Just a small lesson in web etiquette that some people tend to miss. I know it's pretty easy to use the 'ole nets these days, what with Myspace and Facebook and all, but there are some basic concepts which most folks should understand.

The old "don't be a dick, right-click and save-as" motto still exists as far as I'm concerned. Embedding content from Youtube, Flickr and the ilk is obviously cool, they provide those links right there to promote their bandwidth for your own personal usage, that's what they're there for. Copyright is also something fairly flexible: case in point, the Trogdor image below I originally used to reference the fine folks at homestarrunner.com, a typical example of fair usage.

I'm not going to get on any high horses here, just realize that embedding images from sites where the theme is not a shared-hosting service is asking for a bit of abuse at your own expense.

I know, I could set all of the images stored on my server to disallow referring, but there are circumstances when I'd like to use my own storage elsewhere (ala forum signatures and whatnot) and I'd rather not micromanage that. So when someone else treats my server like their own personal storage facility, like say... for their Myspace page, I have a tendency to do something like swap this:

for this:

Before you tell me how evil I may or may not be, consider that the standard photos most people substitute in these circumstances are tubgirl and goatse.cx. I think I'm being rather kind, comparatively speaking. Pretty soon I'll just remove the image and they can have a nice pretty broken image icon instead. =P