[conspire] Box needed for open source demo

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):

> I have set parameters that I will not spend a dime on boxes to give 
> away, because I am trying to scale this up globally.  I am hoping 
> that we will be able to develop a web site which will help people 
> from all over the planet coordinate the canibalizing of computers 
> to share parts that would otherwise go into landfill.

It's a worthy goal.  But who pays the cost of transporting those parts
to the coordinating volunteer, and then of storing them pending
deployment, and then of sending the refurbished computers to elsewhere
on the planet?

You may recall that I had a bunch of very small (by today's standards)
hard drives, a while back:  You said it was a shame to discard them, 
but you're in San Francisco with no car, and I'm 100 km south of you.
Any means of transporting those drives to S.F. would have involved costs
greatly in excess of those drives' tiny fair market value.  

The reason I wanted to get rid of them is, of course, that no only do I
have no use for them, but also because Peninsula rent is high, and the
drives weren't justifying their pro-rata storage cost.  Your own
rent/ft.^2 situation in S.F., in that regard, is probably comparable if
not worse.

Then, someone has to pay to get such parts to (e.g.) Brazil -- unless, 
say, you know some technophile in the merchant marine who deadheads
empty freighters to Sao Paulo.

I'll be delighted if the economics of all this works; I'm just not clear
on exactly how.