Month: October 2021

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New York took an aggressive stance toward fossil fuels this week, effectively killing the development of new fossil fuel power plants in the state. The Department of Environmental Conservation denied permits for two proposed natural gas power plants, saying they were incompatible with the state’s climate law, which calls for an end to fossil fuel-generated electricity by 2040. 

Though the proposed plants would be more efficient than those currently in operation, the state agency said the plants would generate “significant” amounts of pollution and that their construction now, less than 20 years from the targeted net-zero emissions date, would be “inconsistent” with what is required by the climate law.

New York’s climate law requires polluters to account for two sources of emissions: from the plants themselves and from the natural gas supply chain. Once the latter was included—figures which in the past were nearly always ignored when determining a power plant’s pollution—the emissions quickly exceeded the DEC’s thresholds, the decisions say.

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Microsoft regained its crown as the most valuable publicly listed company in the world on Friday from Apple, whose shares slumped following a weak quarterly earnings update from the maker of iPhones and Mac computers.

Microsoft’s 2.2 percent gain on Friday lifted its market valuation to $2.49 trillion. Apple slid 1.9 percent, taking its market cap to $2.46 trillion.

Microsoft reported this week that its revenues soared in the third quarter, aided by a pandemic-fuelled surge in cloud computing resulting from a shift to remote working. The company’s quarterly revenue grew 22 percent, its largest gain since 2014.

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A pirate-website operator named Joshua Streit was charged with hacking into Major League Baseball (MLB) computer systems and trying to extort $150,000 from the league by threatening to publicize security vulnerabilities, the US Department of Justice announced yesterday.

Streit also "is alleged to have illegally streamed sports content online from MLB, the NHL, the NBA, and the NFL for his own personal profit," the announcement said. Streit was charged in US District Court for the Southern District of New York with wire fraud, illicit digital transmission, sending interstate threats with the intent to extort, and two counts of computer intrusion. The maximum possible sentences for these counts add up to 37 years in prison, including 20 years for wire fraud, though the press release noted that "maximum potential sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the judge."

Streit is a 30-year-old from Minnesota who is also known as Josh Brody. The pirate streaming website that he allegedly ran was called HeheStreams and operated from approximately 2017 to August 2021.

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The Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency authorization for the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children ages 5 to 11.

The FDA's authorization follows the recommendation of its independent advisory committee, which earlier this week voted nearly unanimously in favor of authorizing the vaccine. The committee of 18 voting members voted 17 to 0 in favor, with one abstention.

In a day-long meeting Tuesday, advisors pored over data and analyses of the vaccine in the younger children, who will receive two shots of a 10-microgram dose—a third of the dosage used in people ages 12 years and up—three weeks apart. Data from clinical trials suggest that the smaller dose in children produces equally strong immune responses as those seen in older age groups while minimizing the risks of side effects.

John Carmack, seen here wearing an early prototype Oculus Rift headset.

Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack has been bullish on the idea of "the metaverse" for a long time, as he'll be among the first to point out. But the id Software co-founder spent a good chunk of his wide-ranging Connect keynote Thursday sounding pretty skeptical of plans by the newly rebranded Meta (formerly Facebook) to actually build that metaverse.

"I really do care about [the metaverse], and I buy into the vision," Carmack said, before quickly adding, "I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times." The reason for that seeming contradiction is a somewhat ironic one, as Carmack puts it: "I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse."

Today, Carmack said, "The most obvious path to the metaverse is that you have one single universal app, something like Roblox." That said, Carmack added, "I doubt a single application will get to that level of taking over everything." That's because a single bad decision by the creators of that walled-garden metaverse can cut off too many possibilities for users and makers. "I just don't believe that one player—one company—winds up making all the right decisions for this," he said.