Chuck Schumer @SenSchumer
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This MAGA Supreme Court is continuing to erode our country’s environmental laws.

Make no mistake—this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands.

We’ll keep fighting to protect our waters.

The Washington Post @washingtonpost

Breaking news: The Supreme Court on Thursday cut back the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation’s wetlands and waterways, another setback for the agency’s authority to combat pollution. https://wapo.st/3q9g6Nx

Readers added context
All 9 judges agreed that the EPA overstepped its authority and that the plaintiffs' property should not be subject to EPA regulation. However, 4 judges disagreed with the majority's opinion on the limits of EPA authority with respect to wetlands.

nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/…
12:02 PM · May 25, 2023

1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dispatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources? //

2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, U.S. gasoline cars constitute just 3% of global CO2 emissions, so how will getting rid of them impact climate change? //

3. How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to “get off fossil fuels” when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it.

[…]

5. But, perhaps I’m most confused about the whole air quality thing. The obsession over it gets attached to all energy policies. But there’s clearly a strawman to the “we need cleaner air now” demand. First, the air quality conversation in the U.S. reminds me of Voltaire’s “the perfect is the enemy of good.” Americans seem completely unaware how drastically our air quality has improved. Check data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), our criteria pollutants have been plummeting over the past many decades. //

Clyde Spencer
Reply to
KevinM
May 23, 2023 7:45 pm
… statisticians should be fined for associating life expectancy gains with any factor at all.

There is general agreement that the availability of soap (better hygiene) was an important factor in increasing longevity. Also, the control of bacterial infections with antibiotics, and the dramatic reduction of fatal childhood diseases, resulting from vaccinations, played an important role. Additionally, the availability of affordable, effective insect screening, along with programs to reduce mosquito breeding areas did a lot to reduce malaria in the US. There were many factors, most correlated with economy of scale made possible by inexpensive energy.

According to ShortFinals.org, in 1941, in Trafford Park, Manchester, Ford UK had two assembly plants where they were told to build Rolls-Royce Merlins – lots of them! At the time, this engine was in the vast majority of British fighters and bombers, including the two which had just won the Battle of Britain, the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane.

In his book Not Much Of An Engineer, Rolls Royce supercharger designer Stanley Hooker states that Ford UK looked at the Merlin engine drawings and said “we can’t build an engine to those tolerances.” Hooker said loftily (his words) “I suppose the tolerances are too tight for you?” ” No, they are much too loose – we use much tighter tolerances for car engines so all the parts are truly interchangeable without any hand adjustment needed.”

Ford re-drew the blue-prints for the Merlin, making it more suitable for mass production, and by 1944, over 400 engines a week were flowing out of the plants.

The first Merlin engine developed 880hp but by the time the last mark of Merlin was produced the power output was 2030hp.

The Merlin engine was then enlarged still further and named the Griffon. Aircraft which were powered by the Merlin engine include the Lancaster, Spitfire, Halifax, Hurricane, Battle, Defiant, Whitley, Mosquito, Hornet, York, Lincoln and North American Mustang.

In 1973, the innovators at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had a time machine. The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a generation of researchers. A half century later, how we live with computing is still shaped by the Alto.

On the 50th anniversary of the Alto, many of its creators and some of today’s leading inventors gathered at CHM to share the Alto’s legacy and discuss what we can expect for the future of computing research—centered today on artificial intelligence (AI).

Deutsch Connector User Guide. Assembling and dis-assembling Deutsch DT, DTM and DTP Series Connectors.

No middlemen. No price games. Huge drug savings.

We offer safe, affordable medicines at the lowest possible price.

The forced energy transformation crowd continues to be in denial about how badly the California grid has been compromised by wind and solar, how expensive the battery solution is, and the prospect of Big Brother in the home (setting temperatures and restricting power use at will). As Ludwig von Mises observed, the failure of government intervention leads to more and more intervention, posing a choice between free markets and Leviathan.” //

AdenW
May 24, 2023 6:03 am
A simple solution. Smart meters and virtue signalling.

1. Greens sign up to a Green register, get the badge they can display to show how good they are.
2. Smart meters
3. Greens have to sign up to renewables only electric supply
4. Then when the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine, a message is sent to the smart meter and click, they get cut off.
   Once a green, always a green, you are on for life.

The New Pause has lengthened by a further two months to 8 years 11 months. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH monthly satellite global-temperature dataset for the lower troposphere shows no global warming at all from June 2014 to April 2023. //

NOAA thinks there is a 62% chance of an el Niño developing. If it does develop, it will probably bring the latest Pause to an end. Nevertheless, these long Pauses are a visual demonstration of the now-undeniable fact that the rate of global warming predicted by IPCC in 1990 has proven to be greatly in excess of the subsequent outturn. //

In fact, IPCC’s midrange prediction in 1990 of 0.3 K/decade business-as-usual warming since that year exceeds the 0.136 K/decade real-world global warming rate observed since then by a startling 120%. Indeed, even the 0.2 K/decade lower bound of IPCC’s 1990 prediction exceeds observed reality by close to half. Yet policy is being made by scientifically-illiterate governments on the basis of the 0.5 K/decade upper-bound prediction, which exceeds observed reality by a shocking 268%.

Valve boss says service, not price, the big issue for consumers and publishers.

Here's Valve's co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell talking about piracy in the games industry. The man behind online retail service Steam tackles those who claim that lower prices for games will make piracy go away, and he takes on companies that seek to fight piracy by inconveniencing consumers. //

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy," Newell said. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable.

"Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty."

He adds, "Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

The Palo Alto Research Center (a Xerox company) has authorized the Computer History Museum to provide public viewing of the software, documents, and other files on this web site, and to provide these same files to private individuals and non-profit institutions with the same rights granted to CHM and subject to the same obligations undertaken by CHM. For more information about these files, see this explanatory information and @CHM post.

In 1970, the well-heeled corporate behemoth Xerox, with a nearly perfect monopoly on the quintessential office technology of photocopying, cut the ribbon on a new and ambitious bet on its future: the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was a large research and development organization, comprised of distinct laboratories. Several concentrated on extending Xerox’s dominance of photocopying, like the General Science and Optical Science Laboratories. Others, specifically the Computer Science and Systems Science Laboratories, were aimed at a new goal. They would develop computer hardware and software that could plausibly form the basis for the “office of the future” some ten to fifteen years hence, giving Xerox a profound head start in this arena. //

Individual Alto users could store and back up their files in several ways. Altos could store information on removable “disk packs” the size of a medium pizza. Through the Ethernet, they could also store information on a series of IFSs, “Interim File Servers.” These were Altos outfitted with larger hard drives, running software that turned them into data stores. The researchers who developed the IFS software never anticipated that their “interim” systems would be used for some fifteen years.

With the IFSs, PARC researchers could store and share copies of their innovations, but the ancient anxiety demanded the question: “But what if something happened to an IFS?!” Here again, Ethernet held a solution. The PARC researchers created a new tape backup system, this time controlled by an Alto. Now, using Ethernet connections, files from the MAXC, the IFSs, and individuals’ Altos could be backed up to 9-track magnetic tapes. //

The nearly one hundred and fifty thousand unique files —around four gigabytes of information—in the archive cover an astonishing landscape: programming languages; graphics; printing and typography; mathematics; networking; databases; file systems; electronic mail; servers; voice; artificial intelligence; hardware design; integrated circuit design tools and simulators; and additions to the Alto archive. All of this is open for you to explore today at https://info.computerhistory.org/xerox-parc-archive Explore!

https://xeroxalto.computerhistory.org/

But if you are over a slow network or with huge files, it would be nice to have a progress bar. Sure, you could write your own version of copy, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some more generic options?

ONE WAY
The pv program can do some of the things you want. It monitors data through a pipe or, at least through its standard output. Think of it as cat with a meter. //

There is also progress. It looks around for programs running like cp, mv, dd, and many more, looks at their open files, and shows you progress information for those programs. It only does this once, so you’ll typically marry it with the watch command or use the -M option. //

If you want to add a progress bar to your shell scripts directly, try gum

The movie star reportedly owns at least seven jets along with other smaller aircraft.

John Travolta is much more than just a Hollywood star. The actor is known for his love of aviation and has several jets in his private portfolio. Travolta is certified to fly 11 different aircraft and owns a number of planes himself. //

Perhaps the actor's most prized possession was the Boeing 707-138B that he picked up over 20 years ago. Travolta initially acquired the 707 from Qantas on a rental agreement before the airline handed him the jet as part of his brand ambassador role.

The 150-seater former Qantas jet was revamped to carry just 15 guests and boasted two bedrooms and a full-size bathroom.

I have a mixed-use scenario; I am fine with paying for content and streaming it using proprietary applications. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" remains one of the most insightful things anyone has said about media consumption in the last twenty years. But I have plenty of content that I have, at some point, paid a license for, and ripped to an unencumbered format that I can use going forward. //

There's no question that Downloader is frequently used to load programs that, in concept, can "enable piracy". But that almost always indicates that people want to consume content that is region locked, under onerous licensing terms, or no longer available through legal means. If I want to watch an Israeli TV show in the United States, and no one wants to sell it to me, what other choice do I have? It probably takes more effort to block those services by region than it does to sell it everywhere. Instead, grey market streams, private torrent trackers, and VPNs make money because they are serving a market. That people are paying for ways to circumvent restrictive licensing and content delivery is evidence in itself that the providers could make money by selling the content instead of blocking it. They don't even have to make a physical product! Just let some bits go one way instead of restricting them.