I would have voted "because it's cool" but really it's because I have control of my software and my equipment. Education is part of the deal. Security and privacy is not guaranteed but it's under my control.

Definitely missing out on "better services" because large data models can do very good spam filtering which I don't get because I don't have access to other peoples' mail ... (which falls into privacy concerns... of other people...)

If this had been a real issue, it should have been detected quite a while ago. However as far as I can tell, this limit is reached if one is running very very quick running programs, say if it only takes 5ms to fork and run the program, then one may run into this 8 core issue.

This will basically slow down poorly written shell scripts that constantly runs subprograms - if the subprograms run in parallel (which they are not unless multiple instances of the script are running at the same time). Also it means fork bombs will create processes slower than expected on machines with more then 8 processors. I highly doubt someone would worry about this case.

About 2.9e-7 gigawatts.

for PVR (1 HDD), server(4 HDDs), and all those wall warts, standalone clocks, switches, CPE, battery chargers I left plugged in, TV and monitor standby power,...

Oh man I am sort of forever angry for GoDaddy...

I had GoDaddy as my DNS registrar for over a decade. When I first signed up, they offered free email. I didn't take up on this offer at first because it added complexity - it didn't seem to work as I wanted (my homeserver is my smtp server). I wanted it to be a backup server by perhaps running a catchall and queue mail to my home server in case it goes down -- seemed like something that could be done.

Fast forward to a few years ago. They decided to go with Microsoft as their mail server. No more catchall. No no no, this will not work. at all anymore. So I just gave it up. Sigh.

I ended up just not running an alternate MX as most servers will retry anyway, though I've been desubbed a few times with a few mail lists due to bouncing, alas my server has been fairly stable and the bouncing hasn't happened way too often.