Many games do one or both of those things. The first is to make it slightly tougher to use the game without purchasing a copy. Civ III does both.

And I guess I understand #1, though I still don't quite approve--especially since given that I've got an iPod, I'm not used to carrying CDs around anymore! But #2? There's no excuse for that. Sure, give me an OPTION for that, but...I wanna be on the internet! Or IMing! Or playing music! Or something!

Grr. So annoying! I just bought Scrabble for my computer (Mac, so it was more of a PITA to find a version) and was all "Whee, yay!". Except two problems: one, it requires putting the CD in EVERY TIME (ew?) and two, it takes up the WHOLE screen while playing it--can't have anything else open. GRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

I'm sorry you already paid for it. I normally recommend paying for and downloading X-Words Deluxe to Mac Scrabble afficionadoes. It doesn't come configured exactly like a scrabble board due to copyright issues, but you can define your own boards and letter frequencies very easily, emulating the real board perfectly. I even found a text file on the internet of the Full Scrabble Dictionary and imported it as the program's dictionary, so I get the full Scrabble experience with 9 levels of computer opponents and all that jazz.

it requires putting the CD in EVERY TIME (ew?)

You can try making an image of the CD with Disk Utility and mounting it to play. Most CD-based copy protections are too smart to fall for that, but some do.

Hmm. Any non-Mac suggestions for something like Gris was talking about above? I'd love to have a good Scrabble program.

brenda -- if you go to Gris' link, you'll see that they sell a Windows version.

So my only experience with robots.txt is in a fannish context, where we're usually looking to prevent sites from being indexed at all.

Now that I'm more active with the website for my mother's chorus, should I bother specifying any details for robots? We obviously want to be indexed by search engines. We don't have any problems with traffic or bandwidth excesses. Is there anything else obnoxious a robot would be doing that I'd want to stop?

More Tivo "bugs" showing up.

Since I got the lifetime subscription when I bought the box, my Tivo's essentially free at this point, and I have no reason to get rid of it. But this bug that makes the broadcast flag show up where supposedly no broadcast flag exists is not making me happy.

My printer is giving me trouble. Every time I try to print, I get an error message saying "pen failure," while the printer itself keeps telling me to "remove and check color cartriage." It doesn't say what to check it for, and if I take it out, all it tells me to do is put it back in and close the door. Upon which it then says "remove and check color cartriage" again, rinse, repeat.

There's nothing physically wrong with it that I can see. I've unplugged it and restarted it twice. Any ideas?

You might check in the printer properties for a "head cleaning wizard" and try that.

None of the buttons seem to be responding, is the problem. Everything I press just makes it beep at me and tell me to check the cartriages. But I'll keep trying.

[update: Telling the printer "I ALREADY CHECKED IT THREE TIMES SO WORK YOU FRACKING BITCH" does not help. The good news is, my printer is not a Cylon.]