exercise them, that's your problem.
And once people decide that no, they can't actually move to Alaskan wildlands but must win dominance here and now, them having a problem becomes a problem for everyone. Which is what's happening in America.
You seem to think this "go West" as some kind of legalistic loophole in the vein of "forever minus a day" that's to be used to excuse dismissing your political opponents. It's not. "Go West" was, for a large portion of American history, a realistic option for the losing party. Moving to Alaskan wildlands is not.
What you don't get, is if this succeeds, what is to prevent our employers from insisting that each of us wear it while we work?
What makes you think that's a bad idea? There are plenty of jobs where this would be a godsend. For example, take a factory. From examining industrial accidents to being able to send live video feed to the maintenance ("is that supposed to be doing that?") to accessing piping schematics to accessing factory's control systems from the field to simply locating people, a Google Glass - an Ex-approved version, of course - or similar would be a huge improvement over walkie-talkies, which are used nowadays.
Is raising the bar on cops worth it to lose this freedom?
You don't have the freedom to keep your workplace activities a secret.
You may want to read this short story which has such a thing as its premise.
No. "Manna" has as its premise automation, which is unrelated (and already happening). This story is about monitoring.
Fortunately, centralizing corruption means there's only one head that needs to roll in order to fix a rotten department.
Sadly, no. Some bad cops get paid in money and some get paid in the security and convenience of doing nothing about it. It's the culture - the spirit - of the organization itself that becomes corrupt. Simply replacing some personnel won't purge it; you have to destroy the organization by moving the less-corrupt members into other, healthy departments in a dispersed manner, and keeping an eye on them until they're assimilated into the new culture.
If that is even half true, that's just tyrannical.
The English translation of the law is here, and is a whopping 12 pages of sparse text, so no need to keep guessing.
But why didn't the summary just link to it in the first place?
That means even a church in Finland doing disaster relief cannot call together a congregational meeting and ask for funds without getting a "by your leave, sire" from a bunch of police bureaucrats.
That seems to be beyond the scope of the law according to Section 2. Also, the possible reasons for rejection are enumerated in Section 13, so it's not really in the power of a bureaucrat, who's role is limited to checking that the legal conditions are met.
What they said was that they wouldn't rescind Slashdot Classic until Beta was "ready", which is missing the point that we don't want Beta at all. It was a very disappointing response.
It could be a face-saving retreat: say Beta will replace Classic when "ready", keep it "in development" for a while and then silently drop it.
Companies do that kind of thing a lot. For all the talk about how they exist solely for shareholder value, they certainly do seem to exhibit a lot of human characteristics. I wonder if it might be time to admit the current monomaniacal approach is stupid, and add at the very least self-protection as a legally binding duty for a company? After all, incorporation exists to limit personal risk for the investors, so corporate behaviour tends towards suicidal risk-taking, which is a bad thing when combined with the sheer power a large corporation wields.
Basically, redefine the legal concept of incorporation to give the resulting entity a duty to care equally about shareholder value, stakeholder value and the continuation of the corporation.
This country was founded on the idea that we could disagree, put it to a vote and still live peaceably with each other once the decision has been made.
No. It was founded on the idea that if you couldn't live with it, you could go west and start a new place (or even live by yourself in a cabin somewhere). But the West is full now, and America is running into the same problems as everyone else: people actually have to reach a livable compromise. And it's failing economically, politically and culturally, as that same never give up -spirit that once inspired pioneers against the elements now fuels petty tribalism by sending people against other equally determined people.
America can't even pass a budget without turning it into a ridiculous drama, and a lot of people actually encourage it precisely for the harm it causes ("starve the beast"). The end result will be another civil war, collapse or a total cultural reform. Something's gotta give.
Except that the final decision on a charge back is made by the bank issuing the card. They have EVERY reason to keep their customer happy, and NO reason to give a crap about the merchant.
But this is not a merchant, this is a politician. The bank has every reason to keep politicians happy to keep those bailouts and deregulation coming.
Heraclitus said that "The only thing that is constant is change." Slashdot isn't immune to that, so people have the choice to embrace the change and help make it better or to fight it and be left on the sidelines.
The only thing that is constant is change, but few rejoice when the end comes. Slashdot might be old and decrepit, but it is still a piece of history from the Internet revolution, and for many of us a long-time companion. Given the personal and cultural significance, the tone of the comments is understandable.
All good things have to come to an end. Beta is the harbringer of that final inevitability for Slashdot, a reflection of the same shadow we must all face one day. Embrace it if you will, but Slashdot will still move to that great hosting service in the sky when it arrives.
Altough this do rise some interesting metaphysical questions: do human superorganisms have a soul? We humans certainly talk about organizations, companies and nations like they were persons. Can Slashdot become a ghost? And if so, would it haunt those responsible for Beta? Would it send -1 Flamebait for everyone on their contact list? Would it keep redirecting them to Goatse? Or would they simply be found one morning, petrified and govered in hot grits?
And how would you exorcize Slashghost? Would you need to get Stallman and Gates to double-team on it? And if you did, who would get the movie rights ?-)
Change is inevitable and the whole "F*ck Beta" approach is juvenile and ultimately counter productive.
Change is inevitable. So is death. And in this case the change for the worst seems to be bringing the death of the community.
Also, I don't think that "counter productive" applies here. This looks suspiciously like a change driven by ulterior reasons; perhaps Slashdot Beta is some Business Genius's personal pet project, perhaps someone at Dice wants to shutdown Slashdot for political reasons, whatever. But in any case the Beta project will go through, a lot of users will leave, the network effect causes a vicious circle that kills the site, and that'll be that.
So, "Fuck Beta" is not productive, but neither is it counter-productive, since it's unlikely anything could stop Beta and the resulting death of Slashdot. But it is understandable as an emotional response to losing a long-standing and unique community with historical value. So let people went; they're only humans (and scripts and trolls), after all.
The lesson here is that forums can't be trusted to be sheparded by companies. Forums aggreagate people, who create communities; losing a community when the company inevitably does something stupid is always at least somewhat traumatic to the members, and makes the world as a whole poorer. There's a need for a distributed forum hosting software.
Here would have been an awesome feature for beta: and edit button.
One of the best features of Slashdot is that what's said remains said. You can make a new account and start over, but you can't take credit for the good while editing away the bad.
Slashdot Mirror
So... where does the dealership get a new Ford? Do multiple different manufacturers make Fords nowadays? Because if there is only one manufacturer, then the only "competition" is about which dealership takes the smallest cut, which benefits neither Ford nor the customer.
Even a large Slashdot discussion is just a few hundred kilobytes, or about the size of one small image. So no, that explanation does not make sense, especially once you factor in the size of the Javascript itself.
Well, does it matter to the heart whether it's pumping blood through fat or muscle? If anything, muscle has a higher metabolic rate and thus puts more stress on the cardiovascular system.
AFAIK one of the main problem of steroids is that they grow muscles but not heart, so you end up with a serious risk of heart attack the same way as a fatso.
It doesn't. Why would it? People act out their genes and upbringing, genes originate from evolution, which in turn reflects the laws of physics. The ultimate cause - and thus ultimate responsibility - for any given breach of ethics goes way beyond any agent that could be considered even remotely capable of them, beyond humans, beyond life, beyond matter right to the nature of reality itself. So pass the buck away, stop worrying about assigning blame, and concentrate instead on what can be done to solve the resulting problems.
Yes, but thankfully there wasn't much left to ruin after Dungeons and Dragons finished what Rock'n Roll had left.
Honestly, you'd think we wouldn't be here anymore, after all the times society has been ruined since antiquity.
If the world isn't fair, then why do you complain when winning or losing don't make a difference for the price one gets?
Well, don't worry, democracy seems to be on its way out. Your tax dollars are busily building Fascism 2.0 even at the moment, so just lean back and relax.
Beyond misusing "autism" as an insult? I dunno, I'm not a psychologist.
Currently the amount of power you wield depends on how good you are at manipulating people ("think of the children!"), or how much cash you have to bribe them with. As Information Age gets into gear, the ability to manipulate technology becomes another viable power base. All that's happening is that the fitness criteria are broadening and becoming more inclusive.
Which has nothing to do with what happened. This is a case of someone accidentally publishing documents, then complaining when someone else quotes a few snippets.
Because you have to eat. If you aren't independently wealthy, the best you can hope is to be treated as a valuable asset in someone else's get-rich schemes. But even that severely limits your options - you'll end up inventing microsecond trading algorithms instead of medical molecule simulators, or writing propaganda instead of the next great American novel.
A quaranteed unconditional minimum income sufficient to live on would solve the problem, but is unlikely to be politically viable.
Sure, why not? Hard drive space seems to have cost around 1$/GB in 2004 when GMail was launched. Add the invitation-only registration for several years and it's easy enough to keep costs under control.
I neither like or dislike Javascript. As I stated, it has a cost, and because of this shouldn't be used where it's not needed. And no technology, including but not limited to Javascript, should be used to achieve a worse end result, such as loading comments piecemeal.
What change would that be, if they have been a de facto standard for more than a decade, as you imply?
Dunno why you seem to think I'd care about "looking old". Do you perhaps think it's some kind of insult?
Javascript performance may or may not be an issue for a particular story on this particular site. It's the repeated clicking on "load more comments" button that is the problem.
What in blazes are you talking about?
Money laundering is not about hiding the fact that you have money - because you could just bury it in a chest somewhere, or in a case of Bitcoin receive it in a new adress - it's about providing a legitimate-looking origin for what you use. Coin tumblers don't help with that, they just make it harder to connect a particular transaction directly to another transaction.
Basically, when you buy a mansion, you can't do so with money from your cocaine sales, but must instead use money from your inexplicably succesful pet email webshop. Who buys all those pet emails, and where does their money come from? Beats you, you just get some Bitcoin and send an email to the address given. Surprised you too that it got so popular. Must be some weird hipster trend or something. Tacky, but perfectly legal. The money is yours fair and square, and so is the mansion.
This is true of for every human and for every possible cause of death. Something will get you, sooner or later. However, quitting smoking decreases the odds of it being "COPD" and "sooner".
Think of it this way: Slashdot is going to die one day. Does that mean it should simply go ahead and switch to Beta?
Slashdot has a queue for registration now?
Well, doesn't that solve everything? Just make a Classic shard and a Beta shard and let all the cool kids who are now forced to wait in line head for the Beta (Neo?) while the grumpy old men stay on Classic (Jurassic?). Everyone's happy, and you can even make the Slashdot Jurassic and its dinosaurs viewable from Slashdot Neo as a kind of Jurassic Park.
Seriously, people, do I have to think up all the good ideas around here ?-)
No, slashdotters have a perfectly rational dislike of UI changes that make the site less usable. They also have a - perfectly rational, as you demonstrate - fear of this dislike being dismissed as mere resistance to change.
Javascript has its uses, but it also has a cost. All those scripts require execution time, and it's a lot easier to make a site-breaking error - for example, hang the browser - with imperative language like Javascript than a declarative one like HTML and CSS. Also, the actual use Slashdot put it - load comments a few at a time - is not an improvement from the user's point of view.
UI designers should stop assuming user's hatreds and fears are "irrational", and instead seek to understand why something is hated or feared. It would lead to better products and also reduce backlash over UI changes, because people didn't have to fear being stuck with bad ones.
The implication of site design on a site where content is user-generated is whether said content - comments, in Slashdot's case - keeps being generated. The consensus seems to be that Beta is sufficiently bad in this regard to give the deathblow to Slashdot.
Beta is not paintwork. Beta is a set of sound-absorbing elements that stop those conversations from being overheard but look trendy. And, this being Slashdot, the coffee is two weeks old and has already been drunk in at least two other cafes.
The main complaint about Beta is that it makes it difficult to read comments, and almost impossible to read them in their context.
No, you actually don't have the same option. People settle easier places first, so what's left are Alaska or Yukon - or, rather, the nastiest reaches of both. Your ancestors, on the other hand, had Midwest.
And once people decide that no, they can't actually move to Alaskan wildlands but must win dominance here and now, them having a problem becomes a problem for everyone. Which is what's happening in America.
You seem to think this "go West" as some kind of legalistic loophole in the vein of "forever minus a day" that's to be used to excuse dismissing your political opponents. It's not. "Go West" was, for a large portion of American history, a realistic option for the losing party. Moving to Alaskan wildlands is not.
What makes you think that's a bad idea? There are plenty of jobs where this would be a godsend. For example, take a factory. From examining industrial accidents to being able to send live video feed to the maintenance ("is that supposed to be doing that?") to accessing piping schematics to accessing factory's control systems from the field to simply locating people, a Google Glass - an Ex-approved version, of course - or similar would be a huge improvement over walkie-talkies, which are used nowadays.
You don't have the freedom to keep your workplace activities a secret.
No. "Manna" has as its premise automation, which is unrelated (and already happening). This story is about monitoring.
Sadly, no. Some bad cops get paid in money and some get paid in the security and convenience of doing nothing about it. It's the culture - the spirit - of the organization itself that becomes corrupt. Simply replacing some personnel won't purge it; you have to destroy the organization by moving the less-corrupt members into other, healthy departments in a dispersed manner, and keeping an eye on them until they're assimilated into the new culture.
The English translation of the law is here, and is a whopping 12 pages of sparse text, so no need to keep guessing.
But why didn't the summary just link to it in the first place?
That seems to be beyond the scope of the law according to Section 2. Also, the possible reasons for rejection are enumerated in Section 13, so it's not really in the power of a bureaucrat, who's role is limited to checking that the legal conditions are met.
It could be a face-saving retreat: say Beta will replace Classic when "ready", keep it "in development" for a while and then silently drop it.
Companies do that kind of thing a lot. For all the talk about how they exist solely for shareholder value, they certainly do seem to exhibit a lot of human characteristics. I wonder if it might be time to admit the current monomaniacal approach is stupid, and add at the very least self-protection as a legally binding duty for a company? After all, incorporation exists to limit personal risk for the investors, so corporate behaviour tends towards suicidal risk-taking, which is a bad thing when combined with the sheer power a large corporation wields.
Basically, redefine the legal concept of incorporation to give the resulting entity a duty to care equally about shareholder value, stakeholder value and the continuation of the corporation.
No. It was founded on the idea that if you couldn't live with it, you could go west and start a new place (or even live by yourself in a cabin somewhere). But the West is full now, and America is running into the same problems as everyone else: people actually have to reach a livable compromise. And it's failing economically, politically and culturally, as that same never give up -spirit that once inspired pioneers against the elements now fuels petty tribalism by sending people against other equally determined people.
America can't even pass a budget without turning it into a ridiculous drama, and a lot of people actually encourage it precisely for the harm it causes ("starve the beast"). The end result will be another civil war, collapse or a total cultural reform. Something's gotta give.
But this is not a merchant, this is a politician. The bank has every reason to keep politicians happy to keep those bailouts and deregulation coming.
So beta really is some PHB's pet project, then.
The only thing that is constant is change, but few rejoice when the end comes. Slashdot might be old and decrepit, but it is still a piece of history from the Internet revolution, and for many of us a long-time companion. Given the personal and cultural significance, the tone of the comments is understandable.
All good things have to come to an end. Beta is the harbringer of that final inevitability for Slashdot, a reflection of the same shadow we must all face one day. Embrace it if you will, but Slashdot will still move to that great hosting service in the sky when it arrives.
Altough this do rise some interesting metaphysical questions: do human superorganisms have a soul? We humans certainly talk about organizations, companies and nations like they were persons. Can Slashdot become a ghost? And if so, would it haunt those responsible for Beta? Would it send -1 Flamebait for everyone on their contact list? Would it keep redirecting them to Goatse? Or would they simply be found one morning, petrified and govered in hot grits?
And how would you exorcize Slashghost? Would you need to get Stallman and Gates to double-team on it? And if you did, who would get the movie rights ?-)
Change is inevitable. So is death. And in this case the change for the worst seems to be bringing the death of the community.
Also, I don't think that "counter productive" applies here. This looks suspiciously like a change driven by ulterior reasons; perhaps Slashdot Beta is some Business Genius's personal pet project, perhaps someone at Dice wants to shutdown Slashdot for political reasons, whatever. But in any case the Beta project will go through, a lot of users will leave, the network effect causes a vicious circle that kills the site, and that'll be that.
So, "Fuck Beta" is not productive, but neither is it counter-productive, since it's unlikely anything could stop Beta and the resulting death of Slashdot. But it is understandable as an emotional response to losing a long-standing and unique community with historical value. So let people went; they're only humans (and scripts and trolls), after all.
The lesson here is that forums can't be trusted to be sheparded by companies. Forums aggreagate people, who create communities; losing a community when the company inevitably does something stupid is always at least somewhat traumatic to the members, and makes the world as a whole poorer. There's a need for a distributed forum hosting software.
One of the best features of Slashdot is that what's said remains said. You can make a new account and start over, but you can't take credit for the good while editing away the bad.