On server farms and their impact

From BLDGBLOG:

Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...? Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?

Server farms use a tremendous amount of electricity, it's posited that the U.S. will require 12 new power plants just to account for the growth in electric consumption for computer systems and peripheral electronics. Electric is used not only to power the servers (and generate heat) but also to cool them off (since they perform better when not melting down). It seems perverse that we either cannot capture the resulting heat and use it for some beneficial purpose, or get systems to run cooler (or perform more efficiently when running hot). It reminds me of people who drive 10-20 miles out of their way to save a couple of cents per gallon on gas, sure they "saved" money on the gas, but whatever savings they achieved were canceled out by the time spent driving and use of gas on the drive.

Anyone using last.fm for anything interesting?

I've been on last.fm for awhile, possibly since 2005. I suppose I could look it up. Anyway, lest this turn into some sort of egocentric wistful post of, ahem. Anyway: Does anyone actually use last.fm? I don't listen to my "radio", I have 15,000+ tracks in iTunes (aside to RIAA interlopers: they're almost all legal) and prefer to listen either via iTunes or one of my iPods. p. Around this time last year I took one of the last.fm "top 20" lists and manually converted it to an iTunes playlist. I had about half of the tracks and bought the other half through iTunes. I'm now contemplating a long (really freaking long) drive to South Beach in two weeks and would like to dumpster dive through last.fm to either create some interesting playlists out of my existing collection, or a mix of what I own and what I could buy through iTunes. There's something called mobster but it seems to be Windows only and all of my music (and reliable computing power) is on the Mac. And I'm not really looking to write a lot of crap, which I probably could do but by now someone, somewhere has had to have figured out how to mine last.fm for potential iTunes playlists, right?

If you're using last.fm my userid is epcostello.

I really need to learn how to write HTML some day.