I was waiting for the day after CmdrTaco left that I'd stop reading Slashdot, and I think I've found it.

Peace out, y'all.

Why is this true? Open source implementations of plenty of encryption algorithms exist and that doesn't make them inherently less secure.

Dialup is the norm? Satellite internet has been around for more than a decade and you can get 768k down for like $50/mo. Not significantly more than anyone would pay for cable or DSL.

Sure, the latency is terrible, but it sure beats waiting days to download an update or a clip from YouTube.

Or even more likely (c) human error.

Not to burst your bubble on this, but the chances that you'll even come close to breaking even are highly unlikely.

First off, even if you're only running 500watts in servers, which is not more than 2 decent ones under moderate load, you are paying about $450/yr to keep them on 24/7. Assuming you're lucky enough to get power as cheap as $0.10/kWhr.

Unless you have some source of customers, i.e. you are a web-developer, or have lot of friends who want a sub-par web host, you'll need to advertise. The hosting market is incredibly saturated and Adwords on hosting keywords is very expensive. Expect to spend a few thousand per month for a few months to recruit your initial 100 users.

Once you've got 100, you can probably turn it down to a few hundred per month to keep to user count flat to make up for those you lose in turn over.

This also assumes that with that advertising you are actually able to sucker some users to pay $10/mo for static hosting on your cable modem, while they can get it for free from a number of providers like Google, or pay what amounts to a few bucks a month for hosting with an SLA, a real support staff and some level of redundancy and backup. There are a lot of suckers in the world, so we'll assume this is possible.

Now, after you factor in the time you spend answering inane support e-mails from your customers, you'll see it's probably more profitable to get a second job at McDonald's. If only flipping burgers was as much fun as playing with servers. ;)

Not to rain on your parade here, because I agree with your sentiment; But 'FIRE', being the combustion of a fuel with oxygen, is used to power every creature that has lungs or gills and many that have neither. Nearly all of the fuels we use to burn can be consumed directly by some organism. So I'd say that nature has that angle pretty well covered.