Up to $6 billion total, with plants already scheduled to shut down the top priority. //

On Tuesday, the US Department of Energy announced it was releasing guidance that would help nuclear plant operators apply for a slice of $6 billion available under its new Civil Nuclear Credit Program. The money will be coming out of the funds allocated through the infrastructure law that was the centerpiece of President Joe Biden's legislative accomplishments.

The money intends to keep plants operational that would otherwise close due to economic issues. Priority in the first round of funding will go to plants where their operators have already announced closure plans. Next year, the remaining funds will be available to any plant operator, regardless of plans to close it. //

When the money runs out, however, the plants will be facing even stronger headwinds from wind and solar energy, which are likely to see their prices decline even further in the intervening years.

Doctors noted that the problems began with a raised, itchy rash and mild diarrhea. The red, wavy skin lesions originated in his perianal region, then began to migrate under his skin, reaching all over his trunk and limbs. Doctors outlined individual red squiggles on his skin with pen and noted that 24 hours later, the squiggles had moved.

The shifting rash—and the identification of Strongyloides stercoralis larvae in a stool exam—clenched the diagnosis. Doctors prescribed the man the anti-parasitic ivermectin, and the rash and diarrhea improved.

Taylor Lake
5 hours ago
"Lastly, that this judge actually ruled to allow this nonsense to continue is nuts, and given that he did, who knows how he’ll actually rule on the matter."
There's a saying, "Who Dares, Wins." I've heard it's the motto of the British SAS, but I don't know that for sure. What I do know is that the American Left has taken it to heart.

When politics is an alternate expression of war, anything goes. Throw anything and everything at your enemy, and see what sticks. The object is to win, not to win "pretty." Have no shame. Show no embarrassment.

"It worked, didn't it?"

• Harry Reid

Lawfare is just another weapon in political warfare. The Left knows this, and practices it. Conservatives still think that it's dirty pool, but then too many conservatives have been slow to understand that they are at war. Too slow. It has cost them a stolen election, and now we are witnessing assorted attempts to criminalize their participation in the political process and haul them before courts and "commissions." It's not about what's true, or even real. Just use every weapon at your disposal and see which ones work.

"I reject your facts."

• Nancy Pelosi

How do you disable modsecurity for just a specific directory. I'm getting errors in phpMyAdmin that are caused by modsecurity tripping based on rules. I have the following files set up: //

SecRuleEngine Off must work . Have you tried to put SecRuleEngine inside Directory:

<Directory /var/www/site/phpMA>
  SecRuleEngine Off
</Directory>

/var/www/vhosts/system/_site_/conf/vhost.conf

https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/issues/1736

According to Tolkien, fantasy requires a deep imagination known as "sub-creation." And the genre reflects a fundamental truth of being human. //

Why Tolkien loved fantasy

Books of all sorts are escapist. Fictional narratives and made-up characters define a novel. Yet, no genres are quite so escapist as science fiction or fantasy. In that, lies their value. When we imagine a school of wizards, dragon-riders, or humble villagers becoming heroes, we leave the world behind. We enter a world which bears just enough connection to this world to make sense, while being alien enough to be exciting, vibrant, and hugely readable.

As Tolkien put it, “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

The ability we have to read books, imagine worlds, and play make-believe is one of the greatest balms we have. Fantasy takes us on an incredible journey, but it gives us all the heroes and villains we need to make sense of the world.

As Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points told The Federalist in 2020, “The highest readership in American history was whenever we had a burgeoning massive partisan news. That’s actually how most people got their news, when we had huge levels of literacy, and we even had huge levels of news consumption, of voter participation.”

“Places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the mainstream media, which are carrying over their old veil of objectivity … but they have to post crazy critical race theory, because that’s what their upper-middle-class white subscribers want to hear,” Enjeti said. “And that’s fine, it’s okay. Seriously. The part that bothers me is that they then claimed to be the arbiter of truth and the paper of record in the United States.”

Enjeti is the hugely successful host of an independent news show that prizes authenticity over neutrality, understanding that’s almost an impossible standard anyway.

So how can the television network be neutral even if it really tries? This is the same problem that plagued Lemon and Cuomo. They honestly believe bananas are apples. That’s how insulated and ignorant they are. I’d say everyone at CNN should read “Coming Apart” but they won’t because its author has been condemned in the court of wrongthink.

CNN+ is a casualty of the network’s identity crisis, which is in and of itself a casualty of our national identity crisis. But without cynical and incompetent corporations like CNN, who told the country apples were bananas while pretending to do the opposite, we wouldn’t be so deep in the hole anyway.

My professional opinion is that it should take at least six weeks for the units to rebuild, but I don’t think Russian President Vladimir Putin will be up for that (Intelligence Claims Putin Wants a Big Victory in Ukraine Before May 9). Likewise, I’d recommend the Russians try to mass their forces and focus on one objective, but it seems as though units are being fed into the fight as soon as they arrive, and, in my opinion, Russia is trying to do too much with too few forces.

As I see it, the upcoming campaign has three battles that Russia must win to achieve its territorial objectives. I would contend that Putin’s political objectives of deposing the Zelensky government, disbanding the Ukrainian army, and preventing Ukraine from having military alliances with the West are, barring some deus ex machina, out of reach. //

In my view, the Russians are in a very difficult position. The terrain they have to attack across in the north strongly favors the defenders. Their lines of supply will be hard-pressed to support the 70-80 BTGs they are staging there. There is also a race against time. More Ukrainian units are created and move into the battle area every day, and more heavy weapons arrive. Russia has to find that sweet spot where their units have rebuilt back to combat effectiveness, and the Ukrainians haven’t yet begun to field the weaponry sent to them. They also, in my view, have to win all three of these battles–holding Kherson, sealing off Mariupol, and taking positive control of Donbas–to have a chance of gaining their territorial objectives. Ukraine only has one must-win battle: Donbas.

In Poland, which boasts both by far the largest military and economy of the surveyed states, almost two-thirds of the public openly declared their support for a national nuclear weapons program.

The change in attitudes is striking. When Poles were asked the same question in 2018, 83.6% favored abolishing nuclear weapons. However, the newfound realization that a non-nuclear country can be rather helpless in a confrontation with a nuclear-armed enemy has led Poland to request the US to base nuclear weapons in Poland; see Poland Says That if the U.S. Has Some Spare Nukes They’d Be Happy to Take Care of Them. //

Even when Russia loses this war with Ukraine, you can bet Putin will still use threats of using nuclear weapons to try and intimidate anyone who offends him. He will also believe that his possession of these weapons will prevent NATO from taking action under Article 5.

The strategic question is how do we live in a world in which the collapsing Third World kleptocracy that is Russia possesses nuclear weapons but can’t use them to bully other nations or drag us into a nuclear conflict. //

The only way we break the cycle of cringing in fear every time Putin has bad borscht and decides to threaten someone with nukes is to place Russian cities at risk. We can do this by either walking away from the non-proliferation regime that has limited the ownership of nuclear weapons or by providing some allies with nuclear-capable delivery systems and holding the weapons until that nation requests their release. It’s not a wonderful thought to contemplate, but it is better than endless wars in Eastern Europe brought on by Russia’s ability to threaten nuclear attack unless appeased.

BOISE, Idaho -- Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory have completed a rare overhaul of one of the world’s most powerful nuclear test reactors and normal operations are expected to resume later this spring, officials said Monday.

The 11-month outage at the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Test Reactor, or ATR, in eastern Idaho allowed a core overhaul that's done, on average, about every 10 years. The changeout was the sixth since the reactor started operating in 1967 and the first in 17 years.. //

The ATR is unique because unlike commercial nuclear reactors that produce heat that’s turned into energy, the ATR produces neutrons so that new materials and fuels can be tested to see how they react in high-radiation environments. The test reactor’s unique cloverleaf design includes a core that’s surrounded by beryllium metal to reflect the neutrons.

But all those neutrons put wear on the internal parts of the test reactor, meaning it would lose the ability to conduct experiments if it is not refurbished.

The reactor’s designers foresaw that problem and created a reactor with internal components that can be periodically replaced.

In my hometown of Simi Valley, California, we have a beautiful Holy Week tradition that helps us remember Christ’s sacrifice throughout the week. Atop Mt. McCoy, at the far western end of the valley, sits a cross originally erected in the early 1800s as a landmark for Spanish priests traveling between the Ventura and San Fernando missions. Since 1921 sunrise services have been held at the cross on Easter Sunday, and since 1941 (with a few exceptions) it has been illuminated every night during Holy Week by members of local community groups – some of whom have their families sleep overnight on the mountain to keep watch over the generator. On Good Friday, though, there is no light, a solemn reminder of that dark night.

As a child I loved seeing the cross lit up during that week and thought it was pretty, but my appreciation for what it represents has grown significantly as I’ve gotten older and experienced the pain of losing a loved one.

Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit and it’s been a huge change to the whole industry. Now, when everyone has adopted the idea of free SSL certificates, the logical evolution step is at hand — managed certificates. What are the options across major cloud providers?

DrunkDiogenes
6 hours ago
“In conversation with [a fool], one virtually feels that one is dealing not... with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

McTurkeyArs Praetorianreplya day agoReader Favignore user
dr_lha wrote:

"Should we only allow billionaires and formal aerospace engineers to lead our way into space? "

Forget the billionaires part, I read like like "should we only allow formal doctors to perform surgeries?"

I completely agree that we don't need to have only billionaires leading the way. We don't even need to have exclusively people who've graduated college be the ones doing it, as there are self-taught engineers capable of delivering great results. But to denigrate the value of knowledge and education in one of the most complex fields of engineering, which has the capacity for considerable death and destruction if done poorly, seems like the kind of hubris that's going to be worthy of a group Darwin Award. //

ColdWetDogArs Tribunus Angusticlaviuset Subscriptorreplya day agoReader Favignore user
stdaro wrote:
I wonder if high volume megarocket launches are better off all happening from off-shore platforms.

mega-rockets and their required infrastructure are highly disruptive to their surroundings. Also, ideally, they're launched near open water to avoid overflying populated areas (ahem China), and the sea shore is environmentally sensitive. The shore areas that aren't under conservation of some kind are usually populated, and the sound and shock wave of launches isn't great to live near.

Once you're good at getting all the stuff on a barge and getting it out to a platform, you're not so limited by geography and you can launch from wherever is most advantageous for orbital mechanics. We could stop doing all our crewed LEO stuff in the weird inclinations that are easiest to get to, and just do stuff in equatorial orbits.

You could do all the polar orbits from the north pole once the ice caps are done melting :(

Ask anyone in the offshore oil business about how expensive it is. Sure, we can do lots of things on off shore platforms / repurposed boats but it is hella expensive. So you need sufficient volume to justify the capex and opex. We don't have that yet.

Now, Elon thinks, at some level, this is a good idea and has purchased (at fire sale prices) two slightly used semi submersible oil drilling rigs. Work is not proceeding as rapidly as is SpaceX's norm so it seems like their isn't the pressure to get this part of the Starship/SH system working isn't all that high.

So stay tuned to this space (umm).

And you don't need to go to the north pole for polar launches. You can do two things, move out of the way of land to the north of your launch site via boat or barge or just do a dogleg. With Falcon 9 and presumably Starship/SH they have enough delta v to do that.

Having a direct line of sight to the poles made sense in the early days when you were scrapping for every bit of deltaV. Now we have a bit more power so we can use it to make life easier. //

McTurkeyArs Praetorianreplya day agoReader Favignore user
etxdm wrote:

Having spent a good portion of my career as an engineer helping to start up new petrochemical plants, I sympathize with the SLS teams. I will say though, that although our facilities were every bit as complex as the SLS fueling and launch systems, we were expected to work through the gremlins and get things working well as soon as each section of equipment was built and transferred to operations. I'm puzzled about why valves and fans weren't completely debugged and commissioned before there was a rocket mated to the launch assembly. Anyone who has put together a critical path diagram tries to use as many parallel steps as possible.

That's not an efficient way to make more money. See, you're thinking like an engineer. SLS was not conceived by, managed by, or designed by engineers. Oh sure, the finer points were done by actual trained engineers. But the big picture? The order of tasks? The checklists? That all went through people whose sole professional purpose is the extraction of taxpayer wealth in order to preserve ongoing employment in specific organizations and locations. You don't maximize the plus in cost-plus contracting by being efficient with your engineering and processes, but rather the opposite. Technical problems? That sounds like justification to keep people working longer without having to actually.. you know.. expend physical hardware or deliver a functioning product (both of which would reduce the available options and excuses for arbitrary ongoing delays).

I wish I were being sarcastic.

Six sailors stranded on a remote island without food for almost two weeks have been rescued by the Brazilian Navy — after sending a message in a bottle out to sea.

Last night we covered the initial reports in BREAKING. The flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet Hit by Ukrainian Missiles, Dead in the Water, Crew Evacuated. The Moskva came under fire from a Ukrainian Neptune missile launcher that fired two missiles. At least one of the missiles penetrated the missile/gun defensive system, and when it detonated set off explosions of weapons loaded in their firing tubes and ignited propellant. The fire and explosions overwhelmed the damage control effort, evacuating the crew. At some point, the fires were either extinguished or under sufficient control to permit Moskva to be taken into tow. While in transit, Moskva sank.

Some stray thoughts.

Today is the 110th anniversary of the RMS Titanic striking an iceberg.
This is the first loss of a Russian flagship since the Battle of Tsushima Straits.
This is the biggest warship lost since World War II.
The Argentines are able to share the ignominy of being one of the two nations that lost a capital ship since World War II.
The Russians are still blaming Russian incompetence for the loss rather than giving Ukraine credit for the missile strikes. Placing the responsibility for the loss on a non-specific “explosion” is rather lame as the evolutions a cruiser would carry out don’t have the same risk factors as those aboard aircraft carriers (see USS Oriskany and USS Forrestal; the loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard is in a class of its own). //

Michael Weiss 🌻🇺🇸🇮🇪
@michaeldweiss
Strange for an “accident” aboard one ship, as per Russia’s MoD, to cause all the others to sail farther away from shore unless the accident was being hit by Ukrainian missiles.
Raf Sanchez
@rafsanchez
NEW: US defence official says Russian warships have moved away from Ukraine’s southern coast after explosion on the Moskva. They’re now 80 nautical miles or more from the shore.

Possible sign they’re trying to get out of missile range.
11:44 AM · Apr 14, 2022 //

The Moskva figured prominently in an event in the early days of the war when it demanded that Ukrainian troops defending Snake Island surrender. The incident is commemorated in a Ukraine postage stamp. The sinking of that ship will create a huge morale boost. //

the permanent loss of Moskva’s impressive array of missile launchers to the Black Sea Fleet. According to the provisions of the Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits, warships of belligerent nations can’t enter the Black Sea unless they are homeported there. Turkey has said that for the purposed of the Convention, the special military operation Russia is flogging away at in Ukraine is a war, and it has turned down requests by three Russian warships to pass through the Straits. The remaining Russian surface combatants are much less capable in a land-attack mode, and they will act, as my old man would say, like a long-tailed tomcat in a room full of rocking chairs. //

She was fatally struck by two homegrown Ukrainian cruise missiles, neither of which, according to any simulation, should have been able to make it through Moskva‘s defenses. The prestige damage to Russia is huge, and it may, in retrospect, be seen as the decisive moment of the whole war.

Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar Land Rover, Ford, Lamborghini, and Lotus also use w3w. //

What3words divides the planet into 3×3m squares and assigns each one a randomly generated three-word address. //

What3words is a mapping company that looks at navigation differently. It divides the planet into a grid of squares, each measuring 3×3 m. Each one of those squares gets its own identifier made up of three random words—hence the company's name.

So, 1 World Trade Center, Ars Technica's corporate HQ (as opposed to the orbiting one), includes the "squares" cycles.rugs.lucky, feels.thigh.bigger, and gifts.spray.ties.

The fact that this large building with a single street address (285 Fulton St.) can have multiple what3words addresses highlights the utility of this approach, which is magnified in the case of something like a stadium or industrial park. And since what3words' grid is independent of street addresses, it means you can also use it for parks, hiking trails, or literally any other location on the planet.

Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com
@JordanSchachtel
If the libs are mad about Elon buying Twitter they should just make their own Twitter. It is a private company, after all.
8:22 AM · Apr 14, 2022 //

I don’t like that the exercise of the First Amendment is now at the mercy of billionaires, but this is the world we currently live in. Because so many on the right don’t have the stomach to stop corporatism (usually in league with the government) from crushing free speech, the only current move is to play the game. Musk is playing the game, and we should all be rooting for him to succeed.

Up until now, all installs of Raspberry Pi OS have had a default user called “pi”. This isn’t that much of a weakness – just knowing a valid user name doesn’t really help much if someone wants to hack into your system; they would also need to know your password, and you’d need to have enabled some form of remote access in the first place. But nonetheless, it could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials.

So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.

E85 fuel—a mix of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline—rapidly fell out of favor. But 98 percent of US gas stations offer E10, a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. At this concentration, the ethanol oxygenates the fuel and increases its octane rating; it also stretches the country's supply of gasoline by diluting it.

As the name suggests, E15 is a mix of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline. It's much less common in the US due to the EPA's restriction on summer sales (because of the greater evaporation during hot weather), but in 2019, former President Donald Trump approved its use year-round. In 2021, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled that the EPA had exceeded its authority in doing so. //

It's also bad news for anyone concerned about climate change. Although biofuel blends were supposed to save us, growing energy-intensive corn to dilute gasoline is probably worse than just burning the gas itself, as Ars' Tim de Chant covered in February. Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its latest report with the finding that we have to massively cut carbon emissions within the next three years if we want to have a chance at limiting warming to even just 2°C globally.

Storm Events Database
The Storm Events Database contains the records used to create the official NOAA Storm Data publication, documenting:

The occurrence of storms and other significant weather phenomena having sufficient intensity to cause loss of life, injuries, significant property damage, and/or disruption to commerce;
Rare, unusual, weather phenomena that generate media attention, such as snow flurries in South Florida or the San Diego coastal area; and
Other significant meteorological events, such as record maximum or minimum temperatures or precipitation that occur in connection with another event.

The database currently contains data from January 1950 to December 2021, as entered by NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS). Due to changes in the data collection and processing procedures over time, there are unique periods of record available depending on the event type. NCEI has performed data reformatting and standardization of event types but has not changed any data values for locations, fatalities, injuries, damage, narratives and any other event specific information. Please refer to the Database Details page for more information.