The little black box on your roof...

Many years ago Senator Barry Goldwater was interviewed by The New Yorker magazine. Buried in the rambling discussion was a comment of his that some day everyone would have this small black box sitting on their roof tops that extracted electricity from 'the universe' seemingly for 'free'.  How that black box did the trick was not revealed as far as I recall, but I've never forgotten that remark of his for some reason.
 It now appears that a Japanese physicist may have discovered a mechanism for transferring energy by quantum teleportation

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24759/

The actual paper is referenced here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0200

 The reviewer at the first link appears at first read to be hyping the result more than it perhaps deserves. But perhaps not.

 If it were possible to transfer energy from the entangled state of quantum systems spread across the universe (with one end of those systems present on your roof top...), then the Senator's vision might be realized. Of course since we wouldn't know whose else might be sucking on the same energy tit, we might create some intergalactic social problems if we jumped into such arrangements willy nilly -- something the human race probably wouldn't think twice about doing if the opportunity arose.

 There is a famous novel about someone who created a 'free' energy device of this kind -- it almost destroyed the earth as I recall before people figured out how to use the idea properly. I'll look for the link to that book and post it here if I can recall the title.

 buyer beware!