I just read this over at Scientific American:

People who have been exposed to pesticides are 70 percent more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those who haven’t

I’ve always disliked the use of pesticides since I first learned about DDT in middle school. It always seemed readily apparent that chemical pesticides were not a very good solution because evolution naturally creates pesticide-resistant pests. Over the long run, you’re always better off utilizing natural pesticides (e.g. predators, plants that attract predators) over chemical pesticides. Like petroleum-based fertilizer, the more you use them, the more you need them.

Hopefully this research will kick start some awareness in regards to sustainable farming.

I’m impressed! I had no idea that the people I argue with on a regular basis about global warming were so rare: A recent poll by Widmeyer Communications on various green-car-related questions reveals that 94% of Americans think that “Global warming is becoming a major threat to our country and the world”.

It also says that 55% of Americans who were planning on buying a new car in the next 5 years would consider buying a Prius! Looks like there is some awareness out there.

My other two representatives are Democrats, so I don’t feel it necessary to seek their support for impeachment. If the issue came up before the House, I have no doubt that they would vote in favor…

Dear Senator Mel Martinez…

I know you’re a Republican and that the House is where impeachment proceedings begin, but I just wanted to state that Bush is currently dragging down the whole Republican party. Since you’re new to the Senate (compared to the endless terms of your colleagues), I urge you to distance yourself from your peers and to support the impeachment of the President of the United States.

Bush has been abusing his power for far too long and today’s SCOTUS ruling has pushed Bush over the edge from being an abusive tyrant to being a complete embarrassment to the American people. The ruling confirms the sickness of his leadership and makes this country appear backward and medieval to the rest of the world.

His spying operations have grown to a scale never before seen in all of humanity. Not only has he been spying on Americans without warrant, probable cause, or approval from the FISA court, he has created and instituted these programs without the review or approval of the American people. In six short years he has rendered our nation’s great freedoms into mere memories. Americans today cannot make a phone call, communicate via the Internet, or even make a bank transaction without having their activities monitored and recorded by the unchecked all-seeing eye of the Presidency.

The very same President who has instituted this police state at home has mobilized our military to crush an entire country under manufactured pretenses. He purposefully lead a misinformation campaign to drum up support for his war and ignored the experienced advice from both the Pentagon and the CIA that the basis for his argument was false. This delusion was pumped out like a fire hose of gasoline on to the American people and now his deception has sparked a blaze of anti-Americanism world-wide that is burning this country alive in their hearts and minds.

Not only is Bush executing attacks on our civil rights, foreign countries, and the American way, he is disgracefully squandering this country’s resources. He used classified information to personally attack an opponent of his war mongering and is making a Ponzi scheme of our tax dollars. It makes one wonder what other classified information and moneys the President is misusing.

Impeachment at this juncture is pertinent. President Bush has had enough time in office to demonstrate just how bad a president can be. The American people should not be forced to suffer under his regime any longer.

I just noticed on Digg a CNN article talking about the scientific accuracy of Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth:

The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.
But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

So the question remains: How do you convince the “faith-based” skeptics that global warming is real and caused by human activity? No matter what statistic or evidence you present, they still don’t believe. Not only that, but listening to global warming skeptics present endless debunked arguments is getting very tedious. Perhaps I should print out some Global Warming Skeptic Bingo cards

A recent National Academy of Sciences study was commissioned to determine the accuracy of the temperature measurements oft-cited by other reports and articles concerning global warming. At issue was whether or not the methods of measuring temperature (tree rings, varves, etc) were accurate enough to determine that the Earth is at it’s hottest. Here’s the brief:

There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, retreating glaciers, and other “proxies” to say with confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new National Research Council report. There is less confidence in reconstructions of surface temperatures from 1600 back to A.D. 900, and very little confidence in findings on average temperatures before then.

To illustrate what they’re saying, I’ve modified the standard global warming graph just a bit:

This is a fairly damning report for those who think that the earth is merely entering a high point in some sort of natural temperature cycle (whether it be biochemical or sun-output-related). FYI: It takes 11 years for the Sun to go from its solar minimum to its solar maximum.

The answer to this question has been staring us in the face for millennia, but there are still many who believe that homosexuality is some sort of fetish or learned behavior. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (a peer-reviewed scientific journal) reveals evidence that homosexuality (at least in men) may be caused by womb-related conditions:

Professor Anthony Bogaert from Brock University in Ontario, Canada, studied 944 heterosexual and homosexual men with either “biological” brothers, in this case those who share the same mother, or “non-biological” brothers, that is, adopted, step or half siblings.

He found the link between the number of older brothers and homosexuality only existed when the siblings shared the same mother.

Other recent research points to certain genetic factors that may determine sexual orientation. There may not be one single cause of homosexuality in men, but it seems damned obvious at this point that it is not a “choice”.

I had a discussion this weekend regarding our educational system and it reminded me of a post I made at the Volokh Conspiracy regarding cheating in school. So I don’t have to go searching for it again, I’m going to archive it here…

Posted on 05-18-2006 at 11:52am

Ahh, nothing like a good old fashioned argument about cheating in school. It is so refreshing to see that the arguments haven’t changed much at all since, well, the beginning of public education! Lets have a quick review of the “problem” and what most people think of as “solutions”:

The Problem: Students cheat. They find new ways to do it all the time. Every time one form of cheating is stamped out, these little bastards come up with a new one. When will the madness end?!? If these students are so clever and intelligent, why don’t they just spend their mental resources on actually learning things?!?

In the year 2106, people will still be complaining about this.

Proposed Solution #1: Technological warfare! Every time the students come up with a high tech way to cheat, the teachers should come up with a high tech way to beat it. Teachers should spend as much time thinking about ways to defeat cheating as the students think about new ways to cheat!

Of course, in order for this to work the teachers would have to have as much at stake as the kids.

Proposed Solution #2: Harsher punishments! The punishment for cheating should be so harsh that students would have to be insane to cheat.

A punishment so harsh that only a teenager with a penchant for risk-taking behavior and a lot at stake would dare to cheat! Hell, with stakes that high a student would have to spend more time studying ways to not get caught than studying for a test. Insane I tell you!

Proposed Solution #3: Outsource anti-cheating mitigation and discovery to a 3rd party. Teachers don’t have the time or resources to bother with trying to stop cheaters. It is much better to increase tuition and taxes to pay for private enterprises that specialize in stopping and catching cheaters.

Of course, a 3rd party will always have the students best interests in mind. They’ll work to permanently solve the cheating problem so that they won’t be needed in the future.

My crazy idea: How about we stop using grades as a measure of the value of a student and start using tests, papers, and quizzes for their intended purpose: Knowledge gap remediation (i.e. find out what the student missed and fill the holes in their knowledge). If we continue to use a student’s past errors as a measure of their academic achievements, what message are we sending? That the grade is more important than the knowledge.

I’m going to keep this simple: If content owners want to make money off of streaming video they need to get their act together. I’ve had it with their digital restrictions, their their licensing restrictions, their predatory practices, their complete lack of foresight, and their anti-freedom lobbying efforts. If you own the rights to any amount of video content, you’re either going to sink or swim in this Internet age. Just follow these simple rules and you should be OK…

1. DRM (Digital Restrictions on Moving content from one device to another) must die. It only makes money for DRM companies and shrinks audiences. Anyone who says they can stop piracy with DRM is lying to you. It imprisons your content with a burly cell mate that everyone tries to avoid. In the end, only your legitimate customers will get screwed.
2. Don’t make exclusive content deals. Selling your content to a single company limits your audience and legitimate customers may dislike that cable/Internet company you’ve decided to associate yourself with.
3. Make getting your content as painless and easy as possible. Offer multiple formats, bitrates, ways to view/purchase, etc. Let your distributors worry about how they distribute. They’re the ones paying—not the end user. Let them worry about sending in those licensing fees.
4. Free content sponsored by advertising worked great for over 50 years and it will continue to work for the foreseeable future. If your content is easy enough to get, no one will bother searching for pirated copies (even if the ads are edited out). The only legitimate restriction to free distribution should be tracking downloads/streaming and reporting it back to you.
5. Standardize on a free, open listing format that allows customers (and internet-connected consumer devices) to find and retrieve your content as easily as possible. The more easily programs can be written to automatically find and retrieve your content the better. RSS is your friend.
6. Don’t limit yourself to hardware. Let software programmers and hardware manufacturers come up with innovative ways to view your content. It isn’t your problem.
7. Don’t limit your content to proprietary video formats. Even if there’s no DRM, closed formats are bad. The last thing you want is to increase the barrier of entry to making software and hardware that can view your content.
8. Let anyone redistribute (or re-sell) your content. John Doe in Anytown, USA may want to setup a streaming IPTV station for his local neighborhood that features some of your content when he runs out of local programming. The long end of the tail is your friend!
9. Remember, it’s the Internet. Don’t restrict your content to one corner of the world. If you provide local language versions of your programming there is no limit to how many eyeballs will see your content. Just don’t expect to get accurate regional/geographic statistics—IP addresses do not accurately represent physical locations.

1. Never sue your customers. The only groups you should ever sue are people and companies that have violated signed contracts. The idea here is to design your business model in such a way that no customer could effectively cause you financial harm. Load your content with ads and encourage them to redistribute it! Set up free P2P systems that track distribution and you’ll never have to think of your customers as criminals again.

   The first content providers that stick to these rules will be the first ones to make real money from IPTV.

The BBC had an article today about a new process developed to create a kind of glass from pure carbon dioxide:

To create the glassy amorphous carbonia, the team led by Professors Mario Santoro and Federico Gorelli heated solid carbon dioxide between diamond teeth at pressures over 400,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure.

It is still in the “figure out a better way” stage, but if industrialized it could create a significant carbon sink. The perfect place to put all that carbon dioxide we need to get out of the atmosphere. Especially if Klaus Lockner’s CO2 capture device takes off.

The super-strong glass could replace Lexan and Plexiglass and finally get us the equivalent of transparent aluminum

My server was taken down on Tuesday and I just finished configuring the new server around 3 AM this morning. Everything should now be working properly (email, websites, etc). Details are below, but first:

I’ve moved to a new web host: http://serverpronto.com. They have great prices and so far the server has been fast and the connection has been more than adequate. Their data center is in Miami—which isn’t good for when the next hurricane comes—but I can live with that. Forces of nature can be planned and the risk can be mitigated. What my previous host did to me was absolutely unacceptable.

In case you were unaware, I was previously hosting my site with 1and1.com dedicated “root server”. For just over a year everything ran perfectly. Their pricing was OK and the extras such as permanent serial console access and free backup space were awesome. On Tuesday, 1and1 disconnected my server from the Internet.

< !-more->

What Happened

In April I ordered riskable.info from 1and1 as part of a free promotion they were offering. Later that month I was charged $7 for the domain. Obviously, this was an error so I called them up: They agreed, it was an error. The person I spoke with said I would be credited the $7 on my next bill and all was well.

I was never credited the $7, but I had completely forgotten about it by the time I paid the next bill. Not a big deal… Waiting on hold for another 30 minutes would probably end up costing me $7 in my time anyway. I moved on, but apparently this little event created a ripple effect in 1and1’s billing system… More on that in bit.

On the first of June (Thursday) my server emailed me to tell me that its nightly backup had failed the previous night. Reason: The username and password were not accepted by 1and1’s backup server. I figured it was just a temporary glitch with their system and that it would probably be automatically taken care of the following night. It wasn’t.

Friday morning I received another email saying the backups had failed so I decided to investigate. My first thought was that the username/password might have changed so I logged into my 1and1 account to see if it had. I couldn’t even get that far—the 1and1 control panel would not let me administer my server. In fact, the only thing it would let me do was update my user info. I immediately called 1and1 support (note: paraphrased)…

1and1: “Hello, may I have your customer number please?”
Me: “Sure… It’s (number)”
1and1: “Thank you. Let me have a look at your account… Ahh, do you have a question about your cancellation?”
Me: “There must be some mistake. I never canceled my account.”
1and1: “You’ll need to contact the billing department. I’m sure it was just a mistake and they should be able to re-instate your account.”

Phew! Sounds like an easy fix, right?

(called 1and1 Billing Dept.)
Me: “Hi there, it seems that someone made a mistake and slated my account for cancellation.”
1and1: “Oh, let me have a look… I see. Yes. Hmmm… It won’t let me re-instate your account for some reason. Let me talk to my supervisor.” (apparently he has greater access to the system)
(…on hold for several minutes…)
1and1: “My supervisor says that there’s a technical problem and we can’t correct it from here. He is going to contact Germany (where my server was located apparently) and have them reinstate your account manually. Everything should be fixed by Monday. If you have any problems, just give us a call.”
Me: “Wait a minute. My server isn’t going to be shut off or anything is it?”
1and1: “No, it takes a long time for that to happen once a cancel request is put into the system. 60 days. We should have this fixed by then.”
Me: “Oh, no big deal then. Will someone call me when this is taken care of?”
1and1: “Yes. Someone should call you on Monday. They may need to get some information.”
Me: “Alrighty.”
(bye byes)

Despite all this I started a backup of my server to my home machine. I didn’t like the idea of not having the ability to utilize their backup server over the weekend. I ran into two problems with this: 1) We lost power about an hour after the first backup run started, cutting off the upload. 2) My Comcast connection died several times throughout the weekend (thunderstorms). The end result was that I never got a complete backup.

On Monday everything was running great. Nothing to worry about. I checked to see if I could login to the backup server from my own server and I could. My 1and1 control panel reflected a $4 credit on my account so I assumed I was taken care of (and I didn’t feel like wasting more time on hold). On Tuesday morning, my server was offline.

When I called 1and1, I was told:

1. My account was actually canceled in April by one of their agents for no particular reason whatsoever.
2. They would not bring my server back online.
3. They would not re-instate my account.
4. They would not allow me access to my backups.

1. They were going to open a ticket to give me access to my data (with no details how they would do that).

   Apparently it was a holiday in Germany on Monday so no one got to my ticket in time. On Tuesday I called six or seven times to get the status on getting my data. Every call was different. I spoke with 1and1 service reps that told me the following things (in order):

2. My trouble ticket was already at the highest priority and “Sebastian” was going to contact Germany to have them give me access to my data.
3. They had no status update, but they will add a note to the ticket that I called. Sebastian is in a meeting.
4. Again, no status update. Sebastian is still in that “meeting” (this is several hours later)
5. Billing department was closing so I was told to call technical support (which is 24/7) to get status updates.
6. First technical support person: “I am escalating your ticket to the highest priority.”
7. Second technical support person: “Someone will call you when your data is available. What I’ll do is note the ticket so they know to call you and not use email (since my email server is down). I am escalating your ticket to the highest priority.” (seems like they’re reading that from a script)

(next morning…)

8. Technical support says that my ticket is owned by the billing department and I should call them
9. I spoke to a person in billing who told me, “There’s nothing I can do at the moment. My manager owns the ticket and he is in a meeting. Call back in two hours.”

(two hours later…)

10. The techs in Germany now own the ticket. I should have my data “later tonight”. Someone will call me. Manager/Supervisor/whatever is still in that meeting (uh huh).
11. Called a few more times. No status update (night time folks are in India I think and don’t speak English very well). Still no data.

(next morning…)

12. Spoke with a woman who was EXTREMELY helpful. She read every ticket note and gave me detailed answers to every question I asked (regarding the process that was going to take place to get me my data). She seemed to instantly realize upon reading all the ticket notes that I was getting screwed over and contacted her manager, Ian. Ian was going to personally call Germany and take over my ticket (note: I didn’t speak with Ian directly at this point). I was told to call back and ask for Ian an hour later.
13. I called back an hour later and spoke with the same guy who told me that there was nothing he could do and I should just call back. I asked for Ian. He told me “Ian is unavailable at the moment” and said, “I already told you there’s nothing I can do. Call back later.” He was very rude and hung up on me. I called back IMMEDIATELY…
14. Someone answered the phone and I immediately asked to speak with Ian. He was on the phone talking to me in like 10 seconds. Ian told me that he was going to put me on hold and go get Sebastian out of a meeting to get my ticket escalated. He asked me for an alternate email address and the location where they could dump my data. I setup an FTP server and emailed him the info.

1. Thursday night at 8:05PM I received an email (at my gmail account) from Ian with login information to retrieve my data off of my old server.

   No one from 1and1 ever called me.

   The New Server

   While all this was going on I was searching for a new hosting provider. I read good things about serverpronto.com in the Gentoo forums. They’ll setup a server for you in 24 hours with just about any popular Linux distro including Gentoo (which 1and1 didn’t do—but I had Gentoo running on my server anyway thanks to my mad skillz with their recovery console). I ordered myself a basic AMD dedicated server for $30/month with a couple extras (that I won’t get into).

   The new server is now up and running with all my old data (as far as I can tell) and the only thing I have left to do is automate some systems administration tasks. At some point I want to get a 1U colo server setup so I have more power/storage to play around with. I’m really getting sick of this 40GB limit (my 1and1.com account had the same size drive).

   That’s it for now. I’ll probably chime in later with some details on how I have my server setup (since it is all fresh in my mind again). I’m positive some people would find that info interesting/useful.