You are oversimplifying greatly.

Following the money. So you are saying that if I go to instawallet.org from a library, a wifi spot or though tor, create a wallet, anonymously send money to that wallet, bitinstant.com, make another, and another and another, series of one time use bitcoin wallet addresses, before it gets sent to SilkRoad, which tumbles that, they are going to track that? How? You can set 6 one time use wallets up and transfer random amounts.

Intercepting packages. Wow, someone sent me drugs? Why would they do that? Oh, you think I was on SilkRoad? Well, if I were to do so, I would have a truecrypt usb key with portable firefox and tor on it, and I dare you to be able to prove that I was ever on SilkRoad.

As for the bitcoins on people's computers, personally what I like is the place that converts bitcoins into silver and gold. That would be the payout method I would chose. Besides, you do have to have a certain level of expertise to access and operate here, and most of the community seems to be very well aware of the need for encryption.

But I thought corporations were people....

I've personally given up on trying to convert people to linux. If you can't even be bothered to learn how to install it yourself, what's the point?

Gravatational force of the planet = 1930s
Tidal Power = 1970s.

Get educated.

Fine, hundred of years, are you saying you think it's ok to produce toxic waste, as long as you bury it somewhere? And what happens when you run out of places to put it? This is one planet, how long do you think it will take for us to places to put it? What happens when there's an earthquake and the container vault cracks? Seeps into groundwater? That's one of our problems, the lack of foresight. Meanwhile, we have solutions that are clean and work but we ignore them.

Why is using nuclear fission an option?

Gravatational rotation of the planet = Tesla tower
Kinetic energy from the ocean waves = Salter's duck

Both would/could supply our energy needs but instead, our political process have been subverted by the nuclear lobby, which end results in incidents like Chernobyal and Fukishima

Not quite as impressive as using the gravatational force of the planet or tidal power tho.

Well, instead of assuming no better solution exists, perhaps you should educate yourself.

Google "Tesla Tower"
Google "Salter's Duck"

Have a nice day.

Slight difference being that neither planes nor cars present an ecological disaster for thousands of years when they malfunction.

I think it's pathetic that it's the 21st century, and we've harnessed the power of the atom to boil water to make steam to make electricity.

I wouldn't trust a nuclear reactor if it was a day old. What, it's not going to have a problem someday? What am I trusting here?

I will trust that whenever there is an accident, and there will be an accident, it will evolve into a problem that will take thousands of years to cure. All the nuclear meltdowns we've had are still going on.

Hopefully this guy won't be mad at the shoutout.

There is a lot of work being done to make GnuRadio in general more accessable

GQRX http://www.oz9aec.net/index.php/gnu-radio/gqrx-sdr

I have a USRP2 and I agree, the cost is prohibative, but to be fair, some of the SMD parts are as much as $45 bux each, and it's a 8 layer PCB.

Hmm, not quite as sexy if you can't transmit.

I've been using watt-a-vision for the past year and have been pretty happy with it, but it connects to the old style meters. Now I'm in an apt building, so I'm not sure if I'm effected but here's my opinion on the pros and cons.

I should make clear that this won't be the same experience but I'll try to give my opinions on each (some assumptions are going to be made)
Info: the watt-a-vison just is an optical counter that hooks up to a box that connects via wifi to my network, sends stats to watt-a-vision, where I can view a graph of my usage
Pros

I can monitor my electricty usage from one central point, unlike tweet-a-watt like devices.
It's set and forget.
It helps a lot when I forget to turn off my ps3.
I can backcheck my usage against my bill.
Since it's got a web interface, I can use any modern device for viewing.
It's on *my* network with my security

Cons:

Somebody else has an idea of what my energy consumption is (watt-a-vision) and could determine occupancy based on usage.

Now I'm going to talk about the SoCal Edision implementation.

Their own network,with means if it's compromised, somebody is going to have a lot of info.
No way to backcheck your usage independately unless you put tweet-a-watt devices everywhere.

As for the RF issue, I dunno how much these things transmit but I do have an RF meter and there's several apps on the iphone at least that will use the magnetometers as a teslameter, so that could be useful.

With that being said, I'm about about smart technology, but I would rather the tech be mostly in my hands than mostly in any company's.