I’ll admit that one of those perpetrators that leaves his electronics floating in limbo between being fully on and being completely shut off. I do it all the time to my home PC, for example, because boot up times can be a pain and I don’t want to leave the computer fully on, either. It’s because of people like me that the British government is working on something that would effectively ban “standby” mode on nearly all home electronics, claiming that it uses up power unnecessarily.

In fact, products left in standby account for 8% of all power use in homes, according the UK’s Energy Review. This wasteful use of energy can be safely eliminated by simply forcing manufacturers to remove standby mode from their devices, getting us poor consumers to decide: on or off, and nothing in between.

A similar proposal has popped up in California. It was dubbed the Vampire Slayer Act because it works to throw cloves of garlic at all those electronics that suck power incessantly in standby mode.