There are South American banana republic dictators looking on in awe.

Which they then charge you extra to recover from the ditch, with a cleaning surcharge on top of that.
Oh - and they delivered it to Ulan Bator. Would you like the extra cost 'return within a month' service?

There's whole swathes of countryside (mountain/canyon) around here with zero cell coverage. Not just in the boondocks either. I'm probably going to move from my current Pixel 5 + Lineage purely for that reason.

Cue the competing conspiracy theories...
1. It's clearly faked because it's (proven/handed down from my preferred deity) that you can't get signals through the plasma
2. See - the Apollo stuff was faked because they didn't show reentry
3. The earth is flat because reasons

Just another step along the "you rent this from us - ownership is a myth" path that the tech companies are desperate to force us down. The problem being that it's getting increasingly difficult to find devices without this sort of encumbrance.

I didn't watch the first episode original broadcast because it was on Thursday and my parents had opinions about TV on school nights. Fortunately they showed it again on Saturday so I got to see it. Daleks I could deal with but the Cybermen were nightmare material for me.

More to the point - how open is it to 3rd party (assumed hostile) updates? Clearly there's no on-device checking for validity.

Another Google abandonment. Anyone got any suggestions for a decent replacement supplier?

First kit was a Nascom 1 in 1977. Was way too much of a pain - although it did work.
Replaced by the first 'pre-built' machine in 1984 - Memotech MTX 512. With a separate large box that housed a pair of 5.25" floppy disks. I had an 'interesting' time justifying that purchase, after the fact, to my dear wife who was less than impressed.

I can honestly say I prefer them. In fact with my hearing failing with age they're damn near a necessity.

Surely that would fall under a religious exemption. Or possibly divine intervention.

the security checks of Google's app store.

I'm sorry - I can't seem to parse this collection of words into a meaningful (partial) sentence.

Trans: please give me more funds for studies with no criteria on which to evaluate the results.

You mean the FedEx driver bothered to wait for a signature? Just this morning I watched a FedEx driver stop at my driveway, take out a box whose contents are worth somewhat more than $1500, carry it up to the door and dump (actually just drop) it on the porch and leave. Despite it being signature required and having 'FRAGILE' stickers on 4 sides. Fortunately the actual goods were in a travel case.

One would assume that any such DC would have a blockchain type technology behind it. One would further assume that it would allow the Fed (and by implication anyone with "official" access) to trace any transaction. If these assumptions are indeed correct then the adoption is a given - this is the FBI/IRS/ICE wet dream.