but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.

Most of the genuine bugs described (versus the braindead design decisions) appear to be related to hardware integration (i.e. the input stack) and/or the carrier part of the experience.

Am I surprised that the hardware integration on a cheap phone might be crap? Nope. Am I surprised that the carrier integration might suck? Nope. Am I surprised that the more a device deviates from the mainstream, the weirder the problems would be? Nope. Is it likely that the experience would actually be *worse* if the vendor had just shipped AOSP? Very.

I bought the LG Optimus not because it was the cheapest or because I didn't expect it to have bugs, but because it was the only offering with a slide-out keyboard, and I've become addicted to the precision of physical keys.

So, in a nutshell, the answer to your question about why this stuff happens is "I want something so badly that I'm a captive market who won't explore decent alternatives (is the built-in slider on a 4" phone really that much better than an S5 bluetooth keyboard case or Swype on a phablet? Really?) and will stick with the phone in spite of it being a piece of shit"?

Honestly, I have to give kudos to LG for gauging how desperate the potential users of this phone would be for a physical keyboard and saving themselves a little cash on testing. It seems to have worked out okay for them.

Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations?

In general, I don't entirely disagree. In this case... I'm not sure how useful the black box would be in the event of a missile strike. I wasn't aware the civilian aircraft had the kind of gear to track a missile, or that the kinds of collision sensors they have would be fast enough to catch it. It's definitely not going to be able to tell who shot the missile or where it came from. Heck, I'd be surprised if the black box could tell the difference betwen a missile strike and a large suitcase bomb in the cargo hold. So unless it actually was an mechanical or aircrew failure (and I highly doubt it), I think the black box is a red herring.

Passwords have been stolen just by listening to keyboard click noises. Why could a typewriter be any different?

A much stronger mechanical action which generates multiple (the keypress itself plus the imprint on paper action) strong and distinct signatures. I'd expect it would be far easier to pick up than even the loudest Model M keyboard...

I'd be curious how much a highly sensitive seismic sensor on the ceiling below the typewriter would pick up, or even on the foundation of the building.

There simply MUST be a clear distinction maintained over where something is located, or country borders don't mean anything.

The question to ask is, is the data stored in another country as easily available to a
Microsoft employee in the USA as data stored in the USA would be?

There's a compelling argument, and multi-national corporations in particular make themselves vulnerable to it, that if you ignore borders in your day-to-day operations then you can't exactly point at the border as an insurmountable issue when someone is making you do something you don't want to do.

The recent case where a Canadian court ordered Google to censor results globally is another example of this. People argued that the court only has jurisdiction over google.ca results, but conveniently forgot that google.ca is hosted in the exact same server farm as all Google search services. So where do you draw the line? Surely not where the corporation decides it's convenient in that particular instance.

It would also significantly cut down Slashdot comments if they had to be typed on paper and mailed.

First posted?

Buying typewriters may be cheaper than Tempest shielding.

Of course, they do have to work a lot harder to avoid someone just eavedropping on the keypresses...

I keep the following quote pinned in Google Keep to remind myself of what happens when corporate communications becomes completely divorced from reality:

In other words, better execution and innovation through strategy and goal and discipline and engineering coherence.

From the previous Microsoft CEO. Nice to see that Ballmer's ghostwriters are still with the company.

Of course it has a boss

Um... no. Pure communism is incompatible with the entire concept of "boss", unless you're using "boss" as some kind of shorthand for "what society needs".

Real communism doesn't even have a "boss"

Theoretical communism doesn't have a "boss".

Real communism, as practiced by real people, has an entire class of people who are "the boss".

It might be interesting, not to mention somewhat obvious, to quantify how much things have changed in the last decade or two given the trend towards never being more than an arms length away from entertainment.

Which government has working days like that?

A better question is "which hackers have working days like that"? Why would anyone expect criminals to work 9-to-5 jobs? I'd expect something more along the line of noon-to-hey-let's-go-get-piss-drunk-and-sleep-in-until-noon.

This is true. I'm questioning that said patents are really such an "ace up the sleeve" if someone else is beating you to market with devices that already do what your patents purportedly cover. There's only a limited set of physiological sensors that are going to be useful in headphones and that aren't already in their phones, and LG just nailed the main one. Body temperature would be the next obvious.

IMHO, Apple's ace up its sleeve is the same thing it's always been... to ability to pump out a product that's just plain nicer than anyone elses product. Patents just muddy the water.

But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with 'one or more integrated physiological sensors' designed to help users keep track of their body stats.

You mean like these. Somehow, I have a feeling those patents might not be as useful as someone might think...

Vim is pretty much the standard vi/editor/$VISUAL on every Linux distribution I use.

It is for me too, after I type "apt-get purge nano".