General Zod wrote:Themightytom wrote:
How do the servers communicate with everything else anyway? Are they REALLY going to run a cable out there or would it be a satalite feed and wouldn't taht be a huge bottleneck?
You realize we already have several miles of internet cable under the ocean already right?
While the ship is moored to one spot, the cables would work fine. But if the ships need to be moved significant distances, like in your hurricane scenario, then the fiber-optic cables would have to be disconnected and dropped back to the sea floor. You won't want to be dragging cable for tens if not hundreds of miles across the bottom of the sea floor while the ship is avoiding said hurricane.
The ships would have to have a device that can quickly locate the end of the fiber-optic cable, and drag it up to the surface. The closer the ships stay to shore, the easier the job is.
But really, you might as well build a bunch of land-based data centers by the shoreline of, say, New England or Seattle with wave power generators close by, and a water pump to pump in the water from the Ocean.
Unless the ability to have your data centers beyond the reach of law is important enough that it's worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars in acquiring and maintaining the ships and specialized technology to regularly locate, connect, and disconnect sea-floor fiber-optic cables, whenever the ships need to move from their stations. Not to mention the myriad of other administrative and operational costs, such as the personnel to operate the ships.
Frankly it seems to me that the overall costs to set up and run this would be too high to bother with.