Let's try again with the car analogy. What about if your car doesn't have an alarm system in it, and it gets broken into? Should the government be punishing the car owner, the car manufacturer, or the criminal? If the government really wants to get involved, let's form a SWAT team that tracks down and kills the people making malicious software.

I know the previous poster personally, and I have to say, he was the first person to come to mind when commenters here were talking about weird, arrogant kids who think they are better than everyone else. I am actually quite glad he is living overseas this year.

I think it is DoD policy to just classify any satellite imagery taken at that resolution.

I'm surprised a resolution of 15m wasn't enough. At the supposedly alarming rate that they are receding, wouldn't you think there wouldn't be such a need for this kind of precision?

The plan I heard described a network of objects in your house that can work to optimize energy usage, coupled with an incentive strategy on the part of the electric company to encourage customers to be more efficient. You're correct; it's easy to see a benefit to the power company at a large scale, but without an incentive that shares the benefit with customers, nobody is going to go along with this. I love how, in this case, basic economics can be used to save everyone money and maybe preserve the environment too.

I guess I meant to reply to one of the other replies to my post and not my own, oops.

Cool, I had never even heard of anything like this before the last week.

Smart Grid technology is actually just around the corner. I was just listening to the CEO of Cisco talk about how they're trying to make a big push into this industry, a quick search turned up this; http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/energy/smart_grid_solutions.html