I suspect anyone convicted solely using evidence produced by the DEA since the circulation of the presentation will have a chance to take a crack at it.
Any bets on whether a court will decide that one or more of them has enough standing to at least go for discovery?
Now, that's a WTF. Code that shouldn't be touching the network at all, yet has remotely exploitable bugs.
You never display anything that came in over the network? Your browsing must be REALLY boring.
What's next, being able to take things out of my refrigerator from the nearest highway, even though my refrigerator does not leave my kitchen?
Funny you should mention refrigerators. Wasn't it last week when the stories came out about the botnets made of unpatched Internet of Things devices, turned into spam-transmitting zombies? One class of pwned device particularly called out were the refrigerators with the fancy displays in their doors...
IMHO network neutrality should not be under communications regulation in the first place. There are some very good reasons for treating different sorts of packets differently. These include achieving quality of service improvements by prioritizing limited streaming over bulk transfers and economy of scale by combining guaranteed-QoS and best-effort on a common infrastructure.
The real issue is not the technical one of whether packets are prioritized. It's two other (related) issues:
- Does the way the ISP prioritized packets in its transport operation give its (above the transport layer) "value-added services" a competitive advantage over other, similar, services sold by other providers. This is the domain of antitrust. (See Tying, Bundling, and Abuse of Market Share.)
- Does the handling of the packets cause the ISP to fall short of what is expected of "Internet service". (For instance: Does the ISP block or degrade traffic of higher-level services compeitive with its own offerings.) This is the domain of consumer fraud.
IMHO a more effective way to handle the issue might be to require the separaton of ownership of ISPs and "content providers", much as the Bell Telephone monopoly was broken up into local service, long-distance service, and equipment manufacture. Conglomerates combining ISP data service, telephone service, entertainment "content" publishing, and news services have built-in conflicts of interest.
The bill was introduced by John Federico, a cable industry lobbyist.
Really? Since when do lobbyists have standing to introduce bills in the Kansas Senate?
Perhaps the bill was written by industry figures and proposed to a senator by this lobbyist. But it was the senator who introduced it. Stating HIS name, too, and clearly describing the process, might have some effect on this guy's chances for reelection.
The very existence of this document is evidence of a conspiracy to deny civil rights under color of law. This is both a civil and a criminal issue.
IMHO it should be trivial to show that the authors of this document, along with all adminstrators and instructors who used it in training agents and all agents who, having attended such training, committed any of the described acts, have committed a felony.
I wonder if civil RICO suits might be brought, as well. B-)
Another factor that might be pushing vendors to provide information to open source developers and/or publishing open source drivers is the fallout from the Snowden revelations.
People worldwide have awakened to the possibility that malware may be imbedded in closed drivers and firmware (including closed "binary blobs" embedded in open-source drivers). Indeed, it WAS imbedded in some - and sold as a feature. (Example: Intel's AMT, early versions of which lived in and ran from the Ethernet interface firmware, before it was moved to the Northbridge.)
Even if it isn't contaminated, a vendor can't SHOW that it's not contaminated as long as it's closed. So to convince jittery customers that the device is safe, the vendor needs to have open drivers and firmware available.
A vendor's own souce may include licensed code from others, making it hard for the vendor to open its own code (and perhaps contaminating its own developers). On the other hand, releasing the necessary information to the open souce community can lead to fully open support - at negligable cost (excluding perceived risk of exposing company secret-sauce recipes to the world - which won't matter if the customers stop buying the sauce-covered product, or demand falls enough for them to lose their competitive position).
So the Snowden revalations have created a strong incentive for vendors to enable open source developers.
An example would be replacing h from the bacteria in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.)
Should have been:
An example would be replacing lost fixed nitrogen with newly fixed nitrogen derived from the bacterial in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.
===
If you must recycle an organism's waste into its food supply, the more, and more diverse, steps it goes through on the way, the less chance for pathogens to also be "recycled" into new infections.
Using any animal's waste as a fertilizer for its food is a recipe for a health disaster. Some pathogens are extremely hard to denature. Two examples come immediately to mind: Hepititis viruses and CJD prions (a human version of "mad cow"). Even if a process were effective, any failure, even short term, becomes an immediate disaster.
Instead, if waste is to be recycled, it is far better to recycle it as nutrients for a different species, the more different the better. For instance, human waste might fertrilize animal feed for herbivores, which are substantially different in biochemistry. (A better technique, of course, would be to recycle human waste into something useful other than the leading-to-humans food chain and replace the "lost" nutrients with smething newly-synthized. (An example would be replacing h from the bacteria in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.)
(The same applies to plants. For instrance: In our garden we rotate crops: Freshly composted soil might have tomatoes grown in it the first year, then only veggies that aren't susceptible to common diseases of tomatoes the second year, and so on. We'll typically run the soil through a composter again before once more growing tomatoes in it. Leaves from the fruit trees are removed in the fall rather than being allowed to compost beneath them, to eliminate things like apple worms and peach/plum/nectarine leaf-curl fungus. The trees might be fertilized, instead, by composted waste of other vegatables, while the tree leaves are sent to a recycling arrangement far away from our orchard.)
I find it hard to imagine an achievable form factor in which it would be useful. It's the smallest form factors that needs the highest energy densities, and specifically small, flat, nearly air sealed form factors that people care about the most. It's not mechanically suitable for such applications.
Given the energy and power desity it doesn't have to be very large to be very useful. The downside is thaat it needs access to air.
So one place that comes to mind immediately is laptops. Not quite as a drop-in replacement for a sealed unit: Laptops already have forced-air cooling. You'd just pass the forced air past the membranes of the cell. This would give it access to far more atmospheric CO2 and water vapor than depending on local air currents. I wouldn't be surprised if that makes it practical.
Another is electric cars. High energy and power density translatie to low powerplant weight, and from there to more payload, better mileage, etc. There's lot of access to air amd plenty of room for the plumging. It's refuelable with a cheap, non-toxic, liquid, so you get plug-in hybrid versatility with very little more equipment than a pure electric rechargable.
I saw no mention of the usual platinum catalyst, and the summary specifically disclaims the use of such in this method.
Look at the right edge of the diagram. You'll see an oval labeled Pt on the surface of the cathode, serving as the site of a reaction where hydrogen leaving the cell is reacted with atmospheric oxygen to form atmospheric water vapor - achieving the necessary hydrogen gradient to pump the electricity generation. (Alternatively, with the charging current pumping protons IN, the same catalyst would be cracking atmospheric water vapor to provide more, to feed the catalyst's hydrogen affinity and thus the cell, leaving the oxygen to fly away.)
Note that the platinum is not involved in the internal reactions, which are entirely mediated by the 13 enzymes. It's just a handy way to provide a hydrogen source/sink at a roughly fixed concentration, to dump protons during discharge and provide them for charge.
Now even if it IS reversable, perhaps the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and/or water vapor might be a limit on charging rate, leading to the preferred method of "recharge" being injecting the cell with more pure maltodextrin solution of the appropriate strength and running it as a primary fuel cell rather than a rechargable fuel-cell-battery system. But if it makes it past the "valley of death" into production we should know in a few years.
1. it doesn't work 2. it can't be produced (= it can't get cheap enough) or 3. someone has a deep interest in blocking it (think NiMH)
Or: 4. It's just been invented.
Jeez, guys. There's still some substantial engineering to do between finding a reaction that works and deploying it as a product.
Look at how long it took for Edison to turn electric-driven incandescence into a practical light bulb - and how rapidly that deployed once it was finally done. Or look at the several generations of automobiles between the first hand-built, otto-cycle engine driven rich-guy's toys and Ford's mass-produced models, or the several generations of steam engines before practical, standards-based, inexpensive railroad transportation was deployed.
If this proves practical and deploys I expect it in a lot less time than the above examples. But I DON'T expect it to already be deployed for years before the week the first published paper describing the fundamental breakthrough is published.
The reaction is not internally reversible. Once all the accessible sugar has been oxidized, you need new sugar to refuel it. It doesn't recharge.
Where do you get that?
Though the detaied description of the reaction in The Fine Summary of the paper is in terms of the maltodextrin + oxygen -> water + carbon dioxide direction, there's no inherent reason that it can't be run backward with a power input, and the descriptive article speaks as if it can.
I've checked one part: The two enzymes at the start - which convert maltodextrin to glucose 6-phosphate (one stage of the cycle) are both reversable. If the other 11 are, also, you have a complete bidirectional system.
Drive power into the electrodes and you pump in hydrogen cracked from atmospheric water by the platinum catlyist on the atmospheric side of the dilectric membrane - the same catylist that disposes of the hydrogen by burning it with atmospheric oxygen to make water vapor when discharging. Also admit carbon dioxide by the same semi-permiable membrane that you use to dispose of it during discharging. Result: The enzymes synthesize maltodextrin solution from electricity and atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, releasing atmospheric oxygen. It's much like a plant, with the chlorophyl replaced by a membrane, two electrodes, and a platinum catylist.
This brings up an interesting possibility: Electrosynthesys of food, to replace plants. If you can extract the maltodextrin solution without unacceptable loss of the enzymes you have a handy energy input for, say, bio-engineered bacterial synthesys of everything else you need - including replacements for the eventual loss or degredation of the 13 enzymes. Result: Complete drive of a working life support system from any source of electricity.
I can see the "plant rightist" movement already, taking the verse from Leslie Fish's "Fisher's Chant" literally:
And you who feed on nothing but plants Don't hold your pride so high For plants are living, and just might feel And they take so long to die.
Where it gets interesting is that large chunks of papers are literally re-telling the same stuff over and over again.... Obviously trying to re-write this over and over is a completely pointless waste of time, so many academics just copy/paste the same old crap and then get on with the rest of the paper. Is that sort of self-plagiarism bad, and if so why?
In the "keystone" course I took, (i.e. basic library use and academic writing) which included avoiding both self- and ordinary plagiarism, the main issue was clearly distinguishing among your new work, your new interpretation of others work, and the previous work of others and/or yourself.
The college uses an automated plagiarism-detection-and-measurement service, which compares newly submitted work against a database of previously submitted work, published work, and crawls of the web. We were warned, not just against using copy-and-paste boilerplate in multiple papers (or papers for multiple classes) but that the tool also tended to false-positive for self-plagiarism due to a person's writing style and word choices resulting in a tendency to put identical multi-word strings of significant length in more than one paper.
(I made a point of having a discussion with each prof, giving a heads up that I make extensive web posts under handles, consider it fair to use the same research and phrasing both in a discussion here and in a paper, and would be more than a little annoyed if the tool claimed I'd lifted a paper from my own contribution to a forum thread on some hot topic. So far I've had no problems.)
The FCC regulations that banned cell phone usage on planes were based on the idea that the phones EM emissions might interfere with the operation of the airplane's equipment.
Also that the cellphones, when located in an aircraft, had a field-of-view including a large number of cell towers and could chew up a slot or two in each of them. One airliner full of people with operating cellphones, passing over a city, could make a substantial dent in the city's cellphone capabilities and produce a LOT of dropped calls - some of them potentially emergency calls.
These were both reasonable with the original, analog, cellphone network, where the phone-to-cell uplink was a narrowband FM signal capable of transmitting substantial power. (The "interferes with avionics" concern might have been more "can't prove it's safe but it looks risky" than "proved it's a problem", but the multi-cell interference issue was apparently an observed effect.)
The modern broadband digital systems, whether CDMA or OFDM based, spread the energy out over a broad spectrum and re-focus it internally in the receiver. These far less of a risk for interference with other radio-sensitive devices. (Meanwhile such devices have also been improved when it comes to rejection of extraneous interference.) (You'll notice that hospitals have, for a while, been deploying WiFi - also an OFDM system - internally, and have been much more permissive about where they'll let you operate a cellphone.) These systems also are less prone to being interfered with by other, weaker, cellphone signals.
With the recent retirement of the analog cellphone network (causing even multi-mode phones to cease transmitting in that mode), the problem-child mode has gone away. So it's entirely reasonable for the rule-making bodies to drop the mandate that the cell phones be shut off, and the Airlines to follow suit where they trust this analysis. (Delta, for instance, still wants phones turned off, or in "airline mode" if they have it, during the ground-to-cruising-altitude phases of the flight. They trust it while cruising, but not in the more critical near-ground phase.)
It's modulation depth (per the abstract) is only 38%, so it's not quite a broad-band as on-off-keying.
Once you've got that it's trivial to use beam splitters and destructive interference to change the modulation from 62% vs. 100% to 38% vs. essentially 0% amplitude.
Not that it matters: The receiver is AC coupled, anyhow. As long as the modulation is sufficiently deep that the signal is substantially above the noise floor, you're fine. Switching a third of the amplitude is nearly as good as switching all of the amplitude of a signal of third the amplitude. (in terms of energy, which is the square of amplitude, the switched part is more than half again the unswitched part.) If you're using stimulated-emission repeater amplification along the way you need more excitation light, but that's still a trivial cost.
You're missing the simplest explanation: during his campaign, Obama lied.
Dead on.
Obama learned politics in Chicago - the current record holder for corrupt big-city political machines. He is a classic example of a corrupt machine politician.
The Clintons are also masters of the (less intense) state-level version of the form, having risen to the top in Arkansas, which has been run by a corrupt machine since a Mafia family from New York took it over when the big city got too hot for them. Obama beat them for the Democratic nomination. He has now remade the Federal government on the model of Chigago.
This was predicted and announced by quite a large number of people well before the election. Nevertheless, he won. So how did this come about?
There are a number of factors. But IMHO this is the most decisive: The Republican Party's organization, for well over a decade, has been solidly controlled by the Neocon faction (one of the four major and several minor factions of the party). In the last two presidential nomination battles, the Liberty wing (another of the big four), under the inspiration of Ron Paul and drawing members mainly from the young and/or Internet connected, made substantial inroads.
Their successes in the 2008 nomination process threatened to eventually displace the Neocons' control of the party machinery, as the Neocons had displaced their predecessors (mainly the Christian Right) previously. So in the 2012 nomination the Neocons fought an extremely dirty battle, with large amounts of cheating, rule-breaking, and even incidents of violence (including broken bones). This so alienated the Liberty wing (and some members of other factions) that they refused to support the Neocon's nominee in the general election. Romney lost five states by margins substantially less than the number of people who voted for Ron Paul in those states' primaries, and those states' electoral votes would have swung the general election. It's a good bet that virtually none of the Ron Paul supporters voted for Romney, and even those would have been more that balanced by Republican voters for other candidates who were also appalled at the machine's treatment of their opposition.
One circulating meme was: "If this is how they behave in the nomination process, how can we allow them to control of the machinery of the Federal Government?" Even KNOWING that Obama would run the Fed like a Chicago-style machine and use it to stomp on the people, letting the Neocon's machine continue to consolidate their control of the major opposition party and drive the big-government non-choice-election system into the foreseeable future could still look like a worse choice.
It's modulation depth (per the abstract) is only 38%, so it's not quite a broad-band as on-off-keying.
Once you've got that it's trivial to use beam splitters and destructive interference to change the modulation from 62% vs. 100% to 38% vs. essentially 0% amplitude.
First issue is that those viewers are time-shifting. The broadcasters hate that...
Tough. The Supreme Court has already said that viewers have a right to time-shift, whether the broadcasters like it or not, in the context of recording of over-the-air signals directly received by the viewers. They're just re-fighting that battle because the context is enough different that they get another at-bat.
Second issue is that those viewers are not being measured.... Remember that ad rates are set by how many people are measured watching the show.
And that's a matter between the advertisers and the rating services.
There's an easy solution: Aereo has ACCURATE data on EXACTLY how many clients are receiving the signals and where they're located. Potentially the ratings services - or the advertisers - could cut a deal with them to buy suitably aggregated and anonymized data to include these viewers in their counts.
That they haven't already done so says to me they're just being cheap and shafting the broadcasters by undercounting the viewers. Seems to me that's cause for action between the broadcasters and the rating services, but NOT between the broadcasters and Aereo (unless Aereo has been stonewalling or trying to gouge the rating services.)
I also agree that, regardless of whether disabling VT-d keeps NSA out of AMT (or equivalent) or if they have some personal back door associated with it, shutting it down is still very useful: It closes this barn door to all the other bad guys who don't have any "extras" and use it as you describe.
... who was Time's Person of the Year in 2001? Osama Bin Laden, naturally?... no, it was Rudy Guliani.
Remember that this choice was made a little less than four months after 9/11, and the popular reaction to the event was so bad that women in California were ordering their dogs to attack people who "looked Muslim" at freeway rest areas. Time is published from New York City, ground zero for the bulk of the attacks.
I suspect they figured that if they gave Osama the title there'd be another building brought down - by New Yorkers with sledgehammers.
In most instances on Intel hardware you can effectively disable AMTs interface to the outside world by turning off the hardware virtualization (VT-d) feature in the BIOS.
But how do we KNOW this works? (As opposed to, say, the machine's AMT server no longer talking to remote clients unless the right encrypted hand-waving is done by the client to tell the server it's NSA calling - or the encrypted handwaving telling eavesdropping firmware to switch VT-d on and be cagey about it?)
If I understand it correctly, the AMT stuff is running on a separate ARM core. There's no reason (beyond software elegance) that this has to work through the normal virtualization mechanism, or that NSA wouldn't think ahead and either design it to work with its own mechanism or turn VT-d on but make it act like it's off, and spread the story about VT-d disablin a necessary underpinning of the feature.
The term anarchist is usually reserved for people who use violent means to protest or overthrow governments and who aren't organized enough to be called "insurrectionists" or "rebels"
By whom? I smell B.S.
The term "anarchist" is used, by anarchists, political scientists, and anyone astute, to mean anyone who wants (and works for) a situation where governmental control over a population is eliminated (or minimized, though the latter are properly called "minarchists") on an ongoing basis. (This actually requires considerable social organization to achieve.)
It is used by government propagandists as a pejorative to flame anyone attempting to reduce their power. One part of this operation is to attempt to equate it, in the minds of their target audience, with "nihilist" (a person working for the elimination of all social organization - some of the famous of whom were obvious psychopaths) and various terrorist wackos.
Similarly, "andrchism" gets applied to situations where a government is losing its hold on an area in the face of attacks by one or more self-appointed replacement governments, or where a government has fallen and several such alternative gropus are fighting it out to be the new top dog. Such a situation, in my opinion, is the exact opposite: "Polyarchy" - a multiplicity of governments, and the death and chaos is the result, not of no governments, but of too many. B-b
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):
Hardware-based AMT features include:
Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.
Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall on an open LAN to establish a secure communication tunnel (via AMT) back to the IT console. Examples of an open LAN include a wired laptop at home or at an SMB site that does not have a proxy server.
Remote power up / power down / power cycle through encrypted WOL.
Remote boot, via integrated device electronics redirect (IDE-R).
Console redirection, via serial over LAN (SOL).
Keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) over network.
Hardware-based filters for monitoring packet headers in inbound and outbound network traffic for known threats (based on programmable timers), and for monitoring known / unknown threats based on time-based heuristics. Laptops and desktop PCs have filters to monitor packet headers. Desktop PCs have packet-header filters and time-based filters.
Isolation circuitry (previously and unofficially called "circuit breaker" by Intel) to port-block, rate-limit, or fully isolate a PC that might be compromised or infected.
Agent presence checking, via hardware-based, policy-based programmable timers. A "miss" generates an event; you can specify that the event generate an alert.
OOB alerting.
Persistent event log, stored in protected memory (not on the hard drive).
Access (preboot) the PC's universal unique identifier (UUID).
Access (preboot) hardware asset information, such as a component's manufacturer and model, which is updated every time the system goes through power-on self-test (POST).
Access (preboot) to third-party data store (TPDS), a protected memory area that software vendors can use, in which to version information,.DAT files, and other information.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck proving that you have standing to sue.
I suspect anyone convicted solely using evidence produced by the DEA since the circulation of the presentation will have a chance to take a crack at it.
Any bets on whether a court will decide that one or more of them has enough standing to at least go for discovery?
Now, that's a WTF. Code that shouldn't be touching the network at all, yet has remotely exploitable bugs.
You never display anything that came in over the network? Your browsing must be REALLY boring.
What's next, being able to take things out of my refrigerator from the nearest highway, even though my refrigerator does not leave my kitchen?
Funny you should mention refrigerators. Wasn't it last week when the stories came out about the botnets made of unpatched Internet of Things devices, turned into spam-transmitting zombies? One class of pwned device particularly called out were the refrigerators with the fancy displays in their doors...
IMHO network neutrality should not be under communications regulation in the first place. There are some very good reasons for treating different sorts of packets differently. These include achieving quality of service improvements by prioritizing limited streaming over bulk transfers and economy of scale by combining guaranteed-QoS and best-effort on a common infrastructure.
The real issue is not the technical one of whether packets are prioritized. It's two other (related) issues:
- Does the way the ISP prioritized packets in its transport operation give its (above the transport layer) "value-added services" a competitive advantage over other, similar, services sold by other providers. This is the domain of antitrust. (See Tying, Bundling, and Abuse of Market Share.)
- Does the handling of the packets cause the ISP to fall short of what is expected of "Internet service". (For instance: Does the ISP block or degrade traffic of higher-level services compeitive with its own offerings.) This is the domain of consumer fraud.
IMHO a more effective way to handle the issue might be to require the separaton of ownership of ISPs and "content providers", much as the Bell Telephone monopoly was broken up into local service, long-distance service, and equipment manufacture. Conglomerates combining ISP data service, telephone service, entertainment "content" publishing, and news services have built-in conflicts of interest.
The bill was introduced by John Federico, a cable industry lobbyist.
Really? Since when do lobbyists have standing to introduce bills in the Kansas Senate?
Perhaps the bill was written by industry figures and proposed to a senator by this lobbyist. But it was the senator who introduced it. Stating HIS name, too, and clearly describing the process, might have some effect on this guy's chances for reelection.
The very existence of this document is evidence of a conspiracy to deny civil rights under color of law. This is both a civil and a criminal issue.
IMHO it should be trivial to show that the authors of this document, along with all adminstrators and instructors who used it in training agents and all agents who, having attended such training, committed any of the described acts, have committed a felony.
I wonder if civil RICO suits might be brought, as well. B-)
Another factor that might be pushing vendors to provide information to open source developers and/or publishing open source drivers is the fallout from the Snowden revelations.
People worldwide have awakened to the possibility that malware may be imbedded in closed drivers and firmware (including closed "binary blobs" embedded in open-source drivers). Indeed, it WAS imbedded in some - and sold as a feature. (Example: Intel's AMT, early versions of which lived in and ran from the Ethernet interface firmware, before it was moved to the Northbridge.)
Even if it isn't contaminated, a vendor can't SHOW that it's not contaminated as long as it's closed. So to convince jittery customers that the device is safe, the vendor needs to have open drivers and firmware available.
A vendor's own souce may include licensed code from others, making it hard for the vendor to open its own code (and perhaps contaminating its own developers). On the other hand, releasing the necessary information to the open souce community can lead to fully open support - at negligable cost (excluding perceived risk of exposing company secret-sauce recipes to the world - which won't matter if the customers stop buying the sauce-covered product, or demand falls enough for them to lose their competitive position).
So the Snowden revalations have created a strong incentive for vendors to enable open source developers.
An example would be replacing h from the bacteria in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.)
Should have been:
An example would be replacing lost fixed nitrogen with newly fixed nitrogen derived from the bacterial in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.
===
If you must recycle an organism's waste into its food supply, the more, and more diverse, steps it goes through on the way, the less chance for pathogens to also be "recycled" into new infections.
Using any animal's waste as a fertilizer for its food is a recipe for a health disaster. Some pathogens are extremely hard to denature. Two examples come immediately to mind: Hepititis viruses and CJD prions (a human version of "mad cow"). Even if a process were effective, any failure, even short term, becomes an immediate disaster.
Instead, if waste is to be recycled, it is far better to recycle it as nutrients for a different species, the more different the better. For instance, human waste might fertrilize animal feed for herbivores, which are substantially different in biochemistry. (A better technique, of course, would be to recycle human waste into something useful other than the leading-to-humans food chain and replace the "lost" nutrients with smething newly-synthized. (An example would be replacing h from the bacteria in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.)
(The same applies to plants. For instrance: In our garden we rotate crops: Freshly composted soil might have tomatoes grown in it the first year, then only veggies that aren't susceptible to common diseases of tomatoes the second year, and so on. We'll typically run the soil through a composter again before once more growing tomatoes in it. Leaves from the fruit trees are removed in the fall rather than being allowed to compost beneath them, to eliminate things like apple worms and peach/plum/nectarine leaf-curl fungus. The trees might be fertilized, instead, by composted waste of other vegatables, while the tree leaves are sent to a recycling arrangement far away from our orchard.)
I find it hard to imagine an achievable form factor in which it would be useful. It's the smallest form factors that needs the highest energy densities, and specifically small, flat, nearly air sealed form factors that people care about the most. It's not mechanically suitable for such applications.
Given the energy and power desity it doesn't have to be very large to be very useful. The downside is thaat it needs access to air.
So one place that comes to mind immediately is laptops. Not quite as a drop-in replacement for a sealed unit: Laptops already have forced-air cooling. You'd just pass the forced air past the membranes of the cell. This would give it access to far more atmospheric CO2 and water vapor than depending on local air currents. I wouldn't be surprised if that makes it practical.
Another is electric cars. High energy and power density translatie to low powerplant weight, and from there to more payload, better mileage, etc. There's lot of access to air amd plenty of room for the plumging. It's refuelable with a cheap, non-toxic, liquid, so you get plug-in hybrid versatility with very little more equipment than a pure electric rechargable.
I saw no mention of the usual platinum catalyst, and the summary specifically disclaims the use of such in this method.
Look at the right edge of the diagram. You'll see an oval labeled Pt on the surface of the cathode, serving as the site of a reaction where hydrogen leaving the cell is reacted with atmospheric oxygen to form atmospheric water vapor - achieving the necessary hydrogen gradient to pump the electricity generation. (Alternatively, with the charging current pumping protons IN, the same catalyst would be cracking atmospheric water vapor to provide more, to feed the catalyst's hydrogen affinity and thus the cell, leaving the oxygen to fly away.)
Note that the platinum is not involved in the internal reactions, which are entirely mediated by the 13 enzymes. It's just a handy way to provide a hydrogen source/sink at a roughly fixed concentration, to dump protons during discharge and provide them for charge.
Now even if it IS reversable, perhaps the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and/or water vapor might be a limit on charging rate, leading to the preferred method of "recharge" being injecting the cell with more pure maltodextrin solution of the appropriate strength and running it as a primary fuel cell rather than a rechargable fuel-cell-battery system. But if it makes it past the "valley of death" into production we should know in a few years.
1. it doesn't work
2. it can't be produced (= it can't get cheap enough)
or
3. someone has a deep interest in blocking it (think NiMH)
Or:
4. It's just been invented.
Jeez, guys. There's still some substantial engineering to do between finding a reaction that works and deploying it as a product.
Look at how long it took for Edison to turn electric-driven incandescence into a practical light bulb - and how rapidly that deployed once it was finally done. Or look at the several generations of automobiles between the first hand-built, otto-cycle engine driven rich-guy's toys and Ford's mass-produced models, or the several generations of steam engines before practical, standards-based, inexpensive railroad transportation was deployed.
If this proves practical and deploys I expect it in a lot less time than the above examples. But I DON'T expect it to already be deployed for years before the week the first published paper describing the fundamental breakthrough is published.
The reaction is not internally reversible. Once all the accessible sugar has been oxidized, you need new sugar to refuel it. It doesn't recharge.
Where do you get that?
Though the detaied description of the reaction in The Fine Summary of the paper is in terms of the maltodextrin + oxygen -> water + carbon dioxide direction, there's no inherent reason that it can't be run backward with a power input, and the descriptive article speaks as if it can.
I've checked one part: The two enzymes at the start - which convert maltodextrin to glucose 6-phosphate (one stage of the cycle) are both reversable. If the other 11 are, also, you have a complete bidirectional system.
Drive power into the electrodes and you pump in hydrogen cracked from atmospheric water by the platinum catlyist on the atmospheric side of the dilectric membrane - the same catylist that disposes of the hydrogen by burning it with atmospheric oxygen to make water vapor when discharging. Also admit carbon dioxide by the same semi-permiable membrane that you use to dispose of it during discharging. Result: The enzymes synthesize maltodextrin solution from electricity and atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor, releasing atmospheric oxygen. It's much like a plant, with the chlorophyl replaced by a membrane, two electrodes, and a platinum catylist.
This brings up an interesting possibility: Electrosynthesys of food, to replace plants. If you can extract the maltodextrin solution without unacceptable loss of the enzymes you have a handy energy input for, say, bio-engineered bacterial synthesys of everything else you need - including replacements for the eventual loss or degredation of the 13 enzymes. Result: Complete drive of a working life support system from any source of electricity.
I can see the "plant rightist" movement already, taking the verse from Leslie Fish's "Fisher's Chant" literally:
Where it gets interesting is that large chunks of papers are literally re-telling the same stuff over and over again. ... Obviously trying to re-write this over and over is a completely pointless waste of time, so many academics just copy/paste the same old crap and then get on with the rest of the paper. Is that sort of self-plagiarism bad, and if so why?
In the "keystone" course I took, (i.e. basic library use and academic writing) which included avoiding both self- and ordinary plagiarism, the main issue was clearly distinguishing among your new work, your new interpretation of others work, and the previous work of others and/or yourself.
The college uses an automated plagiarism-detection-and-measurement service, which compares newly submitted work against a database of previously submitted work, published work, and crawls of the web. We were warned, not just against using copy-and-paste boilerplate in multiple papers (or papers for multiple classes) but that the tool also tended to false-positive for self-plagiarism due to a person's writing style and word choices resulting in a tendency to put identical multi-word strings of significant length in more than one paper.
(I made a point of having a discussion with each prof, giving a heads up that I make extensive web posts under handles, consider it fair to use the same research and phrasing both in a discussion here and in a paper, and would be more than a little annoyed if the tool claimed I'd lifted a paper from my own contribution to a forum thread on some hot topic. So far I've had no problems.)
Curious minds want to know what sort of "self-plagarism" in a journal's content rates shutting the journal down.
The FCC regulations that banned cell phone usage on planes were based on the idea that the phones EM emissions might interfere with the operation of the airplane's equipment.
Also that the cellphones, when located in an aircraft, had a field-of-view including a large number of cell towers and could chew up a slot or two in each of them. One airliner full of people with operating cellphones, passing over a city, could make a substantial dent in the city's cellphone capabilities and produce a LOT of dropped calls - some of them potentially emergency calls.
These were both reasonable with the original, analog, cellphone network, where the phone-to-cell uplink was a narrowband FM signal capable of transmitting substantial power. (The "interferes with avionics" concern might have been more "can't prove it's safe but it looks risky" than "proved it's a problem", but the multi-cell interference issue was apparently an observed effect.)
The modern broadband digital systems, whether CDMA or OFDM based, spread the energy out over a broad spectrum and re-focus it internally in the receiver. These far less of a risk for interference with other radio-sensitive devices. (Meanwhile such devices have also been improved when it comes to rejection of extraneous interference.) (You'll notice that hospitals have, for a while, been deploying WiFi - also an OFDM system - internally, and have been much more permissive about where they'll let you operate a cellphone.) These systems also are less prone to being interfered with by other, weaker, cellphone signals.
With the recent retirement of the analog cellphone network (causing even multi-mode phones to cease transmitting in that mode), the problem-child mode has gone away. So it's entirely reasonable for the rule-making bodies to drop the mandate that the cell phones be shut off, and the Airlines to follow suit where they trust this analysis. (Delta, for instance, still wants phones turned off, or in "airline mode" if they have it, during the ground-to-cruising-altitude phases of the flight. They trust it while cruising, but not in the more critical near-ground phase.)
It's modulation depth (per the abstract) is only 38%, so it's not quite a broad-band as on-off-keying.
Once you've got that it's trivial to use beam splitters and destructive interference to change the modulation from 62% vs. 100% to 38% vs. essentially 0% amplitude.
Not that it matters: The receiver is AC coupled, anyhow. As long as the modulation is sufficiently deep that the signal is substantially above the noise floor, you're fine. Switching a third of the amplitude is nearly as good as switching all of the amplitude of a signal of third the amplitude. (in terms of energy, which is the square of amplitude, the switched part is more than half again the unswitched part.) If you're using stimulated-emission repeater amplification along the way you need more excitation light, but that's still a trivial cost.
You're missing the simplest explanation: during his campaign, Obama lied.
Dead on.
Obama learned politics in Chicago - the current record holder for corrupt big-city political machines. He is a classic example of a corrupt machine politician.
The Clintons are also masters of the (less intense) state-level version of the form, having risen to the top in Arkansas, which has been run by a corrupt machine since a Mafia family from New York took it over when the big city got too hot for them. Obama beat them for the Democratic nomination. He has now remade the Federal government on the model of Chigago.
This was predicted and announced by quite a large number of people well before the election. Nevertheless, he won. So how did this come about?
There are a number of factors. But IMHO this is the most decisive: The Republican Party's organization, for well over a decade, has been solidly controlled by the Neocon faction (one of the four major and several minor factions of the party). In the last two presidential nomination battles, the Liberty wing (another of the big four), under the inspiration of Ron Paul and drawing members mainly from the young and/or Internet connected, made substantial inroads.
Their successes in the 2008 nomination process threatened to eventually displace the Neocons' control of the party machinery, as the Neocons had displaced their predecessors (mainly the Christian Right) previously. So in the 2012 nomination the Neocons fought an extremely dirty battle, with large amounts of cheating, rule-breaking, and even incidents of violence (including broken bones). This so alienated the Liberty wing (and some members of other factions) that they refused to support the Neocon's nominee in the general election. Romney lost five states by margins substantially less than the number of people who voted for Ron Paul in those states' primaries, and those states' electoral votes would have swung the general election. It's a good bet that virtually none of the Ron Paul supporters voted for Romney, and even those would have been more that balanced by Republican voters for other candidates who were also appalled at the machine's treatment of their opposition.
One circulating meme was: "If this is how they behave in the nomination process, how can we allow them to control of the machinery of the Federal Government?" Even KNOWING that Obama would run the Fed like a Chicago-style machine and use it to stomp on the people, letting the Neocon's machine continue to consolidate their control of the major opposition party and drive the big-government non-choice-election system into the foreseeable future could still look like a worse choice.
It's modulation depth (per the abstract) is only 38%, so it's not quite a broad-band as on-off-keying.
Once you've got that it's trivial to use beam splitters and destructive interference to change the modulation from 62% vs. 100% to 38% vs. essentially 0% amplitude.
First issue is that those viewers are time-shifting. The broadcasters hate that ...
Tough. The Supreme Court has already said that viewers have a right to time-shift, whether the broadcasters like it or not, in the context of recording of over-the-air signals directly received by the viewers. They're just re-fighting that battle because the context is enough different that they get another at-bat.
Second issue is that those viewers are not being measured. ... Remember that ad rates are set by how many people are measured watching the show.
And that's a matter between the advertisers and the rating services.
There's an easy solution: Aereo has ACCURATE data on EXACTLY how many clients are receiving the signals and where they're located. Potentially the ratings services - or the advertisers - could cut a deal with them to buy suitably aggregated and anonymized data to include these viewers in their counts.
That they haven't already done so says to me they're just being cheap and shafting the broadcasters by undercounting the viewers. Seems to me that's cause for action between the broadcasters and the rating services, but NOT between the broadcasters and Aereo (unless Aereo has been stonewalling or trying to gouge the rating services.)
I agree with your points.
I also agree that, regardless of whether disabling VT-d keeps NSA out of AMT (or equivalent) or if they have some personal back door associated with it, shutting it down is still very useful: It closes this barn door to all the other bad guys who don't have any "extras" and use it as you describe.
... who was Time's Person of the Year in 2001? Osama Bin Laden, naturally?... no, it was Rudy Guliani.
Remember that this choice was made a little less than four months after 9/11, and the popular reaction to the event was so bad that women in California were ordering their dogs to attack people who "looked Muslim" at freeway rest areas. Time is published from New York City, ground zero for the bulk of the attacks.
I suspect they figured that if they gave Osama the title there'd be another building brought down - by New Yorkers with sledgehammers.
In most instances on Intel hardware you can effectively disable AMTs interface to the outside world by turning off the hardware virtualization (VT-d) feature in the BIOS.
But how do we KNOW this works? (As opposed to, say, the machine's AMT server no longer talking to remote clients unless the right encrypted hand-waving is done by the client to tell the server it's NSA calling - or the encrypted handwaving telling eavesdropping firmware to switch VT-d on and be cagey about it?)
If I understand it correctly, the AMT stuff is running on a separate ARM core. There's no reason (beyond software elegance) that this has to work through the normal virtualization mechanism, or that NSA wouldn't think ahead and either design it to work with its own mechanism or turn VT-d on but make it act like it's off, and spread the story about VT-d disablin a necessary underpinning of the feature.
Similarly, "andrchism" gets applied ...
Should be "Similarly, "anarchy" gets applied ..."
The term anarchist is usually reserved for people who use violent means to protest or overthrow governments and who aren't organized enough to be called "insurrectionists" or "rebels"
By whom? I smell B.S.
The term "anarchist" is used, by anarchists, political scientists, and anyone astute, to mean anyone who wants (and works for) a situation where governmental control over a population is eliminated (or minimized, though the latter are properly called "minarchists") on an ongoing basis. (This actually requires considerable social organization to achieve.)
It is used by government propagandists as a pejorative to flame anyone attempting to reduce their power. One part of this operation is to attempt to equate it, in the minds of their target audience, with "nihilist" (a person working for the elimination of all social organization - some of the famous of whom were obvious psychopaths) and various terrorist wackos.
Similarly, "andrchism" gets applied to situations where a government is losing its hold on an area in the face of attacks by one or more self-appointed replacement governments, or where a government has fallen and several such alternative gropus are fighting it out to be the new top dog. Such a situation, in my opinion, is the exact opposite: "Polyarchy" - a multiplicity of governments, and the death and chaos is the result, not of no governments, but of too many. B-b
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)
One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).
Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.
You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.
If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.
Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):