Milan is a beautiful city, despite some signs of fatigue (most notably the everpresent graffiti). It's also a city that embraces modernity and commerce, and thus was a fitting site for our first leg of Digital Europe 2005.

Modernity has its limits, however. Staying in a hotel across from a centuries-old cathedral that took 400 years to build, one can't get upset at finding no Internet access in one's room. I am an e-mail addict, but it was probably good to be away from my laptop for lengthy periods of time.

I did occasionally feel the need to go online, however, and the hotel provided two computers in its lobby with Internet access. Once I mastered the peculiar keyboard - strike that, I never mastered the keyboard, I just learned to cope with it - I was online and e-mailing away.

Jim DeLong and I were struck, however, at how slow the computers were. The casings appeared fairly new, the operating system was up-to-date. I was baffled by this mystery.

Then I thought I saw part of the answer. On the desktop of the computer I was using was a Kazaa icon. Jim likes to say nothing is free. Well, I was paying the price, in terms of slowness from spyware, for someone else's free access to content on Kazaa.