The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today that it has awarded $25 million for clean diesel projects in California under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009 National Clean Diesel Funding Assistance Program
A single clean-burning diesel locomotive engine can cost $1.6 million, so companies like California Northern Railroad (CFNR) have been encouraged to upgrade by federal and state financial incentives. 80 percent of the cost of the new CFNR 501 engine came fom the Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program at the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Likewise, Caltrans is upgrading their fleet.
The first Caltrans locomotive to be upgraded is a Model F59PHI originally built by Electro-Motive Diesel in October 2001. EMD has installed a 710ECO™ Repower upgrade package with the latest microprocessor-controlled locomotive engine technology for lower emissions, increased fuel economy, greater reliability and predictable maintenance costs. The newly upgraded locomotive will now achieve EPA Tier 2 emissions performance – two levels cleaner than required for this model.
Thus it has taken state laws, local and national grants, as well as 40% more fuel efficiency, and concern about health quality (85% particulate matter reduction in the new engines) to get the railroads to finally get moving in this direction.
Iomega marketing materials give a good laugh on their new ix4 NAS products:
Other security features include robust username and password authorized access, and RSA BSAFE encryption technology for hacker-free installs and upgrades.
What? Does this mean if you are a hacker you are unable to choose a username, set a password, or enable RSA BSAFE? Sounds like some amazing security technology. Hacker-free? Can’t wait to get my hands on one.
Seriously, though, it’s nice to see that a self-contained automatically configured 2TB device costs under $700. Network admins should be considering rules right now to detect Iomega mac addresses. One of these things pops up on the network and you can almost bet trouble is coming — “hacker-free” trouble.
The news release claims the ITSRA “validates the resiliency of key elements of IT sector infrastructure”.
That sounds suspiciously like the SAS70 approach to security where audits can be targeted to very limited areas of an organization and success is never measured across the whole.
Key elements?
Reduce scope enough and success is found somewhere. I think Calvin and Hobbes had a nice variation of this. It was a graphic of a snowman with just two balls — no head. Calvin stood back in admiration and said something about the secret to good-self esteem comes from lowering expectations until they are already met. Here’s another variation from Calvin that will have to do until I can dig up the one I remember:
I’m not saying that is now the case here, as I have not finished reading the full report yet, but the press release language is already steering me in that direction.
About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform.
Here again is a fine example of the issues around making a simple security choice even among highly educated professionals and presumably rational thinkers. Washing hands is resisted in spite of a well documented if not obvious potential to reduce risk. The rest of the article is a very thoughtful look at what the author calls “impersonal forces” that cause distortions to risk decisions, as well as suggestions on health-care reform.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
