I agree, but the poster to which I replied was bragging about how MSFT is doing so well and his stock portfolio is being counted by him and he is enjoying life. I merely pointed out that MSFT did not even perform better than the index.

They had not in the prior ten years gotten stronger than the S&P 500. If ten years ago you had invested in an index fund tracking the S&P 500, your return to today would be 77% instead of the 57% you would have received by investing in MSFT. Many other companies out-performed the S&P 500 in the same ten-year period.

The subject of a film has little to do with quality. I've seen some spectacular films about boring subjects and completely unwatchable rubbish about stunningly interesting topics.

Interesting how taste works, eh? One man's rubbish is another man's tour de force.

I do, and it has more than 120,000 titles for rent. They also rent equipment if you need it to watch some of the formats less popular in the United States or have a region-locked device. Blockbuster closed because their market share was gobbled up by alternatives. There is not yet a viable alternative to Scarecrow but I don't think they are doing as well as they used to.

Of course everyone should evaluate their value, but not long ago $8 for two movies a month was a very good deal where people were willing to pay that and pay for gas and drive and stand in line and browse a cacophonous store. Today $8 for two movies a month is seen as a bad deal.

That's all I was saying. I wouldn't pay $8 for two movies a month because their selection is limited, but I would if they had movies I liked.

Obviously film enjoyment is a subjective matter. Claiming one film is better than all other films in a very wide net is a pretty tall order though. On the other hand comparing one film against an entire other genre is probably making a bigger claim about your preference of an entire genre than the one film. I'm unsure whether to check out Troll Hunter now.

Yes, enlightenment is preferable, I was following Lab Rat Jason's prayer format for I am a neophyte prayer.

Well, then I'm out of competitors! I still rather go to the local video store, which happens to have even more selection than Netflix or Greencine, but they don't deliver.

Yes, they do. They should be paid for their work. There's a market opportunity to stream quality films to people for reasonable rates that's untapped. Having a service that solely catered to that market probably wouldn't support itself due to infrastructure costs but it's an area where on of the existing companies could expand and increase their market share. I wish they would.

You should pray every night that god will smite the rights-holders, for they are the cause of people preferring physical discs. They hug their discs because they have a film that's worth watching on it that's not available for streaming because the rights-holders fear that if they allow streaming then it might be ripped and hosted up on the Pirate Bay and by not offering streaming they are remaining safe in their rights.

For mail-delivered DVDs that would be greencine.com, which has a much larger selection (or did back when I watched a lot of films).

There were probably 20-30 movies at this year's Seattle International Film Festival I could see myself watching over the year. Trouble is, they're not available at Netflix, or Hulu. There's plenty out there worth watching but most media companies cater to the lowest-common-denominator customer.

It's $8 a month for those two movies. That's $4 a movie. How much did blockbuster charge? How much more time was it to go to blockbuster and back home? It seems we keep wanting more and more for our dollar. Most of the time we get it, but then later when we fall a little short of more and more we're annoyed. Goes to show that you give someone a much better value and they adapt and take it for granted, then reduce their value by a little bit and it's the sky falling. (That last comment was more about the OP, not you specifically--it was your invocation of 2 movies a month being a bad deal that got me to comment in the first place.)

That's true of keys, but misplacing optimism is placing it in a faulty idea rather than not having it altogether.

Yes! Do something notable. Most notable people are still findable on the internets, even hundreds of years later.