Some places might not have enough green energy. But some states have an excess:

What is this nonsense. We're currently fueling the modern era with fossils that take millions of years to renew. Windmills take a decade to break-even. And solar photovoltaics several decades. Ethanol is one of the fastest-renewing energy sources we have.

I've spent the last couple of years working on a system similar to this. I've designed a modular aquaponics/microponics system with a portable greenhouse, custom biofilter, gravity-fed drip irrigation and solar and geothermal heating, all based on UNIX principles: modularity, simplicity, standard interfaces, robustness, ease of repair and maintenance, extensibility, and of course automation. I haven't had time to document much so far, but I made a little introduction video you can see here.

I use Arduinos to monitor temperature and soil moisture, and to control pumps, heaters, and irrigation valves. There's a modular chicken coop, with automated doors also controlled by an Arduino. The Arduino is a great platform for this type of thing. It's extremely reliable, easy to program, and extensible. For example, I decided I didn't like any of the existing relay shields available, so I created my own shield that controls eight standard irrigation solenoids. That was very simple thanks to the openness of the Arduino platform.

The garden isn't quite year-round yet, but that's the eventual goal. If you setup everything right, it really isn't much work to maintain, just like Open Source software. My concentration has been on automating as much as possible, while sticking with organic and permaculture growing principles. I started out by eliminating daily chores, then moved on to automating weekly tasks. At the moment, my system can go for a month or so without intervention, and most work is bi-annual.

Everything is interconnected in one way or another. Grass clippings go into the chicken coop. Chicken litter goes into the compost bin, along with paper trash and kitchen waste. Compost goes on the garden. The chicken coop and compost bin provide shelter for beneficial insects. Fresh water goes into the fish tanks. Fish-fertilized water goes onto the garden, and into the duckweed ponds. Duckweed supplements the fish and chicken feed, and provides clean, fresh water.

I think this is just one of many great directions for the future of the Open Source movement. It's easy to predict that projects like Arduino, RepRap and Open Source Ecology are going to make a huge impact on the world in the coming years, in much the same way that Free and Open Source software have shaped technology over the last decade.

Okay, take this with a grain of salt since I'm not really an expert on web design. But it should be possible to write your web interface in Javascript, store it locally, and use it to communicate via JSON with the Arduino over USB.

If you're considering producing an Arduino shield, it's not too costly to add a bit of memory as well for data logging and storage.

Just something to consider. It seems like it would make your design cheaper and more robust, for the cost of a bit of programming.

Meh, it is kind of a cool platform, in theory. For $25, being able to control some GPIO pins, connect via ethernet and USB, and display info on a TV are nice features.

Also, I think you should generalize this project to include maintaining a bread yeast culture.

This seems like overkill. If you just want a web interface, there is an Arduino library that will allow you to establish a SLIP connection over USB to connect to the Arduino via a webbrowser, no ethernet shield required: SerialIP. It does take up a bit of memory, though, which leads to the next suggestion...

How did you max out the program memory on your Arduino? Why on earth would you use 16 bits (0.001953125 dC precision) to store temperatures, when your thermometer only has +/-0.5 dC resolution? Does it really matter that you turn on your refrigerator compressor at the exact nanosecond it needs to come on?

NSA's illegal wiretapping was "voluntary" when they approached all major telecom providers about it. And when Qwest opted out, they cut their government contracts, prosecuted their CEO on trumped-up charges, and ultimately bankrupted them.

These people are criminal scum. They have an agenda. They are pushing it through, and eliminating anyone who gets in their way.

We'll also help you with that pesky "citizens recording things they shouldn't" problem.

That just means they destroyed all evidence of having collected the data in the first place. You see, the US now practices "quantum" intelligence gathering. If they collect data, but don't look at it, it's the same as never having collected it to begin with. Likewise, if they collect data, and lose the data, and then delete the evidence that they collected the data, and deny that they lost the data, everything turns out fine. It's all very complicated physics that you wouldn't understand, documented in detail in the Back To The Future movies. The lost data should begin erasing itself any minute now. Any. Minute. Now.

So does arbitration.

Depends on the stock. Some stocks, yes if you buy them all you control the company. Others, you don't. Still others, you can buy up all the stock while the company just decides to issue more. The reality of a hostile takeover is a bit more complicated than you imply.

Theoretically. In actuality, the market grows by consuming finite resources, and the input of the sun is tiny in comparison.

Are we talking like "Rodney King" strange or "Roswell" strange?

What assets do they secure?