Courtesy Scientific American:

Not many years ago, there wasn’t enoughwind power coming from the Great Plains to worry about. Now there is, and lots of people are worrying.

A group of mostly East Coast utility companies calling itself the Coalition for Fair Transmission Policy fears that the prime conditions in the Great Plains will make the region’s wind power too cheap for its members to compete with, unless developers there are made to pay the costs of moving wind power eastward.

Influential natural gas producers and generators in Texas are worried. They are demanding that the state’s wind developers share the costs of backup natural gas generators that must pick up the slack when the wind doesn’t blow. The gas industry, threatened by state policies that promote wind power, is asking regulators to impose penalties on wind generators that can’t deliver scheduled energy when the wind dies down.

And last week, four senators representing New York, Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania proposed to deny federal clean energy grants to wind developers that buy blades, turbines and other components from abroad.

“It is a no-brainer that stimulus funds should only go to projects that create jobs in the United States rather than overseas,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said, pointing at a proposed Texas wind farm whose backers include a Chinese power company.

Some renewable policy advocates say the problem has less to do with China and more with on-and-off-again federal energy policies, and arguments over how to pay for the vast expansion of transmission lines needed to maximize wind power delivery. Instead of looking at foreign rivals, members of Congress should start with a look in the mirror, says this side in the debate.

-Source.

See Related Article.

Courtesy Wired:

Contrary to public statements made by the Transportation Security Administration, full-body airport scanners do have the ability to store and transmit images, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The documents, which include technical specifications and vendor contracts, indicate that the TSA requires vendors to provide equipment that can store and send images of screened passengers when in testing mode, according to CNN.

The TSA has stated publicly on its website, in videos and in statements to the press that images cannot be stored on the machines and that images are deleted from the scanners once an airport operator has examined them. The administration has also insisted that the machines are incapable of sending images.

But a TSA official acknowledged to CNN that the machines do have these capabilities when set to “test mode.”-

-Article continues @ Source.

Courtesy The Bismarck Tribune:

North Dakota’s attorney general said he expects the state to sue Minnesota over a plan there to tax carbon created by electrical generation.

After discussing the issue with the state Industrial Commission in a closed session this month, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem said “It is very likely that we will be suing the state of Minnesota.”

At issue is a measure by Minnesota’s Public Utilities Commission to add a fee of between $4 and $34 per ton of carbon dioxide to the cost of electrical generation starting in 2012. The majority of electricity in North Dakota is generated by coal-fired power plants, which emit a large amount of carbon relative to other fuels sources. North Dakota officials argue that the move would place an unfair tax on electricity from the state and discourage its use by Minnesota utilities.

Stenehjem said possible legal action would relate to constitutional protections against restrictions on commerce between states.

-Article Continues @ Source.

Courtesy Scientific American:

New research by leading alternative energy research firm New Energy Finance finds that solar power will cost less by about 50% at the end of 2009 compared to the end of 2008.

The costs are pre-subsidy, so they could be much lower if you take better government subsidies into account.

But it isn’t only solar that’s down in cost. It’s other renewable energy sources, too.

The research company found that equipment costs (in solar, wind, and other sectors) decreased throughout the year but these were offset by increasing financing costs. However, equipment prices are expected to continue falling whereas the financing market is expected to get better.

-Article with links continues @ Source.

Courtesy Rawstory:

Israeli researchers have developed a portable device that causes excruciating sensations of burning and can be built for just $250,000, raising fears that even the world’s poorest, most oppressive governments will now be able to use advanced non-lethal weapons on their civilian populations.

The Man-Portable Active Denial System, developed by researchers at the College of Judea and Samaria, can beam a microwave ray that causes skin surface to heat up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, causing the nerve cells in the skin to think they’re on fire.

In tests of a similar project by the US military, “nobody [was] able to stay in the beam for more than a few seconds,” writes David Hambling at Wired.com.

Reports of the US military developing a burn ray have been around for some time, but the US’s Active Denial System is a nine-ton machine that has not yet come out of testing, for technical and political reasons, Hambling reports.

-Article continues @ Source.

Hey folks, yes indeed there is a fresh Fox’d Tonight. Check this link out!

Dear Listeners,

Our intrepid host Jon Fox is having Streaming issues this evening and thus will not be netcasting.  However things should be back to normal next week.  Our Sincere Apologies.

The Fox’d Up Team.

updated 12:22 p.m. EDT, Wed September 2, 2009

Courtesy:  Morguefile

(CNN) — Electronics such as phones and laptops may start shedding their power cords within a year.

That’s the prediction of Eric Giler, CEO of WiTricity, a company that’s able to power light bulbs using wireless electricity that travels several feet from a power socket.

WiTricity’s version of wireless electricity — which converts power into a magnetic field and sends it sailing through the air at a particular frequency — still needs to be refined a bit, he said, but should be commercially available soon.

Giler, whose company is a spinoff of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research group, says wireless electricity has the potential to cut the need for power cords and throw-away batteries.

“Five years from now, this will seem completely normal,” he said.  Source

UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Stephen Checkoway clutches a print out demonstrating that his vote-stealing exploit that relied on return-oriented programming successfully took control of the reverse engineered voting machine. Credit: UC San Diego / Daniel Kane

(PhysOrg.com) — Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes.

“Voting machines must remain secure throughout their entire service lifetime, and this study demonstrates how a relatively new programming technique can be used to take control of a voting machine that was designed to resist takeover, but that did not anticipate this new kind of malicious programming,” said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering and an author on the new study presented on August 10, 2009 at the 2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE 2009), the premier academic forum for voting security research.

In 2007, Shacham first described return-oriented programming, which is a powerful systems security exploit that generates malicious behavior by combining short snippets of benign code already present in the system.

-Article continues with video @ Source

Woman’s Tweet Draws Landlord Lawsuit

The Chicago woman is being sued for $50,000 for making a negative remark about her apartment maintenance.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
July 29, 2009 08:00 AM

A Chicago-area woman who criticized her landlord on Twitter is facing a $50,000 defamation suit.

Horizon Group Management sued the woman, identified as Amanda Bonnen, on Monday in Cook County Circuit Court, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday. The company, which claims to manage 1,500 apartments in Chicago, says it was “maliciously and wrongfully” defamed by the defendant’s tweet. The person posting the message went by the Twitter name “abonnen.”

Read the rest of the article…