Similarly, if I create a chalk drawing of a foot or a bicep or a car tire in art class, using school materials and equipment time and instruction, I expect that this drawing will be mine at the end of the day.

If someone wants to use a copy of it for their own work, that's a slightly different matter.... but it will always remain mine unless otherwise and explicitly negotiated and agreed upon.

Where is the line between having a spirited discussion on how an administrator can lack common sense...and providing their contact details (regardless of how public they may be) to a public forum?

I believe such a line is defined in post #49746421.

Either way, it already was public information. There is no such thing as information being more public or less public -- it either is public information, or it is not.

That already-public information might be more-popularized in one instant than it was in the last instant doesn't seem to matter much.

Right. I know this. It's also available from that main site, directly, via anonymous FTP....which, AFAICT, is still something that Windows browsers transparently support just as they always have.

So it's better to compile things millions* of times (once for each low-speed, battery-powered, handheld device), than it is to compile things hundreds** of times on a distributed and efficient server farm that certainly has a few clock cycles to spare.

Am I with you so far? Are you with me?

Good.

Can we compute the increased carbon emissions of this, including wear-and-tear due to increased battery aging and decreased lifespan (which more and more means death to the entire device)? Man-hours wasted staring, waiting for devices to compile their own apps?

Because if we did, we'd end up with a small number for each individual user. But when we multiply out by millions, very small numbers turn into very real numbers consisting of man-days, man-months, and man-years.

For the sake of pulling numbers out of our ass, suppose that there are a million Lollipop users. If each user has a minute of their life wasted waiting for ART to compile stuff (which is a low number), then we're at 1.9 man-years wasted because targeting a hundred platforms is hard, and stuff.

Before long, we'll be at a point where entire human lifetimes have been wasted waiting for ART to make things fast, because -- somehow -- keeping track of architectures and compiler flags is something that Google can't be bothered to do (even though they already know, by way of licensing, all that is needed to know for devices participating in their OEM Play ecosystem).

*: That's obvious; Lollipop/ART, while not hugely common in the installed base, is still quite a hot item on devices that support it/it supports (chicken, meet egg). Millions seems appropriate.
**: A quick Google search tells me that in August of 2014, there were over 18,000 distinct Android device types, but the number of them running Lollipop is at best in the hundreds.

That you're both pedantic and wrong?

You, sir, win the award for Conceded Asshole of the Day.

You also seem to be unaware that floppy disks vary hugely in size. Common sizes on PC hardware varied from 360 KiB up to 1.44MiB. Obviously, one would need three of the former to hold as much as one of the latter. Perhaps you're trying to imply that what I said was incorrect.

Oh, you poor, poor pedant. (3*360KiB)!=1.44MiB.

If you can't get your arithmetic right, how are we to believe anything else you have to say?

That is greenend.org.uk.

Because that's where PuTTY comes from, you dolt.

The claim was that a singular truck is thousands of times worse than 20 2-ton cars.

You add that the US DOT estimates that it is 9600x worse than a singular car.

But simple arithmetic says that 9600 / 20 = 480. And my grasp of verbally estimating figures puts 480 squarely into the "hundreds" category, not the "thousands".

Therefore, in conclusion, he was wrong. 1 truck is not thousands of times worse than 20 cars, but it may well be hundreds of times worse than 20 cars.

(Why 20 cars? Why thousands? Who knows; I didn't come up with this shit. I'm just here to be logical and do some basic math since nobody else seems to be able.)

I've got a prototype that will change the world.

Just give me a big stinking pile of money, and I will personally attest that you will be amongst the first to get the finished product into your greedy little hands.

(Aka, vapor.)

Other possibilities:

6) Once disassembled and made to work for the beholder instead of the creator, it turns any "21-equipped" device into a pair of Nike Air Jordans.

7) It's vapor. It's not as if $121,000,000.00 hasn't been raised on vapor before, and it's not like it won't be again.

greenend.co.uk may be more trustworthy than putty.org, but neither will get you the official PuTTY release.

ftp://ftp.chiark.greenend.org....

What confusion?

I have a Samsung TV from around 2008.

It isn't smart.

On Black Friday last year I added a Chromecast to it for $23. The Chromecast came with a bunch of freebies (most notably $20 in Play Store credit, which is actually useful to me).

So, either for free (or for $23, depending on how one counts), my TV became "smart."

And the only place it has ads is...gosh, I don't know that I've ever seen an ad on it.

When the Chromecast becomes woefully outdated I'll plug a different widget into the TV.

On my keychain, I carry keys. Mind you, it's a big carabiner clip full of keyrings which in turn are full of keys, but the main purpose is keys.

I used to carry more keys, but I started wearing out my belt loops. Now most of the keys (shhh, don't tell anyone) live in the glovebox of my car, all mounted to a gigantic split ring.

More important to me than keys (of which the only critically important one is usually a singular car key), are tools.

In my left pocket, I carry (or used to: I want another one desperately) my favorite screwdriver. It's a small forged flat blade screwdriver, made from steel that is both very hard and very -- shall we say -- tough. It turned all manner of screws, both phillips and flat and torx and other, and also made a handy deburring tool and I lost it a few months ago: If anyone has seen a yellow-and-black handled screwdriver, small, sold in ~1996 under the Vermont American "The Claw" brand in a set of 4 tools (three of which were useless), I will reward you kindly.

The left pocket also carries a very small stubby Phillips screwdriver, and pocket change, and has a lock-back Buck pocketknife clipped into it that varies between scary-sharp and near-useless depending on what I've been doing with it lately: I'm not nice to my knife, but I do try to take care of it.

The right pocket gets the phone, and only the phone. Despite Gorilla Glass and a TPU case, the pocket computer ("phone") gets its own place. (Yes, it was "only $199," but I won't be spending $599 off-contract to replace it and repairability has nose-dived since the OG Droid, which was simple to tear down and reassemble.)

The other right pocket (the one on my thigh) has my wallet: I used to carry my wallet in my rear/hip pocket, but it was killing my back from sitting on it. In the wallet, amongst a million discount and membership cards and whatever cash I might have, along with the Paypal/Simple/Local-credit-union debit cards, is a credit-card sized toolkit. It has my Courthouse Knife (never go anywhere without a knife / they never check the wallet), which I use for working in courthouses (it is always scary-sharp because it is seldom used and therefore tends to get touched up between uses), and some tweezers, a toothpick/reset-button pushing tool, a can/bottle opener that barely works (but does work well enough that I don't also carry a P38), and a very mediocre red LED flashlight which is a Godsend when faced with complete darkness (and absolutely useless the rest of the time).

The other left (thigh) pocket has nothing, unless I'm using hand tools, and then it tends to fill up with wrenches and pliars.

This entails that I wear cargo pants/shorts exclusively. I'm OK with not ever wearing jeans again. My butt-pockets never carry anything, and in fact I'd like to find clothing that doesn't have them at all.

And that's about it, except for the shirt pocket, which carries my hand-made smokes in a metal case, and a Bic lighter (Bic because they make the most consistently-reliable lighter, not because they make the most-efficient lighter). (And I don't wear shirts without pockets. I badly gimped my knee once because of a shirt with no pocket and spent a consecutive spring and summer stumbling around like a cripple because of that shirt: Never again.)

If somebody else is copying without the copyright holder's permission, then by the very definition of "exclusive", the pirate is depriving the rights holder of some measure of what was legally recognized as their property

Which is covered by copyright laws.

Please understand that an exclusive right to copy a work ("copyright") is a relatively recent notion in the grand scheme of things, and that theft is probably humankind's second defined profession (after prostitution).

Two reasons why LEDs aren't on satellites:

1. Weight. (A few LEDs might add up to maybe even a whole gram, all said: And you can use that gram somewhere else.)
2. Power. (Which is not unlimited. And using more power requires larger solar panels, and more storage for dark hours.)

Given the complexity of most satellites, I would be deeply surprised if there weren't a few zero-cost test points...maybe with a provision for a POGO test rig to test things with if the thing is ever seen intact by humans again (which it won't be).