<i>When I first started reading your posts, I thought that you didn't really know much, but just pasted interesting looking stuff here to make it look as if you really were a knowledgable person. The reason was that you never included your own comments. Since then, a couple of years or so, I've come to realize that this is just your posting style; you really are a valuable knowledge resource for SDC.</i><br /><br />Thanks. I guess I'll take that as a backhanded compliment ;-)<br /><br /><i>I'm curious though. Why is this your style?</i><br /><br />I'm not sure I understand what you're driving at, but I'll give it a shot.<br /><br />As a rule, I generally participate in a particular thread (deeper than merely posting informative links) when my interest is piqued by some real in-depth, informed discussion <i>in an area that interests me</i>, which is why I post the links. There are some really informative postings on the Web, including here, but wading through the mountain of garbage and gibberish to try and find the nuggets of gold has grown increasingly tedious and, quite frankly, not really worth the investment in time.<br /><br />I've been participating in online discussion since the mid-1990s (<i>e.g</i>., the space-related USENET groups, other online forums, including one of my own on Yahoo!, etc.), so a lot of the discussion I see around the Web is, from my standpoint, unavoidably repetitive. Also, the exponential expansion of the Web has, unfortunately, also brought an exponential increase in the number of kooks. I hate to sound jaded but I got tired of "fighting the good fight" against ignorance a long time ago, so I leave a lot of the lunacy and ignorance for others to combat. I also grew tired of answering the same questions over and over long ago ("Mars. Isn't that a planet or something?"). <br /><br />If that's too pessimistic a view, so be it.