In this case the OP said "then I download a Blu-ray rip of the movie from a torrent site" so, yeah, It's pretty safe to assume that's where he's getting his rips...

Well, one Bing search and the first hit I get is from Legalzoom which has a pretty straightforward writeup. You may be interested in the section labeled "DMCA Basics", but more relevant to the subject at hand they say "What the DMCA does, through DRM, is make the circumvention illegal, not the actual copying. So, now, even if you own your DVD and are trying to make a personal copy ... it is illegal to bypass DRM protection measures to make your backup". Note I didn't say anything about copyright or fair use, but like it or not you are not legally allowed to bypass even broken DRM to make a personal backup of your own purchased media.

If I remember right, you're still considered to be in violation of copyright because you're using an unapproved rip. Your possession of the disk does not change the status of your torrented file. Now while ripping your own disks for personal use is still a violation of the DMCA (I'm pretty sure 'cause you're breaking the encryption to make the rip), it stays away from the whole torrent thing and may give you a better quality file, if only in terms of quality / file size and what language subtltles you get.

This may come as a surprise to you, but if a law the people don't want in the first place is unenforced, the people don't mind. OTOH, illegal / unconstitutional acts committed against the people by law enforcement are very much frowned upon by the populace at large.
To put it differently, if you're toking up in your back yard and I find a cop didn't bust you, I could care less. OTOH, if I find you're being illegally monitored I'm liable to take offense, as it could just as easily happen / be happening to me.
While you have a point, it looks much better on paper than in the real world.

So we have a decision: Do we want a presentation of reality, raw and un-truncated, or do we trust that the media companies are making good decisions that fairly (whatever that means) present a subset of the information that is unbiased and accurate? What news agency do you consider sufficiently comprehensive while at the same time completely without bias?

Any time someone asks me what "the cloud" is I tell them to substitute the words "someone else's computer on the internet". Almost without exception they look thoughtful for a moment, then suddenly my previously expressed misgivings about putting personal / sensitive data "in the cloud" make more sense to them.

Well, you probably don't need it all with you all the time. For instance, your work machine probably doesn't need all your music and your tablet can hopefully do without your software install files and client information. A little moderation and a home server or NAS to hold everything should do fine. Set up some remote access (VPN or SSH tunnel) for the times you don't have something with you and breathe easier knowing your data is entirely (mostly) under your own control.

Funny you should say that. I have an old Mac Mini with a bunch of external drives hooked up to it. Every other week it turns itself on, plays the Imperial March from Star Wars and runs a Carbon Copy Cloner incremental duplication of the files from my server. It emails me when it's done so I can turn it off, as there are multiple jobs and I can't tell which one will finish last. When it's done I turn off the mini and it sits there another two weeks. Every so often (when I think of it) I sync up to an old Drobo as well then unplug it. This means that yes, I do in fact have an offline system powered off 99% of the time. Sadly I do not have a vault but otherwise I have three copies of (almost) all my data at any given time.

Well...

You know, you're right. I meant the subset of Muslims who make up ISIS, and I misspoke. Next time I'll be sure to say some Muslims. Care to retract your sweeping generalizations about "The American Christians"? The act of burning someone to death is a barbaric act. Doesn't matter who does it. I feel pretty confident this is a rational and defensible position.

Well, kidnapping, torturing and enslaving / selling children for one. Putting people in cages and setting them alight for another. Let's not get started on their treatment of women.

I'm... speechless...

So here's your source article, no citations for the "thousands" figure anywhere. There are two examples given, Sam Hose in 1899 and Jesse Washington in 1916. Note that these are examples of past barbarities Americans committed and they're documented so we can learn from them and not repeat history. This is not happening today in America, and there is probably nobody alive now who was not an infant when it happened. Can you say the same about the Muslims that murdered Muadh al Kasasbeh?

History? Speaking as an Atheist in America, I don't think Christians (or any significant number of Americans) have tortured anyone to death by burning them in a cage in a very long time.

While Christians may well have caused as much painful suffering and death as Muslims, I'm not seeing them doing that now. Once again, I can't say the same thing about ISIS.
Also note that your ideas of what I should say are largely irrelevant to me at this time.
Please feel free to continue grinding that axe though!

So... this makes burning the pilot OK somehow? Just as FOX showing it is irrelevant to the fact it happened, that the US Army (apparently) did horrible things to someone does not make the murder of this pilot any less of a barbarity.

While this may be the case, there also seems to be that pesky fact they seem to have put someone in a cage, lit them on fire, and burned them to death.

I would advance the argument that the function of a news agency is to report the news. Not some of the news or the news you / I approve of. This is what's really happening in the world around us, without protecting us from things we may find objectionable or viewpoints differing from our own. How can we possibly make rational decisions or hold properly informed opinions based on only some of the information about a given situation?

What if you have a TV but it's only hooked up to a computer running Flex? Even worse, what if nobody watches the damned thing because they can just stream to a tablet / phone?
Yeah, I chose "don't know" as well.

Assuming a finite supply of resources, helping some people succeed necessarily means that others are not helped.
It is therefore important that we choose a good way of selecting who gets the assistance. I strongly suspect that reverse discrimination (giving preference to females, low income students and minorities as explicitly stated in TFA) does not result in ideal selection criteria in this situation.
Maybe something involving academic achievement and a desire to learn the subject matter (regardless of gender, social standing or anything else unrelated to the subject matter) might be more appropriate?

Let's keep this problem in the proper perspective. There's only 9 of them in the first place.
Unless you're an elf.
Or a dwarf.
Or a hobbit.