> 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".

Even Egypt doesn't want to deal with these people. That's why the Egyptian side of the Gaza strip is also closed.

From their point of view, Gaza is full of the same kind of nutbags that they just got done deposing.

Jordan and Egypt both could probably end this mess tomorrow by claiming the respective territories bordering their countries. They don't want the Palestinians anymore than anyone else does.

Two words: New Releases

Netflix streaming is effectively a replacement for all of those channels on cable that are dominated by reruns and old movies. Netflix streaming is great for that kind of stuff. For anything else, it's pants.

For new releases, you will simply have to go someplace else.

> Israel's ethnic cleansing is absolutely a genocide.

There is no such thing.

Otherwise, there simply would not be any Palestinians left by now. The problem would have been sorted out by simply having exterminated everyone from the occupied territories.

THAT is what genocide is.

Don't use terms you clearly don't understand.

Really? You're going to try and pull that stunt? This territory was a well settled part of several empires starting with Rome. The idea that the people that happened to reside there in 1940 had "American Indian" notions of land ownership is absurd and assinine.

These people were former subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

> That's so painfully true because Linux still has choppy playback of Flash/HTML5 video on low-performance hardware. It still is mostly a server OS (a very good one though).

It's bullshit because EVERY platform has choppy playback of Flash video on low-performance hardware. It's a feature of how lame Flash is. It has nothing to do with Linux.

Low performance hardware will happily decode much more interesting video so long as the coders in question have bothered to hook into relevant "shortcuts".

Adobe can't be trusted to do that (on any platform).

Adobe likes making excuses, instead just taking care of business like all the "hobbyists" have done.

In other words: "because Microsoft can't do then no one can".

The entire history of computing pretty much points out how wrong that proposition is. It's more like "If Micrososft can't do it then EVERYONE ELSE can, will, and have done it for 10 years prior".

Just use a little intelligence or barring that, allow the end user to decide which mode to operate. Also don't GUT one of the modes in question while you're at it.

The problem with this fixation on "performance" is that it was all effectively sabotaged by the bloat of operating systems at that time. The resources required weren't keeping pace with the cost of hardware. It became infeasible for most normal consumers to keep up with what things like OS/2 and Windows were demanding.

It doesn't matter how spiffy your 486 is if it is spending all of it's time swapping.

My own 486 had extremely dissappointing performance when compared to a even mere 68000 until RAM prices became low enough to adequately equip a PC.