My complaints only apply to non-rooted devices.

That's great that Google is going to enable device encryption by default. But are they going to fix the usability and security problems for Android L?

If you enable device encryption on Android, you can no longer back up and restore your data over USB or through third party tools. You can create encrypted backups over USB, but you can't restore them because of bugs in the ADB tools. The only way to back up and restore is by uploading your data to Google's cloud servers, where your data is much more likely to be purloined than if you had just left your device unencrypted in the first place.

When you enable encryption, you set a password. The encryption password becomes your lock screen PIN and there is no way to change it. So, which are you going to choose? A secure encryption password that you'll spend 15 seconds entering on the tiny keyboard every time you want to unlock your phone? Or a useable PIN that is trivial to crack if an attacker gets your encrypted data?

It's clear someone added device encryption to Android to check it off the list and didn't intend for anyone to use it. I hope their product team realizes this before they bring it to a wider audience.

It's also extremely dangerous for the future of NASA human spaceflight. If Boeing blows the budget and schedule again, C3PO is going to look very foolish. Meanwhile, SpaceX will finish their capsule but not to NASA's specifications.

Yes, the better photos do show more effect on the plants.

SpaceWeather.com is "skeptical", says it looks more like a hole dug by a backhoe than a meteor crater.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Nicaraguan govt spokesman says this was a meteorite that broke off 2014 RC. My claim requires only the presence of an over-excited and uninformed public servant.

Coward.

If that's a meteor crater, where's the ejecta? It must have excavated ~200 m3 of dirt, which seems to have simply disappeared. None of the plants surrounding it show any evidence of violent impact, "shockwave", or explosion as reported. Maybe there is actually a crater somewhere, but this is just a photo of some sort of sinkhole?

Agreed. The right incentives applied slowly could fix the carbon problem efficiently and with minimal disruption, at least in the United States.

I am already lighting my house with LED bulbs, taking the bus, and turning off the AC. That reduced my annual consumption by probably 20 GJ. But 35 years down the road I want to be able to harness more energy than is available to me today, not less. More computers, faster and farther transportation, 3D printing, stuff I can't even imagine yet, it's all going to take more energy no matter how efficiently we use it.

Yes, I was using the term incorrectly. But the report recommends a significant reduction in per capita energy generation. The USA team shows primary energy at 86 EJ in 2010 which is 280 GJ/person. Then they recommend a reduction to 160 GJ/person by 2050, which is 40% less.

For sure there is waste to be excised from the system. But you are thinking in terms of 5-10 years, not 35. In the past 50 years per-capita energy reductions have coincided strongly with economic recession. Over the longer term humans have tended to massively increase their energy consumption, not reduce it. In the last hundred years, per capita energy usage has increased by about 70%. We could perhaps get by with a 50% decrease in energy intensity through efficiency gains, but that requires economic stagnation and a very pessimistic view of the future.

As much as I agree that we need to reduce carbon emissions, these recommendations are a recipe for disaster. The USA research team, for example, recommends something like a 50% reduction in per capita energy intensity by 2050. That is flat out incompatible with human nature in a healthy economy and society. I neither want my children to live in a world ravaged by carbon pollution, nor do I want them living a life of energy poverty. Any sensible solution would avoid both outcomes by greatly expanding the availability of clean energy generation. The fact that no one seems to be willing to chart a course of clean energy abundance makes me suspicious that other motives are at work here besides saving us from global warming.

The French team starts with the only healthy and clean energy infrastructure in the world and _completely_dismantles_it_. Apparently their current administration has recommended that the country phase out nuclear power by 2050, and the team takes this as gospel, replacing it with biofuels. The projected results are predictably disastrous.

The only team to make reasonable recommendations here was China, but they also had the easiest job since China has the most low-hanging fruit and the only serious build-out of clean energy generation.

If we're going to have to send a machine to do it anyway, why not start with a simpler organism? We can design a single-celled extremophile that would be viable on the target planet, then send a probe there to make them. Then all we have to do is wait a billion years or so for evolution to produce an organism that we could communicate with. Wouldn't the result be essentially the same?

Didn't know that. Thanks!

Grush's plan is sound as far as back-of-the-envelope estimates go. But there is more to this than money. Roughly half of NASA's HSF budget goes to projects that exist only to spend money. As in, you could cancel the projects, reduce NASA's budget by that amount, and you would still get the same amount of space exploration done. Unfortunately, when the budget crunch comes, those projects are never the first ones cancelled. So I think the key to effective long-term space exploration is to establish incremental and self-sustaining capabilities while resisting cost growth in the pork projects.

So, yeah, someday we can send astronauts to the moon. But first we need to figure out how to send people to orbit for "free". And we need to expose the pork projects for what they are while preventing infrastructure from being built around them. You can help! Don't buy the BS that NASA is going to send humans to Mars for 0.5% of the federal budget. When your Science Committee congress-person comes up for re-election, reward responsible oversight and not "vision".

Whatever you do, don't blow the school's money on a project that is going to be obsolete in five years. Obsolescence should be matched to your annual budget. For example, if you have $1000 a year to spend on something that will last three years, make sure you can replace it for ~$3000. No annual budget? Just buy books.