Software AND hardware costs about twice the price in third world countries, it DEFINITELY does not cost less.

I have. It's a WONTFIX, since the interest of LO developers is to attract as many MSO users as possible.

The correct behaviour for software I use, is for me to be able to control how it behaves, not for MS to dictate how I should use it.

IMHO, OpenID is better. Whether google is trustworthy or not is a matter of opinion, and google can be just another OpenID provider. If we want a single provider, the world will never settle for a single trusted entity.

Sadly, they departed too much from their OpenOffice origins.

As a former OO user (who never really used MSO), I find LO very alienating. There are some stupid features that annoy me to a point where it becomes unusable.

Here's a really stupid, but extremely annoying example:
OO opened ".pps" files in impress, so I could quickly view attachments from my email client and quickly scroll through them.
LO attempts to imitate MSO by opening them only in a fullscreenviewer, with transitions and music (which I'd rather avoid). There is no way to go back to the OO behaviour. The path is now:
1) save file to RW disk.
2) rename file
3) open renamed file.

The worst part isn't the change in default, but the fact that there is no option to go back to OO behaviours. Sure, MSO users feel more at home, but OO users feel they're using some new, wierd office suite they don't quite understand.

Indeed. If we start softening our SPF filters, then nobody will fix their servers, so we'll end up with lots of broken senders, and SPF will become useless (because of the excess of broken senders).

It would also be nice if all this text was CC licensed or something, so other could reuse it for their own SPF-rejects. ;)

SPF isn't meant to add points; SPF can fail or not-fail, but the best it can assure is that the email came from a server the admin says is trusted to send emails, nothing more.

SPF means the sender's domain admin EXPLICITLY configured their domain to advertise a "drop messages that didn't come through X MTA".
User of that domain should be informed of this, and if important emails are lost due to bad SPF records, then it's the admin (or part of the sending organization's) fault.

Most, not all manufacturers.

As a side note, providing a windows-only updater could be bad for them. If there's an issue that REQUIRES a firmware update, and people need a $50 software to install it, I'm pretty sure they'll be in trouble.

DOS has no abstractions or protected more or anything else that gets in the way of direct hardware access. This is usually a bad thing (because it's insecure), but it better for something that needs direct hardware access.

This happened from day 0, it's a known issue with this model - no fix.

Legacy applications?
I've a 2010 intel motherboard with an integrated nic that reports "bad eeprom checksum" every time there's a power failure.
Intel only provides a DOS utility to re-flash the firmware, if it weren't for FreeDOS, I'd have a useless nic (on a mobo with no free PCIs, BTW).

Lots of hardware vendors still provide DOS-only BIOS updated, and similar utilities, regrettably, so FreeDOS still has plenty of uses - though not for the average user.

Optical media is already dying. High end notebooks (including ultrabooks) no longer include optical media.
Most desktops I've seen around don't have optical media.
I've 7 computers at home, of which only one (very old) laptop has a dvd drive.
At the office, only iMacs have optical drives.

It seems they were using Windows XP.