Now all we need is an app market for these :) I'd love to have a website I could go to to see what people have put on these and try them out....of course in a lot of cases you would only want to have one app on there at a time, but it'd be fun to swap out just using a download. Want it to be a file server? download the app. need a simple web database? download the app., need it to do X? see if there's already an app for it...

knowing how we got to the point we're at now with computers is, to me, one of the most important ways to advance them.
If you know what threads have been followed already you can figure out new threads to follow without wasting time re-following things that have already been done to the end and back. And of course there's always the good thing of not re-inventing the wheel without realizing it. Wheels need re-invented from time to time, but if you don't know it's already been done, you prolly won't add anything new to the process.

I see a lot of posts taking learning history as programming in basic or assembly and getting hands on with the early tech. That's good if you want to just program, maybe it even counts as history for that part of computers, but I'd think learning history means looking at how computers got to where we are now by finding out the radical shifts in thought and sometimes controversial ideas that landed us with this amazing technology we use every day now...

Serious question about the summary: the comment about the outer planets shielding us from collisions caught my attention. Does the Moon have any similar ability? does it help steer asteroids away from us due to it's size compared to Earth's?

I think the moon caused most of those conditions: stressing the Earth via tidal forces stirs up the core, breaks up the crust, evens out our wobble. The Moon caused us. The Moon seems to be awfully suspicious. so, 2 possibilities:
1) it like us, and we should worship it
2) aliens put it there and we just have to find the big rockets on the dark side that prove it and follow the manufacture's stickers on 'em to our creators.

only thing I can't figure out for 2) is if they made us, who made them? hmmm...

I got some good links and lots of suggestions. Thanks for the input!

Let's estimate a collection of about 400 movies. To be conservative, say stick one in the player 4 nights our of 5 weeknights (how often does an average person watch TV? couple of hours a night? substitute a movie instead). Add say 3 movies for the weekend. That's about 14 hours a week. 400 movies (at 2 hours each) is enough for 57 weeks or so. Just over a year. Doesn't seem like I'm dedicating my life to sitting in front of the tube then. Also take into account that putting on a movie doesn't mean stopping all else. The TV makes good background to other stuff. I just don't watch much live TV...

Did that, do that (go through the list every once in a while and get rid of the ones I don't watch anymore). The collections is not catching dust. I use the disks currently. After giving up cable (realizing that most of the stuff I actually watched I already own) it's now just easy to hit the collection when I want to watch something. Granted I don't go through all them every week, but I also don't buy more every week. only a few on the shelves sit there for "gotta have 'em all" urges and don't get played much.

Just to fill in some detail, I have the collection alphabetized on shelves, and yup, I can walk over and get them easy enough. Just trying to declutter the movies (and possibly games, CD-ROM's, blue ray, whatever) like I did the audio CD's a while back. I ripped the audio CD's to disk easy enough, and was looking to do same with others but ripping movies I kept running into little issues. Nothing that would make it impossible, just was hoping that since discs were common for several generations of media, there was something out already to just drop the discs into. The Sony player looked promising, but it's depreciated by Sony and got lack luster reviews. Sometimes, even with unlimited HD storage, it's just nice to have the disc available for any media...

It's not so much laziness as clutter. the bookshelves take up needed space and I'd hoped discs being common format, someone would have had a solution by now. Just hoping anyway...

The first hit I get is to the Kintronics page which seems data center oriented and I couldn't find the prices or ordering info beyond "contact us". I assume I missed part of the site...