• David.Poole - Wednesday, January 31, 2018 12:44 AM

    In the UK the electricity meters get read once a quarter.  Smart metering (if the public accept them) enables continuous monitoring and potentially down to specific devices.
    In theory it should help power planning.  In practice I'm skeptical.  I've visited a few power stations and they are pretty good at predicting demand.  People are creatures of habit.
    Apparently the next generation of cars will generate 2TB of data a day.  God knows what that will be.  Again there are far less intrusive ways for potential users of that data to get what they need.  Perhaps a different approach will make that 2TB a day irrelevant.  For example http://www.streetbump.org/about

    Organizations, governments and companies are becoming drunk on data. Magic cure-all.

    [A while back a Ford executive got a lot of backlash for quipping 'we know when you're speeding'. But the implications buried in that statement are frightening.]

    ...

    -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --