"Does that mean that Geek Squad is Satanic?"

Only if you read the logo backwards.

"I was really hoping for an analogy using the metric system."

I, on the other hand, was hoping for a car analogy.

"...I hate iProducts.... I hate.... I get angry... "

Take a chill-pill. Your "hate" over inanimate objects and anger over behavior you have no right to dictate is not healthy. Amazingly, if you just forget about it and move on, you'll have more time to deal with more important things in life.

"crowd source it, let the people decide."

Actually, per the Wikipedia About ChatRoulette, a person can get banned up to 40 minutes if 3 people complain within 5 minutes.

"Will someone please squash this bug please."

Better yet, warm up your arm and be the first one to throw your best shot! Mulligans are allowed. My favorite McBride quote from a CRN Interview:

"
CRN: This lawsuit is very unpopular among many in the open-source community.

McBride: We're either right or we're not. If we're wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us..."

I couldn't comprehend until, finally, the car analogy.

"In theory they're typing notes or recording the lecture or something.

In practice, I suspect it is more of a distraction than anything else."

Not much different than when we were bored with a lecture and played hangman on our HP41C calculators back in the 80's.

"I'm planning on making this one into some sort of automatics control for the house (turn the lights on, report temperature, I don't know, a bunch of lame stuff like this)."

OBSD has support for the 20 pin gpio header on a Soekris net4801 board out-of-the-box. With that you can easily make either digital or transistor switches to control things. The shell command is gpioctl which you may want to grab the source and mod it so its not reading command line arguments and can be put in your code without an os system call depending how frequently you are reading/writing the pin states.

"So we have found a large, ancient city with a large population."

Significant. One of the largest, ancient and romantic cities were so many of its citizens had broken hearts.

"...Apple is the 400 lb gorilla when it comes to online audio sales."

The room usually has an 800 lb-force gorilla in it. That one must be drinking fewer carbonated sodas these days.

I wonder why my 8-bit per channel scanned BW negatives edited in the POS GIMP capture more stops of light than any APS-C or even FF small format digital camera I've seen with a single exposure?

"I imagine this is also a huge factor for people who shoot conventional black-and-white photos. 256 shades of grey is not a lot of fidelity."

No, it's not a problem for BW film shooters. You scan the negative as color. I shoot lots of medium and large format BW film. I know people who scan and edit in 48-bit. Really, you can't see the difference and what there is does not matter. Like I said, subject, mood and composition trumps a 200lp/mm lens and all the measurebater technology every time. That's why a skilled photographer can win an award-winning shot with a plastic lens on a Holga next to a shot that just woos you with fine fidelity and sunglasses color and is boring. YMMV.
       

12-bits of color will not increase the number of stops of light your camera can capture. In the case you described, there are physical limits. If you exceed that, your SOL without combining multiple exposures. So you could use a medium format digital which is better at grabbing more light than small format digital or use medium or large format film and use the zone system to compress the high values and bring in more "stops of light".

"It crash when the picture is big (4000x3000) tested in 2 distros..."

Did you change the default memory requirements in the preference? I scan 6x7 (cm) and 4x5 (inch) negatives and get 12000x10000ish images and edit them in the GIMP all the time. No crashes. Yes, I still shoot medium and large format BW film.