Slashdot Mirror
20% of U.S. Population Has Never Used Email
Ezratrumpet writes "A recent PC World article notes that 20 percent of the U.S. population has never sent an email. Does this number over- or underestimate the actual number of people who know nothing of email? What are the implications of this statistic to our society? Or are these people just Luddites who mourned the demise of the telegraph and have also never used a telephone?"
Why does everything come down to carbon emissions lately, and what does that have to do with the summary. But sure, I'll bite. You're using e-mail. The entire time you're writing it you're sitting at a computer using between 150W and 300W (typical). Probably half a dozen devices between your computer and the destination server are responsible for transmitting the packets over long distances (your modem, the various routers and mail servers). The NSA intercepts your e-mail, automatically runs AI on it in a massive data farm, which uses quite a lot of CPU time. Meanwhile a letter is read with zero power emissions at both ends, and it is transported with tens of thousands of other letters, the inefficient part of the transport being only near the local destination.
But honestly, I just pulled that out of my ass, and so did you, and probably so will anyone else who replies. But that will still be more interesting than the questions raised in the summary..