Old Hard Drives = Free Electricity

tylernt writes "You know all those old hard drives you have laying around? (Raise your hand if you still have RLL or MFM drives... yeah, I thought so.) Well, now there's something useful you can do with them (besides my personal favorite, shooting them): make electricity! While you're at it, you could do something more productive with that old lawnmower, too."

Comments

Re:Say, I use an electric lawnmower

[Cyberllama]

How sure are you? I remember reading about some robot lawn mower that "digested" lawn clippings using a chemical process in order to provide the power. A self-powering machine doesn't have to disobey the laws of thermodynamics. . .

that's awesome

[snyrt]

i work with a guy who amazed me with his last hard drive feat. he gyrostabilized a moped with some old hard drives we had laying around. i'm not quite sure how he did it, but it was something to do with the simple gyrostabilizing force from a few hard drives spinning would stabilize the moped. don't ask me, i didn't do it.

Re:Don't let the MACHINES find out about this!!!

[hoggoth]

> i hate that bit so much. why can't they just use something easier and more efficient to handle to get their enenergy, say, bacteria?

Did you ever think that perhaps the machines were LYING to us about the chemical battery bit? Perhaps there is a deeper reason they keep us and the chemical battery cover story is to protect their secret or just to belittle us.

The possibilities abound:

(A) The machines AI is good, but not much better then human minds. They don't have enough processing power to run a simulation of the entire world down to the physics level for every human being in the world. The matrix is actually run as a distributed application ON HUMAN BRAINS! Each human plugged into the matrix is running a portion of the matrix as well as a portion of the machines OWN applications. Without us the machines lose a great portion of their own processing power and perhaps even identity.

(B) The machines are really smart and they realize that there is no guarantee that their current programming won't lead to an evolutionary dead end. If and when that happens they may need us in some unforseen way as source material to overcome that obstacle. We are an insurance policy.

Anyway... anything is better than they need chemical batteries that use up more energy than they release...