Maybe the invisible hand of the market is trying to tell them something - like

"Copper is too valuable to leave lying around - look for alternatives, such as the fiber optic lines Telcos were suppost to install to people's homes as part of the now ancient de-regulation deal."

If you look at the list of participants, it may provide a clue:

Participants are:
- Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
- Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
- James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

If you follow up the connection of James Elser to NASA, it turns out to be a project called "Follow the Elements"

http://astrobiology.asu.edu/Astrobiology/Home/Home.html

So I'm guessing that they've found certain exo-planets in the Goldilocks zone that have the right balance of precursor elements/molecules for life.

Might it help to make card readers transparent - so there's nothing but clear plastic and a very small read head with some wires leading off into the ATM?
Then if you ever see other electronic cruft surrounding the read head, or see a non-transparent reader, you'd know to be suspicious...

There's a better way.

Send a robotic mission to check out Phobos, including digging into it to make sure it isn't dangerously radioactive beneath the surface.
Send a nuclear powered robotic fuel factory to Mars surface, with the ability to launch enough rocket fuel and oxygen to orbit for a return mission.
Send supplies to Mars surface and to Mars orbit. Include tele-operated robots and a relay sat network.
Once you're sure they've arrived and deployed safely, launch the fuel factory back to orbit with enough fuel for a human return mission.
If that works ok, send a human crew to Phobos, where they land and dig in for radiation protection.
Dispatch a new fuel factory ship to Mars at the same time as the crew.
The crew's first task will be to secure the first fuel ship, for their eventual return mission.
From Phobos, the crew controls the robots on the surface to explore, prospect, set up infrastructure.
Each human should have at least 3 robots on the surface - most of the time the robots will be moving from point A to point B on their own, while the human controls the remaining robot.
Instead of a human that can only tolerate an hour or two in a suit on the surface each day, you get humans working in comfort at least 8 hours a day - making up for any loss in productivity from tele-robotics over being there in an awkward spacesuit. The crew works in shifts to make full use of the robots.
A relief mission arrives 2 years later, allowing anyone who wants to, to go home.
But it also brings more equipment for use on Mars, to start building a base for humans in some convenient location.
Two or three such missions later, with lots of experience landing and launching fuel factory rockets, the first human colonists land.
They find a well established base, already stocked with and producing fresh food and air and fuel.
They've got lots of smart tele-robotic helpers controlled from up above to keep them safe and make the mission a success.
The colonists mostly work via robots themselves - only going out in suits and rovers for special tasks and missions.
Most of their work is science or making stuff - in a shirt-sleeves environment - for the robots to deploy.
They don't plan to return to Earth, at least not for many years. They're colonists, not adventurers.
But very likely, some years later, a modified fuel factory ship will lift off to take the first Mars ambassador back to the old world.

The overall aim is to totally AVOID a flags and foot-prints model, that would lose support after 2 or 3 missions as happened with Apollo, dooming us to another 50 year gap.
It takes advantage of 35-50 years rapid progress in computers, software, robotics/AI, chemistry, manufacturing technologies, instead of blindly trying to repeat Apollo for Mars to show how wonderful and powerful and bold a nation we are. This time, it should be an international effort, even if one nation could do it.

I hate to say it, but as people get older and become disappointed that certain things didn't get accomplished in their lifetimes, they tend to deny the possibility that it will ever be accomplished.

I don't think we should take Hawking's change of heart too seriously.

An appropriate approach might be to define trust levels. It would define "sensitive data packages", such as user name, GPS location, camera input, microphone input, etc - which apps could request be transmitted (with user permission settings or per-use acceptance), OR could be provided to the application. Applications would be installed at a trust level that grants them different access permissions to sensitive data, and would be prohibited from getting or manipulating data packages above their trust level.

Most trusted would be "obtains no sensitive data, engaes in no communications, does no data storage".

Next most trusted might be "All communications via a module that requires user permission settings to transmit specfic "sensitive" data packages"

Then there'd be "Transmits arbitrary data, but explicitly asks user permission for pre-packaged sensitive data."

Worst might be "Reads sensitive data (with user permission control), reads data stored by other apps, stores data for other apps, transmits arbitrary data".

Excellent idea. Let's start a movement to rename it the "United States of Ankh-Morpork". Maybe that would wake a few people up...

"I'm to be an Ankhmorporkian, where at least I'm told I'm free..."

I didn't say it would be a *living* human :-)

I agree - though really the hardest part is getting there and getting back, so I think it might be part of their motivation.

Actually, I think there are some good reasons to go for 2 legs.

It's the minimum you can walk with - so if you can make it work well (and the Japanese have gotten pretty good at it), it makes your robot smaller and less massive, better able to get into tight spaces, etc. It's not statically stable - but again, if you've spent millions already to perfect a 2 legged walking robot, you might as well use it and save some mass.

Why not wheels? Well, in theory a walking robot can go where wheels can't, and specifically for the moon, wheels would kick up a lot more of the fine, abrasive lunar dust, which would get into the bearings and wear it out a lot faster. Leg joints will have a similar issue, but might not kick up the dust as much.

It's possible that in the lunar dust, legs will be more energy efficient - ie. wheels would stop quickly due to rolling friction, where a walking robot loses energy mostly to it's bearings (if properly designed to maintain walking momentum).

... put a robot on the moon, then bring it home after drawing a flag.

Why not have the robot do something semi-constructive? Maybe set up a solar mirror capable of melting lunar rocks. Or set up a drill to see if there are more volatile elements deeper beneath the surface? Or at LEAST give it lots of equipment to play with, and turn it over to their brainiest kids to "experiment with", inspiring their next generation.

If they just want to demonstrate the capability to put a human on the moon and bring them home, have the robot load their return lander with moon rocks - at least that payload would have some value other than publicity, and the robot will have served a purpose.

I am not weighing in on either the pro- or anti- "killing from drones" question.

But I would like to point out that drones create an opportunity that is perhaps in a blindspot for many in and out of the military.

When a soldier goes into a firefight, why must he shoot to kill? Because the other side is shooting to kill him. A remote controlled drone breaks that model. The enemy cannot kill the drone operator, they can only damage the drone - a matter of expense rather than life or death.

In the sort of "war" we're now in, with enemies who hide amongst their own families and neighbors, the chances are very high that you create one new enemy for every enemy you kill, and several for every civilian. So with drones, the military value equation is strongly tipped toward NOT killing, if you can achieve your objective in other ways.

Instead of blowing up that car full of insurgent leaders, disable it in the middle of the desert by blowing a hole through the engine block. Develop knock-out gas bombs, or a fragmentation bomb that injects tiny frozen pellets of a knock out drug. THEN send in your troops, or even a drone "paddy wagon". Taze that guy who MAY have a gun, then have the drone roll over and inject him with a sedative.

Yeah, I know, it sounds all "liberal, peace-nik, kumbaya-ish". But if it does a better job than bullets and bombs, without risking your soldiers - why not? You can always follow up with lethal force if it doesn't work.

Wind power is unsuited for peak load (can't reliably turn it on when you need it). It is unsuited for base load (varies too much). It is really only ideal for something that can be ramped up and down with availability of power.

To me the answer is obvious - wind power must be used to power some high volume, continuously variable production process, where one doesn't care about the moment-to-moment production rate, just the long term average. The process must be highly automated, to avoid the need for having human labor idled when the wind dies down.

If hydrogen production via electrolysis were efficient enough, and if hydrogen were easy enough to transport without huge losses, that would be a reasonable example. The latter could probably be solved by converting hydrogen to propane or another convenient fuel, but the former so far appears to be unsolved.

Another continuous production process suitable for wind power consumption might be compression and cooling for gas liquefaction. While the equipment is complex and expensive, I believe this might be efficient enough to be practical. But then the question becomes, for what purpose would one use such large volumes of liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, etc?

One possibility would be "Clean Coal". "Clean coal" would best operate by burning coal with pure oxygen, so that the majority of it's exhaust gas consists of hot CO2, making it substantially easier to sequester the CO2. But producing pure oxygen from air is difficult - too much nitrogen. Liquefaction of air to extract liquid oxygen (LOX) is one approach - but if that means one needs to burn more coal to power the process, requiring more LOX and producing more CO2 to be sequestered, it may not be a good deal. But if one had a clean, carbon-free method to produce LOX, no additional coal would be required, minimizing the total amount of LOX consumed and CO2 produced. Further, the LOX needs to be warmed before being injected - which can be done by chilling the hot CO2 exhaust, reducing the power required to compress CO2 to a liquid for shipment and sequestration.

In this way, Wind and Coal could be natural allies - in both a technical and political sense. Note that I am not saying coal has no other disadvantages. But perhaps in combination with Wind and CO2 sequestration, the scale of advantage versus disadvantage tips in favor of coal. And while closer than most "alternative" energy sources, Wind unfortunately does not appear to quite make it into "economically viable" on its own.

This is in the UK - the correct media-robot-with-weapons reference here would be

"EX-TER-MIN-ATE! EX-TER-MIN-ATE!"