My experience reaches back to the toggle-and-punch cards days and I don't want want to bore anyone with stories about that.

But one thing I have noticed in all those years a I cannot recall a single year where it wasn't proclaimed by someone that software engineering would be dead as a career path within a few years.

I go back that far, as well.

And the proliferation of languages, each with advocates claiming it to be the be-all and end-all, was well established by the early '60s.

(I recall the cover of the January 1961 Communications of the ACM, which had artwork showing the Tower of Babel, with various bricks labeled with a different programming language name. There were well over seventy of them.)

I'm struggling to understand the point of this article.

It's Infoworld.

The point of the article is twofold:
  - To convince Pointy Haired Bosses that they understand what's going on and are riding the cutting edge.
  - To sell them new products, implementing new buzzwords, which they can then inflict on their hapless subordinates, making their life hell as they try to get the stuff working and into production.

That's the first two lines of the four-line Slashdot meme. The remaining two are:

(3. Bill the advertisers.)
(4. Profit!)

There is zero difference in talent. The difference is one of leadership and money. The money is already there, so there is where people go.

Actually, the big difference is a little-known aspect of California intellectual property law:

If you, as an employee, invent something, on your own time and not using your employer's resources, and it doesn't fit into the employer's current or foreseeable future product line, you own it. If the patent assignment agreement in your employment contract says otherwise, it's void.

This means that, if you invent something neat and your employer doesn't want to productize it, you (and a couple of your friends) can rent a garage across the street and found a new company to develop and sell it.

Employees in California can NOT be ripped off the way Westinghouse ripped off Nikola Tesla.

The result is that companies in silicon valley have "budded off" more companies, like yeast budding off new cells. And once this environment got started, thousands of techies have migrated to the area, so there are plenty of them available with the will and talent to be the "couple of your friends" with the skills you need to fill out the team in your garage.

Lots of other states have tried to set up their own high-tech areas on Silicon Valley's model. But they always seem to miss this one point. They need to clone that law to have a chance at replacing or recreating the phenomenon. Result: They might get a company to set up a shop, but they don't get a comparable tech community to build up. Research parks of several companies, generally focused on some aspect of tech, might form, but you don't get the generalist explosion.

Of course, like any network, the longer it accumulates, the more valuable it is to be connected to this one, rather than another that is otherwise equivalent. (This is what the parent poster already alluded to.) Thus there's only one Silicon Valley in California, with the resources concentrated within driving distance, though the law is statewide. Even with the law change, and a couple decades to let the results grow, other states might have a tough time overcoming California's first-mover advantage.

But California keeps fouling things up for techies and entrepreneurs in other ways. So if some other state would TRY this, they might become a go-to place when groups of people in Silicon Valley get fed up and decide to go-forth.

undoubtedly, you've read about the tempest in San Francisco recently, where urban activists are decrying the influx of highly paid tech professionals, who they argue are displacing residents suddenly unable to keep up with skyrocketing rents.

That was decades-old news in Silicon Valley when I moved here in the late '80s. (A couple who'd gone there for the same project a few years earlier had bought, rather than rented, had the price of their mortgaged house skyrocket over a couple years, and bailed out of High Tech to start a new career as landlords.)

I thought Hi Tek had been doing the same to Berkeley and (to a lesser extent) SF since before then, as well. SF prices have always been high - though perhaps not as high as mid-peninsula around the Stanford tek-lek.

So what's new? Did Hi Tek start buying spaces in the slums and drive the prices further up than SF's already astronomical highs? Did public assistance not rise to track the new rents?

This is SO last millenium...

The flaw with this analysis is the timeline. Yes, the short term impact on the cleaned beaches was pretty horrendous, but it remains to be seen how this plays out over time as the ecology recovers

Hear, hear. The "cleaned" beaches may come back closer to the original - after they've been repopulated by pioneer speecies and gone through the whole beach-equivalent of the succession to climax forest. The uncleaned beaches may get where they're going more quickly, but that may be somewhere other than where they started. And so on.

Maybe, once the toxins have been cleaned up by lifeforms in one case, the soil rebuilt and recolonized by successive populations of organisms in the other, they'll come back to what they once were. (Assuming the area hasn't been reshaped by then.) Maybe they'll come back as something else - like the "flip-flop" island of recent history: Lobsters ate the snails and kept their population down. A hurricane wiped out the lobsters. Attempts to recolonize by importing lobsters failed. Turned out the snail population boomed once the lobsters were gone and it got to where a newly introduced lobster would, within minutes, pick up enough snail riders to weight it down and eat IT, so now the ecology was stable in a different mode. So in either case the beach ecology may converge to a different equilibrium.

But there are sections of the Pacific Northwest where a natural phenomenon did something similar: Two glacers met along the front of the ice cap during the last ice age. When things finally melted they melted last, forming a dam holding back an ocean. When it finally melted through, the ocean poured through in that one spot. It scoured an area comparable to an eastern state down to bedrock, washing everything from topsoil to gravel to rocks to boulders off toward the Pacific. The area STILL is nearly as lifeless as the moon.

So my bet is the unwashed beach will reach a robust and stable exology in historic time. But I wouldn't be surprised if, even with lots of sea life washed up by wave action, the washed beach takes geologic time to make a similar recovery.

First: Do no (more) harm

One of the lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is that attempts to clean things up may make them far worse, while the ecology's toughness in the face of environmental changes is vastly underrated.

For instance: They did a major removal of oil from part of a beach. In the process they stripped the bulk of the lifeforms off, leaving essentially sand - mineral dust. In an adjacent section that was missed, the orgnisms did a fine job of consuming the oil that had spilled. (It seems sea life has to deal with seeped oil quite a bit, from natural sources. Some stuff not only handles it, but considers it a valuable resource.). After a couple years the un-cleaned beach was flourishing (though perhaps not with the same mix of populations as before). A picture of the boundary is impressive: Cut like a knife.

Granted disturbing mine tailings is a very different case. But similar rules apply: Will letting them settle to the bottom, where they can be processed over decades to geologic time, cause less harm than attempting to clean them up RIGHT NOW - which might keep them mixed into the water and produce a much larger, sustained, iinput of "toxic" minerals to the bulk of the waterway's biosphere?

.. german cars use what we call a "Can Gateway" but is better of though as a firewall. Every different system in the car has it's own private canbus. Anything that needs to travel between the busses has to go through the gateway.

A separate CAN(N)BUS for each system? But the original POINT of the bus was to replace the expensive, custom, wiring harness - a bundle of special-purpose wires as thick as your wrist - with a power line and a pair of signal wires. One big party line with everything talking on it. Now you're bringing back the harness AND adding an extra box.

(The above is only half facetious.)

Vehicles that share common can without a gateway are readily exploitable. I could plug a can interface into the headlights, A/C or any other system on the global bus and lock/unlock the doors, roll the windows up/down, trigger the traction control/ABS or even start/stop the car (if it uses a push button start).

Which, of course, is the downside of the system.

An alternative to restoring the bundle is for each user of the "big party line" to "recognize the voice" of those who can give it instructions - and have a list of what instructions each can give it. I won't go into details, but there is ample room for design here. An interloper would be reduced to trying to "mimic the voice" of a talker with enough authority to command the action, or DOSing by "shouting over" legitimate commands.

[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.