This is about http://natick.research.microsoft.com/ and a worry about the future. We already place a large burden on the oceans. They take our waste products and our effluent. All of these things raise the temperature of the oceans somewhat. Microsoft's impact might be minimal but I am as concerned about thousands of datacenters off our coasts as I am hundreds of oil wells.
How far away can the noise of the system be heard by whales and dolphins?
We know that pollutants travel differently in air than in water, but one of those pollutants is sound. http://dosits.org/faq/ has some interesting facts about sound in water and the impact on ocean life.
I am not an expert on datacenter noise, the impact of sound on local ocean life (and how far away the sound travels from the datacenter) nor how much heat thousands of such systems could transfer to the gigantic heatsink of the oceans, lakes and rivers that may eventually be used to cool datacenters. I just have this sense of dread of yet another way to use and abuse our environment to allow, and encourage, data collection about each and everyone of us for the sake of market research, and monitoring our behavior for other reasons.
Just saying...
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