Assessing things in a rational way is just sooo 20th century (or may 19th even). These days people want to have their lowest instincts confirmed and will pick everything that does the trick and then will stop looking. The 21th century will be the century of believing. Of course being rational would be the only way out of the mess we have created but since we created this mess by being not rational I doubt very much we will change now.

Now, Ebola. Ebola is more like HIV than the flu when it comes to catching it. There was a recent study that showed that even living in the same household as an Ebola patient only lead to infections if there was physical contact. It's basically a matter of having bodily fluids coming into contact with broken skin or mucous membranes (eyes, mouth etc.).

There are millions of servers out there that have not been patched yet.

To be more precise: There are uncounted servers out there that have a teeming population of parasites anyway.

But Yahoo has always been and still is the most incompetent of the big players, every time they screw up I'm surprised they still are around, since I never hear from them in between. There's not even a Yahoo phone... Not even that!

As others already said, iOS had mandatory full device encryption (that you even can't disable) since 2009, when the iPhone 3G added hardware for that. What was added now is a different thing (encryption of single apps data with the key dropped from memory as soon as the device is locked).

Full device encryption is not enough since the key needs to be in memory as long as the device runs (or no process will be able to access the file system when the device is locked).

Also Apple's full device encryption uses a key saved in a safe enclave in the SoC, while Google's uses the PIN or password you setup for unlocking your device. If you use a PIN, this is easily brute-forced. If you use a strong password you have to type this in every time you want to use your phone. With a swipe pattern you can't use encryption at all.

Still, it's a start. I would like to see some performance tests though, encryption in software isn't free.

Really. When the NSA is able to dissect an iPhone to read out the encryption key right from the chip or can brute-force their way in with huge efforts this is still useless for mass surveillance. You can expect to be able to buy a consumer product that is secure against this kind of effort about as much as you can expect to buy a consumer car that is secure against an attack with nukes.

But this does not mean that this kind of encryption doesn't help with guarding your privacy. Very much as a car not being secure against nukes does not mean it is "unsafe".

It's a fairly practical approach to make breaking the thing so expensive and bothersome that it will only be used with very good reasons just for reasons of time and cost. Making effortless mass-surveillance harder is a good thing.

That's not the problem. You can always restore the phone from a backup or set it up as new phone. "Unbreakable encrypted" is not the same as "bricked".

Which 2010 phone isn't abandoned? Will the first Samsung Galaxy S get Android L?

A "bad" battery won't land in a landfill. At least the raw materials will be recovered (there's a lot of Li that you don't have to buy then) and there's also lots of mechanical and electronic parts that will be still fine. Refurbishing and recycling could save a lot of cost compared to new batteries.

Building lots of them will also make them cheaper, as with everything.

There's no shortage of programming languages. Swift isn't anything special. It mostly has value for its integration with Apple's environment and this isn't Open Source either, so what would Swift being Open Source actually be good for? I really can't see why anyone would want to use Swift anywhere than on OS X or iOS when the real value isn't in the language anyway but in the frameworks and the integration with them.

(And I'm not even saying that Apple's approach is better. It's a different approach and has its own advantages and disadvantages. But if you have a closed system using its advantages makes more sense than trying to square the circle.)

Or just don't use that service. Photo sharing by iCloud is NOT mandatory. In fact it is optional.

By the way, Apple offers two-factor-authorisation with iCloud. I bet that nobody of those celebrities used that. I wouldn't be surprised even if they used the very same password for iCloud and everything else.

Why is it so important to go there? When we find a planet or a moon with habitable conditions and signs of life (like free oxygen in the atmosphere) there's a LOT to study, just spend enough money on space-based telescopes. And at some point we may be curious enough then to put real effort into going there.

That point is that we will NEVER do that without a destination. Finding one is the first step and even without going it's worthwhile.

We really need a program that offers bounties for finding such vulnerabilities and backdoors. Put a tax up for companies selling networked devices, pay bounties from that when a third party finds something and pay the money back to the respective companies after a year or two when nobody finds any vulnerabilities in their products. This would make actually putting some effort into secure products commercially viable while giving good hackers a way to earn their living in a good way. Win-win.

Right now we're rewarding companies that sell shoddy products while driving clever and well-educated people into the criminal underground. This actually is the worst setup one could think of. Make a sane, well-regulated market out of that and things will improve quickly while at the same time creating careers for people who deserve it.

Only the secondary payload (a small satellite). The primary payload (a Dragon capsule to the ISS) was delivered without a hitch.

As so often XKCD says this much shorter:

http://xkcd.com/1319/

High testosterone levels lead to dominant behaviour, aggression and generally a fixation with power and getting pussy. Cooperation and quietly working on things with others certainly takes a back seat then. It's individual success in terms of mating and dominating over success that is actually useful in the long run and with "boring" things.

That said, not being surprised in no evidence. In best /. fashion I haven't read the fine article, but I would want to see some mechanism that actually LEAD to lower testosterone levels. Evolution? Maybe, seems a bit short, but these are time frames that indeed were long enough to lead to lactose-tolerance to dominate in dairy-eating populations all over the world, so I wouldn't count out evolution rearing its head here. Mutations that supported drinking milk and eating cheese quickly dominated. Maybe other mutations that supported being more peaceful, not getting into pointless fights, and getting things done in a goal-oriented way instead of being fixated onto telling others what to do while holding on to five women without actually knowing what to do except fucking a lot also dominated for very good reasons.

And really: The lone fact that a LOT of people are totally capable to live their lives in dense populations without really fighting others all the time gives some weight to that. Maybe high testosterone levels are just incompatible with population growth and dense populations. Maybe they cause too much trouble to be successful (in an evolutionary sense) when all is said and done. Maybe the quietly working type of guys who are happy with one women and want to be left alone and leave others alone may be not as successful as the dominant asshole individually but there may be just much more of them and they don't get killed as often and raise more children altogether. Maybe even the fact that spraying your genes around isn't of much help when you can't support 10 women and their offspring and single women aren't that good in supporting their children plays a role here.

Every Genghis Khan may have fucked a lot, but he also will have killed a lot of men willing to fight and all the while those men who just got the bread home every day and just fucked one women were breading like rabbits and actually helped their children to prosper when you sum it up. Evolution isn't about individuals but about numbers of individuals actually surviving until maturity (and beyond, since a newborn child alone isn't going to survive for very long).

Why does the OS lack when there's just a lack of apps? Seriously? The OS is fine.

It's just that a THIRD platform (after Android and iOS) has very little hope of getting a foot into the door. MS obviously hopes that it can change that in the long run by fusing Windows and WP as a platform. I think the gap is too large to make this work, but it's really neither the hardware nor the OS that is the actual problem here. Still, MS has more than once proven that it has the patience to turn things around (they all but missed the Internet once and a few years later IE was moving towards a monopoly) and they surely hope they can pull something like this off again.

I'm not very optimistic here, but the OS wars aren't over yet.