Slashdot Mirror
SETI@home Turns Five Today
mfh writes "Five years ago today, SETI@home launched a comprehensive program to search for Extra Terrestrial life in the universe, using millions of home computers to help compile useful data that could some day lead to the discovery of advanced extra terrestrial life. Since inception, SETI@home has found 2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet. SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."
"we ain't found shit!"
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
Cool stuff, until I found one of our managers had installed it on all of the computers in his department. The boss is still upset about that one, although he does do it on his home PC's.
I for one welcome our new Gaussian overlords!
Those bastards I'm competing against have accumulated thousands of years of credits.
All you SETI people out there... if you want your CPU cycles to actually produce something useful, how about running Folding@Home or United Devices or some other medical research program. Looking for scant signs of aliens just seems fruitless compared to the more immediate problems that you could direct your CPU cycles at.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
This has been an interesting effort that I have supported since it first started. I have over 16780 units completed to date (35.011 years effort in processing time) and hope that it leads to something. Once you get started though its like a drug ... gotta finish more units!
Does anyone know anything more about "possible radio transmissions from a distant planet"? TIA
I bet if they found anything it's Top Secret and we won't hear anything about it for a long time. Either that or we just can't figure out what the transmissions are saying.
Evolution or ID?
Let's hope that what we think is knocking on the door is really throwing pebbles at the basement window on a windy day. Years from now we may be looking in new locations and new ways (gravity waves?) and wonder what we were thinking. In any case, here's to the quest. 226 work units and counting.
I ran SETI@home for months but I got bored when I didn't find any aliens. What's the point of the game?
... here
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
... You actually find alien signals.
In related news, ET turns 22 today
Must-not-watch TV!
Intelligent life on Earth
Damn! I'm just 36 units away from my 1000 unit milestone...
My friend convinced me to start running SETI on any system I came in contact with to see how they benchmark against servers we buy. Right now I run four clients on my home systems and at least three clients at work. It's been fun watching the numbers crank away and comparing our newer systems to when we started some years ago.
But, "The young ones do not always do as they are told."
Fight Spammers!
Maybe we need to redirect SETI. We should spend all computing cycles finding intelegent life in Washington.
Evolution or ID?
The status and update page sat nearly a year without any change until May 17th when they posted an update explaining why they haven't released any results from last year's Arecibo run. I realize it takes time to collate data. And given the very high and unpredictable latency of the their distributed processing system, I understand why it might take a long time to push data out and get results back. Still, since the project was originally slated to run two years, then extended to five, yet why have we (the public) seen so few results from this program? Even negative results would be of interest. Maybe I'm missing something here, since I don't pay very close attention to the project, but I sure would like to see more published details including core data and methodology instead of a pretty web site and irregular status updates. JMO. --M
wouldnt it be better to donate cycles to something like folding@home, parkinsons and alzheimers disease protein research?
i dont mean to belittle seti, i think its a wonderful project, and maybe this arguement falls deaf on geek ears (aliens vs disease- woh, war of the worlds:) but id like to see more terran problems solved, no?
ps i donate all my unused cycles to folding (over genome project, i personally feel that we're going to screw something up with the whole genetic genome geewiz junk)
|plastic....or gasoline?|
If I understand this correctly we are lookin for radio frequency only! Now if that's the case by the time we replied and the message was recieved all life on the sending planet and probably this one will have been gone for centuries.
You are unique, just like everybody else.
They wanted a degree, expertise in anal probing, and ten years experience in Seti@home. Damn gray PHBs.
Happy Birthday to You
You Live in a zoo
You look like a monkey
and you act like on too
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!
Evolution or ID?
When I saw this on slashdot, I thought that I had been doing SETI@Home for much longer than that, but apparently I registered May 16th, 1999, early in the UTC. Their news release puts the anniversay as May 17th.
Was that really their first day?
Problem was that something went slightly wrong with the Solaris server resulting in a crash of the server. This was probably unrelated to my setiathome processes (?), but one of the memory dump files had my user ID on them. Nearly lost my privileges - luckily the university IT folks were kind enough to let me off with just a warning.
Uhh, SETI@Home turned five years old on May 17th, 2004. If you're going to announce an anniversary, you should at least get it right!
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
I have been a user since last year and collected 10000 work units, then i moved to both the folding@home and climatepredicton projects.
...
Why ? because i strongly suspect they'd waste CPU cycles on the same work units rather than say: hey, "5 MILLION user are enough" we have found this and that, and until new funding arrives you better move on to other projects.
The "current progress" page hasn't been updated in years, so the "future direction" page, look for yourself
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
Isn't there an inherent problem with SETI as it exists? Isn't it geared to search for life like us instead of life, period? Sure, a patch of moss won't put up a radio signal, but have equal efforts been made to discover planets which could house lower forms of life as has been put into, basically, finding "people" out in space (which is what we're really doing by looking for the evidence we're looking for in SETI)? Does anyone have any comparisons of resources spent? My point is, perhaps SETI should be refocused to consider such factors. "Contact," after all, was a movie....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
On a side note: Are there any free and open distributed computing projects? I run Seti@Home, and Folding@Home looks interesting, but it would be great to have some free projects around.
It sort of fits the spirit of what they're doing better.
readining this reminds me of my best joke on a work mate ever.
He was always forever installing bloody seti on every machine server in the building..
So i played a joke, installed a app on his machine which at random points (i controlled) ping up and say it had found a singnal etc etc etc.. i used the seti gfx etc etc.
He got really excited, so of course we went one stage further.. The seti app told him that the signals were getting sent off for analysis, and someone would contact him shortly.
We then (other had now joined in) continued to make him jump out of his seat and explain "its happened again." while the rest of tried to stop laughing.
So an spoofed email address was setup and we emailed him from seti.. told him they were getting looked at etc..
Over the period of a couple of weeks we got the noise off the film contact, and mixed it with white noies.. luckly he had not seen contact. it started off really quite quiet in the background, and each email it got better and more and more clearer.
It was genuis.. we couldn't stop laughing.. he was telling his friend family etc etc etc that hed discovered possible alien life contact..
Of course.. we then relised we had gone slighly too far and had to tell him..
he was not a happy bunny..
So insightful. I'm surprised this isn't at +5.
I've always marvelled at the concept of connecting our planetary network to a big open port aimed at space, hoping some packets of alien email might arrive.
Let's hope we get a chance to think before someone opens the attachment.
... and 0 aliens ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Does anyone know (can be bothered to work out) what else could have been done with all the CPU time they've been donated?
Don't get me wrong, I run SETI@home myself, I'm just wondering, say, how much of the 2048 bit keyspace needed for signing Xbox executables could have been searched? How far would the TivoCrack project have got if they'd had access to that amount of computing power? I'm just curious really.
Meep meep
But why do we search for radio signals again? I'm guessing that in a few thousand years, we'll look back at our own society and see that our use of radio waves was only for a short period of time; couldnt the same be said for other civilations? Another words, since the gap of heavy radio wave usage would be so small in an alien civilation's technological evolution, the chance of us 'hearing' something (and then reconfirming it) would be quiet low?
I've been running SETI clients for a while now, and I suppose if someone asked my why I do it, I would say that I do it now just because I did it before.
I don't have any illusions about actually finding intelligent, extraterrestrial communications with SETI anymore. (And if anyone does, I'm not holding out hope that it's me.) In fact, I think that we should seriously question whether the entire premise of SETI@home--that other life forms would transmit data at the radio frequency of water--is still valid. Is it reasonable to assume that two completely different creatures would logically arrive at the same conclusion for how to communicate? Considering the amount of diversity on our planet alone, maybe not.
Could a blind man and a deaf man put together in a giant, dark auditorium find a way to communicate? That would be the easy problem; the hard one is finding a way to communicate with any intelligent life that's light years away out there.
Assuming it's out there in the first place...
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
...refusing to produce their proof of extraterrestrial inteligence untill the universe allows them to examine every electromagnetic quanta. Microsoft is likely funding them (via a skunk-works shop in Area-51) to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about us being the center of the universe.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
I run SETI@home. There's a bunch of biotech, math, and encryption projects that don't interest me much. What are some distributed projects in other categories? I used to run evolution@home, any others?
The true birthday was May 17th, per a post on the SETI home page dated May 18th indicating that "SETI@home turned five years old yesterday"
I bet we have found signals. The FCC is now fining them for broadcasting on a frequency already assigned to a different carrier...
Indecision may, or may not be my problem! -- Jimmy Buffett
Because yesterday, they just sent me an email that they hadn't received any data from me since, December 13, 1901.
That was back when we had to process this all by hand. You guys have it so easy now.
Every experiment needs a control. As a control, they should send out a small probe and look backwards at earth on the same frequency(s) and see if the SETI clients consistently discover transmissions from earth... this would at least go a long way to prove if the tests are even valid. (or just point an antenna at chicago, or up in the mountains looking down on san francisco.
meh
I know the parent will be modded "troll" or something, but AC has a point, and it has been mentioned several times here today: The Seti web site sure is pretty, but where's the beef? As anyone who has been to grad school knows, science is nice, but the real focus is writing grants and getting funding for that new cluster or big flat-screens for displying (they say) pretty pictures (God knows you can't do that on a conventional 17 - 21 inch CRT...). Conceptually, Seti@Home has been good for science and advanced the idea of distributed computing. But maybe it's time to wrap it up and solve real-world issues with the same technology...
Not only has it turned five, but it also hit 5 million users sometime between yesterday and today. I was on yesterday afternoon, and noticed it was about 400 people away.
Number of users at the time of this writing: 5,000,769
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
So what's the story behind the classic WOW!-signal?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I'm not sure how they decided the official start date. They have users who signed up as early as March 1, 1999.
SETI has become a substitute religion. Athiests and secularists often claim they are so intellectually enlightened that they don't need religion. They laugh at and mock people of faith that go to church, mosque, or synagogue, but then expect to be taken seruiously and regard themselves as profound deep thinkers because they sit in front of their screensavers waiting for a blip from planet XYZ. How many years sitting in front of the screensavers will it take before athiests concede they their pursuit to find extra-terrestrial life is just as faith-based as conventional religion?
If I'm seeking data, I'll go the local univerisity. If I'm seeking wisdom, I'll go the local truck stop
Okay, why the heck are we wasting so much processing power on something that will likely never yield anything useful for the human race. It's like a processing power lottery, where the probabilities of anything are so remote that the expected payoff is nil in the long run.
Now, there are distributed computing programs that have actually brought results and helped humanity. For example: http://folding.stanford.edu . IF these 5 million users all installed folding at home, could you imagine the advancements and help to medical science we'd see in the next 5 years. As opposed to absolutely nothing gained whatsoever by SETI@home? (Other than the fact that they were the first people to do distributed computing. afaik.)
And if folding doesn't work for you, there are dozens of other much more useful distributed computing projects which have given results and are more or less guaranteed to give more results than this complete and total waste of money, time and processing power.
Let's try to help the human race instead of wasting our time looking for someone else.
geez.
~ kjrose
SETI@home has been getting dissed a lot lately. "Why are you wasting your cycles on this useless project?" some geeks ask. "Why aren't you spending them predicting climate change, fighting AIDS or curing Alzheimer's? You could be saving people from anthrax, smallpox, Ebola, or SARS."
These are all noble goals, worth pursuing. But SETI has a noble goal that doesn't get talked about very much.
Most SETI research so far has been focused on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. (Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a message of our own, someday.)
"So what happens if you listen and you don't hear anything?" you ask. Well, even if we drain the Water Hole and find nothing, we'll still have learned a great deal from the process. We'll know there likely aren't any civilizations remotely like us in our galaxy. We'll know that previous civilizations, if there were any, were not able to sustain themselves. We'll know that intelligent life is fleeting and precious in the universe. And this should make us think hard about our own civilization.
If we're ever forced to acknowledge that there are no intelligent radio signals in the universe, then we must also acknowledge that the odds of our own survival just became much bleaker. Knowing that space is quiet means it's more important for us to be careful than we thought. The longer we search without finding any intelligent signals, the more likely it becomes that intelligent civilization isn't some pretty 4th of July sparkler; it's nitroglycerin, waiting to explode. This is incredibly valuable knowledge, life or death knowledge that's worth going after.
The biggest reason to look for a signal in the first place isn't to commune with E.T., but out of pure self-interest. Any number of systems failures could wipe us out as a species, from a single well-designed terrorist plague to GMOs with unforeseen environmental consequences. How do we as a society learn to play nice with technology? Has anyone else in the universe done it? If we found evidence that someone out there had, it would stand as a beacon, showing that we can probably do it, too. And if we don't find a signal, it means a bell is probably tolling our end somewhere, and we'd better think long and hard how to change that.
So feel good about SETI. It's not just about searching for aliens, it's about searching for a cure for extinction.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
So were there some old-fashioned experiments performed in the past?
It's called Pioneer 10
Have they ever predicted how much power has been used to search over the past 5 years?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Seti actully turned 5 years old on May 17th. Even the official Seti site didn't point it out until the day after.. Looks like they missed their own birthday..
Have a look for yourself, it's on the right side of the page.. http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
3202nd place! Not bad for a sole contributor! :)
I would like to have explicit support for background processes like this. They should be treated like an idle loop - never run unless there is nothing else to do, and not reported in the load average.
Given your desire to criticise other people for what they choose to do on their own property, on their own time, You might want to consider a rewarding career in congress, or your local legislative body. That way, you can criticise people, and gorge from the public trough, At the same time!!
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
already figure this out a few years back?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Hey wait - I'm just hearing breaking news on the radio that an intelligible signal has finally been identified. Apparently the data has been passed on to the boffins at NASA, who have so far been able to translate the following fragment:
Dear Sir,
CONFIDENTIAL
Please, I am Zytrrx Qaluda, the only son of late Wxmzi Qaluda, emperor of the HD 70642 solar system.
My contacting you gave me the courage and confidence to rely on you. I am writing
you in absolute confidence primarily to seek your assistance to transfer our cash of seventeen quintillion United States Dollars ($17,000,000,000,000,000,000.00) now in the custody of a BANK here in Zzprya-7 to your private account pending our arrival to your planet.
6EQUJ5
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
What I would like to see would be an @home project to process data taken on stars to search for wobble or to filter an image of a star from say Hubble over and over looking for telltale signs of less than jupiter sized planets.
Of course there is only currently a limited number of telescopes that can collect such data but that should increase in the next 20 years. I hope to see enough of such data to let us start looking for actual planets and enough of it that an @home is required for that too. That will help us zero in on possible inhabited worlds far more effeciently than searching for random gaussians will.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
5?
Interesting...I've been a member for
5.014 years...wow!...I've been able to travel
time!
Also they just passed their 5 millionth member
today
- bob
Try here Projects that do SETI, Folding, solve complex math problems, even help design new particle accelerators.
Here at the university of north carolina at charlotte (uncc.edu), the entire engineering computer lab (windows machines at least) run SETI as a screensaver. Engineering department, kindof makes sense. I think some other ones around campus do likewise.
However on my home PC i run protien folding. Hell i'd run it on my account at school if they'd let me.
Why?
Odds are astronomically in favor of myself or someone very close to me developing cancer, as opposed to catching a bad case of aliens.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
All this search for ETI is great, but what happens if we "find" another civilization out there?
We have a difficult enough time talking amongst ourselves, let alone an alien race. We can't even communicate with apes, dolphins or other 'intelligent' species on our own planet.
Just to add:
Since the masses seem to thrive on source, here are the locations of a March 1981 (brief) background on CETI and STARQUEST; which came before SETI, and give 'one' reason of 'why search' (they are jpg images of bbs text pages):
CETI-STARQUEST-1
STARQUEST-2
STARQUEST-3
After STARQUEST finished SETI started. (fwiw) Kent Cullers (SETI) participated on Marshall's net and was an active 'Bay Area" amateur radio operator.
While most /.'ers will probably run the FAH client, even Google supports Folding@home - read more at their Google Compute FAQ which allows you to run it as part of the Google Toolbar - heck, I even have my mother helping out this way since it is so super-easy to install.
And if you do decide to support Folding@home, consider joining a team - if you don't have one, you are welcome to sign up for my Google Compute team ;-)
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Opening attachment....
Starting gene sequencer...
Warning: Incubator chamber camera is offline...
"Where's the off switch? WHERE'S THE OFF SWITCH? OH F"
LOST CARRIER..........
"The surest sign that there is intelligent life out there is that it has not tried to contact us yet."
"SETI began in 1960 with the efforts of Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, whose Project Ozma became the first modern SETI experiment in history."
Frank Drake did receive a message during Project Ozma. One night, he started picking up, of all things, Morse code. When decoded, the message read "Message received. Send more Chuck Berry." Nobody ever owned up to the gag.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a *final* frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier *to*, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate...)"- Terry Pratchett
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
May be finding no signals means we are using the wrong communications technology. Radio has only been around 100 years or so. In a thousand years we may be using methods yet unknown which are far more efficient which are standard for advanced civilisations.
However radio is a possible method that we know about and we have to try. It only take one positive result. Keep it up SETI!!
"we ain't found shit!"
.sah data files and it has a cool auto Doppler drift algorithm, nice displays, ...
I like noise. In fact I am fascinated by it.
My viewpoint of the seti@home project is that they are a great source of high quality Radio Telescope signals. I let their program do it's science and I get to keep the work units. Seems like a fair trade. So far I have archived 5762 work_unit.sah files (~1.5 GB). Why?
Because I am an amateur SETI enthusiast and I wasn't satisfied with just watching the screensaver. Gaussians, spikes, triplets, phooey! I wanted to do more. So I collect every work unit and I analyze them myself with the baudline signal analyzer. It can read the
Despite the common mixing trough at 1.4200 GHz, and the stationary harmonic bleed-in interference, I have found a lot of interesting things in the data. Every now and then I run into a weak signal with a non-terrestrial Doppler drift rate. Sometimes they wiggle or pulse. Is it ET? Probably not, but it is exciting and fun. I should make a webpage of pictures.
[Disclaimer: Yes, I am an author of baudline and this is a blatant product plug.]
I smell my first troll here but.. Has nobody ever thought that alien life might be just... stupid! I know it would stink but I can picture the funny looking purple menlike tentacle things on the brink of discovering fire. Not to mention the posibility of them being amoebas. I know this is not to discouridge the program but hey... Besides I like SETI like a screensaver anyway... looks cool
This is a cause worth supporting, my form of charity (and much more cost effective for me I must say). I've had my little 800 celeron with 256 ram processing units for almost two years now, thats all it does, its got its own home on the network now. Alas, I have yet process a single message from my old friends. They will contact me eventually I'm sure (call me if your read this!).
No, I will not fix your computer.
~ Tech404
[blockquote]2,568 persistent Gaussians, possible radio transmissions from a distant planet.[/blockquote]
....
The transmission title reads
"To Serve Man"
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
To take full advantage of the altivec chip and multiple processors.
That and 100 G5 Xserves with Xgrid and my numbers would take a big jump!
Very close to 5 mil anyway:
;)
<brag>
Results Received 11824
Total CPU Time 15.636 years
Average CPU Time per work unit 11 hr 35 min 02.1 sec
Average results received per day 6.55
Last result returned: Fri May 21 19:44:56 2004 UTC
Registered on: Sun Jun 13 01:37:11 1999 UTC
SETI@home user for: 4.945 years
Your rank out of 5001324 total users is: 15035th place.
You have completed more work units than 99.699% of our users.
</brag>
So some of us 5 million are more equal than others
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
NOT FLAIMBAIT please read on..
:)
:) I'm not sure what SETI knows that I dont. I know they arent stupid. So if any good EE/astrophysicist could reply and let me know what the big secret is, I'd be much obliged.
I'm not sure what the SETI people know that I dont...BUT the free space loss of RF is too great to even recieve from our nearest star. Nevermind the rest of the galaxy. Don't believe me? Here, ill walk you through it.
The loss of free space equation is thus:
LFS= -GainRX -GainTX +32.44 + 20logDistance + 20logFreq
Distance in KM, Freq in Mhz
Let's be WILDly optimistic here...
Let's say the aliens are on the nearest star (around 4.3 light years)...have big 30dB dishes pointed directly at OUR 30dB dishes... It was earlier mentioned that the frequency beeing listened on was 1.4 ghz.
20log(4.07 × 10^13 km) + 20log(1400mhz) +32.44 -(60db for gains)
272.19dB + 62.92dB + 32.44dB - 60dB = 307.55dB
307dB = approx 7271016923390732552789153793519 linear units.
Soooo, assume they are transmitting with a million watts. This is very VERY high, but we're beeing wildly optimistic remember?
This leaves a signal level of 1.38 x10^ -25 watts on the recieve end. This is not accounting for noise, which will surely completely down a signal level of this magnitude out.
Remember, this is the NEAREST star, with parabolic dishes pointed right at each other.
So, to recap
I've seen people previously mention here, that, if we dont find anything in this 'watering hole' of low noise, we can safely assume there is no life in the galaxy! I would say that is totally untrue. Since the chances of us recieving anything even from the nearest star are essentiall nil.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I've a laptop as my main PC, and I can't run Seti on it because that would keep the CPU going, not only reducing the battery life from ~5h to about 1-2h, while keeping the fan running (an annoying noise if there ever was one), but also reducing the lifetime of the battery unit itself significantly, a costly part to replace if you're a student like myself.
By saying essentially that power consumption is nothing to worry about, and that I might as well shut my machine down, you're displaying remarkable ignorance. Open mouth, insert foot.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Then an academic (who nobody liked...) bitched because he had an urgent, urgent, URGENT academic project which required the use of all the PCs during that time, so we had to kill our little game and let him take over.
And what did the motherfucker do next? Why, he installed SETI@home on all the systems and bumped his "score" to the top of the list. Why? Because he registered with the project in the name of the little distributed operating system he was developing on the side and used the results page as an advertizing site for his crappy warez.
I believe he got an email from Berkeley regarding this fun and profitable use of their systems, and he had to reregister with a less commercially-oriented title. The faggot.
bunch of statistical manipulation or what?
as of right now they have 5001586 users.
anyway im churning out almost 50 work units per day..
yeehaw!
Kablooie!
At least I don't have an idle CPU...
always run "./setiathome -nolock -nice -19" for best results!
running setiathome on:
OSX (Yikes! G4)
Irix (O2)
Redhat (P4 2.4 FSB 533)
XP same (P4 2.4 rebooted to run games)
(ok, no CLI switches on XP, but I do uncheck the only run calcs during screen saver...)
The density of prime numbers is 1/log (n)... so I'm off by a factor of 512 (I did my math with a 512 bit number). So you're right. You've merely got to grow by a factor of 27076852481648582613070451017022301791371455814216 958741899214654439\3 806735733604454495675 614232576, rather than 13863348470604074297892070920715418517182185376879 082875852397903073\9 789048695605480701785 914487078912
6612090393127249997500596107
1065390281281151998720305206
Personally I like SETI@home it runs quietly in the background the only time I interface with it is when it wants another work unit. I know that I can set it to connect automaticly and download them but I like the illusion of control over my system.
Maybe there is no intelligent life out there but if there that's the case then it is an awful lot of wasted space. If there is intelligent life out there then I hope they didn't call collect because I'd hate to get the bill on that one.
News from across the pond in London, UK is that the Mayor of London has launched a massive campaign online to get people just to vote - his reason being to stop the right wing British National Party being voted in. I like this guy, though I am cynical but it just goes to show, elections matter. What's more, if you sign up to his e-mail address list, you'll receive 3 copies of every e-mail he sends out. Probably just to make sure if the previous ones didn't the next one will get through! http://www.ken4london.org.uk/media/news/BNPlaunch
I agree with this one. I have a laptop also, it has a very loud fan which is fortunately off when doing normal work. However, I usually turn a distributed.project on when I leave the house.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
SETI is bunk. do something useful with your free CPU cycles instead.
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through