I thought VP8 was somewhere between H.264 baseline and H.264 main in rate/distortion terms and VP9 was on par with H.265. Correct me if I'm wrong though.

Once both Firefox and Chrome support VP9, YouTube's HTML5 player will probably be using VP9 to save your bandwidth, especially when viewers like you turn on 720p or higher resolution.

Even children of the working poor?

Yes. Where the number keys and the punctuation keys are on big boy keyboards. How to exceed 60 wpm by touch typing. How to WASD around a model of the school building shooting paintballs at your intramural opponents.

Mario Teaches Typing hasn't been updated since 1996 according to Wikipedia. How well does it work in Windows 7, 8, or 8.1? Or are schools prepared to hunt down a Windows 95/98 license per machine and run it in a virtual machine?

Watching video lessons at home would fix the "all we have is an iPad/Xbox" problems so long as the video lessons are compatible with Safari for iOS and IE for Xbox 360. But it still leaves the problem of needing to buy a computer or device in the first place and subscribe to wired broadband at home, as watching too many videos on a smartphone over 3G/4G will cause the parent to have to pay the carrier when the student incurs a data overage.

Nowadays would something like The Typing of the Dead be more popular?

That depends on whether they're running the programming class in Excel's macro language because "it's already installed".

With the sorry state of student transit in some cities, it might be hard for a student who stays after school to complete his assignments to get home from school. Is Chicago any better?

Provided that the other students haven't already reserved all the PCs at the library.

If computer science is a requirement, then how will students in households without a general-purpose computer complete their homework assignments? A lot of households rely on iPhones, iPads, and/or game consoles, which don't offer much in the way of end-user programmability.

This was true of CGA, but after EGA and VGA became popular, John Carmack figured out how to use these newer cards' scroll registers and built Commander Keen in 1990.

The Commodore 64 had hardware pixel-level smooth scrolling and hardware sprites, putting it close to the 8-bit consoles (Sega Master System and Nintendo Entertainment System) in capability. The Apple IIGS had better color depth but no ability to scroll the screen, so games had to either flip screens or scroll jerkily, like ColecoVision and Spectrum and MSX games.

Unlimited data plans? In Slashdot's home country? It's less likely than you think.

What country and what carrier are you on?

Unfortunately, the software publishers with market power in several industries have not yet seen such incentive.

That doesn't help if the employer whose IT policy you're responsible for building happens not to be "a government body or a sufficiently large corporation".

Your costs won't be so fixed once you start incurring overages on your data plan.

The first result from Google windows 8 hosts file explains that Windows Defender in Windows 8 reverts certain additions to the hosts file to fight phishing malware that hijacks well-known web sites. But if you know what you're doing, you can exclude C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts from Windows Defender. Another, possibly more flexible way is to run a DNS proxy on localhost that interprets a separate hosts file.