Here is a list of the 100 best American films according to the AFI. Less than 5% of them are available to stream over Netflix, but over 95% are available through Netflix DVD. If you limit yourself to Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming, you are watching the results of the best ROI for production investment for their shareholders, not the best art. I'd rather get a great story than a cost effective one, even if it means I have to put in two minutes of physical effort every 90 minutes.

You are confused between two products: "Netflix" which is their streaming service with about 6,000 titles, and "Netflix DVD" which has over 100,000 titles.

Consider understanding what someone has stated before you dive into personal attacks. It makes you look ignorant and petty.

Netflix DVD is the original version of the Netflix product. You get so many DVD/Blu-ray discs at a time, and drop them in the mail after you watch them. No lag/jitter problems and better audio/video quality across the board. It's not an option for people with phones and tablets only, but a much better experience if you have a TV with an HDMI input.

Every month I spend an hour or two looking for movie recommendations, and 10-15 minutes filling my queue. I rarely lose time scrolling through the endless, mostly bland choices on six different streaming services. I have seen more fantastic movies and television in the last six months than I have in the last five years of slogging through broken interfaces.

You've been a corporate apologist for years. Your tongue must be raw from all the boot licking. When are you going to stand up and demand some accountability?

Every time Nintendo launches a new system, there's the same chorus: "It will fail miserably!" And every time, it's wrong - sometimes drastically so. For me the most interesting aspect of this is the smooth transition between mobile and traditional-console gaming experiences. Continuing a console game on the go smoothly and vice-versa is something I've always wanted to be able to do without fiddling around copying save files at best, and without a big fat "nope" at worst. I suspect I'm not alone. I think they're making the right bet here. It's interesting that this aspect is completely unmentioned in the comments so far.

That would require the Earth to be very very special indeed, and I just don't see it.

Not at all. For example, I just generated a random number between 1 and 1e9. It was 869,502,332. By your logic, therefore, that number must have been very, very special. But no, it was just really improbable and that number happened to come up.

It may very well be the same case with life. Life could just be extremely improbable, and Earth just happened to be "the number" that was picked. This is what the Anthropic Principle is all about. Our perceptions are colored by the fact that we're here, so we think, "Since the Earth is not special, therefore, other planets must have life like Earth." It might just be that Earth was the lottery winner.

I said this in another post, but I'll say it again: The best evidence against life being common is the fact that it only happened once on Earth. It's fairly conclusive that all life on Earth has a common ancestor. If abiogenesis were easy and common, it wouldn't just stop once it happened one time, it would happen continuously over the billions of years since it happened for us. But it didn't.

And honestly, life on Earth being completely unique in the universe isn't that hard for me to believe when I look at the utterly insane complexity of cellular machinery. But again, extreme improbability doesn't matter when we're deal with the anthropic principle. We don't sense how long it took for intelligent life to pop up, just like we didn't sense the 13 billion years until you and I were born to think about all this.

likely

We have zero evidence for life being likely, except wishful thinking in the form hand-waving like the utterly useless Drake equation. On the other hand, we do have some suggestive evidence that life itself is improbable. The biggest evidence is that, as near as we can determine, it only happened once on Earth. If life was probable, it should have continued to re-occur, but we're fairly certain that all life has a common ancestor.

I think you mean "wrong" rather than "dangerous". There is a limited impact to our having a wrong opinion on the matter.

This will help you out

Dumbass, improbable does not imply magical. That's the other problem with life being really improbable, a lot of science people get all uptight that the religionists are going to run around gleefully saying "HA!!! THE SCIENTISTS ADMIT GOD IS THE ONLY EXPLANATION!!!"

More like, "it's how it was in the beginning. We all know at this point it's a dumb idea and a huge mistake, and Reddit has proven that editing can work and work well, but we're too set in our ways to admit it's a mistake and thus we'll call it 'working as intended' and pretend that it serves a purpose." See also: Deleting accounts.

Dammit. Reddit has spoiled me on submitting without having to make absolutely sure I didn't make any formatting mistakes and editing later. I wish Slashdot would come into the 21st century.

> I think life at the single cell level might be fairly common. I actually think the single cell is the hard part. People underestimate just how INSANELY complex single cell organisms are. I don't mean a little complex, I mean crazy complex. Look at this animation of DNA replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... One side is duplicated straightforwardly... the other side has to be taken apart, flipped around and reassembled... and this is only one example. It gets even crazier from there. We tend to think of cells as "simple life forms", but they mind-blowingly complicated machines. It would not shock me at all if there was no other example of single cells in the entire universe.

My personal opinion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY rare. It only seems like it ought to be common because of the Anthropic Principle. We're can observe ourselves and thus it seems like life is easy. But everything would be exactly the same if we were completely unique in the universe. In fact, if the universe were cyclic and it took 1e1035 universe cycles for life to happen, things would look exactly the same. We simply have no basis for knowing how probable it is. Given how insanely complex we are, I suspect that it's exceedingly rare.

That's a fake video.