I was similar growing up, except that instead of buying second hand I would rent NES games from the local box store (Phar-Mor in the 80's), similar to movie rentals before NetFlix and such. I suppose the modern-day equivalent would be GameFly, which would also be cut out w/ this.

The idea of a bunch of people from Pittsburgh voting to not give CMU a bunch of loot is at best weird.

For websites, in theory, you could have saved that email you get when you sign up for a new service (message boards, mailing lists, youtube/myspace/whathaveyou), the one that says "keep this email for your records", and probably contained some default password that you had to change?

A professional company (and free/oss software that generates these types of emails) probably includes a way to change that info with a link in that email (or a form on their site).

My hotmail account pretty much only contains those types of emails at this point in time, as that is why I created it. Yes, it would time consuming to switch, but hey, it's your choice in the end.