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Rantings in the digital wind as your Grot Shop of the information age. "I didn't get where I am today without recognising a completely useless machine when I see one" - C.J.
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Sunday, July 8, 2007 |
NASA scientist: ban coal plants now!. Cory Doctorow:
Alex from WorldChanging sez, "We just published a new letter from NASA's Jim Hansen, in which he essentially says the world can't afford to burn coal any more, and we should have a moratorium on coal-burning (except perhaps in a new generation of power plants with carbon capture and sequestration technologies)."
The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!)
(Image ganked from Jay Dugger's Flickr photostream: Unknown Coal Plant Near Saint Louis, Missouri)
 [Boing Boing]
11:36:40 PM 
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DRM guru claims new BluRay won't be cracked for 10 years. Cory Doctorow:
Smokey sez, "Richard Doherty, well-known CE industry analyst, declared to a trade magazine that the BD+ DRM system about to be rolled out on all Blu Ray discs would not be hacked for 'likely 10 years.'"
So, this is dumb for (at least) two reasons:
1. Some teenager will hack this by attacking the least secure implementation of BD+ -- the manufacturer who makes the most mistakes. The BD+ people will argue that BD+ wasn't cracked -- some idiotic company's bad BD+ version was cracked. Yes, true. And that's why BD+ doesn't work: it has to be implemented by companies whose customers don't want BD+.
2. It doesn't matter if BD+ works. There's HD-DVD and all the other compromised DRMs, with the same works released on all of them. If BD+ survives, it's only because DRM crackers can get everything BD+ protects more easily by cracking something else. As the bear joke goes, "I don't have to outrun the bear -- I only have to outrun you." Another analogy: BD+ may be an impregnable steel door, but it protects a safe whose other five walls are made of rice-paper.
Still, it'll be funny to watch BD+ get creamed by a Scandinavian 16-year-old who only started caring about this stuff when the MPAA subverted his country's legal system in a failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay (other trackers may be run by the MPAA as honey-pots -- accept no imitations!)
Link
 [Boing Boing]
11:36:21 PM
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© 2007 Jonathan Butler
Last Update: 7/28/07; 9:00:49 AM
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