Of course my notebook doubles as entertainment when I travel, and I usually have a handful of DVD's or Blu-rays to watch. If I didn't have an optical drive, I'd have to convert my collection on my desktop and transfer to my notebook, a time consuming proposition considering how large my collection is and how lazy I am.

PDFs are great when you want to save a document for later, offline use. Like a product manual, which one may refer to once in a while. You can refer to your local copy, and not have to download it every time.

PDF's are also great for preserving the formatting on documents. It takes a lot of effort to get the formatting to appear exactly the way you want it to in HTML in every browser. Now imagine you have 5,000 separate product manuals, which one can either simply and easily export to PDF, or have the headache of converting to HTML (and losing portions of the formatting in the process), and it's an easy choice.

Using PDF's for major portions of websites is stupid, but they do have their place. It's all a matter of using the right tool for the job (or at least the least bad tool).

My first experience going online was also with Prodigy, which my parents promptly cancelled after they got the telephone bill with all the long distance charges. It wasn't till 97 when I turned 18 and moved out of the sticks that I was able to get on again, with a 56k dialup modem.

I used reCAPTCHA on a small phpBB board. Because of the small number of users, I activate any accounts manually, However, since the first of the year I must have gotten 40 attempted registrations. Very annoying, because I got an e-mail for each of them. Switched to a question that only someone familiar with my board would be familiar with, seems to have stopped that stuff.

I got the warning about being accessed from China. Unfortunately, it came 2 days after I became aware of my gmail account and World of Warcraft account both being compromised. By that time I had already changed the password, and had Blizzard restore my stuff.

This probably won't happen everywhere. I live in a rural community, and there's really no other options besides satellite or (in town) cable. Many people don't even have high speed internet - DSL became available just 2 of years ago, and our town still has a local dial-up ISP with enough subscribers to turn a profit. The nearest over-the-air TV station is over 60 miles away, so it takes a powerful antenna to get even a single station.

I personally could probably do without a lot of the channels on my Dish Network system. However, I like HIstory, History Inernational, Investigation Discovery, and Tru TV enough to keep it around. And my parents don't know how to use the internet, so they have to have something to watch.

For most things I use the DVR of my Dish Network receiver, however for broadcast TV I usually use a VCR (it's a combination VCR/DVD recorder, but I have tons of old tapes laying around). Mom has to have her Oprah and Dr. Phil.

Agreed. If I could no longer use the complex extensions I have grown attached to (NoScript and DownThemAll among them) I would use something other than Firefox. Extensions are about the only thing that Firefox has that keeps me from switching to another browser.

Is that there isn't anything as awesome as the old MP3.com.

Seriously.

I probably haven't been exposed to one independent song in the past year. When mp3.com was still here, I downloaded a ton, in a variety of genres.

Does anyone know of a (good) site like the old mp3.com that offers the same scope of music AND free downloads?

Someone hack his PC and install the damned purple ape!

Copyright infringement is not theft. Theft implies that the person the item is stolen from no longer has the item. But that's beside the point.

I seldom download movies or tv shows from the internet. I have Netflix and that does ok for most movies I'd care to watch. I often buy CD's as well. However, sometimes I want to download things that I can't get elsewhere. Like missed episodes of TV shows, for instance. (I often buy boxed sets, but sometimes I just want the latest one when I miss it)

While I agree, there's always going to be a number of people who will pirate everything under the sun, there's also people who simply aren't being served effectively who turn to piracy out of desperation, because "legal" alternatives either aren't available or cost far too much. For example, I don't buy MP3's because they're too expensive, it's just as cheap (and often cheaper!) to buy an actual CD.