> And I have ones that have failed.

My last Archos 5 with spinny rust inside of it refuses to die. It's fortunate too since no other device I've seen can match it for local storage and disconnected (from the cloud) operation.

I've yet to have an SD card fail. If anything they will become obsoletely-tiny before actually breaking.

It's funny that someone thinks that multiple redundant server farms and the entire network infastructure of the internet and all the phone providers is less of a resource hog than a few tiny bits of electronics.

That is true perhaps.

However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service. It's really rich to see ISPs complain that they are getting too much traffic all in one direction then that's how they f*cking design their service.

Verizon is selling massive downloads. So is every other consumer ISP.

> Why bother compressing?

Uses much less space and yields you something small enough to fit on a phone while still being useful for a 60 inch TV or 120 inch projector. Besides, most playback devices don't handle MPEG2 very well. They're all expecting h264.

DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.

Proper tablet inputs typically are PC peripherals, not the limited functionality that comes with consumer tablets.

Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet. The "direct manipulation" on a consumer tablet is crude and clumsy.

> 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.