That's not a crisis, it's the way things should be.

I've been in the business 30 years now, and I've never seen anything like Google's attempt to support older versions of the platform with backports new APIs. In Android you can target an API level like 20 (Lollipop) but support installation on an older API like 16 (early Jelly Bean). On API 16 all the stuff that goes around your app (notifications) and under your app (the VM) will still be "archaic", but the app itself will look modern because of the backports in the support library. Of course you should still *test* on older devices because not everything may work, but getting something to work across the vast majority of devices (> 86% run API 16 or later) is practical for a competent programmer.

So a user who doesn't immediately jump on the upgrade bandwagon can still run the latest version of the vast majority of apps. You miss out on some of Lollipop's bells and whistles, and most importantly on the new VM which reported extends battery life by 1/3 on some devices. You also miss out on all the bleeding edge bugs, of which reportedly there are still quite a few. If your device is perfectly good, it remains practically useful even if it's four years or so behind the bleeding edge.

That's something new. Forced march upgrades have been the norm over my career, but there's no reason to take that stance when you're talking about mobile devices. Most people replace them every two years or so, and in any case the Li-ion batteries soldered into the things begin to lose capacity after three years regardless of use. And with hundreds of independent Android device makers version fragmentation is inevitable, so it's sensible to make it benign.

It makes no sense to wring your hands because everyone isn't jumping on the bleeding edge release when there are so few practical consequences for anyone. It's almost as if the lack of a crisis is perceived as a crisis. People eventually *will* move to Lollipop because they'll eventually replace their old devices. Manufacturers *will* put Lollipop on their devices to get the battery life and performances, but in their own time. In the meantime their customers are OK on KitKat, and so should they be.

Well then, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks.

5% of the general population are sociopaths; 1% are psychopaths. So in any sufficiently large group you you will find plenty of individuals acting in deplorable ways -- even horrifically deplorable. Christians, Muslims, rural Southerners, lesbian golfers, people who like avocados -- any group is bound to have it's share of monsters.

Oh for Pete's sake.

Writing a book is a lot of work, and when you're done you promote it for the simple reason that you want people to read it.

Very few people get rich from writing a book, and it's fairly safe to say that nobody sits down to write a book on space policy because he thinks he'll "strike it rich".

I think you just answered the poster's question, by the way. SSH is quite good for what it does, but what it does doesn't cover every conceivable need.

A better question might be,"Why aren't we using SSH *in more situations where it might be useful*?"

The lack of features may be a feature.

The more features something has, the more likely an oversight in the design or implementation will prove to be a liability.

Long distances == lots of CO2.

I've crunched the numbers for various trips I commonly take. My share of CO2 emissions on a trip from my home in Boston to Sacramento California is going to be around 750 kg +/- 50 kg whether I (hypothetically!) drive (in my 34MPG highway car) or fly. Airplane CO2/distance figures overlap automobile considerably (185 - 277 grams/mile for air travel). Air travel CO2/mile is higher for short trips, but lower for longer trips because you amortize the CO2 emitted in takeoff over more miles.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be tricky. Air itineraries can often take you far out of your way, forcing you to fly through hubs that aren't on a line as the crow flies. If I *did* choose to drive to Sacramento, it turns out the driving distance is astonishingly close to the great circle distance between the cities: 2600 miles vs 3000 miles.

So the answer isn't to avoid air travel. It's to travel wisely. Consolidate long trips. Plan ahead and get non-stop flights where possible, or at least book itineraries that have the minimum time in the air. Don't wait for the last minute and take a "bargain" itinerary that has you flying all over the place. Drive a fuel efficient car and use that for trips less than 250 miles or so. The Chevy Cruz Eco gets 42 mpg highway; if that doesn't appeal to you an Audi A6 gets 38 mpg, and is not exactly wearing a hair shirt.

Naturally. I should have stipulated that I wasn't particularly addressing you personally so if you took it that way I apologize.

You totally missed the point, which that the LP form factor is fun.

I took the original poster's "debatable" to mean "not worth debating", which of course a much more common than the sense you're using ("something worth debating").

I don't think there's any real disagreement here, other than what the thread should be about.

The poster didn't say that people couldn't find/post/send patches for bugs. Only that there weren't enough people doing so.

How many would be "enough"? I suppose enough so that exploits didn't happen before the maintainers were aware of them. Clearly, then, we don't have "enough" eyeballs of the right sort. But we have more than if the libraries were closed-source.

Which of course is somewhat more likely in a global warming scenario, but could happen nonetheless whether the globe was warming OR cooling.

We have to get past this mode of thinking like this: "It's May and we had to put the air conditioners in already, it must be global warming." Or this: "Temperatures outside are near-record lows. So much for global warming."

Global warming is an increase in the TOTAL kinetic energy of the atmosphere, which is a spherical shell 6371 km in radius and 100km thick. That shell is rotating so that at the equator it's moving roughly 1667 km/h and at the 0 km/h at the poles. As it rotates it is differentially heated in the southern and northern hemispheres by the Sun, and it interacts with oceans, mountains, terrain with various surface albedo, etc. This is responsible for the counterintuitive fact that the average January high for Boston in 37F and the average for Glasgow is 41F, even though Boston sits at 42 degrees north latitude and Glasgow at 56. Nain, Newfoundland and Labrador is at the same latitude as Glasgow and has an average January high of 7F.

We all know this, but somehow this knowledge flies out the window when it comes to our intuitions about what a warming globe means. Our intuitions about global warming treat the atmosphere as a stationary, shallow, well-mixed pool that may be hotter at one end than the other, but distributes heat in a simple and predictable way through diffusion. But if you think about what the atmosphere actually *is* what even a non-specialist knows it behaves like, it shouldn't be surprising to find some place places get colder in a "warming" scenario, somewhat more get warmer, and quite a few get warmer AND colder depending on the season.

The technical term would be 'seigniorage'.

"Inherently worthless" is the salient feature of money. When you trade things of intrinsic value you are bartering. It's only the fact that you were taught to value "dollars" without question that makes you think "$370 million" has any intrinsic value.

Well, we know the Nazi regime asembled ME 262s in an elaborate network of underground tunnels to avoid Allied bombers who late in the war were operating over Germany with near impunity. The tunnels were excavated and ME 262s assembled with Jewish slave labor under horrific conditions.

If you were involved with such a thing you'd have plenty of reason to keep it secret.

Well, putting on the uniform means you can be ordered to take actions that will result in property destruction and loss of life, and (a) you have to do it and (b) you enjoy some protection from legal consequences as a member of a uniformed service.

It's quite common (and legal under international law) for countries to execute "spies" for doing things that "soldiers" do all the time. As a soldier you can drop a bomb on a dam that kills people both directly and indirectly and you are not criminally responsible. But if you drop a "logic bomb" on an installation as a civilian contractor your status isn't so clear. If you travel overseas the target country might well try to extradite you under anti-hacking or anti-terrorism treaties.

Amazon sells books..