If you live in the Baltimore/Glen Burnie area, CrabTowne is worth your time. Not for the food mind you...but just walk on through to the game room with dozens of working arcades (Including Tapper!) and a perimeter lined with working pinball of all types. Really wonderful place. Really terrible chicken fingers.

Interestingly Greg Egan explores this question in the book "Permutation City". In it, the main character downloads himself into a virtual world. When his copied consciousness wakes up, it only takes about 15-30 minutes before it decides it wants out and commits suicide. The plot of the book picks up when the character decides to disable the suicide switch before copying himself down again.

I read an excerpt of it years ago and have been meaning to pick it up ever since. Maybe I'll do that now...

Let me be the first of many to point out this article was posted July 31, 2008, though its central point still stands. Also worth nothing, this article was written before Intel's X-25 SSDs were released which moved the performance bar so high that their insane price (~3-4$/GB) started to make sense for the some people.

...On a TV. Where ad rights, restrictions, and most importantly prices are much different than they are on the web. Hulu's (well really Fox/NBC's) bean counters won't let that fly especially when they can get roughly 7 minutes of ad space on a broadcasted show versus 2 minutes on Hulu. I'd be willing to bet that the prices for those 2 minutes on Hulu are a lot cheaper than 2 minutes on TV for an equivalent show.

And to anyone complaining about having to dance through proxies to watch Hulu internationally, it's for the same reasons. What benefit does Charmin see from advertising toilet paper to people in the Netherlands?

All that aside, as someone who has a modded XBOX with XBMC and was living abroad,I can say with experience that all these shenanigans are tiring. Like any arms race where it's content producers vs. the internet, the internet will win in the end.

Mod +5, Spit Squash Soup on Monitor