an invention to stop the monstrosity that is Wal-mart - duping people into thinking they're saving money, but instead buying cheap, disposable, foreign products or products altered to a sub-standard grade to meet Wal-mart's price point.

I give my ideas to Wal-mart for a one-time prize and they rake in money year after year on its sale? Go blow that smoke up your consumers' collective butts.

Indeed. Isn't this the point of literature, fact or fiction, for us to learn from possibilities and history so we don't make the same mistakes in "real life?"

Sit in WoW trade chat spamming how SW:TOR is going to kill WoW while you wait for the EA beta servers to respond.

I was debating whether or not to cancel my DVD by mail subscription. The streaming was out the door due to lack of good/current content. This e-mail from Reed today nailed it for me in one sentence:

Borders, maybe. But when was AOL ever great?!?! Unless it was the only possible way of getting onto the internet, AOL hands-down sucked compared to any of their peers or predecessors, namely Prodigy, CompuServe or Bubba's tin-can ISP. The only thing AOL ever did was support the CD production/duplication industry and the postal service.

If Netflix is using these two companies as a role model, they're already on the path to failure.

I'll concur with Cayenne8 since I've dealt with closing a government data center in the past.

Granted what I was involved with was migrating and upgrading, but I saw hundreds of perfectly usable, 1-3 year old servers stacked in the old data center, hard drives pulled and drilled and the servers sold to a scrap company.

Complete and utter waste. I seriously doubt TFA servers will be treated any differently regardless of age.

I think it may be a method to generate more profit.

What happens when two companies start working together, exchanging goods for services, etc? Their overhead goes up because now they are dealing with two different cost/profit models that are pulling from different budgets. Typically the primary reason for companies to merge is to reduce those costs and bring a service "inside."

The drilling companies will see a rise in costs because they won't have a parent company to absorb overages or internal costs. The refiner will see a rise in processing and administration fees having to deal with an "external" company. Add to both of these all the standards requirements, federal regulations, etc.

Bottom line is these costs will be passed on to the consumers so that BOTH companies can continue to make ungodly profits.

Watched Captain America and was impressed with the genuine characters, story and unobtrusive special effects - they added without overpowering the scenes. The only issue I had was right at the beginning - Chris Evans' voice not matching the body; I became accustomed to it after a few minutes. Chris made Steve's character completely believable that he was pure, honorable and just wanted to do the right thing. Those are qualities lost today even in our fantasy heroes.

I made the mistake of trying to continue my movie high by going to see Transformers 3. Ugh! I dozed off several times, but didn't feel like I really missed anything. Besides the eye candy of Carly, the voice acting of Nimoy was the only decent part of the movie. Buzz Aldrin himself was just freaking cool, but not nearly enough to save this film. Such a shame for the franchise.

Having worked at an IT company that supported the U.S. government, I saw first hand how a load of bureaucratic hogwash can bring an operation to a halt. I fully understand the "skill" needed to navigate government procurement, approval, change, spending, etc. It's the biggest time and money wasting factor in any operation. Because the department heads feel everything needs to be checked, double-checked, triple-checked, signed off, filed in 12 different ways, audited twice and then run through oversight, by the time the work gets done (if it does) it is either no longer needed or outdated. Past actions of unscrupulous politicians, administrative staff and government employees have led to this necessity.

Add to this the people problem. Everyone I ever dealt with in the department I supported was extremely unskilled and ignorant of the knowledge they needed to know to do their job. I know for a fact that work days are short, especially Fridays and thanks to web monitoring software, I know most of the employees only spend about an hour a day of actual work. Now put this sluggish, ignorant person in charge of making a technical change to an application, a server or god forbid, a whole data center. Top it off with the IT barrage of regulations and procedures (SOX, ITIL, ISO, etc.) and you have the epitome of steering a huge ship with a small wooden paddle.

In the three years I supported them, I only ever saw one major implementation of new equipment, one successful disaster recovery exercise and multiple misses of the DNS SEC implementation.

With my inside knowledge I have no faith in our government in any department. I'm surprised ANYTHING gets done ever. Except, of course, pay raises. Those happen immediately, without fail and completely without merit.

I am seriously looking for this content you speak of. I spent about an hour last night looking through Starz page by page. Mostly crap.

In the Browse DVDs, yes, there are a few thousand. I look through the genres, searches or the recommended based upon my past ratings.

In the Starz Play, Netflix even posts a bullet of "Approximately 1,000 titles available from Starz Play" at the top.

I can only guess your tastes in movies are much, much broader than mine. We've been watching DVDs from Netflix the last 3 years. We basically caught up with all the movies we might have missed in the past few years, so now I watch for new releases, search for classics in the genres we like and catch up on TV series. I have about 75 in my DVD queue, but only 25 in the instant play.

While I was not including the Starz play in my original post, I checked into it last night. I was hoping to justify staying with Netflix for the streaming side. The DVD side is already not worth it as more and more DVDs arrive heavily scratched. Despite cleaning them using the techniques on the sleeve, a portion of the movie will still skip.

Starz play is 38 pages of 31 titles (1178) plus another page of 18 for a total of 1196 titles. The *AGE* of most of those titles immediately decreases the value for a viewer wanting recent (last 20 years) movies. The number of series of old television shows (Gene Autrey, Perry Mason) further decreased the value.

With both the Netflix DVD on demand library and the Starz play, yes, there are several thousand titles. Unless you greatly enjoy old, low-rated or low-budget movies and shows, though, the selection is significantly smaller. For my tastes a few hundred, half of which I've watched over the last three years of my subscription.

I'm already checking into Amazon Prime and Blockbuster for my movie fix when I cancel Netflix.