I don't really have anything new to add to the conversation, but I want to say thanks.

I discovered Slashdot while I was in college, about 10 years ago. I used it to get current events to talk about in my computers and ethics class. Since then, I've checked it nearly daily. I've spent many a happy lunch hour hanging around this site. There are other sites for news and discussion, but I've always come back to /.

Thanks again, Rob. I hope your next project, whatever it may be, is as successful, or at least fun, as this has been.

Sorry. 13 episodes, 15 hours.

If I recall correctly, when King and company made Kingdom Hospital a few years ago, the same guy directed all 11 episodes (13 TV-hours). It's a TON of work for one guy to do, but if Ron Howard thinks he can get it right, I say go for it.

That's almost too bad. Syzygy is such a cool word. (And I almost got a chance to play it in Scrabble once. I had all the right letters, but my uncle decided to use the S on the board for something else.)

Absolutely. I remember a physics test that was open book and open notes. I had only missed a couple of days of class and a couple of homework assignments and I ended up with a around a 54% on the test. Quite possibly the hardest test I took through my entire time in college.

Meanwhile, what's appearing on Randy's screen is (mostly) incorrect information. A very cool plot device in a very cool book.

I might be wrong (someone official, please correct me if I am) but it does look like some of the shows that used to be entirely free will now be behind the Hulu Plus paywall. For example, Miami Vice currently has 4 seasons available. That's on the list of shows that will be available in Hulu Plus. Does this mean that it will no longer be available for free? Or will they be changing it (like they did with Buffy and Arrested Development) so that only one season at a time is available?

Honestly, I rarely watch the older shows, and I'm ok with Hulu keeping the latest 5 or so episodes of the shows I watch. It looks like very little will actually change for me, either.

Maybe the Guggenheim has changed in the last 15 years, but the last time I was there nearly every piece of "art" that I saw was some pointless sculpture. For example, one sculpture was just barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk. This is art? I only remember one piece that I liked in the entire museum (a painting of a lobster and a cat done by Picasso, I think). This is the perfect place to show off awful, pointless videos. They'll fit right in.

Thank you. If not for your name, I'd have sworn I wrote your post. At the end of Lost we knew nothing more than the characters themselves did (except Hurley, but he probably has a few hundred years more experience than the rest). That's how it had always been through the show. I enjoyed the ending. Bad guys got what they deserved, good guys got what they deserved. And everything I wanted answered was given at least a vague explanation somewhere in season 6.

Out of curiosity, what does HTML5 have in it that will prevent web developers from making sites that are just as annoying as Flash-based ones? I'm purely an applications developer, not a web developer, but it seems to me that you can stick a whole bunch of video tags on a page and you'll have a site that looks suspiciously like most of the web does now. At least right now I can use FlashBlock in Firefox to keep the useless Flash stuff hidden.

There is a difference between art and entertainment, in that there is art that simply isn't entertaining. This applies to sculpture, paintings, movies and even video games. Movies are an art form. And I've seen some that were simply no good. This doesn't mean they weren't art. They were simply bad art. I've seen sculptures that were the same. Someone thought that a piece of barbed wire wrapped around a tree trunk deserved a place in the Guggenheim museum. They must have thought it was art. I thought it was something that should have been thrown away. I'm not saying that GTA IV is good art. I've never played it. But I do think that any game that makes you feel some real emotion or makes you think is artistic at some level. It's not the Mona Lisa, but it's something.

I don't know about mice, but I can easily picture my cats learning to do that. Scary, psychotic animals...

Yes. The problem that ST:TNG (and probably the others; I kinda quite watching Star Trek after that ended) ran into was when episode plots were resolved with bad, techy science. When a Star Trek writer could write the climax of an episode as "[tech] the [tech]. Geordi does the [tech] and saves the day" that's a BAD episode. Episodes that were about people and their interactions ("there are FOUR lights!") could be (and sometimes were) really good episodes.

And this, along with price, is the reason that I'm not even thinking about buying a big, fancy ebook reader. I played with an ebook reader at Target one day and the black then white screen flash annoyed me so much that I immediately decided that I would not be giving up my beloved dead tree books.

I've read a few books using MobiPocket on my smartphone, but even that doesn't compare to actual books. Although having my book in my pocket at all times sure is nice.