[First half: Info replacing man.]
[Second half: Distro-specific Linux documentation explosion and lack of upstream transmission.]

And the THIRD half: The X windows system dumping every little subroutine interface into the man pages, with names that collide with unrelated non-X features, so the "apropos" command became buried in junk. B-b

Tesla might want to take a page from Henry Ford's book, from back when He was the cutting edge of high tek:

Ford, to this day, has most of its office space in, or typically as a layer on the outer surface of, its factories, laboratories, etc. Walk down the hall and every few hundred feet you can make a right turn, go through a door, and be on the factory floor or a balcony around it with a handy stairway to it.

Generally the best way to the cafeteria is usually across the floor, as is the best way to more offices than not. (Indeed, the cafeteria may be in the CENTER of the plant, making it equally convenient to all but more convenient to the workers, and making a trip through the factory mandatory for white-collars who want to do lunch.)

Henry wanted the engineers and executives to be connected to the nitty-gritty of the business, and thought that keeping it visible, several times a day, would help improve communication and focus.

There's a story about the River Rouge plant - Henry's dream manufacturing complex, designed to eat iron ore and spit cars: Seems that the managers built an office building in the middle of it, and when it was done, showed it to Henry. After the tour he asked them "How many cars are built here?" When they answered "none", he asked "What parts are built here?" Again the answer was "none". So he had it torn down. B-)

(Cadillac Motor Car did the same sort of thing, at least through the '70s: The offices were across the street from the main assembly plant, but there was an enclosed bridge between them and you actually had to walk across the in-operation assembly line (on the second floor, near the "body drop") to get to the cafeteria / lunch room.)

It may seem strange to give Tesla suggestions from the Detroit auto industry. But IMHO this is something that they got very right. You'll notice my examples were Ford and Cadillac:

The Ford family took the company back from the Pointy Haired Business School Grads a few decades back, turning it around {and undoing the McCarthy Era communication stoppage between the white and blue collars that trashed the US auto industry while Japan built their industry on Demming}. Unlike GM and Chrysler, Ford didn't need a bailout. It was out-competing Japanese auto companie on quality, reliability, safety, and price-performance.

Cadillac, through long since merged into GM, was given a hands-off treatment for decades, because it made cars to exceptionally high quality and comfort standards.

As I read it the initial flap was over the people and journal involved in the replication lying to get the cooperation of the original researcher.

They promised to give an opportunity to review and publish a comment on their own results. They secured her cooperation, getting detailed descriptions of the methodology - far beyond what was in the publication - copies of the original film, and the like. Then, when they got differing results, they denied her the percieved-as-promised opportunity to examine their results in advance and publish a comment with them. They also published comments slamming her work, in terms like "epic fail".

The failed replication of her work might be a problem for her, carreer-wise. But massive ridicule is a much bigger one. So she cried "foul". This - along with similar acts by other replicators - is what brought support for her from other academics.

It is useful that the flap is also bringing to light other, very serious and systematic, problems with the replicability of attempts at performing actual science (or going through the motions) in social fields, creating a search for a measure of the actual reliability level of "social science" results, and exposing estimates of that to a broader audience. But let's not confuse opposition to unethical behavior by certain replicators for opposition to replication in general. (No doubt there is some of both. So let's keep the distinction in mind when evaluating the comments and actions of individuals in the social science fields.)

Meanwile, it looks like "social science" results are far less reliable than political decision-makers had thought, and this flap will give ammunition to those opposing them when they try to legislate hairbrained and oppressive schemes and foist them on the ruled classes. So some good is already coming out of it. B-)

It seems plausible that dismantling it from behind and assembling a new one in place would have cost more than $45 million (plus $80 million for the new TBM).

At first I wondered why they were going to sink a shaft and tunnel into it with the degraded-but-working machine. Why couldn't they just expand the tunnel behind the machine using less automated digging methods, then back the machine up into the room to get access to the front of the machine to repair it?

Then I looked a little deeper and discovered that they're below the water table, essentially tunnelling through mud-and-rocks under several atmospheres of pressure, and the machine is what is holding back a mudslide, followed by Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean, and preventing the creation of a big sinkhole under whatever is above them in downtown Seattle.

OK. Sinking a caisson just ahead of them and drilling into it with the gradually failing machine now looks like the cheapest approach.

... a new meaning for the 'hot wiring ...

We've already seen:
  - In the wild: A contactless box that opens the doors on parked cars. (Not clear whether this is spoofing the remote-door-unlock keyring fob receiver or getting on to the car's bus to issue unlock commands.)
  - Proof-of-concept demonstrations for getting on the bus by successful attacks on communication stack vulnerabilities in more than one of: Cellphone radio (remote help service), handsfree "car is the headset" bluetooth transceiver, door lock radio, security key-in-ignition detector, entertainment system, tire pressure sensors.
  - Using access to the general bus to issue such commands as unlock doors, start the engine, adjust engine speed, and apply or fail to apply the antilock brakes.
  - Getting a lane tracking / following distance near-autodrive to drive the car (in the same well-marked land) for miles by spoofing its "driver has his hands on the wheel" sensing.
and so on.

Seems to me that these could be combined with subverting the auto-park feature to build a full "car steels itself, untouched by human hands" system: Car starts, unparks, enters traffic, drives to a convenient place for the car thieves to take it over, and parks itself, drives into a chop-shop, or onto a carrier vehicle. Initially this might require a chase/lead car to give ongoing control in detail. If this becomes a lucrative criminal enterprise model, perhaps later a plugin to the bus or a malware download might orchestrate the process, even using the GPS navigation to let the car navigate itself from where the user parked it (or the crooks pulled it over and plugged in their device) to the crook's chosen destination.

It also seems to me that this might be the FIRST general use of autodrive functionality: Auto makers have to worry about laws and risks. Car thieves can simply abandon the car, running in traffic, if anything goes wrong with their system or their situation. This would let them become early adopters.

The ability to build an intrusion prevention system that plugs into the diagnostic port also hints at other possibilities: Could a similar device interfere with the use of Lojack/OnStar/Link/etc. to track or disable the car?

Could such a system also be used by the owner OR a thief to disable intrusive surveillance by auto makers, rental agencies, or governments? Could it modify the entries being stored into post-crash black boxes or distance-based road tax systems? Could it disable stored or remote tracking of where the vehicle is or has been? Could it interfere with remote shutdown commands?

Lots of possibilities here.

maybe the car they worked with didn't have drive-by-wire steering.

Don't need drive-by-wire steering (depending on definition, of course).

Drive-by-wire steering (my understanding of the usage) would mean that the steering wheel sent messages to the steering gear electronically, rather than being physically connected, as the normal way of steering the car. Interfere with, or take over, these messages and you either disable or override the driver's input. I doubt the automakers are about to do that - especially over a general bus crowded with miscellaneous accessories programmed by other vendors, all chattering away - any time soon.

However, other features can let the electronics perform steering operations by having the power steering take input from elsewhere - possibly over a general bus - and execute them IF a firm input from the mechanical steering connection doesn't override them. We see that already: with auto-park and lane-tracking features.

So I'm not sure if we're talking definitions or if "take over the steering" couldn't be demonstrated because a hand on a mechanically-linked wheel trumps a command from a computer.

It's right on!

It's not like there is some magical cure awaiting them upon arrival at Emory, there is no cure for Ebola. About the best they can hope for is palliative care, so why not just send a team to West Africa to do the same.

Actually there ARE some experimental treatments and antivirals, both general and specific to Ebola, being worked on. At Emory, in particular. (It's their business.)

In fact, according to previous reports, THIS GUY was working on them. And he had ONE dose of one of them WITH him.

Unfortunately, when he and a colleague both started showing symptoms, THIS GUY gave the ONE DOSE to the OTHER GUY.

Has he had other treatments already that might have made him more resistant than J. Random Villager? Haven't heard yet, but it sure wouldn't surprise me.

Bring this partiular guy back to the US, to the CDC facilities, shove him in a best-of-its-class isolab, and give him the best supportive care available (including more experimental stuff)? This might make sense, big time, despite the risks in transit.

Recode.net quipped that for an extra million, Alexander would show them the back door (state-installed spyware mechanisms) that the NSA put in consumer routers.

Only ONE of them?

What does this story have to do with Linux?

I assume you were going for "funny".

But on the off chance you (or some reader) is asking this seriously...

Slashdot is about things that are of interest to nerds. The approval process for new drugs (which might save, enhance, damage, or end their lives) is one of those subjects.

But 200 miles certainly covers any and all local in-town and in-area travel possibilities, and nearly everything but very long distance travel.

Nope. You need 250 plus a safety margin - on mountains for part of the trip.

In my case that's half a commute between my Silicon Valley townhouse and my edge-of-Nevada ranch. But that's virtually the same trip as between Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area and many weekend vacation spots: Lake Tahoe ski resorts, Reno gambling, gold country camping, etc.

Make a car that can do 30-mile-one-way commute efficiently and has this 250-and-chage range, and a Northern Californian who works near the coast and blows off steam near the CA/NV interface only needs ONE vehicle. (So it takes four to six hours to charge when you get there and when you get back - so what? It'll be parked longer than that anyhow.) Less and he/she needs TWO, with all the environmental impact of building both. Further, the long-range one is a gas hog by comparison.

Does a loaded F-150 even get 500 miles on a single tank of gas?

Yes, it does.

But it's a 37 galon tank.

I love everything about my F-150 Lariet EXCEPT the gas mileage (and the refusal to pan the weather map except when the vehicle is stopped). Unfortunately, when you have to haul several tons up and down a mountain or across an unpaved desert from time to time, it's hard to avoid a tradeoff in that department.

... the induced DC from a solar storm isn't as instantaneous as a lightning strike. It takes minutes to develop, which leaves time to disconnect the lines and affected transformers if they are properly monitored.

But ARE they monitored for DC? It's not a usual problem.

Warnings on the order of minutes might be useful if the transmission line were the only one invoved. Unfortunately, the power grid is a GRID. Lots of multiple, parallel, transmission lines, and many, many, more going elsewhere and often creating loops.

Redundancy is a good thing in most situations. But when you have to drop a high line, and don't drop all the others simultaneously, you shift the load onto those that are still connected. When you're cutting off because you're near the limit - either due to heavy load at the time or because of the DC issue - you can drive the others beyond their limits (or throw things out of sync and add a bunch of "reactive current" to the load) and create a cascading failure. (Indeed, this is how the first Great Northeast Blackout occurred: Three of a set of four high-lines crossing the St. Lawrence Seaway near Niagra tripped out, and the redistributed load put one after another generator above its limits, blowing its protective breakers and making it progressively harder on those remaining.)

Gracefully shutting down the grid is not something you do on a couple minutes' notice, even if you have a plan in place.

As I understand, the induced DC is something on the order of hundreds of volts, which is much less than the tens of thousands of volts transmitted across ordinary high voltage transmission lines; disconnecting them should not result in arcing problems across the switches.

First, the problem with the induced near-DC is not the voltage, but the current. Transformers and transmission lines have as little resistance as possible, because it's pure loss of valuable energy. The magnetizing alternating current (i.e. the part of the AC that's there all the time, not just when there's a load) is also limited by the inductance of the transformers, but that doesn't impede the direct current at all. A couple hundred "DC" (very low frequency - fractional cycle per minute) volts, induced for minutes around the loop, can drive a hysterical amount of current.

Once the transformer is saturated, most of the damage comes, not from the direct current, but from the line power, which ends up dissipating lots of energy in the transformer. Meanwhile, at these voltages and currents, the switches that interrupt the AC are largely dependent on the momentary off time as the cycle reverses to quench the arc. If, say, the event happened when the line was running at about half its rated load, the direct current will be higher than the alternating current, so there will be no off time. This can keep the current flowing even through an open breaker (while dissipating megawats IN the breaker). Interrupting DC is MUCH harder than interrupting AC.

Heck, at these voltages even interrupting AC is hard. (The video is of an interrupter where the jet of arc-suppressing gas failed for one leg.)

High induced votlages in open wires are a problem, but they're not the big one.

The biggie is common-mode currents in long high-voltage transmission lines adding a strong DC component to the current in the substation transformer windings - high enough that when the same-direction peak of the AC's cycle adds to it, the core saturates. Then the inductance of the transformer drops to the air-core value and no longer substantially impeeds the current.

The current skyrockets. The resistive heating of the windings (and the force on the wires from the magnetic fields) goes up with the SQUARE of the current. The windings quickly soften, distort, form shorted turns, melt, open, short out to the frame, etc. The transformer is destroyed, or committed to a self-destructive progressive failure, in just a handful of such cycles - too fast for the circuit breakers to save them (even if they DO manage to extinguish the arcs with the substantial DC component to the current.) Even if the transformer doesn't explode and throw molten metal, gigawatt sustained arcs, and burning oil (or burning-hot oil replacement) all over the substation area, it's still dead.

This happens to MANY of the giant transformers in the power grid. Each set of three transformers that has one or more failed members means a high-voltage transmission line that is shut down until the transformer is replaced.

There are essentially no spares - these are built to order. Building one takes weeks, and there are few "production lines" so little parallelism is available. What is destroyed overnight will take years to replace, while each intercity power transmission line is not functioning until the transformers at its end ARE replaced.

The current occurs because the transformers are organized in a "Y" arrangement, and the center of the Y is grounded at each end (to prevent OTHER problems). The transformers have enough extra current handling capacity to avoid saturation from the DC through that center connection to/from ground from ordinary electrical and solar storms - just not a giant one like we get every couple centuries.

The solution is to put a resistor in that ground connection, to limit the DC in the lines (and dissipate the energy it represents). Indeed, a few lines have such resistors already.

But a suitable resistor is a box about the size of one of the transformers. It's very expensive. And it only makes a substantial difference to the operation of the lines in such a once-in-centuries event. So most executives don't spend the money (and get dinged for costing the company millions) to put them in, to prevent a failure mode that hasn't happened in the generations since Tesla and Westinghouse invented the three-phase long-line power grid.

Or at least they don't until the regulators or their stockholders require it. Which means said decision-makers need a little educational push to decide it's worth the cost and get it done.

Thus articles like this. B-)

I'm up around retirement age. My eyes don't chage focus much at all. So I have to swap lenses to go from distance to close-up vision. (Yes I could use some kind of bi/tri/progressive-focal lenses. But at the moment swapping is adequate for me.)

Until they find a way to correct presbyopia (and they don't see to be even researching it), I'd still have to don/remove glasses anyhow. With my extreme astigmatism, extreme nearsightedness, and substantial age, I'm not a good candidate for lasic and stand a substantial chance of visual artifacts from it. I'm also a target shooter, so my glasses double as eye protection.

Given all this, the potential benefits for me would be small and the risks and cost oughtweigh them.

But if they ever find a way to fix presbyopia the equation could change substantially.