'Around 3.0 kilowatt-hours of electricity could be generated daily from the manure of one cow. Approximately 70 per cent of the energy from the methane could be used for power and cooling, sufficient to power a medium-sized data centre. '

Phil Factor (1/30/2011)

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The United States used 3723 TWh of power in 2006, and Europe was 3022. This makes the 56 Twh used by Data Centers in Europe come in at around 1.8% of all European energy use. I don't have the USA figures, but I guess that they're similar. This contribution seems very small, but the proportion is set to rise. I believe that the science underlying the idea of man-made climate change is currently flawed, but there is no denying that the precipitate rise in the use of oil worldwide has got to stop. Even the harshest cutbacks in the use of fossil fuels that have been proposed only take us back to early Nineties consumption.
Having said all that, My main worry is that, in the current atmosphere of increasing legislation over energy use, it is much better that the IT industry sorts the problem of its own increasing energy consumption out, rather than leave it to the legislators.

[b]djackson 22568 (1/30/2011.....so called health care reform has reduced payments from goverment to hospitals, while increasing regulations and decreasing reimbursements from the one source they can use to pay bills - insurance companies.
Sigh.

RML51 (1/31/2011)

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Hate tp wander off topic, but it looks like that's already been done, and I also hate to see misinformation spread unchecked.

Your statement is not true. Hospitals are for the health care reform. Insurance companies are against it only because they are being forced to cover things such as preexisting conditions. The US is one of the few major countries without a universal health care system, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, have all successfully implemented government run programs with often easier access and much reduced costs.