Yeah, I used to do this when I was a newbie too, but soon enough I learned it's BAD MANNERS... not to mention semi-illegal from a copyright position. Before you take any images from this page, or someone else's, please ask permission. It's also considered only proper to note on your homepage (or wherever you decide to display the images) to add that you got the images from such-and-such a site, and clearly display the link to the site close by.
There's something to be said about plagiarism... it has to be said because it's unprintable.
(And if you didn't get that joke, try telling it to your parents or a jolly old uncle or someone. If they are of a Certain Age they will have a hearty laugh at the joke, and hopefully their day will have been brightened up a bit.)
Anyhow... plagiarism is when you steal text, or a large portion of someone else's writing, and either:
a) Make it look like your own ideas and writing, or
b) Do not attribute the quote to where it belongs.
While it's a lot harder to enforce anti-plagiarism rules on the 'net, that doesn't make it "okay" to steal large swathes of information from someone else's page. If you can go to the trouble of cut-pasting information from another page, you can go to the trouble of cut-pasting the URL or Internet Address of the homepage you stole it from.
Generally speaking, if you see a picture you like on someone else's page, and you've asked permission to use it, you do not link to the image directly. For example, if you really liked my Bureau for the Understanding and Research of Postpets banner
you should not do something silly like use the code
< img src="http://members.xoom.com/twotone/burpban.gif" >
to show the image on your page.
You should click on the image with your right mouse button, and save it to a disk so that you can upload it to your own website later.
As petty as it may seem, I get very peeved when people try to suggest that they know more about, say, Tamagotchi than I do, because they got all of the characters on all the American Tamagotchi.
Quite simply, I spent a great deal of time hunting down OFFICIAL BANDAI JAPAN APPROVED books on Tamagotchi, and also looking at most Japanese magazines that even peripherally mentioned them. (Of course, these began to disappear by the time the Forest and Ocean tams began to come out.) So I actually do know the names for all the Tamagotchi, thank you very much, and I'm quite sure of the information I've gotten from the various Japanese books and websites. (Whether I was able to satisfactorily translate them is a separate matter, and one which I am only willing to discuss with other people fluent in Japanese and English.)
On a related topic, I also get frustrated and peeved at people who nag at me to put up more information on the Devil-Tamagotchi, the Yasashii (Easy) Tamagotchi, the Santa-Clautch, etc. I am not willing to put up any information on a virtual pet that I don't have, and won't ever get in the foreseeable future. Since I'm a lot busier from around August to May, I also have little patience for people who e-mail me out of the blue and order me (rather than politely ask me) to translate entire Japanese sites for them.
