Looks like you are going to have 'very big problems' then because thats precisely what they are doing.

Smartgrid is all about:
1. monitoring HOME users on a hourly basis in order to SETUP VARIABLE RATE BILLING.
Now how much do you think that expensive periods will be at 1am? No. You are being scammed.
Its the same as the Enron power brokering of early 2000 again.

2. Turning OFF your usage remotely.
When the overloaded, inefficient system is about to crash they want to be able to run rolling blackouts. When do think this will be? During moderate temps? No, it will be during heatwaves. Now turning off people AC during a heat wave will have bad results.

No a better solution is to be a more efficient Citizen of energy. But thats not nearly as much fun as telling everyone else what to do huh?

Demand that the power companies develop efficient power transmission (its only like 30% now).
(smartgrid does nothing in this area)

And this coming from a person willing to make lots and lots of money selling you a meter (and other smart power devices).

Oh, and it can be hacked pretty easily too. Then I can turn off your power remotely. Loads of fun.

Correct Sir!

The question every purchaser of the Droid should ask is: Can I develop AND/OR load my own software on this phone and use it over your network?

$10 says Verizon will LOCK this phones apps.

Verizon HATES letting users, you know , use the phone features instead of the BILLABLE Verizon network.

Support GSM G3 and G4, and Open, Unlocked phones.

The weapons do NOT come from the US. What kind f*&king idiot trots across the border to a US gunshop and pays US values for a weapon, when he can buy a AK smuggled from Africa for 1/100 of that price? No one. Straw man.

MOST of all the automatic weapons used by Cartels are FROM THE MEXICAN MILITARY itself. BTW how many fully automatic weapons can you buy in a US GunShop? Please go try to do it yourself.

ARM the Civilians. Give them BOUNTIES for each cartel member. Mexico has very strict gun control.
http://www.davekopel.com/espanol/Mexican-Gun-Laws.htm

Two problems with that:
1. that street criminals think clearly.
they don't

2. that street criminals remember that there are cams on.
see one thing these people never point out is this, after a while everyone forgets about the cams.

Cams won't stop you from being murdered, it just captures it on disk.

Bullocks.

They did earn it.
This class envy crap is going to destroy us all.

People earn whatever they get. Even robbing a bank takes 'effort' stupid. Buying a lottery ticket takes 'effort' and 'risk'.

$5million has never just fallen out of the sky into my lap.

Get over the class envy crap, and get to work. Want to earn $5mil, do something with big risk. Working at Wal-Mart is not ever going to net you $5mil.

Invent a new product, or service, or convince 5 million people to send you $1.

Better yet, get into Politics, theres lots of money there. Or marry one of those Wal-Mart heirs. Did I say risk was involved?

"even sports are tame now"

Didn't you watch the Stanley Cup?

I wasn't even a hockey fan, but that was bucking good bludgeoning. And a heck of a series.

Uh, how about not posting vaporware about your company. This thing isn't shipping AND I am not about to join your 'club' to find out.

Gee you'd think a real company would post a target ship date if they REALLY were legit.

The BenQ is available today.

I thought IT got paid for the number of times they said 'No' to us during the day.

go figure.

No, you will only get action out of this when you call the CELL PHONE COMPANY and proclaim loudly that you will NOT pay for those calls.

Then the cell company will lobby your Congressman for you.

Wrong, Wind River bought all Walnut Creek assets, then kicked Slackware to the curb. Patrick had to fire his 2 employees, and go back to a one man show.

All they wanted was BSD, cause they could keep that closed.

No, Wind River was no friend to Linux.

Why? Just ignore them.
Hear that? Its the Wind River guys LAUGHING all the way to the bank!

Embedded devices use Arm chips, the design is open. The toolkits are free. Only idiotic, big organizations like Boeing use Wind River stuff. I have talked to people who are going to linux just to ditch Wind River and VxWorks.

How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin.

Methinks they just wasted a lot of cash.

for windows:

Programmers Notepad 2
http://www.pnotepad.org/

and MinGw
http://www.mingw.org/

PN2 has tons of features, add your own code clips, tools, etc. It seems to be actively developed. Supports all languages with code completes and syntax highlighting. Its very nice.

Its also included in winARM toolkit as well if you want to dev arm7/9 embedded systems.

Oh and don't forget the many Gas Stations that illegally cut the gas with another 10-20% ethanol.

Its so bad, that you probably should be testing your gas for Ethanol content.

And 15%+ ethanol has a nasty habit of holding water in solution, until saturation, when the whole of water and ethanol separates, and your engine gets a big gulp of water. Or in the case of a holding tank, you pump 20 gallons of $4/gal water.

And to add another distinction, I thought Brazil used the 'wastes' of processing sugar cane to distill Ethanol, after they get the good sugars for other uses.

That is true.

As further empirical evidence, my '98 Plymouth Breeze (aka Cirrus, aka Stratus) with a 2L, I4, making 130hp in a standard mid-size frame is getting about 29mpg around town.

Its so good, I've yet to see a new car match it (except a prius). Plus its paid for and should easily last another 100,000 miles.

My Yamaha YZF600R on the other hand is already getting about 51mpg.

Ooohhh hard problem. Hell I can't even get AT&T to handle easy problems like "Simple Customer Service".

Like, oh I don't know, I don't like Yahoo. AT&T now has everyone over on yahoo portal. BUT they used our AT&T logins. Now I have 2, yup 2 yahoo logins. Guess what, yahoo does NOT allow 2 logins from the same computer.

Now I would like AT&T to put me back on the old BellSouth login page, but no. Thats not possible.
They didn't even reply to my email request. I probably shouldn't have called the ignorant butt fuckers I guess. Or maybe it was the statement that a 12 year old could build a better Customer Service webpage.