Can we get an explanation of how not wanting to have your servers handling more requests than necessary compares to breaking into a library and setting it on fire?

"No, you do NOT have the right to [ask me a question] and [tell others] [my reply] that I [later decided to retract.]"

I assumed the comparison was more directed to Asparagirl's "Yeah, I'm looking at you, Washington Post" example. Like this:

Perhaps individual private websites, such as pekk's, should have the right to say "No, you do NOT have the right to pound my site with requests and serve data that I decided to pull down."

However, in theory, the Washington Post's articles online are also (eventually) placed on microfiche. Saying there's no right to serve data that WP decided to pull down would in some sense require WP to "steal into libraries in the night and set fire to their microfiche collection".

I'm assuming this was in response to the "and serve data that I decided to pull down." part.

I still don't see the relationship between deleting a blog post that you have authored and burning a library full of other people's works down.

The robots.txt will not only disallow your blog post, but if you acquired your domain from someone else, the entire previous site will also be removed. That is not something you should have a right to do, unless you also acquired full copyright to all of the previous site's revisions.

So sometimes an IA-friendly domain expires (e.g. accidentally or because its owner died), a squatter buys the domain, and the squatter points the domain at a junk-site landing server with a deny all robots.txt. The result is truly disastrous: IA removes access to the historic, IA-friendly site. Site acquirers who do this deliberately are pure evil.

Ah I see, thanks for the explanation