An anonymous coward making an appeal to authority. How does this still work?

The grid is bigger than one coal plant. They want to build a few of these, and they can control the timing somewhat by delaying the release of water for a few hours.

Demand and supply already varies by more than these lagoons will provide over the course of a few hours. Somehow the grid copes with it. It's a solved problem.

It's worth noting though that the channel is unidirectional and not used for evil like the comms in the other two standards.

In fact one of the competitors has already agreed to become Qi compatible, so basically given up and started concentrating on just delivering turn-key solutions rather than its own standard that no-one uses.

Qi is the only one anyone uses or cares about. The others had the dubious "advantage" of requiring a two-way link between the charger and device, exchanging serial numbers and other data. The public justification was to allow charging money for the service, but it was marketed to business as a way to track devices (and thus people) using your "free" chargers.

Qi has already won, fortunately.

I've wondered about the legality of crystal radios in the past. People who live near transmitters or overhead power lines have tried to harvest some of that power in the past, and been threatened with various forms of legal redress. Theft, interference, all sorts of stuff.

On the other hand crystal radios are apparently fine. Installing a big metal fence that blocks your neighbour's mobile phone and FM radio reception is fine (as long as it doesn't spoil the view). The neighbours also knew when I was playing with my model train set because that used to interfere with their TV reception.

I could get an ordinary set-top TV antenna, connect a simple energy harvesting circuit (resistor and some Dickinson doublers to produce a useful voltage) and run a small LCD clock from it easily enough. Am I stealing their radiated energy, or is it a really great way to power remote sensor nodes?

Just install an FTP server. I never bother plugging my phone in any more (wireless charging). When I want to copy some files I just open the FTP server app up and send them over wifi. Full access to the device's filesystem, no root required.

Having said that, when I did use a cable in the past I could access all files on the SD card over MTP, so maybe your issue was due to a vendor specific implementation. I know that Samsung's was a bit different to the stock Android one.

Back in the day when it was a choice between 8GB and 16GB a lot of shops were selling "16GB" devices that were actually 8GB on-board and an 8GB SD card. Most consumers didn't care, they never used the SD card slot anyway or even realized it was there, and they were getting a "16GB" device for much less than the official retail price due to memory upgrade rip-off pricing.

Ironically the exact opposite is true. If the case is made of good quality plastic it will be more resistance to scratching and damage than metal/glass, and much more resistant to permanent bending or cracking when flexed. As the iPhone 6 demonstrated, metal is not a good material for things that get stressed for long periods of time in people's pockets. Oh, and don't forget that making the metal case part of the antenna probably isn't a good idea either.

Metal is little more than decorative anyway most of the time. It adds little to the rigidity of the phone and can't be used too extensively because it will interfere with the various radios inside the device, Glass looks nice for about five seconds before it gets covered in fingerprints and cracks far too easily. Plastic is flexible enough to withstand being dropped.

High quality, built to last smartphones are made out of good quality plastic. Expensive crap marketed as a fashion accessory is made out metal and glass. Sadly it looks like Samsung has decided to join Apple in making overpriced, weak phones that sell for 2-3x the price of everyone else's.

Those aren't facts though... In the popular sense of the word perhaps, but probably not what Google engineers are thinking. Chances are they are looking for common myths, commonly mis-attributed quotes, simple mathematical errors, typos and the like.

I'm thinking things like "glass is a liquid", "we only use 10% of our brains", getting famous people's birthdays wrong etc.

What I really can't understand is why young girls are leaving Europe to go and be with these guys in Syria. They don't get to fight, that is forbidden except in the most desperate of circumstances. Instead they get to be sex toys and baby factories for beaded losers with poor personal hygiene, who will eventually die and quickly forget about them while indulging in their 72 virgins.

It can be done with cryptographic signing with a private key, and verification with a public key. That's how Tails distribute their CD images over insecure means such as Bittorrent and HTTP. No-one can modify the binary and sign it without access to Tail's private key.

Actually it is pretty common to disable JTAG on consumer hardware. Sometimes it can be done in software and so the possibly of re-enabling it in a sort of debug mode exists. Typically though it's just disabled because it isn't needed. Hard drive manufacturers ship millions of units, and when they come back for repair they aren't interested in doing a careful diagnostic with JTAG. The controller tells them what is wrong, or if it is dead they just replace it and start the self diagnostic before sending the drive back out as a refurb.

Another reason to disable JTAG is security. These days many drives support encryption, especially SSDs, or at least some kind of password (ATA password feature). It used to be easy to circumvent because passwords and keys were stored in the controller's RAM or sniffable off the data bus, but manufacturers got wise to that. Disabling JTAG stops the RAM being read back easily.

JTAG might not be enough, if they have disabled it after programming to protect the firmware. It's even possible that the JTAG interface was interfered with somehow and returns false data. Firmware can still be checked but only by more destructive means, e.g. decapping the chip.

The question is what to do in the mean time. Personally I buy all my storage media in cash, in person in the far east. I only buy Japanese/Chinese/Korean drives that are made in the far east and never pass through the US, UK or other FIVEEYS countries. Of course, they might be bugged by one of those countries, but I'm not nearly as worried about China spying on me as I am about GCHQ or the NSA spying on me.

Sadly few phones are bothering with micro SD slots any more, but fortunately the good ones don't charge silly money for extra internal storage. When 64/128GB is so cheap I don't think SD cards are going to be important for much longer.

My OnePlus One does have a replaceable battery. The only thing I wish it had from factory is wireless charging, but I added that with an adapter from eBay that is invisible inside the case.

To be absolutely clear, the YouTube videos and blog posts are the very things that the IRC logs refer to . Create a narrative through huge numbers of sock puppet accounts on Twitter, with sock puppet blogs and YouTube videos referencing them. Eventually other people get sucked in and start referencing them too. It looks like there is a real grass roots movement, when in fact it is a small number of people and some idiots who didn't research what they are retweeting.

It's right out of the leaked GCHQ playbook.