Can you say "My Little Powny !"

If a 15 year old can bring down the White House web site, why wouldn't anyone with intent and funding ( Taliban, China) have the knowledge and motivation to figure this out? The entire chain of command that approved unencrypted video should be tried for espionage!

Or - they should use the signal for counter intelligence as others suggested. That could be kind of fun.

@Dan Fruzzetti I already have this working - Anytime my wife needs something, she screeches my name and sends a brief message. :D

Sounds kind of interesting. Generally, I try to avoid ads, but on occasion, It would be nice to point the phone and grab a contact card and copy of the ad. Although a photo would do about the same thing, the data could be used to grab a more featured brochure, the website, or place an order.

A barcode scanner could do about the same as well, but the LED would be more useful as it would have a greater range and you wouldn't look like a tourist when you grab the data.

Ha - gotta give the first guy a thumbs up for doing what they asked!

I thought $200 was high, but the CT's are not cheap.

For the DIYer, it looks like the CT clamps cost about $65 each and you can get any number of small processor boards with analog inputs ($25-$50 depending on features) that will read the 0-333 millivolt outputs. The rest is just a bit of logging and a comma separated file so that you can pull the data into Excel.

@Jeff Kibuule

If the breaker box is in your apartment, then it will work. WARNING - you can be electrocuted and your first born sold into slavery and your landlord will have kittens!

Anyway, there are four screws that hold the face plate on. Remove those and you can get to the two primary lines that feed your apartment. They are the two huge wires at the top of the box. You don't have to remove any wires, the clamp just opens up and wraps around each of the two fat wires.

Comcast won't crush it like a bug.... they will starve it for content after the merger is approved and use the technology to get TVeverywhere going. The problem is that they probably will not offer the TVe service to people who are not comcast cable customers.

Bummer - I really liked Hulu and would be willing to pay real money for the service. Ideally, it would separate your cable content provider and data provider. You could get data via coax or DSL and then select your cable packaging from several content providers.

Oh - and the school is in Arizona - don't underestimate the cost for 24 hour air conditioning. $1 million in electricity for computers creates a LOT of heat.

The issue of increased utility bills and component replacement costs is probably quite accurate. A busy CPU can easily use twice the electricity as an idle one and 100 times that of one on standby. Simply preventing the systems from shutdown or standby at night doubled the cost, not to mention the doubled power usage during the day as most computers sit idle 98% of the time.

So, under normal usage, the power bill would be 1/3rd that of continuous usage.

On average, it costs $100/yr per 120 watts of power to run something 24 hours per day. An average modern desktop can use 200-250 watts of power. That yields $200 * 5000 = $1,000,000 per year for electricity (Just for the computers) as opposed to a normal $333,000 per year.

Given the nearly continuous usage of the hard drive as well, I'm sure that replacement parts were affected at least as much (percentage wise).

3Bxxx

Where the xxx is the capacity.