....And then how long would it be before some terrorist tries to blow up my home in order to destroy the data center and disrupt the cloud?

And home owners will be charged accordingly for the privilage.

love this idea. add in a free, very high-speed internet connection and people will be begging for them.

The biggest question here.... what about bandwidth? My home cable internet connection is not going to do a 400 CPU data center much good. :-) Are they going to be running direct Internet links to everyone\'s homes or what?

I think my 920 ft2 basement could soak up 2kw of heat in the summer and 8kw in the winter. My 100 amp service would only support another 2kw. I see Gomez pays $45/ mo for its distributed computing project. It looks like you need one email account for each $45. Anyhow, anyone with a basement has a huge prepaid heat sink.

A data center heated rec center & pool seems a natural. Imagine a hot tub, sauna and steam room and so on, powered by waste heat!
It is a natural for municipalities to stimulate a POP (point of presence) by attaching such a facility to existing infrastructure, reducing municipal overheads and stimulating local business.
Also, Thinking of my heat powered propane camper fridge, could a refrigeration cycle be driven by such a system for grocery cooling at home, or in shopping malls?

We could certainly benefit from a proposal like this - we have the space in a detached building that still would allow heated air to be ducted into the house in the cold weather. The data center owners would have the benefit of one or two resident geeks.
Cripes - I\'ll be among the first to volunteer.

Has anybody here ever been *INSIDE* a datacenter? These things are *NOISY*. They are so loud, it is difficult for two people to talk to each other! I am running two rack mount servers in my basement, and I have to soundproof the walls of my data closet just to keep the noise to a minimum one floor up! No...while a noble idea, the implementation will most likely be flawed!

this is a really stupidly stupid idea. I hope the MS guys that thought this up aren\'t allowed to write any software.
How many homes have multiple connections to the power grid, backup generators, UPS, multiple redundant internet connections etc.
Oh and separately secure physical access so the technician can let themselves in at 3.00am to reset the server.
Still will need aircon, especially in summer when your house is cooking due to the furnace going 24/7 below it that you can\'t turn off or some poor suckers website will go down.

This is how SkyNet protects itself - by distributing itself into our homes.

Just sayin\'