Also notice how the charges are rarely direct, mostly its a grand jury who decides and the DA can influence how its run.
Note that DC is under federal jurisdiction, so all terms of the fifth amendment apply. This means that in DC prosecution of any "infamous crime" (i.e. felony) requires indictment by a grand jury, per the opening text of the 5th, which reads "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury".
Since the grand jury clause has not been incorporated into the 14th amendment against the states, states are not required to follow this process. Many do, but not all.
29 minutes huh? So does that mean passengers get 10 minutes to board/deboard this thing????? It's gonna have to be quickly loaded. Leaving 9 minutes of travel time?
The pods are small. Think subway car-sized, not jumbo jet sized. How long does the subway stop at each location? Two minutes? Pods are expected to have a maximum speed of 760 mph, which would cover 226 miles in 18 minutes.
And how are passengers going to react to the acceleration/deceleration necessary
Well, at 1/4 gee acceleration (8 f/s^2), you'd need 139 seconds to accelerate to 760 mph. For the described journey, you'd have to accelerate or decelerate 6 times, so that would take 14 minutes, leaving 11 minutes at top speed. During each acceleration or deceleration, you'd cover 14.7 miles, so the six accel/decel periods would cover 88 miles. At 760 mph for 11 minutes, you'd cover 139 miles, that adds up to 227 miles.
So, 1/4 gee acceleration is sufficient, and while what's about 3X the acceleration of a subway car, it's very tolerable. It might actually be more comfortable to do 1/2 gee for 66 seconds, or 1 gee for 34 seconds, on the theory that it's better to spend less time accelerating harder, to have more time at constant velocity.
Tell me oh/. Masters of the Universe where I am wrong?
In your initial assumption that loading and unloading a hyperloop car is like loading and unloading an airplane. Are there any other easy problems you'd like solved?
Well, I don't think it would be acceptable to say that the passengers will be fine unless there's a huge rupture and they're right next to it, in which case everyone could be killed.
Making a huge rupture in a 1" thick steel tube will require a large quantity of explosives. Such a quantity of explosives won't harm a bus full of passengers unless they're right next to it, in which case everyone could be killed. We don't take that as an argument for eliminating buses.
putting it underground seems to solve a bunch of other problems too.
At the expense of creating a bunch of other ones. Engineering is all about tradeoffs. Boring will make sense primarily in densely-populated areas. Elsewhere, the original elevated tube design will be better, I think.
Remember that Google also performs a security check of every web address to make sure it is not a malware site.
Only if you agreed to turn that on.
It's actually a really good idea from a security perspective, assuming you're comfortable with Google receiving that information. I am... but then I browse logged in to a Google account, and have Web History turned on. I find it very useful to be able to search and review my own browsing history. YMMV, and you have to make the privacy vs security/convenience tradeoff yourself. The controls are there to allow you to do it.
Is anyone else vaguely perturbed that we are getting information on this increase in a privacy-enhancing technology by Chrome apparently watching every website that a wide variety of users go to and sending that information back to Google?
In Chrome, go into Settings. Click "Advanced", then look under "Privacy" for "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google". If that is enabled, it's because you approved it. If it's disabled, Chrome is not sending the information.
How about not block any sites, but disable javascript on non-secure sites?
Because that wouldn't work.
All of the various forms of content downloaded by web browsers can be malformed in ways designed to exploit browser vulnerabilities. HTML, CSS, images, video, audio, PDFs... you name it, there have been vulnerabilities related to it.
To protect the users of the cat meme site from malicious parties on the network between their browser and the cat meme site. I don't mean to keep the cat memes secret, obviously that doesn't matter much. The purpose is to ensure that the code executed by the user's browser is the code sent by the cat meme site, not something else intended to exploit browser vulnerabilities to hijack the user's computer.
For lots of sites we could use a TLS cipher suite that doesn't actually encrypt anything. It's the authenticity and integrity properties of TLS that are valuable for every site. Encryption only matters for some.
on a "car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles."
I did it. I may or may not buy the car. I'll see what people think when there's some experience with it, and when I've been able to test drive it. If I decide not to buy it, I get my money back. If I decide to buy it, having put my deposit in gets me one earlier than if I hadn't (my deposit was late enough that I'm still looking at late 2018 or early 2019).
Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment.
If there's a lot of air in that bucket, you're going to have a hard time getting it to the bottom. I'd guess they actually just open the suction hole and let the air flow out and fill it with water as they're lowering it, then once it's on the bottom they suck water out. The flow of water over the bottom edge seems like it would loosen the sand and make it easier for the bucket to sink, at the same time that the water pressure on top of the bucket (due to the pressure differential from the suction) would force it downward.
your ideology supports as being the highest moral standard
Why are you claiming I hold that bizarre belief?
FWIW, to the degree I'm interested in environmentalism, it's merely to keep it relatively nice for people to live in. I couldn't care less about cockroaches, except to the degree that they contribute to my quality of life, and I don't really think that they do. I do kind of like having other plants and animals around; many are useful, many are interesting, some are just plain cute. But that's really neither here nor there, because my comment had nothing to do with environmentalism. I was just correcting your misunderstandings of evolutionary theory.
Do you think that anyone who cares about the correct understanding of evolutionary theory must be a "humans are awful" environmentalist? If so, you should examine your own assumptions.
Thanks, but I will stick to my twisted reasoning.
That was bad phrasing on my part. "Twisted" has negative connotations that I didn't mean to imply. What I meant to say was that you were reasoning evolutionary outcomes that couldn't possibly have been related to the supposedly-evolutionary pressures that you were citing. Perhaps "confused thinking" would be more on target.
I don't actually believe you when you claim that you wouldn't need to be in a privileged position to know if there was no back door. Unless you are actually involved in that code it's hard to believe that you can be sure it hasn't be compromised in some subtle (or not so subtle) way. I understand what you are saying and separation of roles is an important tool in security but it isn't a cure all either.
Fair enough, but my claim isn't based as much on my personal knowledge as on my knowledge of the people who are involved in the code. To be clear I am involved in parts of the relevant code, but no one person could do it all, so of necessity there are many people involved. And I know lots of them, and I know how all of them think, to a first approximation. They think the same way I do, and part of "the way they think" is that they'd scream bloody murder if there were any evidence of backdoor access... and that they do and will actively design to ensure that the level of internal collusion needed to make it possible is simply infeasible. It's that knowledge, of the general nature of security people at Google and the specific personalities of the ones I know, that gives me the confidence I have.
Of course, still some random guy on the Internet, blah, blah, blah, so none of that means too much to you. There is clearly no way I can fix that. Well, except one. Feel free to drop me a line if you're ever in northern Utah (where I live). I also get to Mountain View regularly.
To put it slightly differently, for social animals, evolution is driven by the survival of tribes or packs, not the survival of individuals. That's why wolf packs do just fine with only the alphas breeding, and why evolution hasn't eliminated homosexuality.
Not quite. Even in social animals, genes are ultimately "selfish". It's not about individuals or species. But it's definitely the case that in social animals the beneficial (to the genes) adaptations are often related to the ability to cooperate for the good of near-relatives, as well as the good of direct replication.
They also boot dramatically faster than any other Android handset on the market, in as little as 10 seconds
I can't remember the last time I restarted my phone. If it takes 60 seconds twice a year why would I care?
Well, you should be restarting your phone at least monthly, when the monthly security update arrives. Your phone does get regular security updates, right?
The ultra-fast boot time is really nice for me, because I run pre-release builds and get updates daily, sometimes more. In the bad old days (three years ago) an update meant ten minutes of installing, two minutes of booting, and then a one-hour "optimizing apps" marathon, during all of which my phone was unusable. ART got rid of the "optimizing apps", A/B got rid of the long installation time (installations still take 10 minutes, but it happens in the background while the phone is still running fine) and now fast boot, my phone is only out of service for about 15 seconds when I tap the "Install update" button.
I'm not saying you should care, but for me it's a great feature.
Have you experienced the display grain many complain about with the 2XL? It's the one thing holding me back from choosing the larger phone.
Once I heard people complaining about it and looked for it, I can see it. Sometimes. The only thing that has ever actually bothered me about the display is that at the default brightness setting it's a little bit dim. I turn the brightness to about 75%, though, and it's fine. And I've never had a situation where I couldn't set it bright enough (other than cases like full sunlight where no backlit phone display is bright enough).
I'm not sure what that means. But you're using a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.
Intelligence is not needed for your species to "survive" if what you mean by that is existing in vast numbers over long periods of time.
First, evolution doesn't favor species survival, or individual survival. It favors genetic survival, meaning the survival and replication of a genotype over competing genotypes. In many cases, the best genotype survival adaptations are adaptations that favor the survival or growth of the species, or the individual, but that's a side effect -- and doesn't always happen. Sometimes the adaptation that enables one genotype to out-compete its rivals is actually bad for the species or the individual.
But show me the cockroaches with the social structure and self-awareness it would take to figure out its place on the planet and in the solar system, learn that a large asteroid is a hundred years away from destroying all life on Earth, and use that time to find out how to deflect it.
This is very twisted reasoning. The genetic adaptations that led to our large brains were clearly not selecting for ability with astronomy. The most plausible explanation yet presented is that we developed our ability to think about hypotheticals (the core ability that makes science possible) because individuals who could do that were better able to think about the perspectives of their human rivals, and therefore able to outcompete them for mates and resources. That is, we developed big brains not to ensure the survival of our species, but to be better at kicking the shit out of our human opponents (note that that statement actually reverses the true causality, but it's still a useful way to think about it). And we certainly didn't do it in response to evolutionary pressure from planet-sterilizing asteroids.
What's the sales figures for Android phones without a headphone socket? My guess is that phones with a 3.5mm jack wildly outsell those without.
Since there are so few models without an audio jack, it's really not yet possible to tell what the market thinks about that. We'll see over the next couple of years.
My personal take (YMMV, of course): I've been using the Pixel 2 XL for a few months now, and the only place I even sort of miss the audio jack is in the car, but I just put the dongle in there. My truck has Bluetooth audio. For headphones, I already mostly used Bluetooth, but I've found USB-C headphones to be a perfectly good alternative when I want wired (which is rarely). The only potential problem I see with USB-C is that you can't use headphones while charging (without a hub), but honestly I almost never think about charging. Between the big battery and fast charging, I don't even plug the phone in at night. I just plug it into the fast charger in the car/truck whenever I'm driving somewhere. 30-40 minutes of rapid charging per day is all the phone needs to keep running.
As for waterproof that has been an increasing trend in the Android market starting with the Sony Z four years ago.
The Sony Z was only IP57. The Pixel 2 is IP67. There are a few phones on the market that provide your requested IP68, but there's hardly a great deal of evidence that consumers think the difference between IP67 and IP68 is critical.
the rest I would argue you are dead wrong the market has spoken and it's said all those features are important.
Really? The rest of your list consists of ruggedized and SD slot. The first claim is laughable; the trend is toward super-slim all-glass bodies. On the second, there are wildly successful devices both with and SD slots. Personally, 64 GB is enough storage for me.
Rather than just taking a shit on another seemingly useful feature, why not make it opt-in instead? The weenies that will complain about its mere existence can be ignored with extreme prejudice.
1) change your possibly useful feature to include the ability to turn it off, modify the icon, allow customization.
2) Demand, outraged, it be removed.
Guess which one prevailed.
You don't know which one prevailed. My guess is that it will be #1.
Google teams generally operate on a very rapid release cycle, many with weekly releases. How do you develop a feature that takes several weeks (or months!) when your team releases weekly? What you don't do is branch the code and work on your branch for a long time, either constantly rebasing or trying to do a big merge at the end. That way lies madness. And bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.
Instead, you flag-protect your feature. As much as possible you put your new code into the regularly-exercised paths, so it gets run by automated tests, manual QA and real users, but without actually activating the new functionality. The part that you can't allow to be run, because your feature isn't ready yet, you protect with a flag that defaults to off. You can easily flip it on for your own development testing. When you get far enough along, you can flip it on for a bunch of internal users ("dogfooders").
When it's finally ready to go, you flip the flag for all users. If there are tens of millions of them, you also flip the flag progressively, first for 1%, then wait to see if anything breaks, then progressively greater percentages until you get to 100.
Now... with that in mind, if your feature provokes howls of outrage, what do you do? It's utterly obvious: you flip the flag back off for everyone, to silence the outrage while you figure out the next step.
In this case, I suspect that the next step will be to add a control to the settings interface. That sounds like an easy task, but don't forget that you have to run a gauntlet of UX people focused on keeping the software as simple and intuitive as possible, and a gauntlet of QA people who point out that every boolean option you add doubles their test burden, not to mention internationalization and host of other things. Adding a switch to an app used by a billion people isn't easy. But my guess is that it might make enough sense to do it, so in a few weeks we'll see the feature come back, turned off by default.
Or maybe they'll decide that the clutter and testing burden are too much and just kill it. Could go either way.
But, whatever, it's blindingly obvious that step #1 is to un-flip the damned flag and stop the whining while you figure out what to do next.
Google could put an end to it by simply not allowing it in the license agreement.
No, they really couldn't. Google has to walk a fine line, especially with Samsung, but with several of the major players. Push too hard and they're perfectly capable of pulling an Amazon... but far more likely to be successful. Even the smaller players could potentially band together, or make a deal with Amazon.
You think Android fragmentation is bad now? It's nothing compared to what we'd have if Google pushed too hard and lost control. Eventually it would re-consolidate, I think, though probably not entirely. In the short term it would be a mess.
Of course, more than a handful of features have made their way from vendor overlays into vanilla Android, and I'm not sure Google would have considered those features for inclusion had they not been proven beforehand, so maybe there's some benefit to the current system.
This is true.
most of what Google adds to Android isn't originating from within Google.
This is not true. Google does pick up a lot of ideas from other OEMs, but it's definitely not the majority.
Perhaps, at the very least, Google should require vendors to submit any proprietary drivers so that Google can release vanilla builds for every device
Treble is a better approach, I think. The idea is to provide a standard hardware interface that is tested and validated, both with a set of low level tests (the Vendor Test Suite) and by flashing a vanilla AOSP system image and running the app-level API tests (the Compliance Test Suite). So Google doesn't have to release vanilla builds, you (or your favorite community) can just build your own -- assuming, of course, that you can unlock your device's bootloader.
There are phones on the market that have all of those things. You should buy one of them.
You know.. things that actually matter?
You know those phones I mentioned above? You should check the sales figures on them. The features you mention are important to you -- and that's fine, you should buy what serves your needs, and the great thing about Android is that you have lots of choice -- but they apparently aren't important to most people. You're trying to claim that they are, but objective evidence clearly indicates that you're wrong.
The alternative is "Hey I found a flaw in your OS six months ago and told shittons of other people about it. I'm publishing it tomorrow. I didn't tell you earlier because you don't honor embargoes."
Only not if five months beforehand, Theo already issues a patch without having been on the original distribution list, via a thumb-sized hole in the shitton dike.
He can't be the only security professional out there convinced to his very marrow that six months is a total crock.
Six months is long, but probably a good idea in this case, because a lot of affected systems are hard to patch.
But regardless of what you think of the duration, violating embargoes is a very good way to get actively excluded from notification.
Slashdot Mirror
The default should be opt-out.
As I recall, there is no default. You have to make a choice.
The best part is when it actually gets kinda sulky when you don't make all the correct choices
In what way?
Also notice how the charges are rarely direct, mostly its a grand jury who decides and the DA can influence how its run.
Note that DC is under federal jurisdiction, so all terms of the fifth amendment apply. This means that in DC prosecution of any "infamous crime" (i.e. felony) requires indictment by a grand jury, per the opening text of the 5th, which reads "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury".
Since the grand jury clause has not been incorporated into the 14th amendment against the states, states are not required to follow this process. Many do, but not all.
29 minutes huh? So does that mean passengers get 10 minutes to board/deboard this thing????? It's gonna have to be quickly loaded. Leaving 9 minutes of travel time?
The pods are small. Think subway car-sized, not jumbo jet sized. How long does the subway stop at each location? Two minutes? Pods are expected to have a maximum speed of 760 mph, which would cover 226 miles in 18 minutes.
And how are passengers going to react to the acceleration/deceleration necessary
Well, at 1/4 gee acceleration (8 f/s^2), you'd need 139 seconds to accelerate to 760 mph. For the described journey, you'd have to accelerate or decelerate 6 times, so that would take 14 minutes, leaving 11 minutes at top speed. During each acceleration or deceleration, you'd cover 14.7 miles, so the six accel/decel periods would cover 88 miles. At 760 mph for 11 minutes, you'd cover 139 miles, that adds up to 227 miles.
So, 1/4 gee acceleration is sufficient, and while what's about 3X the acceleration of a subway car, it's very tolerable. It might actually be more comfortable to do 1/2 gee for 66 seconds, or 1 gee for 34 seconds, on the theory that it's better to spend less time accelerating harder, to have more time at constant velocity.
Tell me oh /. Masters of the Universe where I am wrong?
In your initial assumption that loading and unloading a hyperloop car is like loading and unloading an airplane. Are there any other easy problems you'd like solved?
Well, I don't think it would be acceptable to say that the passengers will be fine unless there's a huge rupture and they're right next to it, in which case everyone could be killed.
Making a huge rupture in a 1" thick steel tube will require a large quantity of explosives. Such a quantity of explosives won't harm a bus full of passengers unless they're right next to it, in which case everyone could be killed. We don't take that as an argument for eliminating buses.
putting it underground seems to solve a bunch of other problems too.
At the expense of creating a bunch of other ones. Engineering is all about tradeoffs. Boring will make sense primarily in densely-populated areas. Elsewhere, the original elevated tube design will be better, I think.
Remember that Google also performs a security check of every web address to make sure it is not a malware site.
Only if you agreed to turn that on.
It's actually a really good idea from a security perspective, assuming you're comfortable with Google receiving that information. I am... but then I browse logged in to a Google account, and have Web History turned on. I find it very useful to be able to search and review my own browsing history. YMMV, and you have to make the privacy vs security/convenience tradeoff yourself. The controls are there to allow you to do it.
Is anyone else vaguely perturbed that we are getting information on this increase in a privacy-enhancing technology by Chrome apparently watching every website that a wide variety of users go to and sending that information back to Google?
In Chrome, go into Settings. Click "Advanced", then look under "Privacy" for "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google". If that is enabled, it's because you approved it. If it's disabled, Chrome is not sending the information.
How about not block any sites, but disable javascript on non-secure sites?
Because that wouldn't work.
All of the various forms of content downloaded by web browsers can be malformed in ways designed to exploit browser vulnerabilities. HTML, CSS, images, video, audio, PDFs... you name it, there have been vulnerabilities related to it.
why should a cat meme site need https for example
To protect the users of the cat meme site from malicious parties on the network between their browser and the cat meme site. I don't mean to keep the cat memes secret, obviously that doesn't matter much. The purpose is to ensure that the code executed by the user's browser is the code sent by the cat meme site, not something else intended to exploit browser vulnerabilities to hijack the user's computer.
For lots of sites we could use a TLS cipher suite that doesn't actually encrypt anything. It's the authenticity and integrity properties of TLS that are valuable for every site. Encryption only matters for some.
I've been using the Pixel 2 XL for a few months now
So you're either a Google employee or stole it from a Google employee. It was released on Oct 17.
I'm a Google employee.
on a "car you've never even touched and which nobody has had on the road for any length of time, and is based on an entirely new platform from a manufacturer's previous vehicles."
I did it. I may or may not buy the car. I'll see what people think when there's some experience with it, and when I've been able to test drive it. If I decide not to buy it, I get my money back. If I decide to buy it, having put my deposit in gets me one earlier than if I hadn't (my deposit was late enough that I'm still looking at late 2018 or early 2019).
Give it a few more years... you will definitely start.
At what age? I'm 48 now. One of my colleagues is 70. When will I start worrying?
Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment.
If there's a lot of air in that bucket, you're going to have a hard time getting it to the bottom. I'd guess they actually just open the suction hole and let the air flow out and fill it with water as they're lowering it, then once it's on the bottom they suck water out. The flow of water over the bottom edge seems like it would loosen the sand and make it easier for the bucket to sink, at the same time that the water pressure on top of the bucket (due to the pressure differential from the suction) would force it downward.
your ideology supports as being the highest moral standard
Why are you claiming I hold that bizarre belief?
FWIW, to the degree I'm interested in environmentalism, it's merely to keep it relatively nice for people to live in. I couldn't care less about cockroaches, except to the degree that they contribute to my quality of life, and I don't really think that they do. I do kind of like having other plants and animals around; many are useful, many are interesting, some are just plain cute. But that's really neither here nor there, because my comment had nothing to do with environmentalism. I was just correcting your misunderstandings of evolutionary theory.
Do you think that anyone who cares about the correct understanding of evolutionary theory must be a "humans are awful" environmentalist? If so, you should examine your own assumptions.
Thanks, but I will stick to my twisted reasoning.
That was bad phrasing on my part. "Twisted" has negative connotations that I didn't mean to imply. What I meant to say was that you were reasoning evolutionary outcomes that couldn't possibly have been related to the supposedly-evolutionary pressures that you were citing. Perhaps "confused thinking" would be more on target.
I don't actually believe you when you claim that you wouldn't need to be in a privileged position to know if there was no back door. Unless you are actually involved in that code it's hard to believe that you can be sure it hasn't be compromised in some subtle (or not so subtle) way. I understand what you are saying and separation of roles is an important tool in security but it isn't a cure all either.
Fair enough, but my claim isn't based as much on my personal knowledge as on my knowledge of the people who are involved in the code. To be clear I am involved in parts of the relevant code, but no one person could do it all, so of necessity there are many people involved. And I know lots of them, and I know how all of them think, to a first approximation. They think the same way I do, and part of "the way they think" is that they'd scream bloody murder if there were any evidence of backdoor access... and that they do and will actively design to ensure that the level of internal collusion needed to make it possible is simply infeasible. It's that knowledge, of the general nature of security people at Google and the specific personalities of the ones I know, that gives me the confidence I have.
Of course, still some random guy on the Internet, blah, blah, blah, so none of that means too much to you. There is clearly no way I can fix that. Well, except one. Feel free to drop me a line if you're ever in northern Utah (where I live). I also get to Mountain View regularly.
To put it slightly differently, for social animals, evolution is driven by the survival of tribes or packs, not the survival of individuals. That's why wolf packs do just fine with only the alphas breeding, and why evolution hasn't eliminated homosexuality.
Not quite. Even in social animals, genes are ultimately "selfish". It's not about individuals or species. But it's definitely the case that in social animals the beneficial (to the genes) adaptations are often related to the ability to cooperate for the good of near-relatives, as well as the good of direct replication.
They also boot dramatically faster than any other Android handset on the market, in as little as 10 seconds
I can't remember the last time I restarted my phone. If it takes 60 seconds twice a year why would I care?
Well, you should be restarting your phone at least monthly, when the monthly security update arrives. Your phone does get regular security updates, right?
The ultra-fast boot time is really nice for me, because I run pre-release builds and get updates daily, sometimes more. In the bad old days (three years ago) an update meant ten minutes of installing, two minutes of booting, and then a one-hour "optimizing apps" marathon, during all of which my phone was unusable. ART got rid of the "optimizing apps", A/B got rid of the long installation time (installations still take 10 minutes, but it happens in the background while the phone is still running fine) and now fast boot, my phone is only out of service for about 15 seconds when I tap the "Install update" button.
I'm not saying you should care, but for me it's a great feature.
Have you experienced the display grain many complain about with the 2XL? It's the one thing holding me back from choosing the larger phone.
Once I heard people complaining about it and looked for it, I can see it. Sometimes. The only thing that has ever actually bothered me about the display is that at the default brightness setting it's a little bit dim. I turn the brightness to about 75%, though, and it's fine. And I've never had a situation where I couldn't set it bright enough (other than cases like full sunlight where no backlit phone display is bright enough).
You're using environmental activist thinking.
I'm not sure what that means. But you're using a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.
Intelligence is not needed for your species to "survive" if what you mean by that is existing in vast numbers over long periods of time.
First, evolution doesn't favor species survival, or individual survival. It favors genetic survival, meaning the survival and replication of a genotype over competing genotypes. In many cases, the best genotype survival adaptations are adaptations that favor the survival or growth of the species, or the individual, but that's a side effect -- and doesn't always happen. Sometimes the adaptation that enables one genotype to out-compete its rivals is actually bad for the species or the individual.
But show me the cockroaches with the social structure and self-awareness it would take to figure out its place on the planet and in the solar system, learn that a large asteroid is a hundred years away from destroying all life on Earth, and use that time to find out how to deflect it.
This is very twisted reasoning. The genetic adaptations that led to our large brains were clearly not selecting for ability with astronomy. The most plausible explanation yet presented is that we developed our ability to think about hypotheticals (the core ability that makes science possible) because individuals who could do that were better able to think about the perspectives of their human rivals, and therefore able to outcompete them for mates and resources. That is, we developed big brains not to ensure the survival of our species, but to be better at kicking the shit out of our human opponents (note that that statement actually reverses the true causality, but it's still a useful way to think about it). And we certainly didn't do it in response to evolutionary pressure from planet-sterilizing asteroids.
THAT's how I would define survival.
You and Humpty Dumpty.
What's the sales figures for Android phones without a headphone socket? My guess is that phones with a 3.5mm jack wildly outsell those without.
Since there are so few models without an audio jack, it's really not yet possible to tell what the market thinks about that. We'll see over the next couple of years.
My personal take (YMMV, of course): I've been using the Pixel 2 XL for a few months now, and the only place I even sort of miss the audio jack is in the car, but I just put the dongle in there. My truck has Bluetooth audio. For headphones, I already mostly used Bluetooth, but I've found USB-C headphones to be a perfectly good alternative when I want wired (which is rarely). The only potential problem I see with USB-C is that you can't use headphones while charging (without a hub), but honestly I almost never think about charging. Between the big battery and fast charging, I don't even plug the phone in at night. I just plug it into the fast charger in the car/truck whenever I'm driving somewhere. 30-40 minutes of rapid charging per day is all the phone needs to keep running.
As for waterproof that has been an increasing trend in the Android market starting with the Sony Z four years ago.
The Sony Z was only IP57. The Pixel 2 is IP67. There are a few phones on the market that provide your requested IP68, but there's hardly a great deal of evidence that consumers think the difference between IP67 and IP68 is critical.
the rest I would argue you are dead wrong the market has spoken and it's said all those features are important.
Really? The rest of your list consists of ruggedized and SD slot. The first claim is laughable; the trend is toward super-slim all-glass bodies. On the second, there are wildly successful devices both with and SD slots. Personally, 64 GB is enough storage for me.
Rather than just taking a shit on another seemingly useful feature, why not make it opt-in instead? The weenies that will complain about its mere existence can be ignored with extreme prejudice.
I answered that here.
1) change your possibly useful feature to include the ability to turn it off, modify the icon, allow customization. 2) Demand, outraged, it be removed.
Guess which one prevailed.
You don't know which one prevailed. My guess is that it will be #1.
Google teams generally operate on a very rapid release cycle, many with weekly releases. How do you develop a feature that takes several weeks (or months!) when your team releases weekly? What you don't do is branch the code and work on your branch for a long time, either constantly rebasing or trying to do a big merge at the end. That way lies madness. And bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.
Instead, you flag-protect your feature. As much as possible you put your new code into the regularly-exercised paths, so it gets run by automated tests, manual QA and real users, but without actually activating the new functionality. The part that you can't allow to be run, because your feature isn't ready yet, you protect with a flag that defaults to off. You can easily flip it on for your own development testing. When you get far enough along, you can flip it on for a bunch of internal users ("dogfooders").
When it's finally ready to go, you flip the flag for all users. If there are tens of millions of them, you also flip the flag progressively, first for 1%, then wait to see if anything breaks, then progressively greater percentages until you get to 100.
Now... with that in mind, if your feature provokes howls of outrage, what do you do? It's utterly obvious: you flip the flag back off for everyone, to silence the outrage while you figure out the next step.
In this case, I suspect that the next step will be to add a control to the settings interface. That sounds like an easy task, but don't forget that you have to run a gauntlet of UX people focused on keeping the software as simple and intuitive as possible, and a gauntlet of QA people who point out that every boolean option you add doubles their test burden, not to mention internationalization and host of other things. Adding a switch to an app used by a billion people isn't easy. But my guess is that it might make enough sense to do it, so in a few weeks we'll see the feature come back, turned off by default.
Or maybe they'll decide that the clutter and testing burden are too much and just kill it. Could go either way.
But, whatever, it's blindingly obvious that step #1 is to un-flip the damned flag and stop the whining while you figure out what to do next.
Google could put an end to it by simply not allowing it in the license agreement.
No, they really couldn't. Google has to walk a fine line, especially with Samsung, but with several of the major players. Push too hard and they're perfectly capable of pulling an Amazon... but far more likely to be successful. Even the smaller players could potentially band together, or make a deal with Amazon.
You think Android fragmentation is bad now? It's nothing compared to what we'd have if Google pushed too hard and lost control. Eventually it would re-consolidate, I think, though probably not entirely. In the short term it would be a mess.
Of course, more than a handful of features have made their way from vendor overlays into vanilla Android, and I'm not sure Google would have considered those features for inclusion had they not been proven beforehand, so maybe there's some benefit to the current system.
This is true.
most of what Google adds to Android isn't originating from within Google.
This is not true. Google does pick up a lot of ideas from other OEMs, but it's definitely not the majority.
Perhaps, at the very least, Google should require vendors to submit any proprietary drivers so that Google can release vanilla builds for every device
Treble is a better approach, I think. The idea is to provide a standard hardware interface that is tested and validated, both with a set of low level tests (the Vendor Test Suite) and by flashing a vanilla AOSP system image and running the app-level API tests (the Compliance Test Suite). So Google doesn't have to release vanilla builds, you (or your favorite community) can just build your own -- assuming, of course, that you can unlock your device's bootloader.
Replaceable battery? Rugged/IP68? SD card slot? Headphone jack?
There are phones on the market that have all of those things. You should buy one of them.
You know.. things that actually matter?
You know those phones I mentioned above? You should check the sales figures on them. The features you mention are important to you -- and that's fine, you should buy what serves your needs, and the great thing about Android is that you have lots of choice -- but they apparently aren't important to most people. You're trying to claim that they are, but objective evidence clearly indicates that you're wrong.
Only not if five months beforehand, Theo already issues a patch without having been on the original distribution list, via a thumb-sized hole in the shitton dike.
He can't be the only security professional out there convinced to his very marrow that six months is a total crock.
Six months is long, but probably a good idea in this case, because a lot of affected systems are hard to patch.
But regardless of what you think of the duration, violating embargoes is a very good way to get actively excluded from notification.