An anonymous reader writes with a suggestion for a punishment for Enron employees: make them serve time on treadmills that are hooked up to little turbines, in order to repay Californians for the mess they caused last year.

Now that’s the kind of innovative, dynamic thinking that we need these days. However, while the idea is on the right track, it’s a bit… inefficient. I mean, how much power can you get out of a fat, sweating, Houston energy trader anyway? No, for a truly clean and efficient energy solution, I think we would need to mulch the employees and use them as biomass fuel. Get some power back and lighten up the job market a bit to boot.

Speaking of Thinking Different, I stopped by the Apple Store in Palo Alto this evening. By some bizarre coincidence, Charlie Clouser (the synth player for Nine Inch Nails) was giving a presentation on how he uses his Mac to do professional songwriting and remixing. He took us through a song he developed for the band Opiate for the Masses. I didn’t understand any of the technical jargon, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. As he constructed the song in the synthesizer program, Reason, he showed us that the CPU usage was negligible, no matter how many effects he piled on. He also claimed that most electronic artists could record an entire album with Reason and Ableton alone. In fact, according to Clouser, there is no sonic reason to use expensive dedicated equipment — the only thing that the “traditional” method gives you is better ergonomics and a few extra features for the hard-core professional.

I wonder if he’s right? Well, unfortunately, I don’t have hundreds of dollars to drop on the software — never mind my tin ear.