You obviously haven't lived or even traveled anywhere where there are mountains.

Newsflash: the world isn't flat, and radio signals have difficulty passing through hundreds (or thousands) of feet of solid rock.

There's no cell service where I live. Radio reception is fuzzy. I can barely get satellite TV due to the position of the mountains. My internet has to be DSL as Comcast will never run cable out here.

And Netflix/Hulu/Amazon will happily stream you that fast? I highly doubt it. I have a 6Mbit/s DSL connection and Netflix won't even saturate that, although Amazon and Hulu do a better so it's not my internet connection throttling Netflix.

My car can go a lot faster than the 20MPH it was stuck in traffic the other day doing for a long time too. The potential of the pipe is only one factor.

Yeah, I wonder... it's so awful here:

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The comparison was about legit physical media versus legit streaming services. Not about illegally pirated movies. That's an entirely separate issue and has nothing to do with what I was talking about

Most of the USA isn't cities. City folks have an awfully distorted sense of what is "normal" and have no concept of what the rest of the world live like. My town has a population of less than 4000. The largest "city" in my state has barely over 40,000.

I have a movie collection numbering in the many hundreds. All are on original physical media.

All the reasons that people have for streaming versus playing off discs I agree with... but there's one kicker: once you get past the annoying menus, notices, and previews, and actually get to the movie, the quality can't be compared. Not many people have a 30-50 Mbit/s internet connection that can handle the full bitrate of 1080p video with lossless 5.1 sound, and I can't think of any streaming source that would send that even if someone did. They're all horribly compressed up the ass with lossy compression... noticable even on my 40" TV but especially so on the 92" projector.

Unskippable menus suck, and online libraries are certainly convenient... but when it comes time to watch the movie, I do kind of want it to actually look good. But I guess I'm a dying breed.

Actually, they had done a safety study and determined that a large number of injuries were caused by keys being driven into the driver's knees. So the relocation was mostly a safety issue.

Not to mention they crash-tested their cars against dummy moose...

All these comparisons with Netflix fail to address one critical point: video quality

I can stream the same movie on Netflix and Hulu on the same device (Roku), at the same time, on the same internet connection. If I stream that movie on Netflix, the stream doesn't fully-utilize my internet connection and is noticeably poor. If I cancel, then immediately start streaming the same movie on Amazon Prime, same device, just moments later, it saturates my internet connection and looks considerably better. I can switch back and forth and the results are consistent. I can also recreate this with other movies available on both. I've done this on multiple different nights... the test results are always the same.

Not to say that if Amazon ups the price of Prime that we'll keep it... I'm not a big fan of streaming in-general. But to compare Netflix and Amazon one really needs to take into account the video quality. Netflix quality is absolutely HORRIBLE and I can't stand watching content off it, and choose Amazon or Hulu whenever possible. Of course, in this day and age people seem content with Youtube level of over-compressed shit so it's probably a lost cause...

If you're paying $30/blu-ray disc you're either impatient or doing it wrong. I don't feel a burning need to watch a movie within some arbitrarily-short timeframe after its release just so I can keep up with the Joneses. As a result of that and buying things on sales/deals, I average $5-$10 per blu-ray movie, even very popular blockbuster releases. My movie collection now spans over 400 movies, most of which are blu-ray. And I know friends and family with more.

One might point out that if I had taken all that money, I could have instead paid for 25 years or more of Netflix or what have you. The issue there is that then I'm at the mercy of whatever movies the streaming provide decides I can watch today, and maybe will pull tomorrow, as well as the condition of my internet connection. I've already had maybe a 10% success rate searching Hulu Plus/Netflix/Amazon Prime for a given movie we want to watch, as well has seen frightening lists of what movies Netflix decides to "discontinue" from time to time.

No thanks. I'll keep my physical media, thank you.

"Also, you can't buy a new computer with Windows 7"

Very much NOT true. Where I work we buy plenty of Dell computers with Win7 all the time. Just placed another large order this past Friday in fact.

I'm still trying to figure out why the Wii (not Wii U, original Wii) and the Roku use the exact same sound effects in the UI.

My main use of Google Reader these days is to consolidate the RSS feeds from several specific news sources of my choosing. Then I pass this RSS list to the Google Reader Android ticker widget which is the best of its class. This allows me a nice, clean rotating news widget with the specific news sources I want. Not only that, but I can manage the feeds used from my desktop.

I have not found anything else that can do this, or looks as good, let alone both. I have no alternative once Google Reader goes away. :(

Agreed about the batteries and MicroSD card. This is 2013. There's no excuse for lacking these features. All my cell phones have had removable batteries back to my original Nokia candybar. On Android a single battery can't get you through a full day of use if you're a serious user, and not everyone can get to a charging source constantly. Keeping spare charged batteries is critical. Plus not everyone wants to replace their whole phone just because the original battery (a $5 part) only holds 50% of its original capacity now, when the phone is otherwise sufficient.

And expandable storage isn't just about running out of what is built-in to the device. It's critical for backups should something happen to the phone hardware (failure, damage, etc). Pop the memory card into a replacement phone, restore from Titanium Backup, and you're back up and running in short order. No other solution via the "cloud" or PC backup comes close to being as flexible, convenient or powerful. I have my phone set to automatically back up to itself (external MicroSD card) nightly, no user intervention required.

All my cell phones back to early 2000s (when it was still called "Transflash") have had expandable storage. I'm not going to start giving that up just because some manufacturers are assholes and are trying to push consumers into being conditioned/brainwashed to not expect/want that anymore.

This is 2013. Anyone trying to market a phone needs to stop pulling an Apple, insulting consumers and treating us like imbeciles. Stop gluing the case together and taking away critical options. If we wanted a stupid i-device we'd go buy a fucking iPhone. But we won't: we want Android, which normally COMES with all this. Get with the program or GTFO of the marketplace. Samsung, now HTC. It's fucking infuriating. No removable battery, or no expandable storage = no sale. Period.

I love G+ and hate FB, but it's not surprising G+ is having trouble gaining traction. For example, it's missing some pretty critical features, such as "events" and the ability to exclude individuals when posting something (there are times when I want to post something visible to all my friends except 1 or 2, just for the sake of this comment and not enough to give them their own circle, thereby breaking their permissions on everything else I posted). Considering Google already has a slick calendar, their lack of any sort of event feature is mindblowing. Arranging events is one of the main reasons I used FB in the first place.

Umm, I buy my American, rBGH-free milk for $2.77/gallon, thank you very much. You might want to do more research before incorrectly claiming that all American milk is produced with hormones. I'd hazard to say that most of what I see in the grocery store states quite clearly on the container that it's rBGH-free. If you can't find it here, you're not looking very hard.