A personal computer can be used to do work on. That means it needs to have available the apps I need. I do photography (as most people), video, office docs and programming, mostly.

My PC needs a good photo management package, can't get one for a Chromebook. Equivalent of Lightroom or onOne. It needs a quality editing package as well, Photoshop is the only real competitor, it must have a decent office package (partly check) and video editing software (none exists).

Yeah, right. Give me Darkroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro on that "fresh new computer experience". perhaps you meant "frustrating new computer..."

No

Show me a PC customer who wants anything but Windows or OSX on their desktop/laptop.

Since Windows NT 3.51 Windows has been, by some margin, the best desktop operating system out there. Nobody else has come close. So, what lack of merit is this you are speaking of?

Most people are blind (and morons too, but that's another discussion). I'm not. Neither is anyone with a mild interest in photography or art. The fact that morons will buy snake oil, believe in astrology or Jesus and feel better when taking homeopathic medicines doesn't mean that peddling BS and charging for it is OK, nor does it mean that people that do not buy into BS like 42" UHD screens are snobs.

In reality there is a significant difference between up-scaled content and native HD. It's there, it is not only measurable, but it is easily visible. If the blind morons don't see it, they need to be educated. Same as with Jesus and astrology.

No, it will not. That's not even theoretically possible. An upscaler simply can not add information that isn't there. I have worked with both real-time upscaling and non-real-time, which is significantly better since it can spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to add detail. I have never seen any upscaler able to come close to the original material. Not from SD to HD nor from HD to 4K.

That depends. If the material is of recent production it is not, it is downscaled either from 4K or 8K. If the images were available in decent quality on film, it is probably scanned at 4K and downscaled to HD. To see the difference, get the Blue Planet series, watch the Seas of Life part. Most of the Blu-Ray is filmed on film, scanned at high quality and down-sampled to 1080p. Most of the under-water scenes are shot in SD. To me, the transitions from HD to up-scaled SD material is jarring. Very jarring. Others do not notice.

I own several of the very, very best ones. They can not touch "native" HD material. Not even close. I also shoot quite a bit in 4K and down-sample that to 1080P. 4K down-sampled to 1080P blows material that is shot in 1080P out of the water. The quality difference is staggering. At 1080P.

I was in the same boat as Anonymous Coward GP. My company paid me the same as regular workers, the lawyers were working hard to get me a Green Card (and I did get one too) etc. The H1B scare on /. always surprises me. A couple of questions:

1. Is there a high level of unemployment in the sector that uses the most H1Bs?
   I left the US a handful of years back, but when I was there, that was not the case. I worked for a start-up growing from four to forty employees when I was there, hiring engineers was always an issue, we simply could not get enough qualified applicants from the US and was regularly forced (by our needs) to get H1Bs.
2. Are typical H1B workers in the US paid worse than others with a similar level of education?
   Again, when I lived in the US, paying for a house, a cleaner, a nanny and a decent car on my salary was not an issue. My wife got a work permit and worked in a non-stem field, her salary was less than half of mine, but her job also required at least a bachelor.
3. Are US engineers seeing their salaries going below people with an equivalent education level or lower?
   I'd love to see numbers indicating this. I hear from "Silicon Valley" about over-paid people driving people with "normal" pay out of the city and way out of the region due to property price increases. Are these stories untrue? The number of CEOs in these companies are not enough to make property prices sky-rocket, that phenomenon must be caused by lots and lots of "regular Joe's" in the tech companies having significantly higher salaries than the average in the area.

Wooosh

Seriously. You still believe the population explosion myth? You need to read a publication on the issue that is newer than about 1970.

Nope. The naming does, but the count doesn't. In my end of the world the first floor is the lowest you can get (unless there is a basement) but in the UK, the first floor is my second floor. We'd not disagree on the number of floors though.

As someone else said, C#, for example, also fits those criteria, is open source etc. Once you have done a bit of work in C#, going back to Java is kinda painful. Design by Committee, which is what Java is now, is certainly a less efficient way of killing something than a bullet to the head, but it is also more painful.

Perl

First, I'd recommend (futile, I know) you RTFA. Or at least what was posted here. The "Now your boss" isn't particularly relevant to a high-school student.

You haven't been paying attention. .Net (VB is .Net) is officially open source and available for the platforms you mention. The C# compiler is even open source. No possibility of Embrace Extend Extinguish (if you don't understand why I can't help). Also, the language used in High School to teach kids the fundamentals of programming has no relevance to anything done for work. Ever.

BZZZT! WRONG!