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HughPickens.com writes:

Coal still helps keep our lights on, generating nearly 40 percent of U.S. power. But it generated more than 50 percent just over a decade ago, and the big question now is how rapidly its decline will continue. Almost every watt of new generating capacity is coming from natural gas, wind or solar; the coal industry now employs fewer workers than the solar industry, which barely existed in 2010. Is there a "war on coal"?

Sam Batkins writes the market cap of four of the largest coal companies was more than $35 billion in 2011 but after a flurry of regulation, there's been a decline in their market cap of 99 percent. According to Batkins EPA and the Department of Interior have combined to impose $312 billion in costs and more than 30 million paperwork burden hours. All of these burdens aren’t directed solely at the coal industry, but the Clean Power Plan, coal residuals rule, the MATS measure, and Cross-State Air Pollution Rule will impose nearly $20 billion in annual burdens on the industry.

Barry Ritholtz says that regulation is not the whole story and that cheap natural has been a huge factor. According to Ritholtz, coal-fired plants have been the workhorses of U.S. electrical generation for the better part of a century. "Many utilities are switching from coal to natural gas as an energy source. It isn't only greener, it's cheaper, partly because it costs less to move gas through a pipeline than it costs to transport coal by ship, rail or truck," says Ritholtz. "The reality is that coal is the victim of competition from cheaper natural gas, from green-energy sources like solar and wind, and too much debt taken on to pay for costly and ill-timed acquisitions."

Coal retirements have enabled Obama to pledge U.S. emissions cuts of up to 28 percent by 2025, which has, in turn, enabled him to strike a climate deal with China and pursue a global deal later this year in Paris. “We’ve found the secret sauce to making progress in unlikely places,” says Bruce Nilles. “And every time we beat the coal boys, people say: ‘Whoa. It can be done.’”

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MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A serious professional, [Laura] Kam [Founder and CEO of Kam Global Strategies, a Jerusalem-based public relations firm] has embarked on a very serious mission to make the State of Israel – where medical cannabis is legal and used therapeutically every day – the world’s center for research and further development of the plant. One thing she knows from the outset is that, for the moment at least, we need not worry about competition in this area from America.

“In the US, cannabis is regulated as a ‘Schedule 1 drug,’ akin to heroin, so there is virtually no research going on with it,” Kam says.

“No institution with ties to the federal government, such as the National Institutes of Health, will do any kind of research on cannabis. Israel has much more liberal cannabis research policies than the US, so investment money has been pouring into Israel for research.

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Metro/On-a-crusade-for-cannabis-456932

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/how-running-shoes-change-your-feet
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/13/119/20160174

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Runaway1956 submitted via MrPlow, two stories of yet another threat to Internet freedom:

The government hacking into phones and seizing computers remotely? It's not the plot of a dystopian blockbuster summer movie. It's a proposal from an obscure committee that proposes changes to court procedures—and if we do nothing, it will go into effect in December.

The EFF is also calling for a protest on June 21st:

EFF Calls for a Day of Action on June 21. Please join us. The Department of Justice is using an obscure procedure to push through a rule change that will greatly increase law enforcement's ability to hack into computers located around the world. It's an update to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. If Congress does nothing, this massive change will automatically go into effect on December 1.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

Using Bridge.NET, I was able to get my C# Chip-8 emulator running in the browser. There's a live demo running directly in the blog post!

CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language, developed by Joseph Weisbecker. It was initially used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit microcomputers in the mid-1970s. CHIP-8 programs are run on a CHIP-8 virtual machine. It was made to allow video games to be more easily programmed for said computers.

takyon: A previous post details building a Chip-8 interpreter in C#. Here are Github links for the C# code and Bridge.NET.

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"exec" writes with news of a story appearing in Computerworld :

China has set 2020 as the date for delivering an exascale system, the next major milestone in supercomputing performance. This is three years ahead of the U.S. roadmap.

This claim is from China's National University of Defense Technology, as reported Thursday by China's official news agency, Xinhua.

This system will be called Tianhe-3, following a naming convention that began in 2010 when China announced its first petaflop-scale system, Tianhe-1. The first petascale system was developed in the U.S. in 2008.

The U.S. roadmap calls for delivering an exascale system -- capable of 1,000 petaflops -- in 2023.

But it's not clear just what China will deliver in 2020. Theoretically, an exascale computer could be built today but it wouldn't be practical. The power needs may be in excess of what the U.S. believes is possible, power-wise, by 2023: A system that uses 20 to 30 megawatts [pdf].

"It's entirely probable that one or more governments will deploy supercomputers with hypothetical peak performance of an exaflop by 2020," said Steve Conway, a high-performance computing analyst at IDC. "An exaflop is an arbitrary milestone, a nice round figure with the kind of symbolic lure the four-minute mile once held."

But what will China be capable of delivering in 2020?

The first stage will likely be peak exaflop performance, and then a Linpack test making make it eligible for ranking on the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Conway. But the measure "that counts most, but will be likely be celebrated least," said Conway, "is sustained exaflop performance on a full, challenging 64-bit application." That third stage probably won't happen until the 2022 to 2024 timeframe, he said. That's the timeframe the U.S. has set, and its definition of exascale is sustained performance'.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket t has found the following story:

On June 14, someone using what appears to have been a list of e-mail addresses and passwords obtained from the breach of "other online services" made a massive number of login attempts to GitHub's repository service. A review of logins by GitHub's administrators found that the attacker had gained access to a number of accounts, according to a blog post by Shawn Davenport, vice president of security at GitHub.

Davenport said that the passwords of the accounts accessed successfully by the attacker have all been reset. GitHub has begun contacting each affected user individually with instructions on how to get back into their account. He also urged GitHub users to enable two-factor authentication for the service and to "practice good password hygiene"—providing a link to an xkcd comic on password strength to explain.

[...] "For some accounts, other personal information including listings of accessible repositories and organizations may have been exposed," he wrote.

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Gaaark writes:

If Britain hadn't been, basically, bankrupted by the Second World War, they might have put an astronaut in space by 1951, using Germany's V2 rocket technology.

An interesting read about what might have been, at least for Britain.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150824-how-a-nazi-rocket-could-have-put-a-briton-in-space

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

OK, now. I know that a lot of you, if not all of you will be ready to have steam come out of your nose and ears and blow your top to boot, but calm down, take a stress pill, and think things over. We don't want to be obtusely close-minded as well as have our minds so open as to have our brains fall out. Give it a chance, entertain the notion.

From the article:

Three years after Edward Snowden , the American IT contractor turned global celebrity, made his media debut in Hong Kong, the truth of what really happened in this sensational affair remains elusive. The outline is clear. Snowden left his job in Hawaii with the National Security Agency in May 2013 and appeared at Hong Kong’s Mira Hotel on June 1, having made off with more than a million classified intelligence documents belonging to the American government. A few days later, Snowden appeared on camera to announce that he was lifting the top secret mask off NSA, America’s biggest and most secretive intelligence service.

Hans-Georg Maassen, director of Germany’s domestic intelligence service (the mouthful Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution or BfV), has waded into this controversy by stating that Snowden is likely not who he pretends to be. “This would be an espionage operation joined with an operation for disinformation and influence,” he stated: “In order to drive a wedge between the USA and its closest allies, especially Germany.” That Snowden is in fact a Russian agent “has a high degree of plausibility,” Maassen added.

“Of course” Snowden is collaborating with Russian intelligence, explained Oleg Kalugin more than two years ago. A legend in global spy circles, Major General Kalugin is the former head of foreign counterintelligence for the KGB’s elite First Chief Directorate. In the Cold War, Kalugin recruited moles inside American intelligence just like Edward Snowden. He is an expert witness here. Kalugin made clear that Snowden’s new life revolves around the Federal Security Service, Putin’s powerful FSB. “The FSB are now his hosts, and they are taking care of him,” he explained: “Whatever he had access to in his former days at NSA, I believe he shared all of it with the Russians, and they are very grateful.”

I recommend reading the whole thing. Things are more complex, as usual.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Ars Technica reports

The city of Ammon, Idaho, is deploying [an internet service] model that's worth examining. Ammon has built an open access network that lets multiple private ISPs offer service to customers over city-owned fiber. The wholesale model in itself isn't unprecedented, but Ammon has also built a system in which residents will be able to sign up for an ISP--or switch ISPs if they are dissatisfied--almost instantly, just by visiting a city-operated website and without changing any equipment.

Ammon has completed a pilot project involving 12 homes and is getting ready for construction to another 200 homes. Eventually, the city wants to wire up all of its 4,500 homes and apartment buildings, city Technology Director Bruce Patterson told Ars. Ammon has already deployed fiber to businesses in the city, and it did so without raising everybody's taxes.

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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Climate Central reports

The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

[...]In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [June 15]. That's the first time it's passed that level in 4 million years (no, that's not a typo).

[...]Passing the 400 ppm milestone [...] is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We've seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8°F (1°C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common, and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that service providers such as video-sharing sites like Vimeo are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for pre-1972 musical recordings uploaded by their users.

The record labels had sued the YouTube-like site and successfully convinced a district court judge that, because pre-1972 recordings fell under state laws and not federal copyright law, the DMCA didn't apply. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and also overturned the lower court that ruled the DMCA didn't grant so-called safe-harbor passage to service providers whose employees saw infringements on their platforms uploaded by their users.

The decision once again affirms that the DMCA extends immunity to a service provider for the infringement of their customers if the service provider removes material at the request of the right holder. The decision was akin to an earlier and popular decision called Viacom v. YouTube, which the record labels said was off base in the case against Vimeo.

In the case decided Thursday, the court ruled that a "showing by plaintiffs of no more than that some employee of Vimeo had some contact with a user-posted video that played all, or nearly all, of a recognizable song is not sufficient to satisfy plaintiffs’ burden of proof that Vimeo forfeited the safe harbor by reason of red flag knowledge with respect to that video." The ruling added that a "service provider's personnel are under no duty to 'affirmatively seek' indications of infringement."

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"exec" writes:

http://www.cnet.com/news/a-crashed-computer-at-the-us-air-force-wiped-out-a-decades-worth-of-data/#ftag=CAD590a51e

A crashed computer at the US Air Force wiped out a decade's worth of data - CNET

A corrupted database in the US Air Force's inspector general and legislative liaison divisions has reportedly put more than 100,000 internal investigation records in jeopardy.

The database, called the Automated Case Tracking System, was run by defense firm Lockheed Martin. It was corrupted last month and the firm spent two weeks trying to recover data before notifying the Air Force on June 6, according to Defense One.

The database held information about current investigations as well as all records related to IG complaints, appeals and Freedom of Information Act requests, according to The Hill.

"The database crashed and there is no data," Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told The Hill "At this time we don't have any evidence of malicious intent."

-- submitted from IRC

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HughPickens.com writes:

There is more than one way to get a student loan in China as People's Daily Online reports that many Chinese university students use their nude pictures as IOUs on online lending platforms, putting themselves at the risks of having everybody – including their parents – see them naked. Borrowers are also required to upload pictures of their ID cards and report their family information, including their address and cell phone numbers. "The nude photos will be made public if the borrowers fail to repay their debts with interest," an insider was quoted as saying.

The credit varies based on the borrower's education background. Usually an undergraduate student can receive 15,000 yuan ($2,277) in credit, while those studying at famous universities as well as doctorate students can receive even larger loans. Snapshots of threatening collection messages have also gone viral, with a photo of a female borrower and a message reading how the lender would send the photo and her naked video footage to her family members if she could not pay back her 10,000 yuan borrowed on an annual interest rate of 24 percent within a week.

"Naked IOUs started long ago. Not only university students but many others also borrowed money with nude pictures," says insider surnamed Zhang. Zuo Shenggao from Jingshi Law Firm says that nude photos are actually invalid as collateral in terms of laws. "Nude photos are not property. It is in the category of reputation rights," says Shenggao. "If anyone threatens to publish the photos online, they will violate the clients' reputation. At the same time, they are also spreading pornographic material. Both are illegal and they will commit double offence,"

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GlennC writes:

Are you in the market for access to a hacked server? Now, it appears there's a one-stop shop.

From Kaspersky Labs' Securelist https://securelist.com/blog/research/75027/xdedic-the-shady-world-of-hacked-servers-for-sale/
via the Voice of America news site http://www.voanews.com/content/mht-xdedic-hackers-market-sells-access-to-compromised-servers/3377619.html:

An online underground marketplace that sells access to hacked servers all over the world is a “hacker’s dream,” according to a cyber security firm.

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab says the market, called xDedic, is selling access to more than 70,000 compromised government and corporate servers in more than 173 countries with the prices starting at a mere $6.

The one-time cost gives a malicious buyer access to all the data on the server and the possibility to use this access to launch further attacks.

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