Without a smartphone, it seems that you'd get by with a single credit card, a driver's license; and about $20 in cash.

You misunderstood me. Just open the breaker. You'll still have a customer charge of $18/month or so but it seems to me that the trouble starts when you tell the electric company that you don't want to be a customer. Unless you're trying to tell me that there's a legal consequence to having zero consumption on your power bill.

It may be illegal to be off-grid but there's no law against opening the main house breaker.

I don't know where you buy your electric power but here (PA) the choices I can make for electric supply have a wide price range. I can choose cheap, in which case my electricity is likely to come from coal-powered plants, or I can choose green (wind/solar/biomass) in which case I pay a higher rate. Specifically, my power choices range from 6.91 cents/kwh to 13 cents/kwh on fixed-price contracts. http://www.papowerswitch.com/s...

I'm also not "forced" to select - if I don't choose I end up buying from Met-Ed, the distributing utility.

In other words, the Pope is a Deist.

Either you've never been to the UK or you've never been to the US.

I agree. 2 or 3 years ago the local Redboxes raised their first night fee to $2. Then the Blockbuster Express kiosks came to town and the rate hike was rescinded.

The debit card fee structure was changed to make it less expensive for larger transactions but more expensive for smaller transactions (e.g., those on the order of a dollar or so). This was discussed earlier.

I'm not seeing that in the article or in the poster. The DODAAM website is slashdotted right now, but if it says that I'd be suspecting a bad translation. There's nothing in the feature set of this piece of hardware that supports automatic tracking or autonomous firing. Detecting a human size target at some distance only means the optics and camera has a certain minimum resolution.

I've actually done some work on integrating a similar US-designed device onto a semi-autonomous vehicle, so I can read the DODAAM poster with some background.

If you're not flying really fast (a bit over 1000 miles/hr) you'd still run into issues as daylight outran you. At least when flying east the night would be shorter...

The whole notion that some body that is on the other side of the sun from us half the time is protecting us doesn't really work in my mind. It seems that it only works if you imagine the universe is laid out on a line. Put the Sun at zero, the Earth at 3 and Jupiter at 10 and then anything heading your way from >11 has to get past Jupiter first. In reality we can't even rely on foreign objects coming in along the ecliptic.