DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here’s a trio of eco-disasters taken from one day’s headlines. President Bush appears to be determined to poison as many of us as he can. I’m not real sure what the benefit is, to him or anyone. Maybe that’s why politics make me ill.

Coal-fired power plants’ upgrade provision to die; Utilities expected to save billions on anti-pollution devices

The Bush administration has decided to allow thousands of the nation’s dirtiest coal-fired power plants and refineries to upgrade their facilities without having to install costly anti-pollution equipment, as they now must do.

Bush official rallies support for logging legislation at Sonora summit

President Bush’s agriculture undersecretary came to California timber country Friday to rally support for legislation that would ease logging restrictions in the name of fire protection and forest health.

EPA misled public on 9/11 pollution; White House ordered false assurances on air quality, report says

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available…
[S]ome of the [EPA]’s news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

Or, in short, Bush is saying: you’ll have dirtier air, fewer trees to clean it, and we’ll lie to you about how sick you’ll get as a result.

We’re live on the new server. Argh. We’re working out the kinks, slowly.

Not 12 hours after I posted an item in this space about how DSL sucks because the hardware freezes up every few weeks, requiring me to drive across town to do a manual reset… my DSL modem froze up, requiring me to drive across town at 10:30 PM to do a manual reset.

No, I was not pleased.

This site has been hosted on a consumer DSL line for the past year or so. I’m happy and relieved to say that that will soon change.

DSL is a great enduser technology. But it’s a lousy hosting solution. The upstream bandwidth, which is the only direction that matters for serving a website, is limited to 128 kb/sec. DSL’s great downstream bandwidth is 99% idle in this situation.

The bigger problem is the hardware. My Alcatel DSL modem has locked up a half-dozen times over the past year. The only solution is to drive across town and power-cycle it. (No, this DSL line isn’t at my house, but in the closet of a building down the block from the phone company’s central office.)

In June, the modem puked when I was out of town. My server was offline for 12 hours. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I did. So did my father, who called me in Oregon to ask why he couldn’t download his email.

On Monday I installed a rackmount 1U server in a local colocation facility. I’d spent much of the previous week configuring software. My evenings since then have been dedicated to transferring DNS and other services. I’ll start migrating websites tomorrow, and finish over the weekend.

The new server is a powerhouse: 2.8 GHz “hyperthreading” P4 with the new 800 MHz bus… 2 10k RPM Ultra-320 SCSI drives in RAID-1… in a case 1.75'' tall with sliding rails mounted to the sides. The blowers on this thing sound like Discount Rinse Day at the hair salon. When I had the server running in my office, I couldn’t talk on the telephone; even with my headset, the fans were too loud.

Sound doesn’t matter in the colo, of course. My server joined countless noisy others, each in its 1.75'' slot, anonymously stacked like the gel pods in the Matrix. Just add a few lightening bolts and you’d have, well… lots of dead servers. Bad analogy. Never mind.

The point is, updates are likely to continue being sporadic.

California’s Senate on Tuesday passed the toughest financial privacy bill in the nation by a vote of 31 to 6, a day after it sailed through the state Assembly, 76 to 1.

As early as next week, Gov. Gray Davis is expected to sign the bill, which requires banks and other financial institutions to obtain customers’ permission before they can share or sell information about them to other companies.

This is great news, and there’s a great story behind it too. In brief, state senator Jackie Speier had been working on a financial-privacy bill for four years, but the banking industry managed to beat it every time. Finally, the CEO of E-Loan, a guy named Chris Larson, spent $1M to get the issue on next March’s ballot — to let the voters, not the politicians, decide.

As I understand it, the ballot initiative would have been much more restrictive: it would have required consumers to opt in. If you’ve never dealt with opt-in/opt-out decisions from the business’ side, take my word for it: nobody ever opts in. So an opt-in model would practically kill the banks’ ability to market to their customers.

Speier’s legislation is based on an opt-out. It gives consumers the right to opt out of information sharing, without making that the default choice.

Once the signatures for Larson’s ballot initiative had been gathered, Larson and Californians for Privacy Now were able to threaten the financial industry: come to terms on the legislation, or we’ll let the voters force you to use opt-in.

According to the Chronicle, “Opponents [of the opt-in ballot initiative] had vowed to spend millions to defeat the initiative, which would have almost certainly ended up in court.”

I’m not certain, but I assume Larson’s group will drop the ballot initiative now. That’s disappointing, in a sense, but I can see that having lesser, but uncontested protections in place is a better result than fighting for stronger protections which may not ever be enacted.