In PBS's epidose of Frontline entitled "Spying on the Home Front", a good primer is developed for anyone who is interested in just one example of how the executive branch has ram shod over the Constitution and used every IT trick in the book to help them do it. If you haven't seen this episode, you need to watch it and think long and hard about the next time you use a credit card, do a search online, or browse alt.binaries.pictures.preteen. If you are already up to date on this topic, I still suggest you watch the episode for some interesting interviews. There's even additional footage that should make up anyone's mind about whether Al Gonzales is a slimeball or not.

Ironically, I'm not in the infosec biz, not even tangentially, but I counted no less than three people in this program that I know personally. Cindy Cohn, from the EFF, who was very helpful to us at the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network when we resisted some MPAA injected legislation back in 2003. Jeff Jonas, who's now at IBM, but had developed some of the best pattern recognition software in the world which we've used in health care claims analysis. And my good ole friend Steve Bannerman, now at Narus, but formerly at Apple Computer back in the day. Such a small world, even more painfully obvious after watching this program.

Bin Laden is laughing and so am I

Faulty fax, mistaken as threat, prompts evacuation of stores

Having formerly been a resident, I can gladly say that people in Boston are stupid.

Faulty fax, mistaken as threat, prompts evacuation of stores

'Star Wars' name, ballplayer, or Thai food?

excellent

Quiz: 'Star Wars' name, ballplayer, or Thai food?

In a blog post Tuesday afternoon, Digg CEO Jay Adelson wrote that the company was pulling down a number of news stories pertaining to a cracked HD DVD encryption key that could circumvent the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions on the media discs.

The reason, he said, was a cease-and-desist letter on behalf of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), the consortium with ownership rights to the key that had been cracked. The organization cited Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which concerns the spread of information pertaining to DRM breaking. By including stories that linked to the key, the letter argued, Digg was breaking the law.

This should be VERY interesting to watch. I wonder if they'll use journalism precedents to protect themselves as they are only reporting the truth.

Digg in tough spot with DMCA debacle: Memestreams beware

Have you ever played a game of Super Mario Bros. and wondered what it'd be like to be one of the bricks?

Gaming gone postmodern: Roy Block | Crave : The gadget blog

slashdot is not resolving today. At least for Komkast customers. Since I'm running late, I don't have the time to check and see what might be the problem, but I find it kinda funny that they're having an outage, especially since they seem to be the source of so many outages. Maybe it's just geek karma?

more DNS screwage

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reactable

Is this willful ignorance or just plain stupidity on our part? Or is it just overweening arrogance? Whatever it is, it's a sure sign that we, the people, are still not paying attention. And in this day and age, that's especially unforgivable.

A question I've pondered myself for many years.

The World? Your Oyster? Why Not?

So with the help of two buddies, Friend, a Merck vice president and pioneer in digital gene arrays, drew a back-of-the-envelope plan for an energy storage system that extends the life of battery banks. In 2004, they started rigging up a Rube Goldberg contraption that uses solar panels and electrolyzers to generate hydrogen and allows Web-based monitoring of its proton-exchange-membrane fuel cell.

I've been tinkering with something very similar to this for a few years now. This was my original concept as well, that you could use hydrogen as a storage medium for backup electricity. It actually does work. I wasn't using a lab grade or even industrial grade electrolyzer, and I was able to make a good yield of hydrogen from water. Even filtered rain water will do, although the pH value of rain water vs potable water can take the yield down about 20%. Storing hydrogen is not trivial, but it can be done. I did use a very simple fuel cell to convert it back to electricity just to see that it would work. It does, but the yields were not great due to the fact that the fuel cell was not sophisticated. The point really was that I generated a usable amount of electricity from nothing but sunshine and rainwater, which is about as sustainable as you're going to get.

I've talked to several 'experts' about this setup, and everyone I've talked to says that deep cycle gel batteries are a better storage medium than hydrogen. The down side to batteries is that they need to be vented appropriately (you'll have the same problem with a high quality fuel cell as they need induction air) and you'll have to replace them in about 3-5 years, depending on how many cycles they're given. The cost outcome ends up being still in battery's favor as the duty cycle for high end fuel cells is still not that great (5-8 years).

All in, as an investment, it still doesn't work out. You're spending well over $1/KWH, where a >$1 rate is just break even. In TVA-Land, this is ludicrous. Still, if your conscious tells you that this makes sense, then the pricing isn't so outrageous that you couldn't do it. I believe that systems like this will get more efficient in the next 5 years and end up being about 2x what you'd spend for a grid tied system. This is very similar to buying a tankless water heater. They last longer, are more energy efficient, and only cost about 2x what you'd be spending anyways (including duty cycle).

I live in an urban neighborhood. So there are other constraints I'm dealing with (historic zoning, space issues, codes, and complexities of actually maintaining the system). But if this were for a rural cabin I'd do it in a second.

Backyard Fuel Cell

Satire: Experts call for restrictions on childhood imagination - CNN.com