The reply is to a Linus quote, and he would never have said GNU/Linux, he would just mean Linux, which Android is in spades.

May I direct you to the other closed-source firmware story of the day about DLink routers having remote DNS admin capabilities without password? You can't trust remote admin features on hardware when you can't see or have someone you trust see the software its running.

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.

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.

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.

You might want to update your brand-hate slightly.

Asus: http://www.asus.com/ca-en/Note...
Toshiba: http://www.cnet.com/products/k...

Samsung I know nothing about however ...

Going to the mall is a PITA if you don't live near one. Not everyone does.

Dell will send a tech *anywhere* in North America at least.

There's nothing stopping you from creating a steam user and executing steam as that user with sudo.

The only reason its 106 days is because Microsoft doesn't send out patches when available but makes them 'convenient' on patch Tuesdays. If they felt like it, they could release that patch today.