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Dell Offers Virtual Saplings For Earth Day
theodp writes "The expansion of Dell's Plant a Tree for Me program into Second Life has the Silicon Valley Sleuth wondering if this represents a new low in Earth Day marketing tie-ins. You may wonder, too, after reading Dell's invitation to its Earth Day Party at Dell Island in SL ('get your own tree sapling to plant in Second Life!')."
...I get some chains and tie my Second Life avatar to some trees in the virtual forest?
For Dell's environmental initiatives to make any difference in the real world, people need to get involved. That takes publicity and advertising. I'm sure we're about to get flooded by math majors explaining how each virtual tree required X pounds of fossil fuels to appear on the server, but frankly I don't care. Greenpeace prints their literature on paper, after all.
If this is really all we have to complain about, the world is already perfect. Kudos to Dell for finding a way to bring attention to their Plant A Tree program.
(Note: none of that was/is the opinion of my employer).
Vanya's Law: "In any culture without irony, fart jokes will be the highest form of humor."
... I can smell the virtual fresh air already.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
the energy used to run the servers to render a virtual tree is about equivalent to burning a real tree?
All we need now is a 'Seti@home' type 'growtrees@home' program
and the earth is saved!
yes, that will work.
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
McDonalds has real saplings in Minnesota for free on Earth Day.
Did you know that twice as much wood is grown in Minnesota compared to harvesting?
The trees might offset the enormous amounts of methane generated from fat nerds farting and burping in second life.
Join the National Arbor Day Foundation and they'll send you 10 living saplings for cheap (10-15 bucks).
Of course, that means that people might have to get outside once in a while.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
So many jokes, so little time:
Dell offers new rootkit for Second Life: virtual trees.
Dell branches out into Second Life Phony Industry with Trunk service.
Dell leafs computer business to enter lucrative virtual nursery business.
Davis http://davis.foulger.net
And now I'm really scared about how the elections will go in '08. Absolutely sick, but if it makes Wall St. happy, who am I to argue? This whole "Second Life" is becoming really weird. I hope you keep some method of pulling the plug. I don't want to go to the store to find out they only accept "Second Life" tokens, or whatever you call them. There's something very disturbing about this. Especially if it starts bleeding into "Real Life".
What?
While Dell is a for profit company (whose equipment I happen to use and like), Avatar Action Center is a non-profit organization that is focussed on sustainability education and empowerment and is hosting special events all Earth Day in Second Life. This is an international effort with group participants providing information about wind and solar energy, short videos about global warming and alternative energy and several live music performances. Visit our sim in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Undulosa/219/222/62 and our web site at http://avataraction.org/ Happy Earth Day SimBuddha
i can burn these "virtual trees" in my wood stove and keep warm?
Virtual trees, for a phony world, behind a sheet of glass. Servers and hosts eating power. Ya, that will help the world. Each tree takes a little bit more power to compute and render.
*
Viewed from above of course. There, I feel better already. Gotta go now, I wanted to take my humvee for an offroad drive today.
In America, when you kill a tree, you have to plant a tree (or rather, two trees). So we've got a law on the books that says papermills either tree farm; get trees from outside the country; use corn stalks; or have trees planted to replace the ones they kill. Development companies are pretty well stuck having trees planted when they tear out a forest to build houses.
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This is so lame on Dells part, I don't even know where to start.
Is there a service which lets me click to plant a real tree somewhere on the real Earth?
I'd love to see a service which calculates the CO2 impact of, say, an email server (and its own operations), and orders trees planted to offset that CO2 by the amount trees consume during that time.
People could get periodic reports of their "email pollution" and the trees they've planted to balance it. With an offer to buy more trees to offset the rest of the Greenhouse pollution we generate, including writing and reading this message.
--
make install -not war
Why not plant some real fucking trees and make a difference instead of this "feel good" marketing shit.
How about for a donation, you get a virtual tree-growing game or something, and the money goes to sponsor an actual tree planting or rainforest-buying program somewhere? A few dollars is enough to pay some kid on summer break to plant trees for an hour or so.
You could call it "SimForest." Pay-per-sapling. Premium prices for fancy trees. Runs on the desktop like a wallpaper. Lighting changes by time of day. Branches blow in the breeze...
Sorry. Getting distracted. Anyway, selling game content for charity isn't a horrible idea, but if it's just a feel-good thing and doesn't actually help, what's the point?
wow this has got to be the dumbest thing ever. i mean is this a cheap publicity gimmick or something resulting out of genuine environmental concern? since it won't really have any effect on the environment other than possibly dissuading real people from planting real trees, i have to surmise that it is a half baked ill conceived attempt at appearing to be environmentally friendly(not that dell isn't) that will actually result in further apathy for the environment.
Now here's one iPoddy site! iPod Range
I miss the real trees. I hope the server farm that this virtual forest will reside in is green. It would lessen (but not eliminate) the pointlessness.
The stupid housing community I'm currently renting in keeps trying to grow grass in places that really don't want grass, using the usual massive seed-fertilize-water approach. They dumped some seed and overfertilized again this morning; I spread six cans of wildflower seed into the area while they were at lunch break. I have high hopes for colorful ground cover this time. =)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Not planting a tree, but perhaps close enough, and appropriate for the day.
*waits for Apple to hit back with the iTree*
Do I get to use these trees towards my Carbon Credit account?????