the G-man said: You have plenty of choices regarding your desire (not need) to patronize large corporations, Ray.
Unless you use only what you need, bare minimum, to survive, you are a voluntary consumer. Unlike taxes, the federal government does not REQUIRE you to shop for nonessentials. Those are all voluntary acts on your part.
Furthermore, the government does not require you to buy nonessential products directly from corporations. You could, as noted above, buy used products, which results in no profit to the corporations. You could also buy only natural products.
You're voting with your checkbook, Ray. And every time you buy a nonessential item your vote is FOR corporations.
Originally Posted By: Friendly Neighborhood Ray-man
lets see. i got the cable not owned by rupert murdoch. i don't eat at big chain fast food. i smoke imported tobacco with few of the extra chemicals in american shit.
i make my choices here and there. but i don't really buy that much beyond essentials. the only thing you can really say i buy that i don't need is comics from Time-Warner and Marvel (whoever the hell owns them).
“Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
Though Google says it is in the forefront of green computing, its search engine generates high levels of CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to several competing against each other.
It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from whichever produces the answer fastest. The system minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.
Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for publication by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website http://www.CO2stats.com.
