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Internet Uses 9.4% of Electricity In the US
ribuck writes "Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S., and 5.3% of global demand, according to research by David Sarokin at online pay-for-answers service Uclue. Worldwide, that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year. The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors (which makes up two-thirds of the total), plus other energy sinks including modems, routers, data processing equipment and cooling equipment."
cool non-story that dates back to August 17th.
You know someone over at the MPAA or RIAA is going to spin this in a way that pits pirates as harmful to the future of the planet on an environmental level now too.
Ignorance is the Agent of Fear; Fear Is the Agent of Violence - >1
about World of Warcraft, a fictitious "country", using 10x more electricity than a real country, Vanuatu?
i actually just pulled that factoid out of my ass, but i'd bet good money, considering this research on the Internet and power usage, that it is true after all
Save Vanuatu! Unplug WoW!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
By how much would our energy use go down if we transitioned to servers and network equipment that use less energy? 9% seems like an awful lot to me, especially since the US relies on coal for its power production (something that generates lots of CO2)
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
So...? What, you want us to turn them all off?
The information he seems to be pulling from was from the early 2000's. Many things have changed since early 2000 lowering the amount of power needed for the average home PC to operate. Most users in early 2000 were using CRT monitors which use almost 3 times as much power than a modern LCD. If I took the time to research 2000-2002 vs components in the last two years I bet you will see the power consumption of average hardware is probably close to half as much.
This figures.... doesn't the brain use about 30% of the blood oxygen.
They shouldn't count PCs, they have many more uses than just the internet.
Also, pirates counter global warming...
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
and 99.9 percent of this 9.4% is a result of pr0n!
Remember the article that more are browsing the web *instead* of watching TV? That would mean that TV power is going to PC's instead. (Except maybe for those who leave both on, and some PC's + monitor take more power than a TV)
Table-ized A.I.
This has been said before; but, DON'T GIVE THEM IDEAS!
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
Tubes require no electricity!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
...all the water consumed to squelch burning servers from the /. effect.
Table-ized A.I.
From the Article: PCs&Monitors alone use 235b out of the 350b, so it means PC&Monitors will use ~6% US power, something wrong here.
So are we going to see desktops switching to a slower VIA-type processor and video card when not running CPU/GPU intensive applications? How about monitors switching from backlit to reflective mode when the built-in camera detects abundant light?
> that's 868 billion kilowatt-hours per year
That's simply 99 gigawatts. "kilowatt-hours per year" is silly.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I still need moar internets, damn you!
However, we would still have 20 office computers to run our accounting system with or without the internet. Maybe the 4 remotes would be 1 with old-school leased lines. They could be older/smaller if i didn't need so much power to run firewall/AV underneath tho.
While new machines can suck the juice the previous one had a 2000 watt disk drive.
Here at least the internet only added a couple wall-warts and an extra GHz on the CPUs.
At home, there are 2 decent computers pretty much online only. That is about half so there is an increase at home.
As usual no clue where they get the info so speculate away...
yet more flawed finding from some bozo - not news.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's Al Gore's fault.
This is why I think the OLPC project shouldn't be limited to third world countries. These laptops run on only a couple of watts! If more first-world computer users used them for basic surfing instead of 200 watt gaming rigs, much energy/CO2/fossil fuel could be saved I think.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
95 percent of that is thanks to spam
95 percent of spam come from windoze boxen
95 percent of windoze operating systems come from micro$oft
american customers pay 100 percent of the bill
So everything in my building is support for the Internet? Seems like I might use the AC for something else than cooling a PC that has net access.
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
So "The Internet" makes up 3.13%, not 9.4%
The other 6.27% is from desktop computers. Which may or may not be doing "internet stuff" at any moment in time. Lumping all desktop machines into the count is disingenuous.
It's still a bigger number than I would have thought. And it is a bit of an eye opener to realize how much power all those PCs are using up.
Paul Leader
Don't forget the vacuum cleaners used to clean the carpets in the buildings where the network designers and operators work, or the stereos that play music while people are browsing the net, or the electric lights that let the non-touch-typists see their keyboards at night.
Come on, unless they're somehow able to measure electricity used only while a computer user is actively viewing Internet content it's absurd to count desktop computers in the total. Or, alternatively, it's absurd to attribute the electricity usage to "the Internet". It would be valid to estimate the electricity usage of computers and/or data communications equipment, but to try to pin a number on "the Internet" and include multifunction equipment that serves non-Internet functions is just sloppy.
Come to think of it, there are probably lots of FT-2000s that carry some Internet circuits and some PSTN circuits, how do they account for that? What about the 5Es and DMSs that are carrying modem calls? Do they accurately attribute the percentage of the switch's electrical usage based on the percentage of modem vs voice calls?
So then I guess you are saying that since bittorrent comsumes about 50% of the internet bandwith it consumes perhaps half 4% of the power. Of course since bit torrent can be an edge network this might be more or less than 50% of power depending on if the edge is more or less efficient thant the backbone. My guess is that it is less efficient but that's arguable. One factor is if you want your home heated or not. That waste heat from the edge servers is heating homes and thus is an equivalent savings on the energy needed to heat homes. The opposite is true if you had the AC on. On the backbone all waste heat is working against the AC.
By the same token spam is also a major consume of world power. Now that would be a good reason to go against that!
If we assume most traffic is one the backbone and that the backbone scales as the number of servers running it. Then we only have a few more years before the power consumed by the internet will be larger than todays total power budget. This seems impossible. Ergo the traffic must be out on the edges. And there the scaling may be different with power.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They'll have a hard time refuting this study!
Ahhhh !! Computers Can Do That ? (c) Homer Simpson
Most people never turn off their monitors or computers when they're not using them, so 9.4% seems accurate.
Furthermore, a large fraction of the remaining 1/3rd of power is servers. Many of them would be run even without the internet, most probably as internal servers for 1-800 phone reps.
The actual power attributable to the Internet is probably quite small. And certainly less than the gasoline and other motor fuels used in personal shopping/research/entertainment trips reduced by the Ineternet.
Please look at the total picture. Not some sensational part.
I'm sure everytime I've read something about a datacenter they speak in terms of performance / watt. So, that would indicate they were already doing it.
astounding
Oh yeah that internet is sooo much less energy efficent then the manufacture, packaging, storage, shipping, and retail outlets, etc for billions of CDs and DVDs. Oh don't forget to count millions of little spinning DC motors, actuators, signal amplifiers, and laser diodes.
90.6% of electricity in the US is not used by the Internet.
Much better.
I wonder how much energy is actually SAVED because of the internet, quick example: email. How much energy is used shipping a letter across the country?
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
It would also be interesting to know how much energy the Internet saves. For example instead of people flying around they talk on VoIP or have a teleconference. Documents are emailed rather than having to be flown around the world. Music and movies are downloaded rather than people driving to the shops for a disk. Or is the Internet is promoting long distance relationships that otherwise just would not be?
The numbers do suggest that electronic equipment needs to be more efficient.
I don't understand how much energy that really is. Can you convert the units to Libraries of Congress?
What about the fact that I don't need to drive to the store anymore to buy something? What about the fact that I can receive and pay my bills online without using any paper? There are tons of examples.
I have to believe that much of that energy use is "stolen" from other things that are no long necessary because of the internet.
So why isn't my monthly electric bill 10 times more than my ISP bill instead of the other way around?
The electric utility infrastructure is over 10 times more expensive to install and support.
Am I the only person that is tired of getting reamed by this monopolistic pig.
At least gimme fiber for the same price.
If we can't get real competition, then how about some good old fashioned government REGULATION!!!!!!
How is this trolling? We might need a -1 Not funny, but trolling?
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
That's patently ridiculous. Everyone knows there's a positive correlation between the lack of pirates and global warming.
"Excellent, excellent..." C. Montgomery Burns
558KWh per pc on average as reported by a company selling a power saving device... Plus is that average for all PC's or just business, or home pc's? This is a report on Internet power usage, how to separate the business pc's that don't have Internet? He is pulling the data from lots of separate sources and making a lot of assumptions.
GRANTED this is a quick Internet "answer a question" not an actual research project.
Coralized link for those who wish to read TFA.
Kid-proof tablet..
Not sillier than "miles per gallon". Why do I say my car gets 15 kilometers/liter, instead of saying it gets 1500(square centimeter)**(-2)? Because what I need is a practical way to determine how much fuel I need for a given trip, not a theoretical number.
When you mention "kilowatt-hours per year" you get kind of information that's different from simple kilowatts. Power consumption is not uniform, to supply 8760 kilowatt-hours per year you need more generation capacity one kilowatt. Your generator may sit idle some of the time and generate more than a kilowatt at other times.
"Equipment powering the internet accounts for 9.4% of electricity demand in the U.S."
That doesn't seem to pass the initial sniff test. I know that on the consumer end, it's nowhere near that amount. And on the business end, at least from what I'm familiar with, the percentage is still lower than that. Sure, various ISPs, Google, and other places may drive it up, but still...
It looks like they are assuming that if a PC is connected to the internet, that all electricity consumed by that pc, monitor, etc., is directly attributable to the internet. Pretty blatantly false, if that's what they're doing. Presumably the group doing this study benefits from exaggerating this statistic in someway.
If you are including every device contected to the Internet, then surely it is more than that. The vending machine in my building is on the Internet. My phone is on the Internet. My laser printer is on the Internet, and in a way, I believe my cable box is too. Between infrastructure, servers, telecommunications, and end systems, a huge fraction of the electricity-using devices we interact with are on the Net.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
9.4% is probably way off, but here are some conversions/comparisons anyway:
868 billion kilowatt-hours per year = 10^11W=100GW
Space shuttle liftoff: 100GW
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I suddenly feel really bad for having a 300 watt CRT. But it does power down most of the time, so that makes up for it, right?
So, when im not online and instead working on a document, they consider this 'useage' ?
What if im multitasking? 100% of my power usage isnt going to view that webpage or email, its a small percentage.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Trouble is that leaving computers running is arguably a rational business tradeoff. If a desktop computer draws 250 watts (and most don't average that high), and is left on during all non-business hours (assume one works only an 8-hour day and no weekends) that is 128 hours or 32 kWh or, at $0.10/kWh, $3.20.
If your entire employee cost (pay, bonus, worker's comp, medical, office-space, etc.) is only $60,000/year, an employee needs to save less than 10-minutes/week to break even.
One coder measured his own pretty high-end machine (including support for 3 monitors) at less than 140 watts when not doing heavy processing. This doesn't include the monitor which in most systems sleeps after a short period anyway. If we use 150 watts, a 9 hour day, and $100,000 employee cost then break-even happens by the time you have saved 2 minutes 15 seconds per week or less than 30 seconds per day.
Now if it takes 2 watts cooling per watt of usage then the benefits of shutting down are greater. But on the other hand, none of the office buildings where I've worked have metered power or cooling (except for custom auxiliary units) so from the tenant perspective, leaving the machine running has no impact on power or cooling costs.
Sure, for many, waiting for a computer to boot is part of the morning routine and provides an excuse to go fill the coffee cup. But if buildings metered power and cooling usage and if computers were made to save-state and swich off and back on like a light - or at least in just 1-2 seconds - people would be much more willing to power down not only at night but at lunch and whenever they aren't using the machine.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
How much energy is spend delivering fake moon rocks, Star Trek sets, and other must-have items purchased from eBay?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Why is this a troll? It's a dry witticism about the standards of "evidence" the MAFIAA employ when arguing for themselves.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
"The total includes the energy used by desktop computers and monitors" you say. long before internet we were using computers.
Read radical news here
My wife only has one computer. As do I. So there.
Instead of spending so much to cool them down, we could set up efficient cooling arrays, or even use the heat to store energy in biomass or fuel cells instead.
The problem is that we are unwilling to revisit the basic design concepts.
Why should a "desktop" computer crank out so much heat? My son's Mac Mini doesn't. His next computer won't either.
There are better ways to do this.
Besides, most of our energy use is for: lights (could use LED lighting for 1/20 the energy), washers (heating up all that water), and dryers (if we only got rid of those covenants that didn't let people line dry clothes), and machines that aren't even being used - look at that printer in the office, it's on 24/7 but after office hours, who is printing to it?
For that matter, why are our gigapop Internet networks running 24/7 in most places? Couldn't we have master switches and routers with key servers that were on 24/7, and have the "desktops" turn OFF their monitors and even computers when no one was using it? Turn off LAN segments that aren't in use automagically.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Pr0n is the reason for so many computers being switched on, but pr0n will also power North America's electrical grids.
My name is John Titor, and I'm from the future. In the next five years, a man already known in your time for an innovative invention will stun investors and send panic through energy markets with his Wankamo, a masturbation-powered battery charger that attaches to the forearms of the growing number of desperate North American nerds.
Using the Wankamo, desperate nerds will attempt to attract women by claiming that they have a near-zero energy footprint as well as a tireless shtupzeug.
When this fails to bring any more sex their way, the desperate nerds of North America will form the first Starfleet Academy.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
We already have a unit of energy. It's called the joule, and one joule per second is called a watt.
That means that a kilowatt-hour is 3,600,000 joules.
Kilowatt-hour? Why not just use the SI unit, instead of making your own, metric-sounding mix of American and international terminology?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Consider the rapid decline of newspapers - the hard copy as compared to online editions. This results in less energy-intensive and habitat-destructive logging on the one end, less fuel-burning distribution in the middle, and less waste paper to discard or recycle on the other end.
Or consider the decline of the secretarial profession. Thirty years ago every junior executive on up had his or her own secretary. Now all they get is a laptop. It takes much more energy to feed a secretary than a loptop (although the secretary potentially offers greater sexual gratification).
Then consider warehousing. Before pervasive networking enabled just-in-time deliveries to stores and businesses, there was a massive amount of warehousing that's now largely gone away. Those warehouses were usually heated, staffed, required an extra transportation leg to stock, used up real estate, and are now better than 95% obsoleted by our computer network.
The same tech that allows us to avoid warehousing also results in much less mismatch between production and demand. Lots more stuff used to be manufactured - at large energy and materials cost - just to be thrown away when the demand didn't show up.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
How the heck is that even possible? Doesn't the US have massive industries such as steel mills running 24/7 sucking down major megawatts?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
TFA states that 25% of the power consumed by computers goes toward powering local networking hardware, which is factored at about 20% of the total consumption of the Internet.
This means that a typical small office with 20 computers has local networking hardware consuming the equivalent of 5 PCs.
Sources cited in TFA state that each PC uses an average of (588kW/365.25/24*1000) = 67 Watts, which seems reasonable enough. But that (67*5) means that 335 Watts worth of network infrastructure gear are present in a 20-PC office, which is absurd.
I know that Cisco has been known to make some hot switches, but for fuck's sake. At my place of employ (a not-atypical 20-ish PC small office), we've just got a passively-cooled 24-port 3com switch which doesn't even get warm to the touch, two Linksys WRT54GL routers, and a cable modem.
High estimates for this scenario might be 15 Watts for the switch and 12 Watts for each of the other devices, for a total of 51 Watts for the entire network, or about 4% of that which is used by the PCs.
By these estimates, my own home network has a slightly worse ratio, at about 6%.
But even if we figure that everyone else in the world has a vastly more complicated routing and switching fabric than I portray here, I simply cannot envision this figure being beyond about 8% on average -- a far lower figure than the author's stated 25%.
This means that the total consumption of the Internet in the United States, as corrected, stands at about 8%, down from 9.4%. (Not much different expressed that way, until you realize that 1.4% of the total US electricity consumption really is a huge figure.)
If anyone else has any additional corrections to make, please do so. Your contribution helps keep the teh Intarwebs green.
Kid-proof tablet..
Or consider the decline of the secretarial profession. Thirty years ago every junior executive on up had his or her own secretary. Now all they get is a laptop. It takes much more energy to feed a secretary than a loptop (although the secretary potentially offers greater sexual gratification).
This is why I hire supermodels.
They don't eat.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Al Gore invented the internet... internet ruins the environment... I'm starting to think Al Gore's crusade to prevent global warming should've started with himself.
If only we could convince pr0n watchers to preform some sort of heavy duty, repetitive, back and forward motion on small, cylindrical hand-held generators.
What percentage of the US food supply is used up keeping humans alive to maintain the internet? My God... this thing is a monster!
It's cool that somebody put a lot of money to investigate how much money we are spending in energy. Sarcasm aside, it is kind of cool to find out how much we really are using something. Well, at least through an estimate. Other than that, how is this news worthy. It would help out students to develop an argument for energy use or for a independent study to reference for their own report.
Should I be worried that downloading porn is becoming too expensive. Should we start reducing the amount of time on the computer so I can save energy. The weird thing about this is that it only accounts for 10% of energy use. What about the other 90%? According to the reverenced CIA Factbook it says that 71% of the energy produced comes from fossil fuels. How much of that is used in vehicles? I could understand coal and natural gas plants but how much of that is used for fueling planes, trains or automobiles? Secondly, businesses need computers to operate but they also need faxes, printers, not to mention light. I mean do we really have to have street lights on all night long. I mean there are millions of them and they are on for at least 8 hours each day. Again with the sarcasm, I apologize for that but come on.
Watts are energy per unit time. If the shuttle is using 100GW, presumably this is just for the few minutes / hours it is blasting off. The 868 Billion kW figure means 100 GW continuous, 24 hours a day, all year. As one would expect, 9% of the US power usage is a lot more than what it takes to send a few tonnes of metal into space.
AEM
Ya, and VIA-I wish they had more support, they seem to have some quite neat stuff, small, quiet, powerful enough for normal low intensity web surfing and whatnot. Cheaper empty (and very very small) cases that fit their boards would be nice as well, and not shuttle small, I mean thin and tiny macmini sized cases. Solid state hard drive, and there ya go. Or an actual standard normal cheap laptop that you could upgrade every few years with just a new motherboard and ram would be nice. Small cheap more power savings, etc. OLPC for the non third world.
Sarokin estimates the U.S. energy consumption of data centers (including cooling) at 45 billion kWh. The EPA Report to Congress in August on IT energy efficiency estimated that U.S. data centers used 61 billion kWh in 2006, so that part of the report missed by about 35 percent on the low side. Sarokin used a slightly older estimate from AMD.
Interesting data nonetheless. My firm conviction is that the Internet saves money on every front. If you try to get the same level of productivity by any other means, it would cost you more. Just ask newspapers, who are still using newsprint, printing presses and trucks to deliver the news.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
From http://davidjarvis.ca/essays/solar-power.shtml ...
If the United States of America were to invest the money it spent on the Iraq War ($452,673,414,399) on solar-based energy solutions, they could have met 6% of their annual energy needs. The United States has more than enough rooftop space available for solar panels to meet their electrical needs twice over. Their planned military budget during the next five years is $2.75 trillion ($2,750,000,000,000), or 36% of their electrical usage if spent, instead, on solar panels.
Wow, that's several megawatt-hours per US resident per year. Perhaps $100 in electricity per person per year.
Sounds like bullshit to me.
You can't compare power to get a metric for energy consumption :P What's the absolute energy of a Shuttle launch to LEO?
...Because Al Gore invented the Internet and it would never waste energy causing Global Warming!
is this any computer that is internet enabled while on?
I know that when my computer is connected to the internet (or when using bandwidth eg:listening to streaming radio etc.) I am usually doing other non-internet things on the machine at the same time that I would be doing otherwise- how was this accounted for in the #s?
for instance- let's say that I am streaming radio while painting in photoshop- how much of that is actually the internet using? Or what if I am just "connected" (as I am all of the time with broadband) and working on music on my computer?
it seems like an inaccurate # to say the least.
10^13J
Let's next calculate how much of the paper is wasted in printing books and newspapers..
Thing I can never understand is why they don't ditch A/C for server rooms and start putting big extract fans into the roof. In a relatively ok ambient climate like Ireland I can never see the need for refrigerated cooling because you still need A/C fans to circulate that. :S
frankly, I think 5% of total world electricity isn't all that much, considering we're talking about a worldwide network of computers. Electricity is only a fraction of the total energy consumption worldwide, traffic and heating being much worse. Honestly, I'd have expected more than merely 5%. That's like 2% of the total world energy consumption. That's about 20-25 times less than traffic. It's less than lights and it's even less than you'd save if everyone in the world simply switched to power saving lightbulbs. Surely, making IT equipment consume even less power is sensible and a good thing, but don't try to show how utterly bad it is. There are factors considerably worse than the internet, factors that HAVE to be run with fossil energies, for example.
It has to do with scaling. How many buildings have the internet in your area? Now how many buildings have electricity in that same area? There's a good chance the latter number is significantly higher so they get to lower the price as for the most part providing electricity/internet for 1000 buildings is going to cost the same as providing it for 10001, however that extra person doesn't get it for free, and so everyone's price gets lowered as a result.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
hehehe More than that... if they forgot to add all these voltage adapters plus electricity used by battery chargers for external devices. You might easily add another 3% to that 9.4% "total".
I told you all long ago that Al Gore is responsible for Global Warming because 'HE' invented the internet. See how this all comes together? He is leading the global warming effort out of guilt.
*laugh*
The Internet is making the world a better place, and as an Internet user, I feel the energy is well spent.
There is balance in energy consumption. People are staying at their computers more, rather than driving around for amusement. Fewer trees die for paper since information is available electronically.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Actually it is supposed to be the other way around:
:)
http://www.seanbonner.com/blog/archives/001857.php
Pirates and global warming are inversely related.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
but yourself.
Of course, most of slashdot-dom points fingers at the ISPs, the data centers, the big corporations, etc. I can only find a smattering of posts that even suggest looking in the mirror.
It is *you* and *I* that demand internet resources. Blaming the suppliers of those resources is hypocrisy. Of course, it is no more hypocrisy than that of Gore, Laurie David, et. al., who demand that the plebes impoverish themselves while producing order of magnitude more CO2 than they. But, you'd think nerds would have a better understanding of the actual source of the capabilities the net provides.
Of course, if, like me, you recognize that the wealth and progress which the internet makes possible will far outweigh any hypothetical environmental costs, and that the benefit/cost ratio will increase rapidly due to the knowledge sharing impact of this technology, then you are not worried about these numbers. Electricity consumption, and energy consumption in general, is a sign of human progress, progress that will allow us to better adapt to any environmental change that may be forthcoming, whether natural or man-made.
But, if that's all technological hubris and greedy over-simplification to you, then I have the solution:
Turn off your damn computer.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
I'm I to assume that he crunched the numbers excluding stuff not needed for the internet? If not this sounds like bogus crap. Yeah you need a device to connect to the internet, yeah you need routers and servers. But attributing say 200W to my desktop because it is an internet device doesn't make sense. Say I leave it on all night, I'm connected but not using the internet (LAN). Does that count? I'd guesstimate that the average user is only using the internet for 1-2hrs a day. The rest of the time there computer might be on, but they are gaming, or even reading the content that they downloaded (you aren't using bandwidth, the data has already been sent, so you might as well be reading it using word rather than IE/Firefox). Counting all the power used by IT as for the internet is retarded. This would be analogous to saying that the average person spends 100 a week for transportation to the bar (cost of car, insurance gas, for the whole week).
Sure servers take power, but what are you getting out of it?
i gotta green brane, dood
Really? I tend to find that most people with brains that have gone greenish are always shuffling about seeking to use the brains of others, and they tend to pretty inefficient about it -- what with all the biting and chewing.
Though, they do seemed to have minimized their effort on clear communication...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").