HDMI supports HDCP but it is not mandatory. That said, this is only the video portion of HDMI which is signal compatible with DVI. There are no DRM concerns here, they are simply using a commonly available socket.

A vanilla version compiled for ARMv6 will run, yes. Those are, of course, pre-prepped images ready to dump straight to an SD card and boot. There is nothing terribly fancy going on here as Fedora and Ubuntu run on the device readily, once you toss in the firmware blob for the GPU and the driver packages (just like any other distro.)

At which point you get everything available to any common Linux platform.

Whereas with Android you get a platform that shares nothing but a kernel with the rest of the world, using a custom graphics API, custom libc, wonky filesystem, and a heavy dependency on Java. Let alone the lack of a package manager and repository to back it with.

Possibly, but it'll be slow as hell unless it includes drivers for the GPU which, very often, if it runs Android to start then Xorg compatible drivers will be nigh upon impossible to actually get.

a better operating system (a flavor of Android 2.3)

Android? Better than Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/etc?

You're either a fanboy, a Google employee, or utterly unfamiliar with how limiting and inflexible the Android platform is.

A bit further south will put you out of the worst danger from the problems the drug war is causing for Mexico and be a bit closer to the equator as a bonus

FTFY.

Those who believe that science can do more than offer a theory that fits the evidence do not understand the philosophical foundations of science or the limitations of inductive methods.

That's assuming we really need more.

Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith.

A leap of blind faith? Blind faith in what?

One cannot reason around this, and ignorance and scientifistic hand-waving do not provide an alternative, though they may be convincing to some.

An alternative to what? I get the feeling you're suggesting I'm "missing" something, but I'm not sure what.

False.

Agnostic means that you don't believe it's possible to know. Atheist means you hold no belief.

No, you wouldn't. I note elsewhere that it should be possible to safely and securely install keys automatically from a read-only volume. You know, one that was pre-fabricated or required direct, manual intervention to set up.

It might, if no one steps up to manage it.

Someone could do that, though. After all, the APIs aren't copyrightable so pull a LibreOffice: establish a foundation, swap out the trademarks, and move on.

What third party?

Verisign maybe? Someone already established in the industry that isn't obviously biased?

How about the Linux/BSD/Haiku/ReactOS/Hurd community pick a 3rd party or just one of themselves?

And have to run around and convince all the hardware vendors to include them, only to be ignored readily? I suspect the only reason Redhat had success was precisely because they are Redhat.

the dancing bunnies problem.

Ah yes, better to spew some FUD and not approach the problem rather than think of a way it could be done safely. Blame the user and use it as a justification to impose even more onerous restrictions. Why not use it as a justification to bar disabling UEFI or changing keys? Because MS knows they'd get nailed to the wall for being anti-competitive. Again.