Forget Hp Ink Information: What About Those Smart Sensors?
Do you remember that movie, Twister, with Helen Hunt? In it, Hunt played a tornado-chaser who was trying to dump a barrel-load of tiny sensors into the eye of the tornado, in order to obtain fine grained data about the storm. Well, thanks to the makers of hp ink information about our entire planet (not just tornados) may soon be available at this same, microcosmic, fine grain level, thanks to hps widely touted smart dust system.
It may seem like a long leap for the makers of popular home and business printers, inks and papers, but its true: Hewlett Packard is reportedly developing an intricate system of small sensors that will be distributed around the planet to collect ambiguously defined information, such as the average energy consumption of a given community, or the evolving shape and size of a given ecosystem.
It might sound potentially creepy; exactly what kind of information will HP be collecting? You dont have to be paranoid to get the impression that this sounds like some sort of creepy, invasive spying system. But the company assures its public that the only information it collects will be of the environmental sort, promising a boon in our understanding of the way the planet works, and thus improving our capacity to protect the environment by changing our habits.
So why would an ink manufacturer set its sights on such a seemingly mysterious, and certainly grandiose, project? To stay competitive in a global market that has taken its share of the punches dealt by the economic meltdown. According to stats on the companys health, people just arent buying as much paper and ink as they did before recession, so HP has to step it up to remain competitive with other techie mega-giants like Microsoft and Google, the latter of which has its own pseudo-spy systems in effect with programs like Google Earth. The paranoids amongst us are going to have a hard time sleeping in the coming years if this trend of invasive sensors continues.