Medium Low

Following up on my old DRM thread: lately comes news that the iPhone Dev Team have succeeded in jailbreaking the iPhone 3G. The Slashdot post about it contains some pertinent comments:

schmidt349 wrote:

This wasn't some simple privilege escalation coming out of a buffer overflow in the web browser. Apple signs the shit out of every binary on the phone. The kernel won't execute a binary in userland unless it's signed; the firmware loader won't execute the kernel unless it's signed; the low-level bootloader won't execute the firmware loader unless it's signed.

The iPhone 3G is a paragon of embedded device security, at least by way of making sure unapproved code doesn't run on the device, and it's a testament to just how amazing the iPhone Dev Team guys are that they actually found a way to (a) defeat the whole chain of trust in the iPhone firmware in order to jailbreak it. This by the way doesn't even take into account their real genius, the hack into the baseband firmware for the S-Gold radio device, which executes code in its own universe, completely separate from the S5L application processor.

In short, this hack wasn't some bunch of script kiddies having a sleepover and cracking the copy protection on Arkanoid 2 for the C64. This was a brilliant circumvention of some of the tightest security ever found on a PDA or mobile phone.

followed by sycraft-fu, who added:

This is an excellent case study in why DRM is retarded. As you say, this is some of the tightest security ever found. Yet, it has been broken by some very smart people. Such is the fate of any DRM that is sufficiently widespread that smart people care to go after it. You can be as clever as you like with your DRM scheme, you are going to find someone as clever as you will likely break it.

Yesterday some program my kids were watching on TV referred to the practice of counting sheep to help oneself fall asleep. It made me wonder where the concept came from.

This morning I had to go settle one of my kids at 4:30am. My personal practice for getting myself to sleep when it doesn't happen naturally is to mentally play back the highlight reel of my sexual history. I'll go through partners sequentially from my first sexual experience and remember the best episodes with each of them.

It occurred to me that perhaps the person who invented the notion of counting sheep was doing exactly the same thing. But when his wife asked him how he got to sleep, he couldn't really say, "I reminisced about all of the sheep I'd had sex with." So he said he had been "counting" them.

I recently noticed that my favorite beer, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, no longer comes in bottles with twist-off caps. The author of one of my favorite blogs, Salon's How the World Works, has also noticed this fact and has written about it. My initial reaction was that his discussion of the symbolism of the change was way over the top. In spite of that, his premise that in an era of increasing environmental degradation and limited resources it may be impossible to maintain our accustomed level of convenience and luxury is an important message. In an earlier post to Medium Low I examined the way that terms such as "green" and "sustainable" are used to rationalize our continuing consumption. I think a better and, dare I say it, more sustainable paradigm is to accept the fact that all of our decisions have an impact on the world. Rather than looking at one choice as being more "green" than another we should acknowledge that any choice consumes resources and limits us in some way. Choosing to live in a big suburban house is fine, but if you make that choice then don't complain about traffic jams because your decision just made them worse. In Orion Curtis White examines these issues. He makes a strong argument that the current manifestation of environmentalism is simply another facet of our free market, consumption-based culture which views nature as a commodity. The capitalist system is so deeply entrenched that despite our good intentions we're unable to perceive an alternate point of view. I don't believe that the spiritual view of the world and our place in it that White propounds is the answer, or at least not the complete answer, either. However, it is clear to me that we should be thinking about models for society that do not rely on continual growth and I believe that articles such as these provide a framework for the discussion. If only they were read by more than a handful of prosperous, well-educated liberals.

This year has seen a trend for large, cool cultural events to label themselves as green. The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, the Sasquatch Music Festival, the Live Earth concerts, and Burning Man are a few examples of recent or upcoming events that are calling themselves green and/or carbon neutral. One might argue that any event that causes large numbers of people to drive long distances is by definition an unsustainable extravagance, but what do I know? Of course let's not forget some of the other forms of environmental damage caused by large gatherings of humans. Like a carbon-neutral event that generates enough drug-laced urine to damage aquatic ecosystems. It's fairly obvious that the term "green," like "organic" before it, has become a marketing tool that assuages liberal guilt while it encourages still more consumption, however the green labeling of massive music festivals strikes me as being especially hypocritical. Any change in society first requires awareness that a problem exists, so an increase in green consciousness is a positive thing. However, the motivation for so much of the green movement is to sell things. A conservative would argue that this proves the superiority of the free market. I, on the contrary, think that all we've done is substitute one form of consumption for another.

This post is about a year out of date, but hey, I’ve been a busy graduate student! I can only claim to understand the underlying mathematics at the shallowest level but I am fascinated by modern physics. I recall reading articles about the observations of the Bullet Cluster in the popular media a year or so ago but at the time the implications and importance of the discovery were not obvious (at least to me). I’ve taken advantage of my summer vacation by spending a lot of time reading and today I discovered this blog entry that describes the observations of the Bullet Cluster and the cosmological implications. This particular entry is one of the most accessible descriptions of the connection between astronomical observations and theoretical cosmology that I’ve encountered (be sure to check out the cool animation!). Observations of this sort are largely possible because of orbiting platforms, of which the Hubble Space Telescope is the most well known. These satellites can be developed and launched for a fraction of the cost of manned space missions. They indisputably provide insight into some of the most profound questions of science. And yet, many of these missions will be sacrificed in order to repeat a visit to the moon. Under the unlikely assumption that a new moon mission is not simply election-year rhetoric, what’s the point? Read here about some of the basic science that won’t happen as a result.

In addition to our *ahem* intellectual pursuits, several Medium Low contributors devote much of their leisure time to unreasonably difficult endurance events such as trans-Europe bike tours, RAMROD and Ironman Canada. Personally, I enjoy the process of planning and training for an event and observing how my body adapts and changes over time. However, the culture of recreational athletics, in particular the gym, never ceases to embarrass me. A regular topic of conversation at the Medium Low headquarters is the general ridiculousness of American culture, and I believe that the Range of Motion (ROM) exercise machine is about as excellent an example of ridiculousness that you’re likely to find. First of all, look at the thing. It’s, I don’t know how to describe it, a weird hybrid of some sort of bondage device and a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption. Even better is the workout plan—4 minutes per day! Evidently 4 minutes on the ROM provides the same benefit as up to 45 minutes of running, 45 minutes of weight training and 20 minutes of stretching. All for $14615. And to think of all that time I’ve wasted on long bike rides and runs.

I was once married to a woman from a military family. Just as we were parting, her father was retiring as a lieutenant general (that's three stars) in the US Army.

The US military prides itself on being "professional", which in the military context means largely immune to the immediate external politics of their country. Examples of non-professional military organizations would be one loyal to a dictator or one in which promotions were largely governed by nepotism. However, that's not to say the US military is not political. To be promoted to 1-star general or above, one must be nominated by the President (on recommendation of a military promotion board) and then confirmed by the Senate. While this is apparently often a smooth process and the President and Senate follow the recommendations of the promotion board, that's not always the case.

In addition, the higher up one rises the fewer positions there are available into which one could be promoted. It's not a matter purely of rank. By tradition, the very uppermost positions are always filled by officers from particular specialties. For example, the head of battle strategy will always be an officer who rose through the ranks of the infantry, not an officer who spent his career in logistics.

Finally, the military has an "up or out" policy. There is a period of time after one's previous promotion when one is eligible for one's next promotion, the specific period depends on the rank. If you are promoted before that time, you are "below the zone", during that time, "in the zone" and beyond that period "above the zone". You only get one shot at "above the zone". If you are not promoted that year (only 3% of officers not promoted in the zone are promoted above the zone), you must retire.

In the case of my former father-in-law, there were only two jobs left for him to take and the then-occupants of those jobs showed no signs of leaving. So he retired because there was nowhere for him to advance in the army (a funny aside - he was quite worried about what kind of civilian job he could get since he only knew the military life, but he immediately got a job as a VP at a large telecommunications company and retired from that job not too many years later as a very wealthy man).

All of this brings me to a subject in the news today: the replacement of Gen. Peter Pace as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ever since knowing my former father-in-law and watching the end stages of his army career, I always have sympathy for people in Gen. Pace's position. Such a person has spent his whole life playing the game well to rise to that position. It is purely by chance that one would happen to rise to the top position during any particular war, and it seems to me especially bad luck to reach that point in the middle of an especially unsuccessful and wrong-headed war. I can't help but feel sad for the guy.

Remember when I described how the AACS LA can issue replacement encryption keys that are designed to restore DRM protection for subsequently released Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs? Well, the AACS LA did that for the first time about a month ago. Guess what? Engadget reports that the new keys are already cracked and packaged into a DVD-ripping application, even before the first discs that use the new keys have been released! As the kids say these days, that's the awesome.

The Improbable Research blog (from the folks who hand out the Ig Noble Prizes), today brought my attention to a New Yorker article about the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is being built at CERN on the French/Swiss border near Geneva, and when it comes online will be the largest particle accelerator ever built.

Out of curiosity, I asked Wikipedia how the LHC compared to the Superconducting Super Collider, which was partially built in Texas before being canceled by Congress in 1993. The answer: the LHC will achieve energies of 7 TeV (trillion electron volts). The SSC was designed to achieve 20 TeV.

The New Yorker piece is the most recent in a string of articles that ponder the question of whether the LHC will accidentally create a mini-black hole that will swallow up the Earth and presumably our neighborhood of space.

The subject is fascinating, but in my opinion completely pointless. Humorously:

'...CERN officials are now instructed, with respect to the L.H.C.’s world-destroying potential, “not to say that the probability is very small but that the probability is zero.”'

Regardless of the PR, there is still a small chance that this could happen. But if it did, we wouldn't be around to care. So why care now? Humanity, from a big enough context, consists of a hair on a wart on a frog on a bump on a log on the bottom of the multiverse. We wouldn't even merit a paragraph in the obits of the Universe Gazette.

Unlike the other melo contributors I am not gainfully employed, but instead am nearing the end of the first year of a master's program. I enjoy life as a 40 year old student, although there have been moments when I've felt very old. This is my second time through graduate school, the first time ending with a PhD in chemistry. When I began my program last September I had been out of school for 13 years, and it had been 22 years since I began my undergraduate studies. Keeping in mind that memories are not nearly as accurate as we'd like to believe, my melo advent will consist of my thoughts on what has changed on campus since the late 80's.

It goes without saying that the younger generation is wired. Wow, are they wired. Wireless, actually. I'm hardly a luddite but I was stunned to observe the nearly-constant texting, IM-ing, chatting, facebook-browsing and general universal connectivity. In fact, the most consistent complaint that I hear from my classmates is that there are insufficient numbers of outlets in the classrooms, and the lighting is bad for viewing a laptop monitor. One class was held in a decrepit old university building that lacked Wi-Fi. The horror! Frankly, if I were a professor my classroom would be a laptop-free zone. While access to google or wikipedia is occasionally useful, the amount of note-taking that gets done on laptops is minimal. Even more shocking to me is just how blatant students are about using chat during lectures. There's no effort to be discreet and professors are much more tolerant than I would expect.

A positive side to all of this new information technology and a clear difference from my first time through college is the ease of research that is facilitated by the incredible availability of information. I believe that this is the single most significant difference; I never go to library. Instead I'm able to do my research from home, at any crazy hour of the day or night. And then I send my completed assignment to the professor via email. For someone who formerly took notes and made photocopies from bound collections of journals that were stored in the bowels of the library, and then typed a paper (remember typewriters?) this is a remarkable and wonderful change. My background as a scientist exposed me to many specialized databases, and for me the amazing range of information sources provided by the university is a great big wonderful information playground. This brings up another generational difference; many of my classmates believe that searching = google. It drives me crazy when I work with them on group projects. They're ignoring an unbelievable resource, one that is far better than they'll ever have in the corporate world. In fact I had a long discussion with one of my professors about this topic. She felt that in spite of the availability of information that the average quality of academic work has declined as a result of indiscriminate use of google.

And then there's the issue of grade inflation. It does appear to be real, although after experiencing it I don't think that it matters much. In my program it is nearly impossible to get a grade lower than 3.0. However, in order to maintain good standing with the graduate school, all grades must be 3.0 or higher, so a 2.9 is effectively a failing grade. In spite of the fact that the grade range is compressed between 3.0 and 4.0 the ranking of students remains legitimate. Additionally, if anything I've found it more difficult to get a 4.0 than it was back in the 80's. As far as I've observed, 4.0's have been reserved for truly exceptional work. A related issue is that of workload and expectations. There's no question that my current program feels easier than my work as a chemistry PhD student. However, the disciplines are quite different so I'm not sure that a comparison is completely valid. All of my, ahem, life experience does seem to be good for something, too, as I clearly am able to work more efficiently than most of my younger classmates. On the other hand, on several occasions I have been surprised at how accommodating professors are when students have come forward with (at least in my opinion) quite lame reasons for needing extensions or regrading of an assignment.

Ubiquitous information technology has dramatically changed academic life and I believe that this is the single most significant difference between my university experiences. Professors also appear to be generally more accommodating of student's desires than they were in the past and perhaps the expectations are lower. However, something that never changes is that as a student you get out of your studies what you put into it. Some of my classmates appreciate this fact, and some of them don't. As one who didn't appreciate it back in 1988 I can't judge them too harshly.

When playing The End of Suburbia DVD last night, we were presented with the following choice:

This question seems to be asking "Do you want us to swear at you, or not?" A better choice might have been "Original, Unedited Version" and "Edited for Language".

We chose the version with bad words. As it turns out, there were only two bad words in the whole documentary, both uttered by James Howard Kunstler; one being a word from the title of his blog.

A side note: if you're try to take a screen grab in Mac OS X from within the DVD player, it won't let you; Apple assumes (correctly in this case) that the material is copyrighted, but of course doesn't make exceptions for fair use of that copyrighted material. Instead I used the VLC player to make the screen grab above.

This week a couple of studies came out concerning young children and television. The first is a study led by Dr. Frederick J. Zimmerman of the University of Washington that will be published in JAMA. Zimmerman surveyed parents regarding how much and what type of programming children watched from birth through 24 months. The second study was authored by Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas in Austin and surveyed parents of children up through age 6.

I'm a parent of a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old. We are strong believers in the maxim "all things in moderation." We are not rabidly anti-TV, but we also are not laissez-faire about letting our kids watch anything that's on. Our kids only watch Noggin and PBS Kids on TV; and classic Disney films, Sesame Street and Electric Company on DVD. That's pretty much it. Once in a while I'll watch a sports program on a weekend afternoon with them in the room, but they never see adult programming like CSI or Law & Order or even the news.

Becoming a no-TV household seems vaguely attractive, but think how much TV programming is a part of our body of cultural knowledge. References to TV shows old and new come up in my conversations many times a day. It seems like isolating one's children from that body of "knowledge" would handicap them when it comes to relating to other kids. Personally, I learn an immense amount from watching TV. Not everything I watch, obviously, but definitely from Nova, Frontline and many programs on the Discovery and History channels, for example.

Having said that, however, I have to admit that the zombie state our kids get in while watching TV is disturbing. My 3-year-old gets so entranced that I literally have to stand between her and screen to get her attention, and even then it takes a few seconds for the trance to be broken.

It turns out we're pretty damn average according to the results of the Zimmerman study as reported in Science Daily:

The average amount of viewing time for the children was 40.2 minutes per day. At 3 months of age children watched less than an hour per day and by 24 months they watched more than 1.5 hours per day. "Approximately half of the viewing was of shows that parents reported to be in the children's educational category," the authors note. "The remaining half was approximately equally split among children's non-educational content, baby DVDs/videos and grown-up television."

The Vandewater study, however, (as reported in the Washington Post) is far more disturbing:

...as many as one in five youngsters under 2 even have a television placed in their bedrooms. More than half (54 percent) of these tiny tots could turn on the TV themselves...

...Most often, parents interviewed in the study said they put a TV set in their kid's room because it freed up other TVs in the house for parental use...

The percentage of older children with TVs in their bedrooms is even higher. To me, putting TV in a child's bedroom is obviously a bad thing. Children are very clever. It won't take them long to learn how to turn the volume down so they can get away with watching TV at any hour of the night, forfeiting the sleep developing brains clearly require. I can guarantee that our children will not have a TV (or a computer, for that matter) in their room until they are out of high school.

When I was young, I always woke up very early - long before anyone else in the house. I would try to watch TV, but in that era most stations were off the air until 6:00 or 7:00 am, and even when they came on the air their programming was about as unattractive to a kid as could be. The local farm report is what I remember most. But today, who knows what one's child might tune into in the middle of the night. I doubt many of the parents who put a TV in their child's room take the time to program the channels to which the TV can be tuned.

Parenting is a whole other topic, but I think TVs in young children's bedrooms are part of a larger "parenting of convenience" trend. Many parents today don't want to have conflict with their children, so they acquiesce to pretty much whatever the child wants. As many have commented, these parents are raising a generation of narcissists who learn very few lessons about personal boundaries or responsibility. As the Love and Logic folks say, you can pay your dues (i.e. learn to set limits for your kids and deal with the temporary conflict that causes) early in your children's lives, or you can pay much higher dues when they are teenagers. To us the choice is obvious.

A collection of fake IDs from a bartender in New York.

I had a fake ID when I was 20, because I was the youngest in my group of friends at the time. Mainly I used it at O’Rourke’s Tavern, our hang-out in Lincoln, Nebraska. Actually it wasn’t a fake ID, it was a real ID that I got at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Council Bluffs, Iowa with a friend’s birth certificate and social security card. I have a feeling that you can’t do this today, with their computers and whatnot.

On my 21st birthday, I went to O’Rourke’s with a group of people. They’d long stopped checking my ID there, but after ID-ing everyone else in our group the bouncer said, “might as well check yours, too,” and I gave him my real ID. He just shook his head and let me in.

Now we turn to some real science. Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas recently described observations of a very large supernova. The New York Times has a good article about it. It is apparently the largest supernova ever observed and was a star about 150 times the mass of our Sun.

A press release from UC Berkeley points out:

Unlike typical supernovas that reach a peak brightness in days to a few weeks and then dim into obscurity a few months later, SN2006gy took 70 days to reach full brightness and stayed brighter than any previously observed supernova for more than three months. Nearly eight months later, it still is as bright as a typical supernova at its peak, outshining its host galaxy 240 million light years away.

The NY Times article describes what we might experience if a very similar star in our own galaxy, Eta Carinae, were to die in a similar fashion:

Eta Carinae could blow up sooner than we thought, Dr. Smith said, noting that it could be tomorrow, it could be thousands of years from now. Astronomers have no way of telling.

Even if it did blow as the new supernova did last fall, at a distance of around 7,500 light years, Eta Carinae would be unlikely to cause any serious harm to Earth, astronomers said. The explosion would be visible in the daylight and at night you would be able to read a book by its light.

The Journal of Improbable Research today brings attention to a seminal event in the world of science: the Institute for Creation Science Graduate School ("Advanced Degrees in SCIENCE"!) is calling for papers for the initial publication of the International Journal of Creation Research.

I propose that everyone submit at least one paper! Since the entire enterprise is based on nonsense, one can't require any particular expertise in order to form a hypothesis and write a paper describing one's attempts to investigate that hypothesis. Unfortunately, peanut butter is already taken. I think maybe I'll base my theory on extruded ovo-triticum admixtures as a basis for life.

I'm also going to encourage my daughter to submit a paper. Her logic skills should be more than sufficient for the task. After all, she's three years old!

The National Day of Prayer was apparently yesterday, although it's pretty fucking hard to figure out the actual date from their web site (this was about the 10th page I navigated to).

We missed it, God damn it!

My good friend B is an executive at a television network. As such, he gets free annual physical exams at the company clinic. Yesterday he went for this year's exam. Usually the doctor doing the exam is a hot 30-something female, so B kind of looks forward to it.

B had the usual blood tests and other prodding, and then it was time for his prostate exam. Suddenly, B realized that his bowels were not quite as vacant as one would hope at a time like this. Too late now, he thought.

The doctor who arrived for the prostate exam was not in fact the hottie, but a 60-year-old male. As he probed B's least receptive orifice, he said to B:

Doctor: So, did you give a blood sample?

B: Yes.

Doctor: Yeah, well I have a stool sample here too.

With that the doctor ripped off his glove, threw it into the trashcan and stormed out the door, leaving B with a lube-covered and lube-filled ass. B reports that he did the "toddler walk" down the hall, trying to get to the bathroom to clean himself up without leaking santorum all over his pants.

I attended a fascinating talk today by biologist Shari Kaiser. She was presenting results of work she did that generated an interesting hypothesis about why humans are susceptible to HIV when other primate species are not. You can see an abstract of her paper on the subject here. Apparently this work is novel and interesting enough that it will soon be published in Science. I'll paraphrase the abstract and try to fill in some of the background science.

HIV is a retrovirus. Retroviruses work by making parts of the cellular genetic machinery work "backwards". Normally genes (sections of DNA) are transcribed into mRNA, which is then translated into proteins. But a retrovirus is a strand of RNA (plus a protein sheath called a capsid) that tricks the cell into reverse transcribing the virus RNA into DNA. That DNA can then sometimes insert itself into the genome of the host cell. Subsequently when that "gene" is expressed the resulting RNA is another copy of the virus.

One other piece of the story: there are two kinds of retroviruses: exogenous and endogenous. An exogenous virus is one that infects an organism from the outside, e.g. when a virus is passed from one person to another via transmission. But remember that successful retroviruses become incorporated in the genome of the host. Therefore, if the retrovirus infects a germ cell (sperm or egg) and becomes incorporated in that cell's DNA, the virus is then passed to offspring produced by the germ cell via normal DNA replication. Now it is a potentially permanent part of the genome of that family tree. Whether it becomes permanent, of "fixed", depends on whether and how it affects the selection outcome for the infected organism: for example if it kills the host before reproduction it cannot become fixed in the population. Once it becomes fixed in the genome it is an endogenous retrovirus. It is estimated that 8% of the human genome consists of (inactive) endogenous viruses. Compare that to the 1.2% of the human genome that comprises our genes.

Once can look for endogenous viruses in various species' genomes. It turns out that many primates, including our closest relative the chimpanzee, have multiple copies of an endogenous virus called PtERV, which appears to have become extinct as an exogenous virus approximately 4 million years ago. Humans do not carry PtERV, which may mean that early humans had resistance to the virus.

Cells have various defenses against viruses. One form is an antiviral protein that binds to the virus capsid and affects the virus in some adverse way. For example, it may disassemble the virus. Only two antiviral proteins have been discovered in humans so far, both were discovered coincidentally as part of HIV-related research. Kaiser's work focused on an antiviral protein named Trim5α. She was curious whether Trim5α may have protected early humans from PtERV. Trim5α is one of the set of genes that undergo the most dynamic mutation, presumably because it is responding to rapidly evolving viruses.
How do you test restriction of a virus that has apparently been extinct for 4 million years? You resurrect it. Remember, we have many copies of the DNA template for the virus sitting in all those primate genomes. So Kaiser identified the pertinent portions of the virus genome and used genetic engineering to make cat kidney cells produce them. She did this in three pieces so as not to actually recreate the whole virus - she really only needed the capsid for her work.
It turns out that the human Trim5α protein is quite good at restricting the resurrected PtERV virus. A whole bunch more work with Trim5α from various primate species essentially showed that Trim5α can either be good at restricting PtERV or it can be good at restricting HIV-1 but generally not both. Rhesus macaque monkeys, for example, are essentially immune to HIV-1 because their form of Trim5α is good at restricting the HIV-1 virus.

So her hypothesis after all of this: humans suck at fighting off HIV-1 because we were good at fighting off PtERV 4 million years ago.

Along the way, she made a lot of discoveries that could be helpful in fighting HIV-1. For example, could we enhance human resistance to HIV-1 by modifying the human Trim5α gene? Time will tell.

We MeLoids all keep track of the Peak Oil meme. If you're not familiar with the Peak Oil phenomenon, please take a minute to go read about it on Wikipedia. Different people make different predictions about how our lives will be different in a post Peak Oil (PPO) world, ranging from "we're totally fucked, society as we know it will end" to "no big deal, we'll adjust". Personally, I think it'll be somewhere in between.

The one thing we know about a PPO world is that oil will be much more expensive, and we use oil profligately for everything: the obvious energy uses but also fertilizer, plastics, most non-natural fabrics and food (yes, you eat petroleum). And complex manufactured objects like iPods use barrels of oil per unit. The raw materials for each component have to be extracted and processed and then transported several times through stages of distribution to reach assembly. Then the components have to be transported to the place of their final assembly into the device, which is then packaged and transported again through multiple links to the point of sale. Food is another issue. The commonly cited estimate is that the average food item eaten by a US consumer has been transported 1,000-1,500 miles.

I find myself trying to imagine the PPO world several times a day. Pretty much any time I purchase something or unwrap something or throw something away, I wonder whether I'll have access to that item PPO or if I do, how it will be produced, packaged and distributed. For example, last night I used some plastic cling wrap. When oil is $200 per barrel will it still be economical to manufacture and sell cling wrap? The wide variety of produce we have available year round will almost certainly go away, but what will be available? Will local farmers figure out ways to use greenhouses or other solar heating to grow lettuce in northern climes in the winter?

It's possible we could maintain some of our "food on wheels" lifestyle if we did as James Howard Kunstler is always harping: rebuild our rail systems. But since we won't start doing that until it's way beyond obvious that we need to, there are going to be many years without Tropicana fresh squeezed OJ in the interim. We certainly won't be able to manufacture and distribute 116,000 iPods a day [Apple sold 10.5 million iPods in the first quarter of 2007].

What kinds of things will be economical to distribute on a national scale? Laundry soap? Bicycles? M&Ms? And which will fall away or be produced regionally or locally?

Vacations will certainly change dramatically. Fuel costs are already a major component of airline fares, so big increases in oil costs will immediately make air travel unaffordable to all but the rich. And you won't be driving your 8 mpg RV to Yellowstone, either. If you're lucky, maybe you can take a train to many places. Will greyhound experience a huge revival?

By the way, if you're new to this topic the first thing you should do is disabuse yourself of the notion that biofuels or hydrogen are going to save us. Corn prices are already skyrocketing due to diversion of corn to biofuel production, and so far those biofuels are making an almost unmeasurably small contribution to overall energy needs. It is just simply not possible to grow enough biomass to replace a significant amount of petroleum and still have land to grow any food. And hydrogen is not an energy source. It takes large amounts of energy to produce the hydrogen (for example, by extracting it from seawater); by some estimates more energy than the hydrogen stores. So hydrogen is merely a new way to transport energy, not to produce it.

What do you think? How fucked will we be? What products that you use every day will no longer be available? And for those you think will be available, how and where will they be produced?

The death of AACS, the DRM scheme used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, is arriving at an accelerated pace (see "DRM End Times"). arnezami has been joined by "Geremia" over at the Doom9 forums and together they have made significant progress toward permanently breaking AACS. The current hack still requires technical skills (desoldering chips in drives, flashing ROM), but they are making discoveries that should lead to easy tools that anyone could use.

arsTechnica has a pretty good summary, concluding:

Although AACS has proven much more difficult to fully crack than the copy protection on regular DVDs, it is unlikely to remain only partially cracked for very long. The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places—security by obscurity—merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.

AACS is probably the most sophisticated DRM scheme that is being used in publicly distributed media. The death of AACS could be the knock on the head that media companies need in order for them to realize DRM is a dead end.