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<blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 5365772" data-attributes="member: 19675">As a Mac user, I look at this and give it: two thumbs sideways.&nbsp; It may improve over time- I'll keep looking- but I'm no fan of having my stuff almost exclusively in someone else's hands.&nbsp; I've got 3-4 terabytes of storage to work with, a few hundred PCs won't take up a blip of space.I like to be environment friendly too (I was in Greenpeace for a while, I recycle, etc.), but as yet, its not exactly clear that computers, etc. are greener than books, at least not yet.Look at the list of stuff that it takes to construct and power a computer: precious metals like gold or platinum (mostly strip-mined), copper and sometimes aluminum (also strip mined), solvents &amp; carcinogens to produce the plastics (petrochemical and paper production run neck &amp; neck as polluting industries), and the fuel to run them, either in batteries (rechargeables use rare elements like lithium, largely found in nice places like China, whose record on environmental and human rights issues is well-known) or in DC (coal, gas, oil, nuke, etc.).And lets be honest...even if the stuff is electronically stored, we're still printing a lot of stuff up anyway, so we're not exactly paperless.As for recycling, both paper and computers have recyclable elements, but the infrastructure for recycling paper is currently far more well developed than for computers and all the stuff that goes along with them.&nbsp; I have a recycling bin in my yard, and another half-dozen paper recycling locations within a few blocks of where I live, at churches, schools and what have you.&nbsp; I have to drive miles to recycle a computer, and a few more to recycle a rechargeable battery.Oh, there may come a time when computers are green, but that time isn't now.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dannyalcatraz, post: 5365772, member: 19675"] As a Mac user, I look at this and give it: two thumbs [I]sideways[/I]. It may improve over time- I'll keep looking- but I'm no fan of having my stuff almost exclusively in someone else's hands. I've got 3-4 terabytes of storage to work with, a few hundred PCs won't take up a blip of space. I like to be environment friendly too (I was in Greenpeace for a while, I recycle, etc.), but as yet, its not exactly clear that computers, etc. are greener than books, at least not yet. Look at the list of stuff that it takes to construct and power a computer: precious metals like gold or platinum (mostly strip-mined), copper and sometimes aluminum (also strip mined), solvents & carcinogens to produce the plastics (petrochemical and paper production run neck & neck as polluting industries), and the fuel to run them, either in batteries (rechargeables use rare elements like lithium, largely found in nice places like China, whose record on environmental and human rights issues is well-known) or in DC (coal, gas, oil, nuke, etc.). And lets be honest...even if the stuff is electronically stored, we're still printing a lot of stuff up anyway, so we're not exactly paperless. As for recycling, both paper and computers have recyclable elements, but the infrastructure for recycling paper is currently far more well developed than for computers and all the stuff that goes along with them. I have a recycling bin in my yard, and another half-dozen paper recycling locations within a few blocks of where I live, at churches, schools and what have you. I have to drive miles to recycle a computer, and a few more to recycle a rechargeable battery. Oh, there may come a time when computers are green, but that time isn't now. [/QUOTE]

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