Lizzie Cornish 1 wrote: "Sorry, I don't understand all this 'impose' and 'control' 'run my life' kind of thing going on here".

Lizzie, the issue of 'control' not some OCD-related control freakery, or touchy-feely New Age self-help thing. From my point of view, it's about practicality. Quite often, media-rich sites like MySpace cause my computer to grind to a halt and occasionally hang altogether. I lose control over my PC.

To put it another way, non-auto starting music presents the broadband user the option of turning music on which takes a very, very short period of time which is nothing in terms of inconvenience compared to the hassle it causes someone like me.

You've mentioned turning off the music, but I don't think you understand even that's not the instantaneous solution that it will be on your machine. Depending on how much media content there is on a single page (it's not a case of having "13 pages up at once, or whatever"), even turning it off can be an issue because I'm not just having to wait for the music to stream but also the actual player software to load. If that's taking too long - because there's so much media content - then it's a nightmare

I'm not sure you genuinely understand about the problems this can cause. I mean that in the sense that perhaps you've never had to use dial-up or when you did (perhaps in the past) it was before the likes of MySpace and YouTube were around or took-off, rather than anything else! To put that into perspective, and give your point about waiting to see videos or hear music, if I want to watch a single YouTube clip that last say around 4 minutes or so, it might take me the best part of 2 hours waiting and not being able to browse anything else on my computer for those 2 hours.

Again, that's a single YouTube clip by the way, if there's 4 or 5 YouTube clips trying to buffer away on a single clip, then I've literally no way of seeing them as my dial-up connection terminates every 2 hours which means that with so many trying to buffer at once, I wouldn't even get to see a single one because my 2 hour connection would end before any of them managed to load. "Waiting" for something to load become meaningless and takes on a Sisyphean quality.

All the things you complain about regarding "coughs and splutters", certain adds locking your machine up, well you admit you're on broadband. Try and imagine that (literally) 10x worse and you've some idea about what the rest of us are talking about.