[Usability] Trash observations

[Mark Knecht <markknecht gmail com>]

As a user I started looking at Trash today. It won't empty for me.
This led to some questions:

1) Where is trash? When I right click and choose Properties then I see
"Location: on the destop". However when I open a terminal and look at
the destop I don't find a directory that seems sensibly named as Trash
or anything of the like. Where is it?

2) It appears if I open the Trash icon then I see a folder that I'm
trying to delete. The folder is owned by me but the location says:
"trash:///". Where is that?

3) Once I go down into the folders I find the reason I cannot empty
trash - there are files in my trash can that are owned by root. As
background, this is a folder that I created on my desktop, placed some
C code in it as my user, su'ed to root and built the code.  root now
owns the files that were built in my directory structure. However
Gnome allowed me to 'delete' the files, as far as getting them into
the trash can, but Linux I think won't allow me to empty my trash can
because I don't own the files I put there. Does anyone else see the
inconsistency in this?

4) When I try to drag the folder icon back to the desktop Gnome won't
let me telling me there are file permission problems. This is because
some files are owned by root.

5) Lastly, when I try to empty the trash I choose a menu option that
says "Empty Trash". It pops up a dialog that says Empty in it's
message title and als in all the text, but the action you have to take
to actually empty the trash is to hit the 'Delete' button. Why not
keep it consistent and say 'Empty now" or something like that.

Anyway, I'd very much like to clean up my trash can so whether there's
any interest in the rest of this where are the files kept so that I
can go there in a terminal and erase them by hand.

Thanks,
Mark