Not quite irrelevant.

Microsoft probably sells Skype data to some law enforcement and intel agencies but not to others.

If it replaced it, I could almost be OK with it.

The problem is that it didn't - so for half the stuff you have man pages (with pretty good see-also sections); and for the other half the stuff you have info pages; and suddently you have to do twice the work to find anything.

Better search technology could help that one.

I rather the distributions stay away from this -- or at most just passed whatever documentation they do add to the upstream projects.

IMHO the biggest *problem* now is that you often have to got to Red Hat's manuals, or to Arch's or Ubuntu's wiki, or to Gentoo's mailing list, etc. to find documentation to anything.

Seems like that means you have a half-dozen competing efforts that all are re-envengint the same documentation; and since many of those distros are commercial enterprises, are motivated not to share and to paywall off their investment. Ugh.

I think that's *half* of where the problem started.

The second half is when various Linux distros started writing their "own" documentation, rather than contributing back to the upstream projects.

Once documentation fragmented like that; every damn blogger started trying to make documentation "his" to preserve his own page-rank; and a bunch of commercial Question/Answer sites saw the business opportunity of trying to own the documentation for themselves.

Once all those were in place -- it seems most of the efforts moved away from contributing documentation back to the source projects, and moved towards commercializing and monitizing "answers" - which is only profitable when the documentation doesn't keep up.

Sad.

Now if only they would push such information to the upstream projects we'd be getting somewhere. Otherwise, that's just one more set of web-pages that needs to be checked.

Pretty annoying if the best way to find out about an application is to have to check the Yggdrasil archives, the Slackware web page archives, the Caldera docs, archives of the Mandrake web pages, Knoppix blogs, etc.

I think Unix (not just BSD, but I include BSD-based SunOS 4.x) documentation from the mid 90's was the best and easiest to follow.

The main thing I miss from that era is that practically everything I wanted to know could be looked up in man pages; and if not on that first man page I tried, in a meaningful see-also page.

These days, seems most software (not just Linux, but for any platform) is scattered amongst HTML-urls that point to long-gone former websites, and youtube tutorial videos.

Now you might say that much of today's software is too complex to describe in a man page --- but IMHO - that's the bigger problem. If people write complex monolithic bloat, writing pretty documentation for it is the least of our problems.

The entire point of the research is to learn enough to be able to stop an outbreak in a major US city if one were to start.

Why do you seem to be advocating not doing such research?

It's being used by, and trying to be hacked by, many groups.

University researchers, governments, MPAA/RIAA, computer security companies, etc.

Seems the project should encourage as many people as possible attempting to hack it -- because that increases the odds that when people finds a hack, at least some of them will report the weakness back to the project.

On the other hand, if the project discourages hacking attempts, only malicious groups will find the hacks.

This way people will be much more aware of the kind of tracking possible (merging of locations from the phone ; with interestests from what websites you browser; with associates that you call).

I can see a new service coming up similar to a Taxi for your phone..... have someone drive your phone to where you're supposed to be, while you go to where you want to be. And perhaps they can loan you a loaner phone and forward the calls to it.

I imagine it's hardest on the accountants.

• Is the cost of those experiments passed on to customers? Overhead? Do the customers get discounts for the dual purpose mission? Would they want discounts but didn't think to ask because they weren't even aware?
• How is the risk / insurance handled? It the added experiments' components caused a failure, who's insurance pays for it? Is the cost of that insurance passed on to customers?

etc.

With Surface, it seems Microsoft is a bigger threat to Lenovo than Dell, HP, IBM, etc.

With that in mind, I can't imagine why they'd support any Windows platforms.

They don't even lose jobs.

The money their taxpayers save can be spent locally creating the same amount (measured in dollars) of jobs that it would have if the money makes a round trip through the federal government along the way.