Yeah. Not so much.

Libertarian view : If someone is committing murder, rape, robbery, theft, fraud, arson, trespass, etc. — then it is proper to call on the government.

There really should be a term for the common practice of creating a flawed statement, ascribing it to someone, and then using it to make them look bad.

You should use gmail and lose the hate along with the spam you'll no longer see. You'll live longer.

Funny you should say that now. I was just now reading a historically important post from 1991. Slashdot covered the 20th anniversary of this particular post.

http://classic.slashdot.org/story/11/08/25/1535255

I'm curious, should George Bush be able to delete all records of things he said publicly, to remove all mention of WMD from the archives? There is a strong argument that once you choose to publicly make assertions, to engage in open, written discussion, the comments you chose to publish remain. If I were to call someone a thief and a liar, I'd fully expect that the accusations I chose to make publicly would remain a part of the public record. If I don't want to look like an asshole, I shouldn't act like an asshole.

Linus used Minix to write Linux. His motivations included pure geek fun, 32 bit support, and the ability to modify and distribute. Minix was free of charge, but not 100% freedom. You weren't allowed to modify Minix and distribute your own version. At the time, BSD included code written and controlled by AT&T.

http://www.learnlinux.ie/content/linus-torvalds-original-announcement-usenet

Vigilantes would be far far far more likely to go all Charles Bronson on some poor slob who's only crime was having a known email address than an actual spammer.

This is why vigilante justice is inappropriate in the case of spam.

Not because it would be 'disproportionate' - Spammers routinely and intentionally destroy entire human lifetimes in aggregate. (This is a role reserved for overly intrusive government and local cable providers.)

On the other hand, why does every single piece of art have to be solely judged by how much revenue it takes in?

They don't. However, opportunity costs do need to be considered - every penny spent on a particular piece of art is away from something else, since there's only so much coin going around. Also, public should have some say about how public money is spent.

I hate to say this as someome from the US, but the serving of yogurt from Starbucks has more culture than anything the big, mainstream movie houses churn out these days.

This is, of course, complete rubbish. Mainstream movies transmit and reinforce cultural memes. You're simply already surrounded by said memes, so you don't necessarily notice.

I can see where discussion sites don't allow for deletion as it is a royal PITA to maintain site integrity, threads, etc. if a user disappears.

It should be easy. Since all the posts should be in a database, just replace the content with something like --self-deleted-- and keep everything else the same.

For anyone quoting it from before it was deleted I'd say "fair use" if they're in the USofA.

Take your account:
chill (34294)
Leave the user number the same (34294) and just --self-deleted-- the user name (chill) and anything you've listed in your profile.

And your post (#45807903) would also show --self-deleted-- but it would still show and my reply would still show in this thread.

And just make sure that no one else can ever use "chill" as a username or the email address you've used. That's just a different list.

George Lucas was (at least until recently) the owner of the Star Wars Christmas Special. That doesn't give him the right to destroy all tapes made of it in the world. (Much as he wanted to - rumor has it he bought up and destroyed a great many copies before the digital age made it pointless)

Ownership isn't the right to "unpublish".

I have no idea what you're talking about, except that it's awesome.

Or, to quote MC Frontalot

Wise words.

Hehe, I love "Chelsea tractors" as a term. I call all SUVs "minivans" here in the states, as most a child-haulers marketed to dads who are still trying to feel macho despite the fact their wife makes them drive the kids in the minivan while she drives the nice sedan to work.

Not exactly. From that link:

If you later decide that you would like to reactivate your account, you can do so at any time by signing in to Nextdoor using the same email address and password as before, and then clicking Reactivate.

So everything is still there.

Why not kill the account completely except for the past posts? And put the username and email address into a do-not-allow list so that a future user won't be able to take it over.

The reason is that they want to be able to sell your information.

You don't seem to be arguing against my point that you know you're going to have disasters when you use Adobe products.

I really wish Adobe would show some class and open-source Fireworks (can't be beat for UI mockups), but I expect disaster instead.

Political correctness flat out denies any pride in your heritage, unless you are part of some select minority.

No, it denies vilifying or ridiculing other heritages to make yours seem better by contrast. If you need to see "singing chinamen mispronouncing words" to feel pride about your non-chinese culture, and political correctness keeps you from broadcasting this fact for the entire world to see, then you should be thankful about it.