[nmglug] Free Software, Free Energy

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 12:42 -0700, joe at highmayhem.com wrote:
>
> I suggest body power as a cleaner alternative. Remember those wrist 
> watches that were powered my the movement of it's self on ones wrist. 
> Suppose a supper efficient computer that was powered by energy harnessed 
> from key strokes and mouse use. For vegans like Troy and I this would be 
> totally plant based energy.

You would have to type pretty fast and all day long to keep it going.
It would be like a perpetual motion machine.  How could you run long
number-crunching computations with that?  Store up the energy created
while typing all the code?  Then you need that battery again.

What if you drew energy from all of the users of AOL?  Do they type that
much, or are they just lazy consumers reading advertising?

I think that battery manufacturing can be engineered to reduce the
harmful environmental impacts.  Batteries can be designed for recycling
from the start.  The problem then is getting all of those lazy consumers
to actually bring them in for recycle.