If they find that a pulse is indeed helpful, do you think this solution would work:
Taking this pump and sending its output to a bladder with a check valve. The continuous flow will fill the bladder, and once a certain pressure is reached, the check valve opens and sends a pulse of blood out. It's failsafe too, since if the valve breaks you're just left with continuous flow like you have now.

Silly defaults definitely contribute, you're right about that.

Yes, I did list specific issues, but like I said, they're _examples_ of systemic problems. Whatever development processes created them have been creating issues many years now and will continue to do the same for as long as they're not fixed.

My boss summed up Linux very well in 2002: All the plumbing is there, but the faucet is missing.
Sadly, it's still true.

That PC speaker control only controls beeps from Gnome apps like hitting backspace in the console.
Apparently there's another sound system somewhere that's also working. Which is another really stupid thing in Linux: gratuitous, incompatible duplication. I can think of 4 different incompatible sound servers. Each has their own drivers and controls if you have the misfortune of needing more than one due to apps.

And yes I do have an nVidia card and checked the "use proprietary drivers" box. If it doesn't work then I'm entitled to a message to that effect at the very least. Doing nothing is unacceptable.

These are specific examples of systemic issues. Fix one of these and soon enough they'll be broken again.

I recently tried Ubuntu after leaving Linux as my primary OS in 2003. You're wrong. The GUIs are only fine if you're willing to stick with their narrow limitations. I think it's because they're constantly being rewritten instead of incrementally improved.

Examples:

When I hooked up a second display and clicked "detect displays", it did nothing. No error message, no effect. I see no way to fix this without editing config files manually.

My sound doesn't work at all. It's listed properly in all the config screens, but nothing comes out of the speakers. Now what do I do? I see no easy way to try different driver or other things without delving into a kernel module mess. Hello, terminal.

How do I disable that wretched shutdown beep with a GUI? The mute control has no effect on it, nor does disabling the system beep in the sound preferences.

This is basic stuff that's been an issue for 10 years.

Sorry, but desktop Linux in 2009 gave me the same experience as desktop Linux in 2003. I.e. 3 days of googling and sludging through manuals to get things working. The process is a tad smoother now, but it's still only good for two groups: Grandma who'll leave it the way it is, and experts who live Linux. Almost everyone I've ever met falls somewhere in between. It's hard to be just savvy in Linux. It's all or nothing.

Pretty skins are just that, skin deep.

Don't give me that paid support crap. I've never called MS support. I've never called Apple support. I can figure out how to maintain their systems by using them. If I'm going to have pay someone to help me with how to do basic things in Linux then I might as well just buy one of the other two.

You're right, there was a proof of concept of this as well. I think it was in the early 80s. Someone implemented a compiler that would detect if it was compiling the login command's source and add a back door. It would also detect itself being compiled and made sure the resulting binary also had this ability.
So in effect the vulnerability only existed in the binaries and not in the source (login's or cc's).

There was a also a paper about how to combat this. AFAIK the just was that if you had two different compilers (like gcc and icc) it was possible to detect shenanigans. If you had a completely trusted compiler, i.e. a hand assembled one, no matter how crappy then you could detect shenanigans with certainty. You don't have to compile the whole system with your trusted but crummy compiler, once it verifies your normal one then you use that for real work.

My iphone 3g gets charged by USB. The "AC" charger is just a small brick with a USB port that you plug in your iphone cable into (as if it was a computer).

It also doesn't make much sense to have a storage device without a computer to actually make use of it.

That's because of the flash. License plates are made to be reflective so the flash worked on it even though the plate was far away. Other plates were probably at a wrong angle. The blur is caused by a slow shutter speed, which means the scene was relatively poorly lit. The flash strobe is very fast, so it wasn't affected by the camera shake much.

I wonder how many people were saved because someone warned them of the danger by calling/texting them.