> No porn and no torrenting, and no hacker tools are not a disadvantage for schools use.

Lack of "hacker" tools is a disadvantage for any educational environment. Students might actually be expected to create something rather than just being mindless consumers.

There have already been educational programs mired by patent attacks that have been pre-emptively banned from the iPad. The corporate IT mentality filters out more than just "the bad stuff".

This much should be obvious to ANYONE that has had to deal with the corporate IT mentality.

With Apple, you get an extra layer of that for free. Your own internal IT busybodies don't even get their chance to kick you in the balls. Apple beats them to it.

> If only tablets had on-screen keyboards or supported Bluetooth keyboards or keyboard docks!

In other words, spend extra money to turn your tablet into some kind of laptop wannabe. You're trying to make the tablet something it's not in order to make up for it's inherent flaws when the simple and obvious thing is to buy the thing that already meets your requirements.

> There's a reason GDocs is free...

Yes there is. It's a solved problem. It was a solved problem 20 years ago. It's simply not a task that anyone should be paying money for anymore.

> everyone having their own PC turned into an admin nightmare.

This is entirely the fault of Microsoft. Apple itself used to even acknowledge this fact before it gave up on being a computer company. Remember those old commercials you never see anymore.

This was never a "PC problem". It was always a Microsoft problem. They poisoned the well.

A Chromebook is little more than a very locked down PC running Unix. Even an iPad is ultimately the same thing.

One of the things about Civ V that quickly stuck me was how much less crash prone the Linux version is when compared to the Windows version. I had co-op players constantly going offline because their version was crashing all the time.

> What's wrong with that? It's one of the cores of the only fair type of government we've found so far that works, communism.

Yes. It worked out so well that corruption caused it to implode in a most spectacular manner. Just ask anyone from the former Soviet block how much communism "works".

You're a silver spoon member of the 1% by comparison.

It takes more than wishful thinking and a single political party with no check on it's power to run a country effectively.

> First, why analyze the percentage of computer and math degree holders who hold an IT job? Why is a mathematics degree automatically equivalent to a CS degree?

Computer Science is ultimately a branch of mathematics. That much should be obvious to anyone that's been through a decent University program.

> If we're going to open up our southern border...

The problem with H1-Bs is not that they "feruhners". The problem with H1-Bs is that they are an underclass that's at the mercy of the company that imported them. They are even lower on the totem pole than underpaid undocumented Mexicans.

If you are an H1-B, ICE knows exactly where to find you if you get too "uppity".

> But then I have to do that for every single disc. And I value my time.

What time? You stick the disk in and type run.

There is no "time" involved. The computer does all of the work. It chugs along quietly while you go do something else.

The part of the process that requires my direct interaction with the computer actually takes LESS time than futzing with a console player would.

There's no need to "pretend' that disk menus are useless. They serve no real purpose for 99.9% of users. If anything, they are a bother.

> Yes, you can muddle through all the playlists by hand and extract everything you want, but sometimes you just want a family member to be able to play the damn thing.

Actually, if you want to play the "joe average" card here it makes much more sense to rip the media and present a simple menu option so that "a family member is able to play the damn thing".

The whole Tivo/iTunes/XBMC interface is MUCH simpler for rube relatives than anything that a DVD or BluRay will present to you. It's f*cking ironic that people will defend this sh*t. Each disk is it's own personal precious little snowflake with it's own interface and quirks.

It's the exact opposite of what all of the HID groupies say you should be doing with user interfaces.

If you want to "just play the movie", the interface that something like XBMC gives you is FAR superior to the usual consumer option.

> Sadly, the Raspberry Pi lacks SATA, which is what the unit uses to connect to the optical drive.

There's no good reason you couldn't use a USB device which would be the usual approach for plugging an optical drive into a small low profile machine such as the PI.

> Why use a regular player? Because it "just works".

Kind of sort of after a fashion with lost of nonsense and bother.

I ditched my last console DVD player because "just works" doesn't really work.

> The experience is overall smoother.

No it isn't. A PC provides a much better playback experience. It's simpler, more direct, and completely under your control. You can enforce a single standard UI across multiple playback devices.

Ripping a BD can be a pain but it's usually worth the effort even for a rental.

> Yes... because there is no way the compression schemes of ripped files can improve over time.

Except we aren't talking about "ripped files", we're talking about STREAMING. What you can achieve with genuine ripped files will actually make the streaming services all look hopelessly pathetic.

Streaming services suffer from the same problem as cable providers. They are corporations that want to cut corners and they know that the average American will eat dirt.

The entire "download-as-you-go" concept is fatally flawed.

Bandwidth caps aren't even the biggest problem here despite being the likely show stopper.

> "A man threatened to rape my mouth with a shit-covered horse-cock this afternoon."

Oh really? I don't see any bruises on your hands from where you beat the crap out of him.

I'm really surprised that more women don't use the social norms and double standards to their advantage and take the opportunity to lash out. They might find that they even get some assistance with the beat down.

> What do you do if the movie you want to watch hasn't been released on DVD either?

A much much MUCH smaller problem.

Your own remarkably obscure examples demonstrate this.

Streaming requires permission from the relevant publisher THIS SECOND. That permission can be REVOKED an hour from now.

On the other hand, what's available on physical media represents everything that was consented to EVER. That consent can NEVER be revoked. We can trade old copies of that media until the publishers get blue in the face.

"It was never published on DVD" is a much smaller problem than "it is not currently available for streaming".