Well the discs will last longer than tape if stores right.
Yes all bluray drives will play cds.
You would have to buy the dvd burner, but you can install yourself.
Stick a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the bluray drive
Currently, no. You should get a PS3 to do that.
Not necessarily. You can have a CD/DVD reading drive that does not write.
Both Mac and Windows can't play Blu-ray directly, so you need some third party software. VLC is a free one which can play some non-commercial disc.
DVD burners are not compatible with blue-ray disks. Only a Bluray drive is capable of handling Bluray discs.The term BlueRay is derived from the actual wavelength of the laser that is used in the burning process. This laser emits a Blue color as opposed to the lasers previous which use a laser in a wavelength that emits a red color. The actual Blue ray lasers are much finer ( like comparing a pencil tip to a needle tip) therefor the information written to disc is much more compact and as a result a normal laser can not read information written with a blue ray burner.
DVD players and drives cannot handle Bluray discs, whether recording to them or reading from them. Bluray players and drives on the other hand can use DVD discs as well as Bluray discs.
Computers can only play Blu-Ray discs if their optical drive is a Bluray drive rather than a DVD.
As far as I know, you will need the Mac Blu-Ray Player (or similar) and an external bluray drive for your Mac. It will read a Blu-ray disc from an attached drive and play it in Mac OS X. During the Christmas, there is a big discount on the website, you can get more there:
Use an external hard drive, or USB Flash drive.
Downloading it does not require a DVD burner; only burning it to a DVD does. If you don't have a DVD burner, there is a smaller CD ISO image you can use to install it (as long as you have a CD burner). You can also use UNetbootin to install it to a USB Flash drive from Windows. If you have another hard drive in your system, you can also install it in "Frugal" mode to that drive, although performance will be somewhat impaired.