Except for the fact that a majority of conservatives get offended by the topic simply because it was introduced to them by people they don't like. Seriously, I think he did a disservice to the environment just by getting himself associated with it.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/107569/ClimateChange-Views-RepublicanDemocratic-Gaps-Expand.aspx

Ow! That hurt!

If you want to understand why rising CO2 is a problem, try to imagine for a second what the world might be like if Al Gore hadn't made a movie about it.

It really sounds laughably desperate when the arguments have devolved to "So-and-so failed to predict the weather 30 years ago". Scientists over the years have come out with lowball estimates too, but those usually don't appear on paste sites.

This argument again? I'm so sick of having to explain why "Don't feed the bears" != "Don't feed the poor". If you feed bears, they'll learn to nag you and other people for food. If you feed the poor, they'll also learn to nag for the food, but there are good reasons why you'd maybe want a hungry poor person to ask you for food instead of having a bear ask.

Anyway, regardless of how they feel about bears, conservatives certainly don't like wolves.

You get the bends from high levels of nitrogen dissolved in blood plasma under pressure. If you move to low pressure regions near the water's surface too fast, the nitrogen is able to separate out into bubbles that get stuck in tissues and blood vessels.

These things are "round" like gas bubbles, but they're more like some sort of fake dummy cells, with a fluid interior surrounded by something that looks like a lipid bilayer made of soap-like molecules that bind together by van der Waals forces and have charged tips that interface with the surrounding water. There is no gas.

It's a badly written article- "oooh bubbles!" People should try not to write stupid shit like this, especially about vaccines. I'm already blue in the face screaming at thick skulled idiots on #CDCwhistleblowers who post crap about how vaccines cause autism because Big Pharma stuffs them with disgusting crap like dihydrogen monoxide.

It's OK. The alternate Kate Upton has really let herself go and she's become the alternate Melissa McCarthy.

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.

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.

By "officially supported" do you mean officially-supported by CM, or by device vendors?

From within Android, I see no such movement. In the short term security concerns have motivated the movement of more stuff into GMS, where it can be updated by Google. Eventually I think the larger update problem will be resolved and that movement will be reversed.

Flourish.

Your example just demonstrates that Google really did allow Motorola to operate as a separate OEM, not directly influenced by the Android team. It's also possible that Motorola didn't have the option of releasing the specs because of agreements with the camera manufacturer. (Note that I don't know anything about that specific incident, and hadn't even heard of it until you mentioned it. I do know that Google would like its Nexus devices to be much more open than they are, but can't get there without becoming a hardware manufacturer.)

If that were an even remotely-likely outcome, it would have happened. Life is extraordinarily good at surviving and evolving new equilibria.

Meh, the history of life on this planet is one long series of massive, unexpected perturbations, ranging from ice ages so severe that the equatorial seas are covered with several meters of ice, to massive volcanic eruptions that block most global insolation for years, to massive meteor strikes. In addition, the ice core records show that the planet has undergone radical climate change (much faster and more extreme than what we're currently seeing) without any cause at all as far as we can detect, as recent as 60K years ago.

Certainly. Equally, we shouldn't ignore the fact that doing nothing at all (assuming we could) will also have disastrous consequences on our own habitat. Earth changes all the time, in all sorts of ways. If we want stability we need to learn to actively engineer the planet.