My university just banned Napster about a week ago, causing no end of debate on the campus newsgroups. Basically, the problem is that Napster makes any computer it's installed on into a server which anyone can acess from the outside. Anytime someone from outside wants an mp3 from someone on campus, they can just download it from the desktop here. Even if they're compressed, mp3s are big files, and all this extra traffic clogs up bandwidth and really makes doing anything online excruciatingly slow. And most of the mp3s being downloaded are disgusting popular music illegally ripped from CD. It's bad enough to have to deal with sluggish data connections, but then to have to listen to the stuff coming through the walls ... I have no quibble with mp3s as a form of promoting new bands or sampling recordings before buying them, but the current state of mp3s on campus is both annoying to the other students and illegal for the administration (they're responsible for not having pirated recordings on the network). $.02

Chocolate Pi (who is going to practice flute now in a vain attempt to drown out the amplified recordings of pop music)