Dude - Not our fault (or Panasonic's) that you have no personality.

This makes perfect sense. 1080p at 20" isn't really necessary. But if you've invested in Blu-Ray discs for your main home theater system, you don't want to have to buy them again on DVD just to watch them in the bedroom / kitchen / wherever you need that smaller TV. Since the BR player will (presumably) play both DVD and BR discs, you get the convenience of being able to play all of your discs, the space-saving convenience of an all-in-one package, and the cost-effectiveness of not having to buy (and store) multiple copies of the same movie. Oh, and the cost-effectiveness of not having to pay for 1080p when 720p will work just fine at average viewing distances.

It's not always about having all of the features, sometimes it's about having a good combination of features at a price point that makes sense.

More importantly, it's small enough (and hopefully cheap enough) that every device with a clock can now get its time from GPS, which means:

a) no more setting clocks after, say, a power outage
b) no more having 3 or 4 clock devices in a room with different times (think of a kitchen - stove, microwave, wall clock, and weather station in mine).

So try reading the actual text instead of just the headline. The point is that ... well, just read the text, it will tell you!

Cable VOD is another choice. If it dies, there are fewer choices.

I agree with what you say about not limiting choices, but your assertion that Cable VOD should not be one of them is a bit contradictory...

Is movie-watching your full-time job? Seriously, 8000 movies rated on Netflix - I presume that means you've actually *watched* said movies, right?

A little math here - Let's say you started 8 years ago when Netflix was pretty new. That means you'd have had to watch 1000 movies per year. That's about 20 per week (yes, I'm rounding here). If you figure the average movie is 2 hours, that's 40 hours per week spent actually watching movies. Plus the time spent to deliver a thoughtful review.

You did actually *watch* said movies that you reviewed, right?

Since content providers' revenue is primarily from advertisers, one of several things is likely to happen:

1. We'll see a move to embedded or overlay advertising (product placements, banner ads, etc.)
2. Content will become less expensive to produce (reality shows, other "crap" programming)
3. Interesting/valuable content will become pay-only (fee or subscription-based, potentially on-demand)

Actually, you'll probably see all of these become more and more prevalent. Content providers don't provide content out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it to make a living (same reason the rest of us have jobs or run businesses). They are driven by the desire (or need) to make a profit, either to put in their own pockets, or to return to shareholders in the form of dividends and increased stock price.

The alternative, of course, is to have the government subsidize and produce the content...

So when are *you* going to get off your a-double and create that software?

Quit complaining that work that someone else has done isn't good enough, and create some value of your own!

Just because they're going off to create something new doesn't make it acceptable to not work.

Users generally expect both New *AND* Improved. If your engineers can't figure out how to do both at the same time, then fire those engineers and get someone who can do the job. And improved needs to be from the user's point of view, not the engineer's. Too many engineers are willing to deal with all sorts of nonsense to get something to work, just because it's new (Let's see, if I stand on my head while twisting around on the third Thursday of the week while pressing this goofy key sequence, it works 30% of the time. Great, ship it!!). But your average soccer mom, accountant, florist, or whatever just wants the thing to work right, the first time, with no issues.