I have a "kill-o-watt", it looks like a single outlet lightning arrestor, but has buttons and an LCD display. It shows continuous and average power draw. I've used it to check power draw on a lot of my electric appliances, including my computer. My laptop draws about 22 watts when booted up and running like now (35 when charging the battery), two watts when asleep, and 2 watts when it's OFF.

This legislation will help HOW? Most devices have to have a small amount of circuitry running all the time so they can watch the power button, which is not usually a toggle switch like on the old gear. That, and a little bit of juice to keep the memory alive is all that's needed. Computers that have "hibernate" mode will dump memory to disk so even that will not draw power while in standby.

I also would agree with several previous posters... if I could not sleep my laptop, I'd leave it on all the time, and that's 20 more watts per hour than I'm using now. If this goes through, it's going to backfire in a big way.

I've owned a SanDisk Cruzer Mini usb flash drive for over half a year now and have been very satisfied with it. Besides being 2.0HS, it's also very low profile, and does not block any adjacent USB ports, above, below, or beside it. There are some computers with the USB ports in odd positions that would completely prevent this hybrid design from even plugging in at all. (like on computers with recessed ports) And for $230 on eBay for 4gb, my old cruzer even beats this new model in price. I expected better avances from them after half a year than this. Where's my 8gb cruzer mini?

Depending on the cost of the computers, and the cost to get a gun out of the hands of the public, this may actually be a good deal for Mexico. I could only speculate wildly about how much it actually costs Mexico to get one gun off the street, (and those look more like miltary grade rifles, not mere handguns?) but I could easily see it being very expensive. In the end it might be cheaper, or almost as cheap and a lot simpler/faster/more effective to simply make the people WANT to bring in their guns. Even if you raise your program cost by say, 30% per unit, but you pull in 10x as many units/month, it just might be worth the extra expense to solve the problem faster.