Hmm... robots w/ sharp whirling blades. I'll move that up above rabid sheep on the list of bad lawn care ideas.

Personally, I don't really care if Tivo aggregates my viewing habits. Actually, I'm all for it. Those stupid "diaries" used to gauge viewing are a joke. Let advertisers and networks get hard numbers of what people actually watch, and maybe it will help weed out some of the crap network programming.

The traffic lights I've seen equipped with this have a sort of white flood light looking thing on it, so emergency vehicles know the light recognized their signal and they can proceed through the intersection. I would think it would be pretty obvious if someone was using it for other reasons. Any cop should know what that white light means.

I got one of those power meter devices and tested my entire entertainment system's idle power output. TV, DVD, VCR, Playstation, etc. It was very insigificant except for the VCR which has a clock. In fact, the VCR w/ its clock took up more power than all all the combined the household devices on standby. So the real story should be not standby power, but devices with LCD displays.

Keep in mind also, without standby power, remote controls won't be able to turn a device on, nor will electic switches. You'd need a mechanical switch to turn everything on.