you might want to read up on smart meters and studies associated with them. they can help reduce your energy usage (together with near real time feedback provided by the meter) and change the usage distribution. i don't think i have to tell you why it's a good thing, for you and our whole energy/climate situation, to decrease your overall usage. flattening down the distribution away from the peaks we see today will help stabilizing and securing the grid (and reduce costs for the utility). obviously that doesn't excuse security problems in the system and they have to be addressed immediately.
energy theft has been a rather big problem in some countries and was an easy thing to accomplish. go ask italy why enel introduced smart meters back in 2001, even though they still don't profit of any userfeedback or newer billing plans. the main goal of introducing smart meters from the point of utilities is exactly to reduce energy theft, you think they're introducing flaws on purpose because they want to loose money?
This is worse than shareware. Shareware was free until you wanted the whole thing.
Have you actually compared Google to your random US company? I think regardless who you compare them with they come out pretty decent.
Some people tend to put them to extremely higher standards than anyone else. Its not enough they are nice, they have to be some kind of techie Ghandies fused with Jesus and a couple of hundred saints.
If only Microsoft was as careful before it pushed out new versions of Windows...
While "common sense" is terribly rare in government, "exceptions" are never in short supply.
"Common sense" is also terribly rare everywhere outside of government, and "exceptions" are extremely common in everyday life. The blame for this aspect of the proposed legislation in question lies not with the government as such, but the fact that there are people involved.
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