The Weight of an e-Book 243
whoever57 writes "According to Prof Kubiatowicz from Berkeley, each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices more difficult to carry: the professor calculates that 4GB of books would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram— about the mass of a single virus or DNA molecule."
Not true at all. (Score:3, Insightful)
From TFA:
Although the electrons were already present, keeping them still rather than allowing them to float around takes up extra energy – about a billionth of a microjoule per bit of data.
No matter whether any bit is currently being used or not, it still has a value. It's not allowed to "float around".
Real units? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Real units? (Score:5, Insightful)
Science? (Score:4, Insightful)
This belongs in the Idle section, at best, but probably not at all on /.