1847 World Wide Warming

Sometimes the scale of our new internet technology overwhelms me. Like the other day I heard that Facebook had crossed the one billion mark for users. But I also heard recently that something like 20% of all Facebook identities are not real. Those fakebookers mean there are only 800,000 real users.
Still it's pretty large. Which if you want to advertise to them doesn't qualify your leads very well. It would be like if you were a salesman for a doorknob company asking for a lead list and someone gave you a phonebook for one sixth of the planet.
But hey, huge is what the internet is. Did you ever wonder how much power it takes to plant the information, store it, and shuttle all that data around? A recent news story in the New York Times answered that question. And they answered it online.
The huge internet data centers that store and process all kinds of e-stuff, including old emails, Google searches, and billions of Facebook updates, consume in the neighborhood of 30 billion watts of electricity worldwide. Yep, even with today's efficient circuitry and electronics, the World Wide Web is a world wide energy sucker. The equivalent of 30 nuclear power plants.
I wonder how many power plants that is in coal? I always knew my computer box helped keep my feet warm under my desk. I had no idea it was contributing to global warming too.
But here's the deal; only about 10 percent of that energy is being used to power actual computations. The rest of the power just keeps servers running 24/7, to avoid any slowdowns in archive retrieval and RAM that might annoy users.
RAM? Archive retrieval? Hmm.
The World Wide Web and global warming:
Thanks to the memories...
America, ya gotta love it.