Waze also tends to give me much better directions than any other app, and much better ETAs as well.

So long as user reporting and map chat is there, there will always be a way to report officer locations; no matter what they do with the official feature.

What's much more entertaining to me is that more often than not, the police reporting function isn't that valuable because the officer will have caught someone and moved on to a new spot by the time I see the notice.

We don't; have you ever even tried to get involved in your community's police decisions? Its hard. The police convince citizens that certain things are important; we use them as the experts to determine their own worth and then pay them for that expertise and for the work in question. Police services are very rarely doing what citizens have asked them to do but instead what they've determined is the best way to keep their jobs.

stop being a troll on the internet.

You obviously don't write software for a living. It takes effort to redirect people to an unmaintained code base and have them both write and investigate possible side-effects of their patch and then deploy it in a format that's usable by all the manufacturers with devices out there. Its an actual cost to an actual company doing actual business that just isn't worthwhile.

Being an open OS, there's nothing stopping Motorola, Samsung or LG from patching their own versions of 4.3 either, just as they modified it with their UI and other extensions. Feel free to whine to them instead; unless you bought a Nexus device, they sold you the phone, Google didn't.

Yes, it is, you can download the source code, root your phone, compile and install your own fix any time you want. Paranoid Android, Cyanogen and a dozen other options exist. Human laziness and the fact that manufacturers are trying to lock you out of doing such things notwithstanding, Android is pretty open.

My point was that only the Galaxy Nexus *could* get updated by Google, because they have the ability to do so. I think you believe too strongly in conspiracy theories to realize this is about not wasting energy on something that's nearly pointless to try and fix.

Their tablets have more RAM than the Galaxy Nexus; though you can easily install Cyanogen or Paranoid Android on it instead.

I wonder if any of these plans are still being updated, even if it's only by some guy in a basement office someplace.

Obviously China is still of interest, but most of them are extremely unlikely, although you wonder if there are times where it gets thought about. France after the attempt on De Gaulle or the possibility of a left-wing revolution in 1968, maybe even about Marine LePen. Mexico might warrant some kind of what-ifs around a failed state status. Germany and Japan are occupied by US forces now, but maybe there's some political theorizing about a populist/nativist Japanese party gaining power. Germany seems like the worst candidate, with the only situations I can imagine revolving around a collapse of the Euro and some kind of German administration of European economies, which seems unlikely.

Yes you can see shooting stars nearly every night but this flyby is maybe worth missing a little sleep if you have the gear and diligence to be able to see it.

Call me a cynic, but if you can't see it with the naked eye, is it really that interesting?

I'm sure it's maybe a big deal for people with telescopes and greater than average interest in astronomy, but for people not in that category it seems like it would just be one more flash of light through a telescope.

Like everyone else reporting on this story, it completely misses the point -- there's no *point* in Google writing a patch, none of the hardware companies involved would ever bother to deploy it. They have *no* control over that bit of code in your phone unless you're running a Nexus device.

Milking aging infrastructure for maximum profit, desperately defending old business models.

Now get off my lawn before I take my buggy whip to you.

Except that you've given every one of these people a free pass if you hack their computers because the court can no longer prove the data was there to begin with and not just planted.