But hardly anyone is running the stock Android anyways. They've all expended on the code, and made it different. Almost no one actually uses the "official Google version" at all...

But they can't because it's open source software. No one could make all of the Linux Distros use the same official kernel... it's not possible, because it's open source, and you can make it yourself.

But this is already the case. Amazon and Barnes and Noble do not sell Android devices with Google services on them.

I don't get why people have such a difficult time understanding that Google can't wrangle these cats, because it doesn't have an Iron Fist on the source code...

I've never seen a RISC processor that can match the performance of the best CISC processors. You know, nevermind the fact that tons of money has been poured into CISC processors making them faster and faster.

Sometimes, it's just a matter of where the attention has been placed.

In addition, big bang nucleosynthesis models place strong limits on how much baryonic (protons, neutrons) matter there can be and it is not enough to be the dark matter.

ADA updates would be good, bringing in the Spark 2014 and early 2015 extensions would have been nice. (Spark is a mathematically provable dialect of ADA. Well, mostly. Apparently, you can't prove floating point operations yet because nobody knows how. Personally, I think it's as easy as falling off a log table.)

There are also provable dialects of C and it would be nice if GCC had a flag to constrain to that subset. Using multiple compilers is a good way of producing incompatible binaries and nasty interactions. GCC has no business having limitations. :)

With work on KROC at a standstill, we have a reference compiler that talks Occam Pi. Occam is a very nice language to work with but working through archaic Inmos blobs is tiresome and limiting.

Code quality in GCC and GlibC is still poor, the stability of internal interfaces is derisory (these should be generated from abstract descriptions, ensuring the flexibility GCC wants and the usability interface developers want) and the egos of the developers should be taken out and shot. However, it's still one of the best environments out there. Those that are better at specific things are usually carrying three to four digit price tags. I'd write in hand-turned assembly before paying for unquantifiable products that I won't even own.

Different animal. Cilk has specific instructions for parallelising loops and similar. It looks like a similar concept to Fortran's capacity to turn anything that can be done as a vector rather than as a sequential operation into a vector instruction.

OpenMP parallelizes at the block level rather than the instruction level. By all accounts (notably comments on the ATLAS mailing list), the performance is terrible.

Snowden released all of his information to journalists before he left the country.

Snowden is both a resident and a citizen of the US. Yes, we revoked his passport, but we cannot revoke his citizenship without his consent. As a citizen, he cannot be blocked entry into the country. He can be detained indefinitely the second he enters the country, but we can't stop him from returning.

For the last time, THIS EO DOESN'T APPLY TO SNOWDEN. *mumbles mumbles mumbles*

INDEED! If they screw that up, it's bad, and they should be the ones holding the responsibility if it accidentally exposes data that they don't want exposed through uPnP... no one else is able to properly infer the right thing to do.

Yeah, my OpenBSD machine specifically refuses to do uPnP as well, because "security"... I've looked into getting some sort of uPnP working... but in the end, I'm just like, "nah... it makes my life a little bit more of a pain, but at least I know what ports are open"

As noted by the sibling post. Bing already does do this. And it's the right thing to do.

But that's the provider's problem, isn't it?

Google can't force providers to use AOSP, and unlocked bootloaders, and all that...

Wait... Google provides your cellphone directly? How did you get on their corporate plan?

Or are you talking about those Nexuses that are provided by a different carrier, and as such that carrier retains the right to do whatever they want to the OSS Android underneath?

You know... because Google can't just go on to the Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T/Sprint network and update everyone's phone. The provider provides the specific Android build.

And that's why they can't update all the devices at once. Because everyone and their mother can develop their own kernel, and their own Android for their platform.

Now, if everyone just ran AOSP, then Google would be fine to update everyone at the same time.

deservedly*

But not only that, it's not like Google can infer intent to share the data... you put it out there, and Google said, "hey, this is publically available, obviously people want this to be indexed!"

There's no adequate way to fix this either, because if it's opt-in, then unknowing individuals will fail to opt-in for indexing... if it's opt-out, then unknowing individuals will fail to properly opt-out (robots.txt for example)

If you put up private data publically on the internet then you simply have to accept the fact that no one else could have known that you didn't want to share the data...

Because methane is a very potent greenhouse gas.

I'm not sure why you bring flatulence into the discussion at all.

Besides, there is a scientific mystery, so scientists want to solve it, independently of how good methane's rap is.

Indeed... Apple didn't make the first MP3 player... they just ended up making a new one that obsoleted all the others with features.

"... any modern airliner can be specced with options to fly itself from gate to gate on an ordinary day ..."
Can you tell me more about this? My understanding is that taxiing and take off are always performed manually. Unless it surrendered control to a central airport system, I don't see how autotaxi would even be useful, as actions are so dependent on other traffic.