This reminds of the time where I was at a go-kart track in NW Atlanta with my 11 year old son. Tons of signs "not liable for injury, we maintain no insurance"... He smacked the kart into the end of a concrete lane separator at ~20-25 mph, and his mouth hit the steering wheel of the kart, and his upper lip hit his teeth, resulting in a fair amount of blood. People from the track came to help, and they were looking at him and suggested that we take him to the emergency room. I suggested that they had not strapped him in correctly, or it would have been impossible to occur in the first place, and that I expected them to cover the medical bills. We took him on the hospital, and as it turned out his injuries were minor. The interesting things was that the next day, we heard from the track's insurance company that they would in fact take care of any deductibles or out of pocket expenses.

Arbitration mentions in a contract are a lot like the signs at the go-kart track - they are designed to make people think that they have no legal recourse. To paraphrase a previous poster, judges don't take kindly to those who say they don't have a say in a situation that is placed in front of them. These clauses often get thrown out if a lawyer is involved, from what I have seen.

There was a 60 minutes story regarding farmers that were sued by monsanto for patent infringement when their fields we found to contain monsanto genetically modified plants within them. See http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/Heartbreak-In-The-Heartland21jul02.htm for more details and the link to the 60 minutes video. this is important in a lot of areas because even accidental/ incidental migration of the plants is being considered a patent infringement.

I was staying at the Renaissance in Las Vegas, booked for a week for a HP training class. Checked out after the first night when I realized that Wi-fi was $10/night. Where did I go? The Choice Hotel 2 blocks down the street.. room was quite nice.
How much did that cost the Renaissance? about $500 for the week....
I haven't stayed at a Mariott in years for the same reason.
Wi-fi is a basic assumption in my hotel choices today. I won't even spend the company's money on this.

read about 'dummynet' (google 'dummynet mac os x' ) - it will allow you to reduce his bandwidth on the network to whatever slow level you want to give him. It is a part of the ipfw package on Mac OS X. Have fun!

and I really enjoy trying to make any complaint about their crappy coverage (for example, downtown Decatur GA).. "We show 3 bars of coverage there"... blah blah blah... and they can't seem to handle handoff between particular towers either (at least places I know around the Atlanta area always result in a call drop while traveling along the same path...

... late at night, after they close.

IN THE UK. We in the United States use more traditional methods of getting you to cough up the passwords: http://www.xkcd.com/538