I see no reason to ever run vim as sudo. The best option in my opinion is to save files using ":w ! sudo tee %" This way you are not opening your system up to potential exploits within vim plugins. It also avoids issues such as this one.
It makes no difference. If you got a plugin injected, you lost already - it can create a local sudo alias which either captures your password, or hijacks the next sudo command you run.
No, it's not dead. It's relatively easy to build from source. I've been maintaining a large project myself and I'll tell you one of the most time consuming aspects is keeping up to date builds. They are, however, having a very hard time keeping up with the accelerated release cycles of firefox lately. For example, Pentadactyl won't work with Firefox 36.0a at the moment.
I think you've inadvertently explained part of the problem here.
The people who have the most influence on SO are not the ones most interested in using it for questions, but the ones most interested in improving their "score". It should be obvious that this outcome is both perverse and extremely difficult to avoid.
Sears does use a type of cell phone for checkout but it does seem to have a modified camera with a laser scanner instead. Something more interesting would have been a new type of amazon smart phone with built in laser scanner and some extra buttons for scan/talk.
