Which shows to go ya, as some people say, there’s more than one way to skin a balky TV provider. Among other things, we’re looking at a small set-top box called the Roku LT. At $50, it’s half the price of Apple TV and offers more content. With Apple, you go to the iTunes store to get movies and TV. With Roku, you’re able to look at more than a hundred channels.  

The set-top box brings in movies from Netflix, Amazon, and HBO.  It has TV shows from Hulu Plus, social networking from Facebook, photos from Flickr, music from Pandora Radio and over a hundred other channels. True, you pay a monthly service fee for many of its channels, but even when you add them up, it’s still cheap compared to the cost of cable.

There’s a $100 version of Roku that plays high definition movies and games as well. It comes with “Angry Birds,” a game so popular we’re now seeing Angry Birds toys. More info at Roku.com.

Facebook now has about 800 million users, which is slightly more than the whole Internet had in 2004, according to InternetWorldStats.com. The Internet now has over 1.7 billion users.

That’s like asking which is faster, a Honda or a Toyota. Either DSL or cable might be faster, depending on what you’re service you’re paying for and how the company happens to be running its network in your area.

Our DSL Internet service used to come in slower than a tax refund because our apartment building had “shared connections.” That meant that if a lot of the grad students in our building were streaming movies, which they’re inclined to do, our service slowed to a crawl. The building recently switched to AT&T Uverse, however, and although it took the AT&T guys more than two weeks to get it working, we now have our very own connection. It’s ten times faster.

Other factors can affect your browsing speed: There may be a “bad guy” program on your machine. To find out, get Microsoft’s free malicious software removal tool. You can get it at Find.PCworld.com/60699. If they can identify the culprit but can’t remove it, do a web search on the name of the program; there will be people out there who have dealt with the problem before.

You might have a real old web browser. Don’t be embarrassed, we were at a deluxe Hilton in Indianapolis recently and they were still using version 6 of Internet Explorer, which is considered unsafe. The latest version is “9.” To update, choose “tools” and then “Windows update.”

BitTorrent.com became notorious over the years as the place to go to for downloading massive files quickly. It has made it easy to download illegal copies of movies, songs and other programs, though they don’t condone that.

The web site is not only still there, it accounts for 21.6 percent of all Internet downstream traffic, compared to the only slightly higher 22 percent for Netflix. Between the two of them they account for almost half of all Internet bandwidth use.

BitTorrent software is free and now in version 8. When you go to the site, the emphasis is on the fast upload and download of legitimate video files like lectures and demonstrations. What makes it fast is that files are broken into chunks and distributed among several computers and then transmitted to the requesting site and reassembled by the BitTorrent software. Another popular program is UTorrent, from UTorrent.com. Speed is dependent on the number of computers involved; senders are typically called “seeders,” and receivers are known as “leeches.”

There is no question that illegal downloads take place. For instance: We used to go to a Blockbuster video store to rent movies. The place was cavernous, and had so few customers you could have fired a machine gun and not hit a soul.

Bob started chatting with one of the clerks about this lack of traffic and he said they had one customer who came in every week, always on the same day, and rented 10 movies at a time. The really odd thing was he rented them in alphabetical order! He didn’t care what the titles were! For all we knew, he did this in several video stores, and it seems likely.

Now, if you were a reporter with a suspicious turn of mind, and Bob certainly is that, you might speculate that the only reason someone would rent a bunch of movies in alphabetical order was to transmit them to a location where buyers and sellers don’t care about copyrights and copyright protection is difficult to enforce. We consulted someone we know in Thailand about this issue and where he lives “anything goes.”

Several readers have asked us how they can copy a movie, like it’s the most normal activity in the world. We answer that it’s illegal. And yet, it’s done.

The latest software from BitTorrent.com is in a beta version and makes it easy for the user to find legal video from sites like the TED Conference, Khan Academy, Make Magazine and Bamm TV. Use the search box to find other “torrents,” large files that come into your computer like lightning. But be careful what you search for.

Searching for a hit movie like “The King’s Speech” turned up some copies all ready to send, but we canceled the transmission. The downloading of movies and television shows that may have had their copy protection broken is just one of the problems that come with using a “Torrent” type of transmission. The massive amount of information being transmitted may cause your Internet service provider to cancel your account. We have been told this has happened to some people, and it makes sense.

An additional risk is the possibility of viruses and other so-called malware being transmitted to your computer along with the movie or video. Our heavy user contact said he only got a virus once and it was removed by the free AVG Anti-Virus program. A BitTorrent spokesperson said their software includes some protection against malware, but we all think it’s a good idea to have your own anti-virus software installed.

The new BitTorrent software lets you create a “private” channel, where you can upload and share your own high definition movies. Start by clicking on an arrow in the upper right of the screen to create the channel. If it gets confusing, take a look at an instructive video from CNET. We’ve shortened the address to tinyurl.com/howtobit.

The most common complaint is that you can’t use it to watch TV shows from Hulu.com or from broadcasters who block their content. We think this really misses the point: Google TV isn’t for people who are trying to save money on their cable bills, it’s for what economist Friedrich Hayek called “leisure pioneers.” Eventually, it will be cheap, the system will improve, and everyone will end up using it and wondering how they ever put up with a dumb TV.

There are three ways to get Google TV, which, by the way, is an operating system, not a device.

• One, you can connect a TV to a $400 Sony box that includes a Blu-ray disc player. It has the catchy name of NSZ-GT1. Wouldn’t you love to sit in on one of their marketing meetings?
• Two, use a similar box from Logitech that doesn’t have a Blu-Ray player. It’s called the Logitech Revue and retails for around $300.
• Three: Buy a 46-inch, $1400 Sony TV that includes Google TV. That does seem excessive.

We bought the Sony box, even though we already had a Blu-ray player, and we haven’t looked back since. It has opened a world of fun and education. Sure, most of the stuff could have been found on our computers. But it’s a lot of trouble to find it.

In the first couple of days with Google TV we’ve enjoyed gadget shows, author interviews, science shows, and investing programs. This is a tiny fraction of what comes up just going ‘round the dial, so to speak. New material comes in every day.

The Sony controller is a little bigger than a smart-phone and — to our delight — has a full QWERTY keyboard. You can type what you want to see. Type any web site (ours, for example) and it comes up.

The Google TV menu has sections called Bookmarks, Spotlight, Applications, Most Visited and Queue. Applications include Netflix, Pandora, an NBA app, etc. Other apps will be available in a few months. The Spotlight section includes New York Times videos, a CNET channel (CNET has dozens of gadget reviews every day), and others. If you have a slow link to the Internet, many of the channels will come in with interruptions, waiting for their signals to load. CNET came in with no lags, however.

The “Queue” section of Google TV has channels for art, business, comedy, food, investing, magazines, news and politics, science, society and culture and tech news. We watched Nora Ephron talking about her new book, some art gallery walk-throughs and a show on making money with stock options. Click on the magnifying glass whenever you want to surf the web, rather than using one of the channels. Use “picture in picture” to watch regular TV in a corner of the screen while web browsing.

Overall, this has been a lot of fun, very educational and we’re glad we bought it.