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DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.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

False security. If you're paranoid that Dropbox sends your password back then you shouldn't be using it at all. Period. It wouldn't be hard for them to infer that the frequently changing, fixed size random file they were stashing was a truecrypt volume and for them to enumerate the mount points to see what was in it.

Please read what I wrote. Dropbox could offer to encrypt a protected folder. By default that could be passphrase based encryption. The encryption could be pluggable to allow other forms of encryption. The passphrase based encryption source / algorithm could be submitted for review.

> 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.

"This could be as simple as providing a settings screen where the user enters a passphrase and once enabled all files within a protected folder are encrypted before they leave the client." You are utterly failing to read my post. I didn't say server side encryption.

Read my original message. I was never pushing for server side encryption. As far as I'm concerned server side encryption is pretty worthless. It might stop an employee stealing data without authorization but it doesn't stop the government, or any 3rd party armed with a subpoena coming in and taking your stuff. But DropBox has fat clients. They can implement encryption on the client side before it ever reaches the server. They could also make the encryption pluggable so somebody with a hard token, or a fingerprint scanner, or some weird ass corporate policy could plug their own solution in. It doesn't mitigate all attacks naturally but it does protect users from DropBox being compromised, or being served with some narrow or broad demand to access certain data.

I installed crouton and it totally sucks!
1) you have to run in developer mode which means one accidental miss boot or wake up and you entire hard disk is erased.
2) you get no live updates from google for the chrome portion
3) crouton linux has all sorts of network adapter problems, like seeing it at all, on my machine.
4) the archiving system for saving your current state for a reinistall after you accidentally press the space bar when it tells you to at boot (and reformats the hard drive) is byzantine and only for very serious experts who think there time has no value (e.g. want to buy a cheap computer and then waste tonnes of their time learing the tricks.
5) printing is a total disaster, and at a minumum requires a real computer or a special printer.

How does "sycophant" work here?

If you want to see my surgery from the surgeon's end of things, Here you go!
Yes, they gave me a DVD of it.

iLASIK is done with all lasers, one to make the flap that was previously done by blade, and the usual LASIK after that. Fewer reported complications than with the older blade style. At my six month checkup I was seeing 20/10 from my left eye and 20/15 from my right. I'm 48 and previously wore progressive lenses. They adjusted my right for a closer focal distance.

It all just works, I love it.