At home I am stuck with dialup.  I really, really, really, hope that I may be able to get something approaching broadband soon (thanks, by the way, to our local electric cooperative, who is putting up rural wireless sites as fast as they can), but it hasn't happened yet.  To make matters worse, my machine masquerades for two others in the house.  For most of primetime every evening we have three hard core internet junkies vying for bandwidth on a mediocre dialup connection.  

Son is a serious gamer who could tie up a broadband connection all by himself if we let him.  We've already looked at satellite internet service, but word is the ping times are worse than dialup, so not a good option from his point of view.

The Momcat is an artist who tends to gravitate to graphics heavy sites.  During the day she has the link to herself a good part of the time, so she tries to lighten up during crunch time, but still.

I'm more verbally oriented.  I appreciate good graphics, but long load times always become a test of my patience.  When all three of us get busy surfing in the evening, a graphics heavy page can take several minutes to load.  When that happens, it becomes a contest between my interest in the page at hand and my patience.  Fairly often I end up aborting the download if it takes very long.  My loss, I know, and I'm sure I miss out on a lot of good stuff, but there it is.

So, I very much appreciate the thrust of this discussion.  How do you find the balance between sharing the benefits of technology and community so dear to us all while accommodating those of us still limited by circumstance.  It shows the sort of mutual consideration that makes ET such a special community.

Now where are we going and what's with the handbasket?