The ACM is pretty good about open access. Every author can use their 'author-izer' service to create links that check the referrer but give free access to the papers, so if you can't get free access to an ACM-published paper from the author's web site, then complain to them, not to the ACM.

Which is kind of hard if your alma mater is 180 miles away.

They do pay developers, but they pay them quite a lot less than the purchase price. The logic is that they'll get a load more downloads. That makes sense, as I've downloaded several things for free that I'd never pay for and a few that I've only run for 5-10 minutes and never touched again.

Let's not. Let's compare the mobile app market to one company. The mobile app market has a number of small upstart developers making $0.99 at a time, but it also includes companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and a large number of software houses that are 20-40 years old, several of which have been on the receiving end of antitrust lawsuits.

I know the difference, but how should I go about teaching this difference to the virtual keyboard of a mobile device? Or is there a key ACM paper on how to guess where "its" or "it's" should go in context?

The specifications for the required ammunition are well-known. The stuff is harder to make than the firearm, however. For that to differ you'll have to use something substantially higher- or lower-tech, e.g. caseless or black powder. And caseless ammo is only easier to produce if you disregard the difficulty of producing a practical propellant.

Sounds like a toy. May as well be using LOGO. Why not install EPD or something that can actually use Numpy etc with more then one thread?

The Chinese government itself literally operates labor camps where criminals are forced to produce consumer goods.

You clearly do not decide who is credible when you say that slave labor is not slave labor.

The 1911 is Open Source today, you can literally download blueprints for every part of the weapon. It's one of the best-loved and best-performing firearms of all time. It does require the use of appropriate ammunition, but the openness of the design has permitted developers to adapt it to several different types.

Xposed requires root. Why do so many more GNU/Linux devices than Android devices come with root? And how do I get a headphone jack fixed after I have voided the warranty by having installed a rooted ROM?

By that standard, using software in GNU/Linux is not really looking beyond Novell because just as Wine is a free reimplementation of Windows API, GNU/Linux is a free reimplementation of UNIX.

How should I "research" thoroughly if the product isn't even available for inspection in my geographic area?

"Machinery" is from 1947. Back then you didn't type your code, you wire-wrapped it.

Oh wait... they haven't passed the bar yet.

This is, unfortunately, the case with a number of funding bodies in academia. For example, DARPA won't pay for my membership, but will pay for the conference. My institution decided to pay for membership out of a different pot of money that doesn't have these restrictions, which ends up with a saving of a few hundred dollars on one account and a cost of a hundred dollars on another.

Ah, you're in the USA? Here, most people have pre-pay plans (being locked into a contract is generally seen as negative, unless it comes with some really good deals) and so get the phone that they bought along with their SIM and then hang onto it until it breaks or someone gives them a new one. I don't think I know anyone who pays close to $40/month on a phone bill (a fifth to a tenth of that is common and it's hard for a contract that comes with a new phone to be that cheap). At that price, I'd probably do without a mobile.

Amazon's app store is a bit better, because they're good at correlating things you've bought with things you might want to buy, so have recommendations that don't totally suck. The only reason I actually have it installed though is their free app of the day (which isn't necessarily a good thing - there are a couple of games that it's given me that have wasted a lot of my time...)