Back then, potential employers understood that they would need to call early or late and probably leave a message. Or, they might, God forbid, decide to hire you on the spot. Now, you answer the phone when they call or they move on.

Ah, I see what you're saying. In all of those cases, I'd say Google shifted to working on a component that integrates with other Google services. It does happen that the service-integrated component largely duplicates the features of an existing OSS component, plus adds a lot, but I don't think that's because of any move to close Android.

At this point there's really no need for Google to maintain generic apps for all of those things; there are plenty out there in every category you mentioned. I'm less sure that there are open source apps in all of those categories... but anyone who wants is free to pick up that ball. I suppose it would be nice if Google were to do it, but that's no longer necessary for the success of the platform.

I reiterate that the above represents only my personal opinions. Google pays me to write code, not define platform strategy (except in my narrow area) and certainly not to act as a proper corporate spokesperson. When I say stupid stuff it reflects on me.

It wouldn't be hard to do something nicer, but my Tasker profile is a pretty crude hack. Since I never connect anything that doesn't have its own volume control, I just have a profile that runs every minute and turns the volume up to max. So if anything turns the volume down, it quickly gets turned back up.

How about replace income tax with a gasoline tax that costs about as much on average?

If a vehicle is on the road in poor repair, there's a decent chance it's because the owner can't afford to fix it and needs to get to work.

Keep in mind that the better insurance gets at assessing risk, the less value it has.At some point they get the risk pinned down with sufficient accuracy that you come out better by putting the premiums into a savings account until needed.

Of course the root problem is mistaking insurance for a solution to outrageously overpriced healthcare.

From the article most of the spending is on things that are beneficial to society as a whole, not just NSA. These include K-12 funding for science fairs, math clubs, and STEM summer camps. Unless the NSA is influencing these in harmful ways, such as pushing ideology beyond the normal "if you do well in school, you could do cool spy work for us" recruiting I don't see a problem with taking their money. Same for the research grants and conferences, which all result in publicly published fundamental research, that help the entire cryptographic and big data communities as a whole. The only program I would have a problem with are any classified research and the sabbaticals to do classified work at the NSA.

The only thing I use Vbox for is to perform firmware updates of devices where the manufacturer decided to only allow updating from Windows

Pretty much:
DJI Phantom 2 Vision+
Sony digital cameras

As long as USB passthrough works I'm golden.

International or USA GS3?

FYI, most of the maintainers for the International version (I9300) want to see Cyngn fail because the leadership screwed one of them (I avoid using the term "us" in this particular instance since while I did Exynos4 work, I never did I9300 work) royally with the Focal relicensing fiasco.

Leadership did make us look like fools by marking N7000 and I9100 as "stable" to inflate the "stable" user counts for CM10.1 to make themselves look better to investors. (Prior to that, a device only got a "stable" build if the maintainers signed off on it, so if a device was mistakenly declared "stable" it was the maintainer who screwed up.)

Um, by definition they're a start-up. They have only been established as a company for approximately two years, with only around 1.25 of those in public existence.

"for a while now" - less than a year for OnePlus One, just a tiny bit over a year for the Oppo N1 - which they completely failed to continue updating by not deploying KitKat until after Lollipop was released.

Umm... You read the first sentence of my post and completely ignored the rest.

Messaging?
Launcher?
Calendar?
Email? (AOSP version of the app crashes when the IMAP server does not have calendar info - WTF?)
Music player?
Browser? How did something that FCs on Settings->General make it out the door?

These are all cases of applications within AOSP where Google started work on a proprietary version of the app and abandoned work on the open-source component. With the exception of Browser, the move was not due to security reasons.

I can understand the desire to integrate Google's services, but the fact that inevitably the open-source non-integrated application gets abandoned is where all of this "AOSP is becoming more closed" sentiment comes from.

At least Google seems to have done it right with Keyboard, where IIRC (I can't check now, so I could be wrong in my memory of this) the AOSP version gains all of the features of the GMS version if a certain native library from GMS is present, but gracefully degrades by simply not offering certain features if it's not present, with the remainder of the keyboard app behaving identically to the GMS variant.

The volume thing annoys me, too. I fix it with a Tasker profile.

As for navigation, try using voice to start the navigation. It's zero-click. I don't know that the maps team intentionally increased the number of taps in the non-voice case, but I think it may actually be a good thing for safety if it encourages more people to use voice rather than taking attention to poke at their screen.

Mass extinctions which are, most likely, also the biggest driver of speciation and diversity :-)

I think the Holocene Extinction may be the exception to that trend, though.

Could be yours is malfunctioning? Mine works.

Um, no. The proximity sensor shouldn't depend on how you're holding it. I'm suggesting hardware defect, not user error.