8 minutes is how long it takes *light* from the sun to reach us. A solar flare takes considerably longer, on the order of a couple days.

Think about it. If the flare itself traveled at the speed of light, we wouldn't even know it had happened until it hit us.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't trolling:

A Trojan Asteroid would be full of Greeks in the same way that the Trojan Horse was full of Greeks.

I agree about redbox being reasonable competion, just forgot to mention them. Although the selection with redbox is limited to fairly recent films, whereas Netflix's mail service (unlike the streaming) is pretty damn complete.

To your other point, cable companies have had PPV for a long time, and even "free" On Demand for a while, but in my experience it has only been since the rise of Netflix that the On Demand offerings have begun to offer much selection. Just a few years ago, my cable companies On Demand menu contained a handful of new releases, and a couple dozen randomly selected older films. Now, the list of available movies is much longer, and almost all of the popular cable shows are available on demand as well.

No, I'm saying that Blockbuster wasn't _really_ competition, in the sense that it wasn't really a fight. Not from Netflix's perspective, anyway, from Blockbusters perspective it was the fight of their life. In my view, they weren't joined by a newcomer, they were just flat out replaced.

Netflix came along and offered an alternative product that was better and achieved the same purpose. They didn't open a rental store across the street from Blockbuster and out-compete them on those terms, they replaced the entire video rental paradigm with a whole new business model.

I admit this is a fuzzy point, and just my own opinion on what constitutes "real" competition. But I hope you get what I'm saying. They "competed" in the same way that the automobile competed with the horse and buggy. Blockbuster didn't stand a chance of holding onto the market with the traditional brick and mortar stores, and by the time they put out a copycat DVD-by-mail service they were already circling the drain.

Yeah, this change is great for those who don't use one service or the other.

But I think most people are probably like me. I use both, and tend to use them for different things. I use the streaming way more often, and mostly for television shows. Episode after episode, no waiting. But the streaming library sucks for movies. There's very little in there that I want to see and haven't already seen. So I use the DVD portion of the plan to get films I actually want to watch.

Additionally, even for TV shows, the streaming catalog is. . . unstable. A few weeks ago a program I had been watching daily was suddenly yanked from the streaming catalog. I was in the middle of a season, dammit! So into my DVD queue it went. Where would I have been if I only had the streaming plan? Pissed off in cliffhanger-land, that's where.

It comes from the other end of the price spectrum. My old plan was 1 DVD at a time, plus unlimited streaming -- 9.99 a month. To get the same service, I would now be paying for the unlimited streaming plan(7.99) and the 1 DVD at a time plan (another 7.99) for a total of 15.98. That's a fraction under a 60% increase.

Until recently they had no competition. Did you mean Blockbuster? Please. A traditional video rental store is no competition for Netflix, at least not anymore than the yellow pages are competition for Google.

They are only now facing real competition, from Hulu, amazon, google, and on-demand services offered by cable companies.

I'm not happy about the price increase, but I am hopeful that it allows them to work out better content deals.

The link goes to a google translation of the article, so I'm guessing the summary was "translated" from the original as well.

I agree, it's completely unintelligible. I only get that one company is suing another over a Wikipedia edit. I think that the defendant company removed the plaintiff company from a list of companies providing some service. I think all the she and her stuff must be because of gendered nouns in the original language.

Facebook started out by being only available to students attending a few select schools, but I don't think that is "effectively invite only." The difference is that when one is a full-time student at a university, the vast majority of your friends and acquaintances are also students at that university. It wasn't open to the public, but for those it was open to, it was also open to a great many of the people they would want to interact with.

With Google+ the sample of people you could network with is essentially random. I would like to try it, but I haven't scored an invite, and even if I did -- I only know one other person who has been able to try it.

You must watch a lot of Fox News.

Congress does participate in Social Security. What made you think they do not? They pay income and FICA taxes on their salaries just like anyone else.

As for "ObamaCare," you are probably right that it wouldn't have been passed if Congress were forced to participate, since that would mean giving up their free government health care and being forced to buy private insurance instead.

Don't be stupid. I think I'm with the vast majority of the lefties on these issues, and my position is nothing like the hypocritical straw man you've constructed.

Both tobacco and marijuana should be perfectly legal to purchase, and to use in the privacy of your own home. Both should be illegal to smoke in a public building. You have the right to decide for yourself what to put in your body; you don't have the right to put it in mine.

Since I don't think that is too complicated for you to have understood, I can only conclude that you were being deliberately obtuse.

Listen, I am not going to get in an argument about whether anything on facebook is user-friendly or not, but the fact that you were not aware of it doesn't mean it is poorly implemented or hidden.

There is a big button at the top of the friends list page that says "Add List." on it. When you post something, there is a drop-down immediately to the left of the "Share" button to choose who can see it. And when this highly requested feature was finally added, there were plenty of news articles about it on all the tech blogs, including slashdot.

Just because you make your living in web development and this feature somehow escaped your attention despite all the hype about it (and despite the lack of it being your apparent number one problem with facebook) doesn't mean it is user-unfriendly. It just means that you can "make a living" at something and still fail to pay attention.

I don't really want to jump to the defense of facebook here, but your particular complaint seem to stem from being ignorant of its "lists" feature.

Create a list for each of your circles, and when you post something, select only the lists you want. Most of my updates for example, go only to people on my "Friends In Real Life" list.

Being an atheist isn't a choice, either. You are either born with the cognitive wiring to see the world rationally, or you are not, in which case you can believe whatever you like (or more probably, whatever you are told).

I could no more "choose to believe" in an invisible all-powerful sky-wizard than I could choose to believe that 1 equals 2, or that dinosaurs are living happily on the far side of the moon. I can't make myself believe in fairy tales. I could only ever choose to pretend I believe them.

in praxis there are, of course, a lot of problems.

No kidding. It was the Klingons' main energy production facility before it exploded.