Re: Interesting comment

["Robert J. Hansen" <rjhansen@xxxxxxxx>]

> The author used to write for the Australian Newspaper and seems to be on
the
> ball, he certainly comes across as sceptical on a lot of things. Has
anyone
> else heard of this type of thing?

No, and color me _deeply_ skeptical.  There are two big problems with this
scheme:

1.  How do you differentiate the printer's draw off the power main from,
say, the CD burner?  There's a _lot_ of different power inputs to a PC, and
they all will obscure the printer's signal.

2.  Multiply #1 by a couple of thousand, to account for all the different
power draws of the different PCs in a given office building.

3.  Even once you have the signal differentiated (which I don't think is
feasible--it's a perfect example of a chaotic-complex system), now you only
know the power usage of the printer.  Now you have to differentiate between
"okay, we're seeing another 3.2 watts; does that mean they're putting down
the letter Q, or does it mean they had to eject and re-feed a sheet of
paper?"  Power alone doesn't tell you that much.

... That being said, I'm not going to say it can't be done.  It probably
can.  But I don't think it can be done purely by monitoring power inputs.