Slashdot reader XXongo brings word of a new three-part documentary — streaming free now — that tries to understand America's early inaction on climate change. Looking back over the last few decades, The Power of Big Oil explores how the fuel industry "successfully set up a campaign to discredit climate science and targetting individual politicians to vote against measures to curb climate change." The Guardian notes that the series includes an interview with a U.S. senator who they say "blames the oil industry for malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research." As far back as 25 years ago, the senator says, "they had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean — they lied." The documentary's makers have dug out a parade of former oil company scientists, lobbyists and public relations strategists who lay bare how the US's biggest petroleum firm, Exxon, and then the broader petroleum industry, moved from attempting to understand the causes of a global heating to a concerted campaign to hide the making of an environmental catastrophe. Over three episodes — called Denial, Doubt, Delay — the series charts corporate manipulation of science, public opinion and politicians that mirrors conduct by other industries, from big tobacco to the pharmaceutical companies responsible for America's opioid epidemic. Some of those interviewed shamefacedly admit their part in the decades-long campaign to hide the evidence of climate change, discredit scientists and delay action that threatened big oil's profits. Others almost boast about how easy it was to dupe the American public and politicians, with consequences not just for the US but every country on the planet. In one video clip an aide to a climate-conscious senator remembers that "You had reams of material coming out of the government. They were at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, at NASA — this expanding network of people, working on this day in and day out, saying that this was a legitimate issue, and that we needed to do something about it. And on the other hand, you had two or three guys who went around to conferences and said, 'Oh, I'm not sure. Oh, maybe there's clouds....' It quickly became apparent that these were private interests who had a stake in the status quo." He refers to it as "emerging industry of nay-sayers." There's also a discouraged assessment from climate activist looking back over a lack of progress in the early decades. "You want to make an assumption that it's a meritocracy — a good argument will prevail, and it will displace a bad argument. But, what the geniuses at the PR firms who work for these big fossil-fuel companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument. If you say something enough times, people will begin to believe it."

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Investor Warren Buffett addressed the annual shareholder meeting today for his multinational holding company Berkshire Hathaway — and said he still wouldn't buy bitcoin. But this time he gave a detailed explanation why. CNBC reports: "Whether it goes up or down in the next year, or five or 10 years, I don't know. But the one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it doesn't produce anything," Buffett said.... "If you said... for a 1% interest in all the farmland in the United States, pay our group $25 billion, I'll write you a check this afternoon," Buffett said. "[For] $25 billion I now own 1% of the farmland... Now if you told me you own all of the bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25 I wouldn't take it because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything... The farms are going to produce food...." "Assets, to have value, have to deliver something to somebody. And there's only one currency that's accepted. You can come up with all kinds of things — we can put up Berkshire coins... but in the end, this is money," he said, holding up a $20 bill. "And there's no reason in the world why the United States government... is going to let Berkshire money replace theirs." Later Saturday Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman Charlie Munger had an even harsher appraisal of bitcoin. "In my life, I try and avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad in comparison to somebody else — and bitcoin does all three," Munger said. "In the first place, it's stupid because it's still likely to go to zero. It's evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve System... and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China."

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The San Francisco Chronicle reports: San Francisco's office occupancy rate continued its spring recovery, rising above New York and San Jose last week, according to a review by a building security firm. After four months of increases, 33.4% of San Francisco workers were back at their desks last week, higher than New York's 32.9% and San Jose's 31%, but still behind seven major cities in security firm Kastle's Back to Work Barometer.... The city of Austin has consistently had the highest office occupancy tracked by Kastle and was at 58% last week, followed by fellow Texas cities Houston and Dallas. [And Los Angeles charts at around 40%] Both San Francisco Mayor London Breed and New York Mayor Eric Adams have urged firms to bring back workers to the office to help revitalize urban streets and the broader economy. "You can't stay home in your pajamas all day," Adams said at an event in February. "That is not who we are as a city. You need to be out, cross-pollinating ideas, interacting with humans. It is crucial. We're social creatures, and we must socialize to get the energy that we need as a city...." Around a fifth of San Francisco office space remains vacant and rents have been flat. That's better than during the omicron surge, when occupancy in New York and San Francisco was around 10%. (According to the article, citing figures from Kastle.) But there's also other metrics. The newspaper notes that the number of people exiting the stations for the San Francisco's public rail system "were up in the first three months of the year but still only around a quarter of pre-pandemic levels."

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Fedora project leader Matthew Miller spoke to TechRepublic's Jack Wallen this week, sharing some thoughts on the future of Linux — and on open source in general: Matthew Miller: I think it's a lost cause to try to "sell" our quirky technology interest to people who don't see it already. We need to take a different approach.... I think our message, at its root, has to be around open source.... [W]ith Linux, when you install an open-source distro, you're not just part of a fan community. You're part of a colossal, global effort that makes software more available to everyone, makes that software better and better, and makes the whole world better through sharing... Just by using it you're sharing in this amazing undertaking, part of a move away from scarcity to an economy based on abundance.... Jack Wallen: What's the biggest difference in Linux today vs. Linux of 10 years ago? Matthew Miller: I think first we have to start with just the amazing ubiquity of it. Ten years ago, it was cute to find a TV that ran Linux. Now, not only is it definitely powering your TV, you've probably got Linux running on your lightbulbs! It's everywhere. And while Linux had pushed proprietary Unix from the server room, ten years ago Windows-based servers were pushing back. The cloud changed that — now, the cloud is Linux, almost completely. (Anything that isn't is a legacy app that it was too much trouble to port!) From tiny devices to the most powerful mainframes and supercomputers: Linux, Linux, Linux.... Jack Wallen: If Linux has an Achilles' heel, what is it? Matthew Miller: Linux and the whole free and open-source software movement grew up with the rise of the internet as an open communication platform. We absolutely need that to continue in order to realize our vision, and I don't think we can take it for granted. That's more general than an Achilles' heel, though, so right now let me highlight one thing that I think is troubling: Chrome becoming the dominant browser to the point where it's often the only way to make sites work. Chromium (the associated upstream project) is open source, but isn't really run as a community project, and, pointedly, very very few people run Chromium itself. I'd love to see that change, but I'd also like to see Firefox regain a meaningful presence. Miller also said Fedora's next release is focused on simplicity. ("When the OS gets in the way, it drops from the conversation I want to have about big ideas to ... well, the boring technical details that people never want to deal with") And he also shared his thoughts on what Linux needs most. "What I'd really like to see more of are more non-technical contributors. I mean, yes, we can always benefit from more packagers and coders and engineers, but I think what we really need desperately are writers, designers, artists, videographers, communicators, organizers and planners. I don't think big companies are likely to provide those things, at least, not for the parts of the Linux world which aren't their products." "We need people who think the whole grand project I've been talking about is important, and who have the skills and interests to help make it real."

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In 1972 — half a century ago — Charles Moss Duke walked on the moon. Now 86 years old, he's ready for America to get back to exploring the moon, reports the Associated Press: Duke said he does not begrudge NASA for ending the Apollo program to focus on space shuttles, the international space station and other missions in more remote parts of space. But he looks forward to future missions that build off of what he and others have learned from their time on the moon, which called "a great platform for science." Duke also noted that he's encouraged by the commercial partnerships that have developed around space exploration, like Space X and Blue Origin [and the companies he describes in their video as "the others"]. Those options, he said, "make space available for more people and more science and engineering and unmanned stuff." "That compliment is going to be really important in the future," Duke went on. The article notes the first of NASA's huge Space Launch System rockets is scheduled to blast off later this year, "with crewed flights planned subsequently." In the video interview, Duke adds that "With Artemis, NASA is going to be focused on deep space, to the moon and beyond, and I'm excited about that..." "The more people we get into space, and can see the beauty of the earth — and the incredible emotion that you [feel] when you see the earth hung in the blackness of space — it's going to affect a lot of people."

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"As a response to recent coverage of software being purged from the App Store, Apple is sharing its criteria for how it chooses to remove abandoned apps," reports 9to5Mac. Apple's announcement say it's only flagging apps for possible removal "that Developers will also have more time to comply after being notified." (90 days instead of 30 days). And 9to5Mac adds that Apple "is also reiterating that the practice is not new but instead part of an initiative that started six years ago. But the Verge took a different message from "Apple to developers: if we deleted your old app, it deserved it." [T]he company has responded — by issuing a press release effectively saying that nobody was downloading the apps anyways.... Apple's explanation does clear up why it, as some developers noted, seemed to apply the rules inconsistently. For example, one developer noted that Pocket God, a popular game from the iPhone's early days, hasn't been updated for seven years but is still on the App Store. Apple is basically saying it's still up because it's still popular. From one angle, this reasoning doesn't necessarily gel with the first half of Apple's post, where it says it removes old apps to ensure "user trust in quality apps," and to improve discoverability, security and privacy, and user experience. After all — if an app is problematic because it's outdated, more downloads would make a bad app a bigger issue. Who's being harmed if there's an outdated app almost no one is downloading? But Apple says it doesn't want the App Store cluttered up with apps that both developers and users have forgotten about. It has enough problems making it easy for users to find good apps as it is, and it's easy to imagine Apple seeing deleting old, seemingly irrelevant apps as a good solution.

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Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from an automotive blog called The Truth About Cars: A group of German automakers, chemical concerns, and battery producers have announced the joint development of a "battery passport" designed to help government regulators trace the history of the cells. The consortium is funded by the German government and is supposed to work in tandem with new battery regulations that are being prepared by the European Union. According to the German economic ministry, officially the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the overarching plan is for the EU to mandate traceable hardware be installed in all batteries used in the continent by 2026. Those intended for use in electric vehicles are up first, with the passport scheme also serving to chronicle everything from the vehicle's repair history to where the power cell's raw materials were sourced. Reuters reports that batteries "could carry a QR code linking to an online database where EV owners, businesses or regulators could access information on the battery's composition." This digital tool should also make it easier to recycle raw materials inside batteries, the government statement said, which would cut dependence on foreign suppliers which control the vast majority of resources, like lithium and nickel, essential for battery production.

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"The Biden administration has a plan to rob Vladimir Putin of some of his best innovators," reports Bloomberg, "by waiving some visa requirements for highly educated Russians who want to come to the U.S., according to people familiar with the strategy." One proposal, which the White House included in its latest supplemental request to Congress, is to drop the rule that Russian professionals applying for an employment-based visa must have a current employer. It would apply to Russian citizens who have earned master's or doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering or mathematics in the U.S. or abroad, the proposal states. A spokesman for the National Security Council confirmed that the effort is meant to weaken Putin's high-tech resources in the near term and undercut Russia's innovation base over the long run — as well as benefit the U.S. economy and national security. Specifically, the Biden administration wants to make it easier for top-tier Russians with experience with semiconductors, space technology, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, advanced computing, nuclear engineering, artificial intelligence, missile propulsion technologies and other specialized scientific areas to move to the U.S. Biden administration officials have said they've seen significant numbers of high-skilled technology workers flee Russia because of limited financial opportunities from the sanctions the U.S. and allies have imposed after Putin's invasion on Ukraine. The provision would expire in four years.

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Dr. Craig Hunter is a mechanical/aerospace engineer with over 25 years of experience in software development. And now Dixie_Flatline (Slashdot reader #5,077) describes Hunter's latest experiment: Craig Hunter has been running Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) benchmarks on Macs for years--he has results going back to 2010 with an Intel Xeon 5650, with the most recent being a 28-core Xeon W from 2019. He has this to say about why he thinks CFD benchmarks are a good test: "As shown above, we see a pretty typical trend where machines get less and less efficient as more and more cores join the computation. This happens because the computational work begins to saturate communications on the system as data and MPI instructions pass between the cores and memory, creating overhead. It's what makes parallel CFD computations such a great real world benchmark. Unlike simpler benchmarks that tend to make CPUs look good, the CFD benchmark stresses the entire system and shows us how things hold up as conditions become more and more challenging." With just 6 cores, the Mac Studio's M1 Ultra surpasses the 2019 Xeon before literally going off the original chart. He had to double the x-axis just to fit the M1's performance in. Unsurprisingly, he seems impressed: "We know from Apple's specs and marketing materials that the M1 Ultra has an extremely high 800 GB/sec memory bandwidth and an even faster 2.5 TB/sec interface between the two M1 Max chips that make up the M1 Ultra, and it shows in the CFD benchmark. This leads to a level of CPU performance scaling that I don't even see on supercomputers."

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Long-time Slashdot reader UnderAttack writes: After Microsoft patched and went public with CVE-2022-26809, the recent Remote Procedure Call vulnerability, the SANS Internet Storm Center set up a complete Windows 10 system exposing port 445/TCP "to the world." The system is not patched for the RPC vulnerability. But so far, while it has seen thousands of attacks against SMB a day, nothing yet for the new RPC vulnerability.... But still, attackers are heavily hitting other vulnerabilities like of course still ETERNALBLUE From the article: Should you stop rushing out the April patch? Absolutely not. I hope you are already done applying the patch. But the April Windows patch had several additional gems, not just patches for RPC. Chatter about CVE-2022-26809 has died down, but as they say: Sometimes the quiet ones are the dangerous ones, and people able to exploit this vulnerability may not broadcast what they are doing on social media. The article is credited to Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research at the security site SANS.edu. Interestingly, Ullrich's byline is hyperlinked to a Google+ profile which has been unavailable for nearly three years.

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Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Inverse: It only took 25 years of development, 17 years of construction, eight launch delays, and five months of alignments, but finally, the James Webb Space Telescope is almost ready for prime time. New photos released by the European Space Agency — and an accompanying video from NASA — show images of stars taken by a fully aligned space telescope, instruments and all. The image shows snapshots from each of Webb's three imaging instruments, plus its spectrograph and guidance sensor. The images show a field of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a galaxy near the Milky Way about 158,000 light-years away. If it orbits our galaxy, it would be, by far, the largest satellite galaxy. But there's a chance it's just passing through or slowly merging with our galaxy.

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"Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal," Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday to his 89 million followers, "so no one can spy on or hack your messages." And on Monday, Musk also announced hopes to "authenticate all humans." But now Security Week is wondering if Musk's acquisition of Twitter will ultimately mean not just better security at Twitter but also innovation for the entire cybersecurity industry: Twitter has struggled with consistent security leadership, hiring and firing multiple CISOs even as nation-state adversaries target Twitter's massive user base with computer-generated disinformation campaigns...."Even if you don't like the guy, you have to root for Twitter to beat the bots," said one prominent CISO interviewed by SecurityWeek on Tuesday. "I think we will all benefit from any security features they [Twitter] can create." Jamie Moles, a senior technical manager at ExtraHop, said the bot-elimination mission could have spinoff benefits for the entire industry. "While this seems like a Sisyphean task, if he's successful, the methods used by Twitter to eliminate bots from the platform may generate new techniques that improve the detection and identification of spam emails, spam posts, and other malicious intrusion attempts," Moles said. If Musk and his team can train AI to be more effective in combating this, it may well be a boon to security practitioners everywhere," Moles added. "Identity is one area I expect to see movement. In addition to just detecting bots and spam better, I think we will see Twitter do a better job around verifying humans. There are a lot of things to fix there," said one CISO who requested anonymity because his company does security-related business with Twitter. Industry watchers also expect to see the company improve the multi-factor authentication (MFA) adoption numbers among its massive user base.... If Twitter can build a reliably secure platform with a new approach to distinguishing between human and bot traffic and fresh flavors of MFA and encryption, this could be a big win for the entire industry and users around the world. Thanks to Slashdot reader wiredmikey for sharing the story

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While Russia's "relentless digital assaults" on Ukraine might seem less damaging than anticipated, the attacks actually focused on a different goal with "chilling potential consequences," reports the Associated Press. "Data collection." Even in an early February blog post, Microsoft said Russia's intelligence agency had tried "exfiltrating sensitive information" over the previous six months from military, government, military, judiciary and law enforcement agencies. The AP reports: Ukrainian agencies breached on the eve of the February 24 invasion include the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, national guard and border patrol. A month earlier, a national database of automobile insurance policies was raided during a diversionary cyberattack that defaced Ukrainian websites. The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, cybersecurity and military intelligence analysts say. It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse. "Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that." As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.... There is little doubt political targeting is a goal. Ukraine says Russian forces have killed and kidnapped local leaders where they grab territory.... The Ukrainian government says the Jan. 14 auto insurance hack resulted in the pilfering of up to 80% of Ukrainian policies registered with the Motor Transport Bureau. But the article also points out that Ukraine also "appears to have done significant data collection — quietly assisted by the U.S., the U.K., and other partners — targeting Russian soldiers, spies and police, including rich geolocation data." Serhii Demediuk [deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council] said the country knows "exactly where and when a particular serviceman crossed the border with Ukraine, in which occupied settlement he stopped, in which building he spent the night, stole and committed crimes on our land." "We know their cell phone numbers, the names of their parents, wives, children, their home addresses," who their neighbors are, where they went to school and the names of their teachers, he said. Analysts caution that some claims about data collection from both sides of the conflict may be exaggerated. But in recordings posted online by Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov, callers are heard phoning the far-flung wives of Russian soldiers and posing as Russian state security officials to say parcels shipped to them from Belarus were looted from Ukrainian homes. In one, a nervous-sounding woman acknowledges receiving what she calls souvenirs — a woman's bag, a keychain. The caller tells her she shares criminal liability, that her husband "killed people in Ukraine and stole their stuff." She hangs up.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Alibaba Cloud has advanced its work to port Android to the RISC-V architecture. The Chinese cloud giant has spent more than a year working on a port of the Google-spawned OS and in January 2021 showed off a GUI powered by Android 10 running on silicon designed by T-Head Semiconductor -- an Alibaba subsidiary that designs its own RISC-V chip. Alibaba Cloud has now revealed it's working on Android 12, and has integrated third-party vendor modules. The result is Android on RISC-V that's capable of playing audio and video, running Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and driving cameras. The company has also "enabled more system enhancement features such as core tool sets, third-party libraries and SoC board support package on RISC-V," which collectively make RISC-V a better target for Android. Another advance is successful trials of TensorFlow Lite models on RISC-V. That effort means Android on RISC-V should be capable running workloads like image and audio classification and Optical Character Recognition. Alibaba Cloud hasn't detailed whether its porting efforts are directed to any particular processor, but is keen to point out that its homegrown Xuantie C906 processor recently aced the MLPerf Tiny v0.7 benchmark -- a test applied to Internet of Things devices. The company has also pointed out that its home-grown RISC-V kit has already been employed in smart home appliances, automotive applications, and edge computing. [...] The Xuantie C906 uses Alibaba-designed cores that are -- as required for RISC-V users -- available on GitHub. When the firm has a complete version of Android on RISC-V, it "will be an important step towards China's goal of reducing its reliance on technology that other nations can control with restrictions such as trade bans," notes The Register. "As RISC-V is open source, preventing its flow to China is all but impossible."

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Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, is turning to cloud-seeding to increase rainfall. Interesting Engineering reports: The country initiated the first phase of its cloud-seeding operation in areas above the capital Riyadh, al-Qassim, and Hail on Tuesday, according to Arab News. The weather modification technique is being executed as part of an effort to increase the country's yearly rainfall, which does not exceed 100 millimeters a year, by 10 to 20 percent. Cloud-seeding is a technique that involves introducing chemicals to clouds, like small particles of silver iodide, to induce more rain from a cloud. This causes water droplets to congregate around them, and the water particles clash with one another, growing larger and increasing the likelihood of rainfall. Ayman Ghulam, head of the National Center of Meteorology and supervisor of the cloud-seeding program, said the program's operations room opened on Monday at the center's headquarters in Riyadh, and the first flights took place in the capital's vicinity, according to Gulf News. He stated that they met their objectives in terms of the results and timeliness of the seeding operations. The center will provide quarterly updates on developments. The program will track cloud formations across the country to find the optimal locations for seeding efforts, which would use "environmentally friendly" materials to increase precipitation in targeted areas. The cloud seeding initiative, according to Gluham, is one of the "promising ways" of preserving water balance in a safe, adaptable, and cost-effective manner.

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New pictures from the Ingenuity helicopter offer a fresh perspective of the wreckage left behind when the Perseverance rover landed on Mars last year, NASA said on Wednesday. The Verge reports: Launched in 2020, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on the Red Planet in 2021, with the mission of finding ancient signs of life on Mars. The rover carried the Ingenuity helicopter onboard -- an experimental project that scientists on Earth hoped would be able to see sights that the rover couldn't. Perseverance went through a grueling process known as the seven minutes of terror to descend onto the Martian surface. As it entered the atmosphere, a heat shield helped protect the rover from the blistering heat of reentry and slowed it down dramatically. After that, the massive parachute deployed out of the backshell (a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle), slowing it down even more. At that point, the backshell and parachute separated from Perseverance and let the descent stage take over, using rocket thrusters and a "sky crane" to gently lower the rover to a smooth landing. On April 19th, Ingenuity took photographs that captured the remains of Perseverance's parachute and the rover's protective backshell, a cone-shaped part of the descent vehicle that carried the parachute and helped protect the rover on its way to the surface. Strewn around the site were debris from where the two crashed into the surface after separating from the rover. The backshell ended up hitting the ground at about 78 miles per hour, according to NASA. From the pictures, it appears that the parachute, the lines connecting the parachute to the spacecraft, and the coating on the outside of the backshell all survived the trip to the surface, NASA says, though more analysis of the pictures will happen in the coming weeks.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Postal Service is facing lawsuits from 16 states and several environmental groups challenging its decision to buy tens of thousands of gasoline-powered delivery vehicles instead of electric vehicles. As previously reported, the Environmental Protection Agency says the gas-powered trucks being ordered by the USPS "are expected to achieve only 8.6 miles per gallon (mpg), barely improving over the decades-old long-life vehicles that achieve 8.2 mpg." The USPS countered that the vehicles get 14.7 mpg when air conditioning isn't being used and that the trucks' size will make it possible to deliver the same amount of mail in fewer trips. The USPS plan is to buy 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years. Of those, at least 10 percent are slated to be battery-electric vehicles (BEV). [...] A lawsuit filed by California and 15 other states on Thursday said the USPS failed "to follow a process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)," continuing: "Instead, the Postal Service first chose a manufacturer with minimal experience in producing electric vehicles, signed a contract, and made a substantial down payment for new vehicles. Only then did the Postal Service publish a cursory environmental review to justify the decision to replace 90 percent of its delivery fleet with fossil-fuel-powered, internal combustion engine vehicles, despite other available, environmentally preferable alternatives. In doing so, the Postal Service failed to comply with even the most basic requirements of NEPA." The lawsuit seeks an injunction forcing the USPS to stop the vehicle purchases "until it has complied with NEPA." It was filed against the USPS and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who was appointed by the USPS Board of Governors in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump. All 16 states involved in the lawsuit have Democratic attorneys general. They allege that the USPS "violated well-established legal precedent prohibiting 'an irreversible and irretrievable commitment of resources' before completing the NEPA process by signing contracts with a defense company (Oshkosh Defense, LLC) to procure vehicles six months before even releasing its draft environmental review and a year prior to issuing the Final Environmental Impact Statement ('Final EIS') and Record of Decision." The states also claim the USPS failed to consider and evaluate reasonable alternatives. "Specifically, the Postal Service did not properly evaluate several environmental impacts of its action, including air quality, environmental justice, and climate harms, by simply assuming that any upgrade to its vehicle fleet would have positive impacts on the environment," the complaint said. States also alleged the USPS "failed to ensure the scientific integrity of its analysis by relying on unfounded assumptions regarding the costs and performance of electric vehicles, infrastructure, and gas prices, and refusing to identify the source of the data relied upon in the Final EIS." "The Postal Service conducted a robust and thorough review and fully complied with all of our obligations under NEPA," a USPS spokesperson told Ars. The statement continues: "The Postal Service is fully committed to the inclusion of electric vehicles as a significant part of our delivery fleet even though the investment will cost more than an internal combustion engine vehicle. That said, as we have stated repeatedly, we must make fiscally prudent decisions in the needed introduction of a new vehicle fleet. We will continue to look for opportunities to increase the electrification of our delivery fleet in a responsible manner, consistent with our operating strategy, the deployment of appropriate infrastructure, and our financial condition, which we expect to continue to improve as we pursue our plan."

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gordm writes: Following appeals from scientists, a Stanford and MIT study showing Diablo Canyon could save California $21 Billion, demand curtailment and a projected power supply shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom is now considering keeping the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open. Diablo Canyon generated 6% of California's total electricity in 2021 and 12% of California's carbon-free electricity. Elon Musk has tweeted in support of keeping Diablo Canyon open, and in support of keeping European nuclear power plants running. According to the L.A. Times, Newsom said the state would seek out a share of $6 billion in federal funds meant to rescue nuclear reactors facing closure. The money comes from the Biden administration's recently announced effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing. "The requirement is by May 19 to submit an application, or you miss the opportunity to draw down any federal funds if you want to extend the life of that plant," Newsom said. "We would be remiss not to put that on the table as an option." A spokesperson for the governor clarified that Newsom still wants to see the facility shut down long term. "It's been six years since PG&E agreed to close the plant near San Luis Obispo, rather than invest in expensive environmental and earthquake-safety upgrades," the report notes. "But Newsom's willingness to consider a short-term reprieve reflects a shift in the politics of nuclear power after decades of public opposition fueled by high-profile disasters such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as the Cold War."

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Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: India will on Friday launch an open network for digital commerce (ONDC) as the government tries to end the dominance of U.S. companies Amazon.com and Walmart in the fast-growing e-commerce market, a government document showed. The launch of the platform comes after India's antitrust body on Thursday raided domestic sellers of Amazon and some of Walmart's Flipkart following accusations of competition law violations. The government's so-called ONDC platform will allow buyers and sellers to connect and transact with each other online, no matter what other application they use. It will be soft-launched on Friday before being expanded, the trade ministry told Reuters. The government document said that two large multinational players controlled more than half of the country's e-commerce trade, limiting access to the market, giving preferential treatment to some sellers and squeezing supplier margins. It did not name the companies. The document said India's ONDC plan aimed to onboard 30 million sellers and 10 million merchants online. The plan is to cover at least 100 cities and towns by August.

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New submitter Mononymous writes: Created by Graham Nelson, Inform 7 compiles a powerful object-oriented language resembling English into a working text adventure. Friendly GUIs for various platforms have been open source for many years, but the core compiler remained proprietary. Now, 16 years after its initial freeware release, Nelson has released the source code under the Artistic License 2.0 in a public GitHub repo. Inform 7 is one of the largest "literate programs" ever released.

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