Beginners may find it difficult to relate the facts from the formal documentation on the BSD rc.d framework with the practical tasks of rc.d scripting. In this article, we consider a few typical cases of increasing complexity, show rc.d features suited for each case, and discuss how they work. Such an examination should provide reference points for further study of the design and efficient application of rc.d.

As exhausting as it is to read that list, the FCC itself says it is not an exhaustive list. The Biden administration’s plan empowers the FCC to regulate every aspect of the internet sector for the first time ever. The plan is motivated by an ideology of government control that is not compatible with the fundamental precepts of free market capitalism.

But it gets worse.

The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both “actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.” In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable; and if you do nothing, you may be liable.

There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.

Greenwood's monologue begins after he says "When life gives you lemons" prompting another character to say "You make lemonade." Greenwood pauses for a moment, bemused, before launching into what you do when life gives you lemons...you sell the lemons, and you do so at a severely hiked-up price. How?

You launch a massive media campaign that turns the simple lemon into a high-value object desired by everyone, including the rich and famous, by infecting the populace with the idea that lemons are actually worth a king's ransom.

This monologue is delivered so well by Greenwood that it's hard not to get sucked into it, but it's all the better that you do because despite it being an actor acting out lines, it reveals a brutal truth about just how controlled we are today. //

The manipulation of markets isn't anything new. Decades of research have gone into figuring out how to make the mundane seem like a high-tier item you must spend high-dollar amounts on.

One of the most successful campaigns to do this in history involves the diamond. It's one of the most common gemstones in the world and yet, thanks to a very successful marketing campaign that got people willing to shell out absurd amounts of money for them.

Thanks to the De Beers Corporation controlling the supply and demand of diamonds, they were able to create a marketing campaign through the ad agency N.W. Ayer in 1938.

the face of ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, the Walmart Foundation has taken a strong stance in support of humanitarian efforts, pledging to donate $1 million to Magen David Adom in order to support the organization and its efforts to save lives. The company announced this move in a statement sent out on Friday to Walmart associates and partners.

Deploy our best deals yet on KVM VPS in 7 different locations, instantly set up! CentOS, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu Supported. Custom ISO's can also be mounted via support ticket.

Operations Displays

View new displays below: Solar DART, Regional Directional Transfer, Generation Outages

Never forget that Ebenezer Scrooge was inspired by Thomas Malthus //

In other words, the underlying reason for the electricity emergency is the lack of natural gas, nuclear, and coal, which can provide reliable electricity in all weather conditions, unlike solar panels and wind turbines.

It’s true that solar panels and wind turbines can still operate in cold weather. There is often still sunlight and wind when it is cold. Snow can be brushed off of solar panels, and it is possible to de-ice frozen wind turbines.

But the sun often doesn’t shine during the hours people most need electricity and wind is not reliable enough to provide electricity during the winter. Right now, PJM is generating very little electricity from wind and has had to resort to burning oil, which is dirtier and less efficient than coal, and far worse than natural gas or nuclear.

Historian Bruce Gilley’s provocative book, ‘In Defense of German Colonialism,’ makes a compelling case that many historical narratives surrounding Africa are motivated by politics, not facts. //

Our anti-Western conceptions of colonial Africa are equally misinformed. In 1904, a policy in German East Africa decreed that all children born to slaves beginning in 1906 were free. Moreover, between 1891 and 1912, more than 50,000 slaves in the colony were freed by legal, social, and financial means. By 1920, slavery had virtually been eradicated from the region.

German East Africa was also environmentally conscious, codifying laws prohibiting unlicensed elephant hunting and creating the first game reserves. It promoted education by natives: By 1910, there were more than 4,000 students in state schools. “The Germans have accomplished marvels,” noted a 1924 British report on local education initiatives. The education system in German colonies provided instruction in local histories, cultures, and geographies, as well as technical subjects common in German curricula. Because of this, local language media prospered. “German transformed Swahili from a coastal language of Muslim elites to the lingua franca for the future country of Tanzania,” writes Gilley.

An exciting advancement over prior AR Summits was the major role that customers played in presentations and hallway conversations. Though nuclear utility operating companies like Duke Energy, TVA, Southern Company and Ontario Power Generation (OPG) made important and encouraging presentations, the strong demand signals provided by Nucor – the largest steelmaker in the US, Dow – one of the largest chemical companies in the world, and Microsoft – one of the world’s largest data center operators – made an even bigger impact on most attendees.

Presentations from Nucore, Microsoft and Dow validated many of the concepts that have long motivated advanced nuclear developers. They showed that credible customers were willing to pay for process heat, always-on carbon free power, and behind the meter installations.

Each of the three said they were willing to assist entities that would own and operate the facilities in obtaining affordable financing by inking long-term, economically viable power purchase agreements (PPAs). Projects with PPAs from established, well-capitalized companies are almost as bankable as a captive base of ratepayers. None of them want to own or operate nuclear power plants.

This post is a sampling of information gleaned during the event. There may be additional posts based on presentations and conversations at the Summit. Several important players in the advanced nuclear community did not attend the conference. //

NuScale has attracted several strategic investors/partners that will help build its plants and/or buy power from those facilities. A notable recent addition to the NuScale team is Nucor, the largest steel maker in the United States.

Nucor is so excited about the capabilities that SMRs offer to meet some of its most challenging requirement that it sent Leon Topalian, its Chairman, President and CEO, to the summit to meet members of NIC and to provide a keynote address. (Attendees also appreciated Nucor’s hospitality as the sponsor of a rooftop welcoming reception.)

Aside: Topalian proudly reminded the audience that Nucor’s initial name was Nuclear Corporation of America. It long ago pivoted to focus on steel making but is now returning to its roots. End Aside.

Nucor operates 50 electric arc furnaces in the US. Its total electricity demand is about 50 GWe that has little variation during the 8760 hours of each per. Assuming Nucor facilities have capacity factors that are close to 90%, its electricity demand is almost 50% of the power produced by the current US nuclear fleet.

GameServer is a TurnKey GNU/Linux appliance for hosting game servers on Linux. It provides a way of deploying game servers in minutes in cloud environments or local VMs.

Automatic installation of gameservers using LinuxGSM. - GitHub - jesinmat/linux-gameservers:

Tool for automatic installation of game servers. Wrapper for LinuxGSM.

Manage Your Game Server Easily With LinuxGSM

The command-line tool for quick, simple deployment and management of Linux dedicated game servers.

In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults. //

How hard would it be for well-resourced criminals to crack the master passwords securing LastPass user vaults? Perhaps the best answer to this question comes from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher and the original developer behind the Adblock Plus browser plugin.

In a December 2022 blog post, Palant explained that the crackability of a LastPass master password depends largely on two things: The complexity of the master password, and the default settings for LastPass users, which appear to have varied quite a bit based on when those users began patronizing the service.

LastPass says that since 2018 it has required a twelve-character minimum for master passwords, which the company said “greatly minimizes the ability for successful brute force password guessing.”

But Palant said while LastPass indeed improved its master password defaults in 2018, it did not force all existing customers who had master passwords of lesser lengths to pick new credentials that would satisfy the 12-character minimum.

“If you are a LastPass customer, chances are that you are completely unaware of this requirement,” Palant wrote. “That’s because LastPass didn’t ask existing customers to change their master password. I had my test account since 2018, and even today I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it.”

Palant believes LastPass also failed to upgrade many older, original customers to more secure encryption protections that were offered to newer customers over the years. One important setting in LastPass is the number of “iterations,” or how many times your master password is run through the company’s encryption routines. The more iterations, the longer it takes an offline attacker to crack your master password.

Palant noted last year that for many older LastPass users, the initial default setting for iterations was anywhere from “1” to “500.” By 2013, new LastPass customers were given 5,000 iterations by default. In February 2018, LastPass changed the default to 100,100 iterations. And very recently, it upped that again to 600,000.

Palant said the 2018 change was in response to a security bug report he filed about some users having dangerously low iterations in their LastPass settings.

“Worse yet, for reasons that are beyond me, LastPass didn’t complete this migration,” Palant wrote. “My test account is still at 5,000 iterations, as are the accounts of many other users who checked their LastPass settings. LastPass would know how many users are affected, but they aren’t telling that. In fact, it’s painfully obvious that LastPass never bothered updating users’ security settings. Not when they changed the default from 1 to 500 iterations. Not when they changed it from 500 to 5,000. Only my persistence made them consider it for their latest change. And they still failed implementing it consistently.”

A coalition of more than 1,600 scientists critical of their peers’ hyperbolic claims about climate change drew a prominent recruit to sign their 2019 declaration that the climate “emergency” is a myth.

John Clauser, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in physics, became the second Nobel laureate last month to sign the document with 1,607 other scientists rebuking the idea of a climate crisis.

“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the declaration organized by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) reads. “Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”

Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) debuted a roadmap to net-zero emissions that became the model for corporate bishops of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards. A June report from the Energy Policy Research Foundation criticized the initiatives outlined as a “green mirage.” The IEA roadmap, researchers wrote, “will dramatically increase energy costs, devastate Western economies, and increase human suffering.”

“The aim of global policy should be ‘prosperity for all’ by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times,” reads CLINTEL’s World Climate Declaration. “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm.”

Norwegian-American engineer Ivan Giaever, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973, is also a signatory to the declaration. //

The World Climate Declaration also notes that carbon dioxide is plant food, “not a pollutant.”

“It is essential to all life on Earth,” the document reads.

In fact, reforestation is on the rise, promoted by a global “greening” effect proliferating plant growth.

Prescription for the Planet

by Tom Blees

"This is the most important book that has ever been written on sustainable development... You MUST read it! It is not A revolution, it is THE revolution, THE way to go."

• Bruno Comby Ph.D, Founder and President of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy

Click here to download the entire book as a PDF courtesy of the author and SCGI.

Pandora's Promise

Pandora's Promise is a 2013 documentary film about the nuclear power debate, directed by Robert Stone. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming.

View Pandoras's Promise on Youtube. https://youtu.be/KMutoR8YTlQ

View Pandora's Promise at Netflix. https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Pandora-s-Promise/70267585

Plentiful Energy
The Story of the Integral Fast Reactor: The complex history of a simple reactor technology, with emphasis on its scientific basis for non-specialists

Authored by Charles E. Till, Yoon Il Chang

A people's guide to our nuclear planet

An introduction to nuclear radiation and its impacts on human health and Earth’s environment.

By Ron Gester, retired geologist & physician, 2023.

Earth is a nuclear planet … and nuclear energy is essential for our existence on Earth.

Without Earth's molten core, life as we know it would not exist. Earth is protected from extreme levels of cosmic and solar radiation by a geomagnetic field generated by the rotation of Earth’s molten core. It rotates because of a combination of convection, due to heat, and Earth's rotation. The heat is generated in part from the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes. [Johnston, 2011] This heat also contributes to convection in the mantle which drives plate tectonics and continental drift. Nuclear energy is a natural and essential force on Earth. Nuclear fission reactors have occurred naturally in Earth’s geologic past. Rock formations in Oklo, Gabon, W. Africa reveal that self-sustaining nuclear reactions ran in these formations for hundreds of thousands of years starting about 1.7 billion years ago.

Nuclear radiation is everywhere. What is it?

Nuclear radiation is a form of energy released from the decay of the nuclei of certain kinds of atoms. It is the same whether it is naturally occurring or man-made. It can be described as waves or particles and is part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes light and radio waves. Ionizing radiation is radiation that has enough energy to remove electrons from their orbits, creating ions. Examples of ionizing radiation are high-level ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays. Natural uranium emits gamma rays. Uranium is not a scarce resource. As a result of its very wide range of geochemical behavior, it is present in most soil, rocks, and water. [Deffeyes, 1980]

Low-dose ionizing radiation is safe. How do we know this? Research in biology & epidemiology.

Life on Earth evolved in a radioactive environment. This background radiation comes from space and Earth. Life has adapted to it to survive. This is true in different ways for the many threats to life including heat, cold, sunshine, and oxygen.

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fourth-generation fast nuclear reactor design that offers more efficiency and safety, while generating 1,000 times less waste than current light-water reactors, the predominant designs used in the US. It uses existing nuclear waste for fuel. The energy needs of the US can be supplied for over 1,000 years just using the existing nuclear waste now in storage.

1. Proven to be reliable and safe over almost 50 years of operational experience

• Ran for 30 years in the USA without any mishaps
• Chernobyl and TMI scenarios were tested on the IFR: the IFR reactor shut itself down w/o human intervention or active safety systems.
• Russians have been running commercially for 30 years without problem (BN-600)
• Passively safe (guaranteed by the physics). Does not require electricity, operator intervention, or active safety systems to shut down if it overheats.

2. The waste has 1,000 times less long-term radioactivity per unit of power than LWR (waste meaning what is no longer usable in the reactor).

3. Uses existing nuclear waste (DU, decommissioned bombs) for fuel. A variety of fuels can be used (any actinide), not just uranium. //

4. Using fast reactors, there is more energy in the trace uranium in the coal than we get from burning the coal. Extracting uranium from coal ash is on the verge of being economically competitive.

In just two decades Sweden went from burning oil for generating electricity to fissioning uranium. And if the world as a whole were to follow that example, all fossil fuel–fired power plants could be replaced with nuclear facilities in a little over 30 years. That's the conclusion of a new nuclear grand plan published May 13 in PLoS One. Such a switch would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nearly achieving much-ballyhooed global goals to combat climate change. Even swelling electricity demands, concentrated in developing nations, could be met. All that's missing is the wealth, will and wherewithal to build hundreds of fission-based reactors, largely due to concerns about safety and cost. //

Based on numbers pulled by the research team from the experience of Sweden and France and scaled up to the globe, a best-case scenario for conversion to 100 percent nuclear power could enable the world to stop burning fossil fuels and start fissioning uranium for electricity within 34 years. Requirements for this shift of course would include expanded uranium mining and processing, a build-out of the electric grid as well as a commitment to develop and build fast reactors—nuclear technology that operates with faster neutrons and therefore can handle radioactive waste, such as plutonium, for fuel as well as create its own future fuel. "No other carbon-neutral electricity source has been expanded anywhere near as fast as nuclear," Qvist says.