Music, ripping, burning and so on, is today's topic. there is an excellent thread over at ATrios on this issue today, but i have a slightly different take. i, like many others, have managed to digitize my entire CD collection. I have approximately 12,000 songs now on my hard drive. I don't share them, a bit because i'm not comfortable with file sharing on that scale and also for security reasons. However, my 40 gigs worth of music, carefully filed and tagged, is easily, in less than a half hour, transferred to a 40 or 60 or whatever gig hard drive via either firewire or USB 2.0. All someone has to do is spend around 120 dollars for the drive, come over, copy the music, and "hey presto" they now are the proud owner of over a thousand CDs worth of music. As the memory technology gets increasingly cheaper and easier and better, i think THIS is the area where the record companies are screwed. people will just exchange memory sticks that will be credit card sized and hold a terabyte and cost probably 30 bucks, all within 10 years or less.