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The Environmental Cost of Silicon Chips
Col. Panic writes "Scientific American is running a small story about the amount of material required to produce silicon chips and the potential hazards of associated toxic chemicals." This combined with coltan mining processes sure paints a dark picture of the chip industry.
Great, another in depth study to tell us how we're so enviromentally wrong. It says that "The team found that the materials involved in making a 32-MB RAM microchip total 630 times the mass of the final product." I bet everybody would quickly switch to 8MB ram if it only took 200 times the mass. You gotta love this academic+eviroment mix.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
Well I expect hear that Greenpeace and their ilk. are going to keep whatever hardware they have now indefinitely. If it breaks down, too bad! They'd better at least just replace it with recycled servers, PCs, and laptops. And they'd better run from a windtower or solar...which probably means they won't be using AMD servers hehe.
(Now if your an anti-globalization protester as well you're really screwed - most companies that can provide you with internet access are multi-nationals - or at least linked upstream to them. Somewhere along the way you'll be supporting them...)
And while they're at it, they'd better start walking every where they go as well. Nope can't use electric cars - well unless they have their own windtower. Whoops - did they check into the processes involved in making the batteries? How long do the batteries last? The plastics in the electric car? Ah crap there's silicon chips in them fancy electric cars too...
Guess it's back to the stone age for us! Oh wait no fire though please - that's burning trees and releasing green house gasses.
Hmmmm, bon appetit ! ;)
This should have been obvious to everyone. TAANSTAAFL. The Second Law includes information, as Shannon proved, which means that the Internet couldn't just spring into being. It had to come at a cost and that cost is now being paid by the environment. When the poor village dwellers that inhabit 90% of the world realize what we've done, they will probably destroy our precious pr0n storage system and revert all those resources and energy back to the Earth where they belong, causing a resurgence in flora and fauna. We'll probably see a reversal of the global cooling trend, too.
That's the price you pay for progress. Oh well. The third world countries get poorer and fucked over, while the 1st world countries get stronger and richer.
For some reason, I can't quite make myself care. I'm sitting at work, with a decent job, and all that is going on a looong ways away.