Plastic is a huge *class* of materials, not just an instance of material. Plastic can be made to not dent at much bigger impacts than most metals can.

The strength of metal is tensile. I.e. if the undertaker and Hulk Hogan grab opposite ends of your phone and pull, a metallic frame ismuch less likely to break than plastic, ceramic and wooden frame. But that is not a typical use case a phone is subject to.

In typical use cases : falling, getting squeezed very tight in pockets, dent inducing impacts etc, plastic can be made to be BETTER than metals, mostly.

Plastics can be made to be more comfortable - they won't get excessively cold in winters nor skin roasting hot if it stays in the sun for long. Ok, the latter is less of a use case, scratch that.

Plastics can be made to slip less on most surfaces. Being eclectically insulating doesn't hurt either.

It is the success of hype over fact that metal, an inferior substance for the use case has come to mean "quality ".

They wouldn't need to use *FAT for iPhone. Other phones use those filesystems to mount on a huge variety of computers. iPhone, famously, doesn't need to bother with mounting , iTunes goodness all the way.

My 30 months old Motorola atrix has a fingerprint scanner that is much much faster than inputting a password. I think it is a great substitute for non military grade security -

E.g. pattern unlock that is so common on touchscreen phones and yet has a worse convenience to security ratio than fingerprint. Pattern is trivially bypassed by low resolution CCTV footage, as well as by observation of pattern trail on the phone, both by completely unskilled adversaries. Brute force is likely to work within an hour too. Fingerprint is resistant to all these, and it's vulnerable to fingerprint collectors but only to moderately skilled adversaries.

So basically you were wrong about the S II. Got it.

What do you mean bad for business? It is business itself. Field requests from TLAs, get money in return.

http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/07/the-nsa-is-spying-on-you-then-charges-you-millions-of-dollars-to-do-it/

You shouldn't have to dick around with a steering wheel to direct a car either. Write a wrapper around it if you can think of a better interface (both steering wheel and sudo ) or STFU. Unlikely because you chose the wrong tool for the job in the first place - selinux instead of sudo.

Whiners are a dime a dozen.

Agreed with other statements in your post, but not this one. One in hundred thousand can blow the whistle having a huge impact. The more people they need, the more the chances of someone being a whistle blower. A single snowden has resulted in at least 100 slashdot stories yet, and hundreds of thousands in mainstream media around the world. Presumably hundreds of thousands of electors would make this a point at the hustings.

Forgot the NSA's plan to reduce dependency on humans, starting with 90% sysads?

But schedulers can be changed on the fly.

Don't need selinux for this. A simple sudoers file modification can do it.

Linux has had ionice (to go with CFQ) for a long time now - starting 2.6.13 . Come out from under the rock and smell some fresh air.

Arguably, OK means "zero killed", so should be acceptable, or .. should be OK.

Your questions are already answered in my GP post. What exactly they run? Choose one of their own OSes, Polish it and run. Meanwhile, Android without solemnly swearing to kill their own OSes.

6 years of bad decisions, sure. That's why they had to stop making bad decisions and still there were chances they failed (last paragraph of my post).

I also answered about money - they had it, were credit worthy and stock market doesn't hate companies with a plan.

But all this would make sense only if you read before replying.

Guess what? The same manufacturers ALSO were selling WP (7 at the time) phones. Do you go inside the tiger cage in the zoo to escape the tiger on your way to work?

This is the cost people who cannot build their own OS and have it accepted by the general public, have to pay. It isn't and doesn't have to be special for Nokia.

But, like Samsung tried with Bada, at least Nokia could have tried to choose one of its own next-generation OSes, sell it along with Android, and when it got some sales momentum with its own OS, ditched Android. They had cash reserves to last a few quarters with some losses where stock markets wouldn't have panicked if they saw Nokia is trying something. Samsung's Bada didn't pick up because Samsung has never been good at building OSes and ecosystems, and it didn't need Bada that badly because it is great at the margins game. Nokia couldn't do the same with WP - the devil wanted Nokia's soul.

If it's own OS never picked up, of course Nokia would have been relegated to competing on razor thin margins. Nothing special about it, just part of the rules of the game in the handset industry.

If you still refust to support your argument of teaching being easy despite your failures being demonstrated repeatedly, I am glad the debate has ended.

You haven't thought about it much. Unknown languages are deciphered all the time. Those with weird grammar and scripts.

The statement of Sherlock Holmes - "What one man can invent, another can discover" - applies to invented language.

So we need cryptography, where the statement doesn't apply.