Trash Robots

It's funny how ideas come to you. I was walking down the hall at work one day, and I suddenly had an image of trash robots. Instead of "dumb" waste baskets, they would be little simple robots - whose only function was to travel (at a pre-set time) to a place in the building where they could be emptied (either by a person or another mechanism) - then they would travel back to where they came from. It would look like the sorcerers apprentice: suddenly, all the waste baskets would start filing out of the offices and rolling down the hall to the dumpster. That's what I imaged one day.

Car License Control

You see it on the news all the time: Someone is arrested for driving with a suspended license. Now, I'm thinking, there must be a way to prevent this - with all the technology around. How about this: You put an RF tag device in driver's licenses (maybe it's already there, who knows? Then you make cars so that they won't start unless there is a valid license in the driver's seat.

This is a simple and ubiquitous technology: most, if not all college and business ID badges employ this sort of scanning. If you needed a license with an RF tag in it to drive, it would be much more difficult to drive on a suspended license (since you wouldn't have it).

I know you can't fix everything with technology, but you can take care of some things, and this might be a good one.

A Scale With Memory

OK, this may already be available, but it's still a good idea. If you can't buy it yet, how about it?

When I'm trying to lose weight, I like to track my progress using a spreadsheet. I figure the most accurate thing to do is weigh myself every day, then look at a one week average. SOme people like to weigh themselves just once a week. There are different approaches. So I was thinking the other day, what if there were a bathroom scale that could do this for you? You could have different users; you login before you step on it, then it would display all sorts of information (user selected, of course). You could have: average (you decide the number of weigh-ins to average); the difference since the last weight (or last average); distance from target weight, you get the idea.

It would help manage a weight loss program, with one-stop convenience.