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A comment on Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and modify our own tools. Parent comment

Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by sandworm101 on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @01:26PM (#13065012)
PlayPump failed, as so many others, because children do not make good horses. Countless projects in many fields have attempted to "harness" children for energy. There was the soccer/football generator (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeb2fyHKirQ). I've even seen attempts to install power-generating floor tiles in English schools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9AZxB55xjI). We think we can tell children what to do, use them as beasts of burden, but they are not a reliable power source.
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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by mikeash on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @09:17PM (#13067911)
We can make children be our beasts of burden, it's just that the techniques required tend to be frowned upon in modern civilization.
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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by adamsea on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @02:07PM (#13065409)
"... children ... are not a reliable power source."

Tell that to The Matrix ;)

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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by bashinator on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @06:31PM (#13067155)
The problem with the Matrix is even with made-up physics, they did a terrible job writing in humans as a power source into the plot. That's a fairly low bar and they failed.
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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by shezi on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @04:18AM (#13069438)
It is claimed that in the original script, humans were used as a computing resource instead of an energy resource, but the idea was scrapped because it was too complicated to understand. A bit like lovemenot next to here indicates.

Discussion: http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive...

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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by whatupdave on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @07:48PM (#13067551)
I've always thought this too but I haven't come up with a better plot device
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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by inimino on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @02:30AM (#13069090)
I think it's a better and more terrifying plot if you watch it as a Kafka-esque dystopia where people are imprisoned by the machines for inscrutable reasons that no-one truly knows. Morpheus's power supply theory is then just a necessary rationalization and a part of the mythology that allows the resistance to continue, while being fundamentally incorrect.

Thermodynamic impossibility is a relatively minor obstacle for a true believer.

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Re:Farm Hack: worldwide community of farmers that build and ... by lovemenot on Tuesday November 29, 2016 @09:36PM (#13067995)
Me too. I always thought it would have been better if humans' processing cycles (thoughts) were utilised to supplement, validate and expand the Matrix. A sort of automatic, involuntary, unaware Mechanical Turk.
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