With a good 2A+ PSU, it seems the B+ can now supply up to a total of 1.2A over USB (compared to ~600mA with the older model B).

All I can say is, I have something in the region of 300 1080p movies, mostly H.264 encoded, all of which play with no trouble at all. Google it, YouTube it, there are countless people doing the very same thing.

If you're not just trolling, report your issue in the Raspbmc forums, ideally with a link to a sample video for others to test with. I'll quite happily test a video or two on my Pi if you supply some links.

And whilst you're at it, where's the SSD, SATA, Thunderbolt, optical I/O, gigabit ethernet and built in Wifi?

It is quite obvious that the Pi is designed for a very specific price point; one that gets it into the most hands possible. Every dollar you add to the production cost, makes it much less likely to get into the hands of people who would otherwise not be tinkering with such things. If you need something more capable, look elsewhere, the Pi is not for you.

I've been running Raspbmc (the most popular XBMC distro for Raspberry Pi) for a long time, and it has been excellent. It's small enough to be hidden behind my TV, and with an added remote control, offers one of the best user interfaces you'll find in a 'set top box'. Streams all my 1080p movies and TV shows flawlessly (*), and handles pretty much every codec under the sun. All for ~$40 (including HDMI cable, USB PSU, SD card and MPEG-2 license for hardware acceleration).

If you search for "Raspbmc" on YouTube, you'll see my experience is the norm. If you have any specific issues, post in the Raspbmc forums and someone will most likely sort you out. :)

As for Raspbian, I'm also running this on another Pi. It's certainly not going to replace x86 servers any time soon, but it certainly has its uses. Maybe your expectations are too high for a $35, 700MHz, 512MB machine?

* Apparently, it may struggle with some very high bit rate encodes, but I've yet to see this in practice and is unlikely to be an issue for most people.

As long as all drivers keep their eyes closed.

Depends what you intend exposing.

Amazon already have their fingers in movies, music, ebooks and app markets. With the leading vendors of smartphones having their own content deals and distribution partnerships (that generally don't include Amazon) tied to their devices, Amazon may see the move into smartphones as essential to getting their existing and future services into people's hands. Similar to what Google has done with Nexus devices, Amazon could sell smartphones at very low margins, or even at a loss, if in doing so they can protect and enhance their other revenue streams. They've now got a lot of experience and brand awareness with their e-readers and tablets, so it's not like they are starting from scratch.

There are alternatives, although I can't comment on how they compare with OpenSSL.

GnuTLS (LGPLv2.1)

Mozilla Network Security Services (Mozilla Public License)

PolarSSL (GPL2 and proprietary).

MatrixSSL (GPL and proprietary

A small level of radiation is one thing; it's the dihydrogen monoxide I worry about.

Working in a professional environment as part of your education can be a very valuable experience and shouldn't be sniffed at. I had the good fortune to do something similar when I was younger, and looking back at it now, I can really appreciate how it helped sharpen my skills and gave me greater insight into what real world software development is like.

Maybe. But then as with other new players in various industries, the new players often end up being the R&D teams for the longer established businesses. When Tesla finally get close to the sweet spot of making money and having ironed out all the kinks, every other car company with deeper pockets and already established service centres, etc, can jump in and drown Tesla at the bottom of the pool.

OpenWRT rocks, but as far as I am aware, there is no support for the type of bandwidth management the OP is after within the web interface. I'm sure you can achieve the same control from the CLI with a few extra packages and command line magic, but it sounds like the OP specifically wants all this to be done from the web interface.

I have not heard of Lucas Nussbaum or Neil McGovern before, but if retaining Lucas Nussbaum at the helm means Debian will continue to release what is IMO the best Linux server distribution out there, then there are no complaints from me.

Ah, ok, that makes good sense. Hopefully it all goes well and we'll see a dry, and soft, landing soon.