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Interview with SETI@home Director David Anderson
CowboyRobot writes "ACM's Queue magazine interviews David P. Anderson, a research scientist at the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, who directs the SETI@home and BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) projects. SETI@home uses hundreds of thousands of home computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. FTA: "volunteer computing arose because projects such as SETI@home needed $100 million worth of computing power but didn't have the money. But there's no free lunch--a project must give participants something in return for their computer time.""
It seems that many of us are competitive enough to donate cpu time and only get back a scorecard.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'll take a share of any items that they patent as a result of SETI. Residuals ought to help pay for new computers down the line for me.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
Am I the only one that stopped participating once they switched to this new client they use now? I couldn't get it to work on either my work or home computers...
When you find the aliens, perhaps give all the Seti@home volunteers a good probing?
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't utilizing 100% of a CPU result in a significant increase in power consumption on the system versus the processor simply being idle? Sure, it's nothing compared to leaving your big CRT monitor on, but still.. I definitely notice my CPU and case temperatures are substantially higher when I have high CPU utilization going on - I can't help but wonder how much energy we're actually consuming here.
I was a seti@home classic user and switched to BOINC. It allows you to run multiple projects of all different types and apportion percentages of your resources to all the projects you subscribe to. It allowed me to perform some protein folding (which some might find more useful) while looking for ET. There are some climate modeling and I think interferometer processing may also be available. I think BOINC needs to add control of CPU utilization parameters, but it is a great step foward from the single-use screen saver distributed computing we've had up to now.
When using it, the laptop fans run all the time, and no doubt my power utilization is higher. As much as I'd like to help , I just can't justify it.
If you donate enough computer cycles, you can use the SETI@home points to buy your way off the Darwin Awards list, like a get out of jail free card... or at least keep your name from being used if you make the runners up list?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Did it occur to anyone that when SETI found a strange frequency-shifting signal out of nowhere, to check what star would be on the exact other side of the sky?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I haven't been able to upload my results for about a week now. And no the problem isn't on my end..
so everybody who contributed gets an alien in return , and would you like fries with it?
How timely considering Seti@home has been offline for a week and all the users have this really keen "Boinc is currently idle" floating screensaver.
Maybe they've been hacked by Aliens who didn't want to be discovered.
"I for one welcome our new alien hacker overlords."
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load "windows7"
The interview concentrates on the computing side of the project, the BOINC platform. While this is interesting what puzzles me more is that so far SETI@Home failed to really find anything. I would it even call it surprising given the fact that recent numerous discoveries of planets orbiting other stars give more ground to the assumption that life might be common in the Universe. Either it is not or a part of our assumptions must be wrong.
I am actually starting project called waldo@home. It will require $100 million worth of computing power to find waldo.
Anyone want in?
K.
Calling it a resource hog may not be the right term depending on what resources you are talking about. The whole point of the programs is to run your CPU to max when it would be otherwise idle. In that sense you are deliberately contributing to the wear and tear of your system, as well as any heating issues you may be concerned about. You are choosing to offset this against the value of the research, which is why I can't understand why people will donate cycles to SETI and not to something more directly useful like folding@home, but that's a value judgement.
It, however, should NOT be a resource hog in the sense of Microsoft Office, in that it slows down other programs. These programs are designed to utilize any resources you aren't using, and immediately give them back if you need to use them. This is done by setting the priority of the process just over system idle. Any cycles that would be spent idle are spent on processing instead, but when a program wants cycles, it gives them up.
Never confuse volume with power.
SETI was just fine with it's old client -- this may just be a how-to on how to loose a loyal following! SETI@Home no longer runs on my computers, and it's because I feel that the little the organizers had to do to give a "Thank You", was not being done, so why continue?
I donate cycles to several different projects using BOINC; you can even choose which projects get a higher percentage of cycles.
There probably several hundred stars in this volume, IMHO some of which will have/had intelligent life. But how long are they going to keep at it with directional RT transmitters?? I'd guess maybe 1000 years. But that's out of a 5 billion year stellar cycle! Not only is space vast, but so is time. Planetary evolutions _will_ be out-of-phase by millions & billions of years.
The user experience might have suffered a little with the switch to BOINC, but think of what has been gained: a generic distributed computing system, where projects can fairly easily package up their computational problem for SETI@home-like processing, without having to go through all the work of setting up the distributed computing infrastructure! And with BOINC, you can specify what percentage of your cpu resources you want to go to which processes... it's like the United Way for CPU cycles. (-:
I work on the LIGO project, which is searching for gravitational waves using several huge interferometers (one out in the desert of Eastern Washington at the old Hanford Works, were Plutonium was made for the Manhattan Project; the other currently being belted by the hurricane down in Louisiana, 3002 km away). I was really impressed by the Einstein@home talk at the most recent meeting. The computation by the Einstein@home project is really very valuable to the LIGO project. If you want to run Einstein@home, it will really help LIGO.
Some pictures from LIGO: http://www.livejournal.com/users/nibot/tag/ligo
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO
I have contributed probably a good 600-625 work units to them so far, and I'd like to know how far those clock cycles have gone toward the research.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Folding@home is hosted by Stanford University and studies protein folding, a biochemical process with implications for fighting disease.)
Amusingly, our structural predictions based on protein folding are just down the hallway from me, in the Baker Labs, which uses a lot of cheap Linux computers to get even better results.
I think Baker's predictions rank usually 2nd to 5th, and the Stanford predictions are below that rank.
It's great to see everyone trying to get all this done!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
he's right, the BOINC thing is probably the worst programmed piece of software i have ever installed in 15years, the quality is so poor its astonishing, shameful really
.PDB debug files that are no use to your average user yet are installed on every single installation using massive amounts of bandwidth (10mb+ when the original was 700k) the install on windows is over 15mb ! hahaha
i dont know who wrote it or managed it, but i have seen better programming from 10year olds in school than this project, its as if they havent even grasped how to write software, granted windows can be a piece of buggy crap but it aint rocket science or ASM, crashes randomly, takes massive resources, leaves the drive littered with
and when you complain/point out bugs on their website they just ignore you and carry on patching their broken app when the whole architecture is broken,
its a memory/space hog, leaks mem , laughable GUI (seriously bad), complicated login procedures (using a 32bit MD5 hash for a password that the user is supposed to remember/type in), screensaver has terrible problems with various graphics cards, inconsistant, no tailing of logfiles, the problems just go on and on and on
its as if someone sat down and said "whats the orst we could do"
i would hate to know how many users have left the project because of it, but its ceratinly opened my eyes to how good projects can go bad in such a short time
if i was the project manager i would junk the whole thing and start again from scratch , i certainly wouldnt accept it in my commercial work and i would be handing the programmers their unemployment cards if thats the quality we can expect from an established project such as seti
seriously, if you want to see what a beautifully programmed application (seti classic) can be turned into by the worst programming ever , go install BOINC
Disclaimer -- I run a distributed search engine project so my opinion is biased.
It was noted above that while there are plenty of CPU sucking projects they don't seem to have end results that can actually be used in daily life.
OK, d.net proved the point by breaking crypto that was thought to be too strong. Fine, done that, why waste CPU cycles further?
SETI@Home -- okay, its cool to search for aliens, but lets be realistic here -- its cool, but not exactly useable.
Lots of effort, heck, lots is too small of a word to describe amount of CPU that went into these projects! Cool scoreboards, teams etc, but what are the end results for millions of users after good 10 years of d.net's existance!?!?! Not much.
This is why I created my own project to build something that I use every day -- search engine. I can live without aliens or crypto, but I sure as hell can't live without a good WWW search engine. Can you?
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
My reason for running SETI: If I find ET, maybe, just maybe I might have a chance to meet Jodie Foster. I'm sure some math genius out there can work it the statistics (close to zero), but in a Dumb & Dumber kind of way... I still have a chance..
-- somewhat_distant
I say "bah" on your emotional "theory of evolution." If you want an answer about extraterrestrial life, just ask the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Seti isn't BOINC. BOINC isn't Seti.
Seti@home was not fine with the old client. There were easily exploitable ways of running up your CPU time that brought into question the validity of the results being returned. It became less a question of donating CPU time to science, and more of an attempt to show the world how big your geek-dick is. "I've got blah blah blah hours on Seti" started to become the equivilent of "I just bought a new H2"
BOINC is a huge improvement over the old client. It does require more RAM to run than the old client, but the infrastructure created by BOINC can (and is) being used by a number of different projects. With BOINC you can now split CPU time between the projects that you're attached to. Your computer can now split a user defined amount of time between finding ET, Modeling for CERN, Seeking out gravitational waves, doing Climate research.
The old Seti system was good, but it's outdated. The new client is evolution in action. The majority of the bugs I've seen are server side, and are mostly related to being one of the largest distributed processing endevours in the world. Give it another shot with the latest versions of BOINC and Seti. Though you'll have to wait a couple days, they're still cleaning up some database issues.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
SETI@Home has always had an inferior statistics system than Distributed.net, and I really think the client is also inferior. BOINC just makes it much less approachable. SETI classic and DNET both are things you can pretty seemlessly run on your parents computer, etc... BOINC requires a more elaborate registration procedure, forcing you to keep ahold of a ginormous string of characters for an account name (rather than having a simple account name / password combo) that I'm forced to search through my gmail every time i must use it.
DNET and SETI Classic allowed you to install the client (or, even without installing, just running the client) and inputing your email addy. simple. lots of new people attracted to the project.
i like the idea of having multiple project cores, but seriously, work on the implementation!! it shouldn't be so complicated!
As I posted below, somone's already doing this: http://totl.net/STI/
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
So did you switch to another prject (like folding@home) or are you no longer
contributing cycles to any distributed projects?
*sigh* back to work...
I agree - 13702 work units here and I won't be contributing another.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I wish BOINC could also be designed to use graphics cards - ala the BrookGPU project - to help with the number crunching duties.*
Granted, it would require both Nvidia and ATi to donate with the efforts (especially ATi and their stingy Linux commitment).
I'd love to see some old machines with all their PCI card slots filled up with 3dfx Voodoo cards and the like helping future scientific endeavors.
*Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the BOINC software rendering the SETI@home graphics courtesy of OpenGL, but I think there are more noble tasks the GPU could be harnessed to work on...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
and not a single "Mr. Anderson" joke :(
Projects like SETI at home are basically looking for signals someone is intentionally sending to us, at an "obvious" frequency and with signal structure dumbed down so a less sophisticated civilization (us, with near certainty) could recognize it as such.
If you believe that the speed of light is a law of nature that can't be trifled with, then no civilization out there would know of our existence unless they were within (prob. well within) about 100 light years. That really cuts down the available volume of space.
However, Fermi's paradox says that they should have already been here to visit us and have known of our existence before we had RF technology, and possibly even before we were human. If this knowledge of our existence were preserved (even updated), I'm not sure they would sit 100 light years away and beam a radio signal at us to get our attention.
And now we're in the realm of Arthur C. Clark...
"The impossible often has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks" - Dirk Gently
Ahhh, but SETI is looking for aliens who are trying to talk to us. Setting up a beacon that targets a set of stars and sends them a message, each in succession, repeating for millions of years doesn't seem that far-fetched or difficult - no moving parts are required, after all, all it would take is good radiation shielding for the computer.
The signal could be quite strong indeed, if based on someplace like Mercury, from just solar power. With just a 100m square array ET could be 200 light years out with your assumptions, and that's something a lone nutjob could set up given reasonable space trave technology. A government-sized effort could be several orders of magnitude better.
SETI is interesting precisely because it should be pretty easy to find any alien life that wants to be found, and yet we keep not finding it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I see some comments about S@h's recent bugs, and come on its still somewhat in beta (as S@h classic still runs right next to it, new sign ups are forced to use the BOINC client but classic is still open to current members) thats no excuse, but it helps to explain some of the strain.
Its not really about seti@home anymore, they had a system set up that worked more or less for them since 99. What they are really doing is removing the enormous cost (enormous even after its been reduced from a direct super computer) of setting up a distributed computing network, up until boinc it was tons of different standards that each in house dev team had to make from scratch. boinc is a system that lowers the cost (in terms of time and knowledge) to enter the distributed market.
This is a mostly good thing, unless you have some n00bs like BURP (rendering project) that make a bug that nukes your local machine account info. This is mostly balanced out by the ability to run multiple projects at once, a good example is that seti@home has been down for about a week, but BOINC still runs and you can run other projects seamlessly.
In 5 years it will be even easier to enter the distributed market, you will never see BOINC or its derivatives take over classical supercomputers, but as the costs go down you will see much more innovative uses for this computing power.
There is truth in humor.
A really good question is what effect does seti@home have on the environment. How much energy is being consumed by the project? An entire medium sized power plant is my guess. Think about it. Would one less power plant on Earth have a significant impact on global warming?
I have several 80 watt CPUs that have been crunching on work units for years. I am in the 10,000+ work_unit.sah club and I'm only just an average small time user. I think seti@home (and BOINC) have about a million active users. Could seti@home be consuming 300 megawatts or more?
Yikes!
I've been a contributor to seti@home when it just started for some years. Maybe I was just being idealistic (and young ;-) but I thought it was a cool project. I still do, more or less, but..well, you know how it goes. After some years, I had to fix or reinstall my computers, and somehow, I never downloaded it again. Maybe I just lost interest too, and then with that more user-unfriendly boinc system, I just thought to myself it's not worth the trouble anymore. After all, it DOES cost you something, and let's face it; after years, there is still little to show for.
;-) would be better off; users get an actual financial gain, and the company gets huge resources for comparatively little money.
I have always been wondering, though, why *commercial* companies don't see the value in such distributed cpu systems? I mean, there are, for instance, commercial genetic-engineering companies, trying to solve the riddle of DNA strings... which usually costs a lot, for computertime on supercomputers. Now, it would seem to me that a system like boinc (but not exactly boinc, because I think it's not allowed for commercial use) would be financially a far better deal. Just give the 'users' some mild financial gain, and they will have a userbase by the millions in no time, while for the company itself it would still be cheaper then if they had to pay for regular supercomputer-time.
So, everybody (well, at least the capitalists
so why don't we see things like this, even after all these years?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
. . . was this lousy certificate
What?
The thought of an old machine filled with 5-6 voodoo 2 cards is scary. I'm sure it would be much more efficient just to use the money you'd spend on electricity to buy a new machine and use the CPU.
I've tried BOINC, and other than the fact that it's a piece of buggy crap, I hate it, and won't have it on my computer.
:-)
Same here. But, old client (V3.08) works fine, at least at 4-5 computers that I have S@H running.
BTW, ~2800 units, ~28k hours.
I've got Karma to burn, I guess so I'll risk it and voice my opinion.
What possible good is SETI@Home? Isn't working on Cancer or Folding proteins a much better use of the CPU time then trying to have some fantasy about Aliens trying to communicate with us?
It is very unlikely that we will ever find anything. If we do find it people will not believe it. There would probably be so little of the signal that it we would never understand it and it would be so old that likely the thing that sent it has long been dead. So what's the point?
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I contribute to the Folding @ Home project; it's better than SETI -- it looks for a cure to cancer (among other terminal deseases like Cystic Fibrosis) instead of looking for aliens
that, coupled with the fact that SETI hasn't gotten any new telescope time in , what, 3 or 4 years means that you're just re(re)cruching old SETI data
if anyone decides to switch or start doing Folding @ Home here, please, consider signing up under my team -- team 33 -- from [H]ard|OCP (www.hardocp.com), page here: www.hardfolding.com
Ok, so we are searching the skies for signals transmitted by aliens.
Is anyone on Earth sending signals to the aliens?
It seems a bit silly to expect aliens to do something that we can't be bothered / are too chicken to do ourselves...
Seti-Boinc is crap, and now it's toast. Seti-Classic rocks!
Seti-Boinc is an object lesson in how to screw a good idea with incompetent design. I've been listening to the 'give it another few days' excuse for a year now, and so have you. If they ever transfer all the Seti-Classic people over to Boinc it will fall over and never come up, which is why Classic is still running.
All I know is that these folks are searching for extraterrestrial life, using some serious math, and yet can't send my long-forgotten password because they changed to BOINC. Yikes. What gives? -j
If you're bored with searching for Aliens (who only want to rape our women and eat our children anyway), try this worthy project:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
So, let us run your grid software and contribute cycles to your projects instead! What are you waiting for?
I am that way, & I admit it:
:)
I love to get a NEW system (CPU, ram, etc./et all, the parts that matter for SETI), & see those average times drop each time, & by HUGE margins (as I only buy a new rig every 4-5 years, just like cars)...
E.G.->
1.) AMD K6-III @ 450mhz back in 1999 when this program of SETI as a community effort started... back then, w/ THAT oldie rig?
It took me 24 hours exactly to complete a single unit
2.) Circa 2001-2003 a Dual Abit VP-6 Pentium III 1ghz SMP rig took me down to:
6 hours 58 minutes...
3.) Currently, using an Abit IC7-Max 3 mobo w/ a Pentium 4 3.2ghz (running my SETI from a CENATEK RocketDrive solid-state "virtual disk" w/ backing power supply)?
I am down to 3 hr 41 min 53.0 sec!
(My actual processing time is around 2 hrs. & 30 minutes + some change, but those first 50 units on the old AMD K6-III @ 450mhz? Kick my butt, avg. times-wise still... I keep trying to 'drag it lower' with newer rigs is all!)
*
SETI is not only a NOBLE cause, & quite possibly a very worthwhile one in our future as a planet & hopefully, member of yes, an intergalactic community: Only thing is? If I was looking down @ us, I would tell our gov't.'s one thing:
"Learn to live together first. We don't want your kind of trash out here where OUR children play... you're too full of 'viruses of the spirit' (i.e.- It's voluntary, & like OpenSource &/or Linux, has its noble features, showing humanity can actually do something worth while every ONCE in awhile & work together @ it, internationally... not too often THAT happens imo & experience (40 years worth)... apk
In the end, there will be 3000 dead Americans but no democracy.....Which idiots supported this war?
So, they would have been better off under Saddam? They didn't just elect an interim govt? They are not currently working on a constitution? Democracy is ok for you, but not for the barbarians in Iraq? I guess we could have said "Screw France and England" 50 years ago.
I supported this war, and not afraid to say so, and without the need to be anonymous, as you have chosen to do. The only problem is that we should have done this back in the first Gulf war, instead of waiting 12 years later. Whether you think I am an idiot or not makes no difference. I certainly do not need reassurance from someone like you.
I may disagree with many things Bush has done, including a few on how the war was conducted, but I fully support the removal of Saddam, our troops risking life and limb to help the Iraqis, and my taxes going to this purpose. I'm a vet, so was my father. I know the risks because I lived with them. We both served so you could voice your opinion here.
Me, I will post my opinions with my name attached, for all to see. I have nothing to hide, nothing to fear, and believe what I believe strong enough to NOT be anonymous.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Seti-Boinc is an object lesson in how to screw a good idea with incompetent design.
Right, I missed the O'Reiley book about "properly setting up massive distributed computing projects."
Tell me, what was so incompetent about the design? Or anything else about this project for that matter? Seti-classic is done. Period. there's nothing more to be learned from the project, you're just re-working the same units over and over. That phase of the project is dead. Move on.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I participate in Folding@Home. Gives a small pleasure that your CPU is actually useful for curing cancer (well, not partly useful) rather than just for playing FPS games and playing rock music. Anyway, any idea what is the world's largest distributed computing (volunteer computing) project? Is it SETI or Folding?
Make sure you computer understands Spanish. They've landed around here and I believe they're taking over.
exponentiation ezine
I have the new BOINC client installed on Red Hat, and 90% of the time it's dead, or not doing anything, or having errors loading the data, or not having data at all to be loaded... pure crap compared to the classic one.
:) but I am really pissed because of the violation of 'Don't break something that works'.
I admint the idea is good and definetly has potential, but the implementation is not worthy even a Google beta status. It does not work, in over two weeks I had 3 units processed completely, and the stats don't show event that.
Not to mention that I was robbed a ton of credits when they cut over from the classic site... (though tehy say they do another sync).
Lot's of talk and blah blah and poor piss execution... I gues they decided to improve their management recently and obviously did a great job at that... I guess they need a SETI search among themselves, ha ha ha, ok lame...
Chile.
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force- if necessary- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002
Which idiots find a way to work their fucked up left wing politics into any discussion, hmmm, fuckwit?
Shits like you should be dropped into the more unfriendly corners of the Earth so you can get a clue, even if it's your last clue.
Your attitude is a big part of why so many people have left SETI and BOINC and will never go back. You're an asshole, the people running SETI and BOINC have been assholes, their stuff looks like it was written and run by assholes, and they will never get another CPU cycle of any computer I control. Stick that in your pointy-headed asshole and smoke it.
Scientific American had an article that suggusted any civilization advanced enough to have colonized a couple systems is almost certainly beaming communication instead of broadcasting it. Lots of luck setting the improbability drive to a location in the beam path.
So to the over one hundred thousand innocent Iraqi people who have been murdered since the invasion, you are saying to them "no life is better than life under Saddam?"
Also the US is not a democracy, it is a republic. Each state can choose it's own form of government, and the president is chosen by a vote of the states, not the people.
I understand BOINC is open source, but the plugin or extension it is actually using for computation is closed source.
Also the previous clients had fully closed source.
I understand there is a confidentiality issue in opening the source while the very same client is still in "productive" use, but after the client has been obsoleted there is none anymore.
As the client consumes per person and especially globally lots of CPU time, releasing the source code after would build credibility to the future projects and also to the former project.
Nowadays we just have any project's authors word the CPU is used for that purpose it is claimed to be used.
"The thought of an old machine filled with 5-6 voodoo 2 cards is scary. I'm sure it would be much more efficient just to use the money you'd spend on electricity to buy a new machine and use the CPU."
Yes, there is the energy efficiency argument, but that logic excuses the energy/environmental costs in acquiring new equipment. If you buy a new videocard (or a new CPU) for this project, you increase demand for it and consequently, more of the videocards (or CPUs) are built. Making processors and related tech requires raw materials, water, and of course, electricity. So when you factor this in, it can be reasonably argued that it is best to use existing equipment to their fullest until they wear out (and then recycle the parts) instead of going out and acquiring new equipment because it crunches numbers faster.
Besides, PCI based videocards are pretty rare. Its not like there are mobos out there up to the task with multiple AGP card slots... There's probably a ton of Voodoo1/Voodoo2/Voodoo3 and TNT/TNT2/GeForce/GeForce2/GeForce3 PCI cards collecting dust.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
It would be rather easy to find the other side of the sky, since it is exactly opposite. The sky is pretty static(as shown by the zodiac signs) because Earth is not moving much relative to the rest of the galaxy, at least not considering the distances involved.
Well I took a look and that would give Virgo, maybe a bit towards Libra as the source. Virgo has several interesting and a few close(10 lyrs) stars.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
That may be common on some BOINC-type projects, but I've found that people crunching for ClimatePrediction.net to be more of the concerned variety.
;-)
There is still some emphasis on stats, but overall the activity surrounding the related Open University course and discussion of climate change and ecology tend to eclipse competition for its own sake.
CPDN is the most demanding distributed computing research project I've seen and narcissists fall by the wayside pretty quickly. What we COULD use are more geeks.
So to the over one hundred thousand innocent Iraqi people who have been murdered since the invasion, you are saying to them "no life is better than life under Saddam?"
No one seriously believed the 100,000 number other than the big media outlets out to get Bush at all costs. Check out this analysis at Slate.com - not what one would consider a Bush-friendly source. It's statistics at its worst.
A fact-based, yet still not Bush-friendly source is iraqbodycount.net. Their number is 25-28K.
Now, clearly this is tragic. But consider it in perspective. This isn't Eden where we went in and started shooting up naked people eating fruit. These people were being killed to the tune of 300,000 over the previous decade, where the government sponsored rape rooms for wives and daughters of dissidents, killed political opponents and underperforming athletes by tossing them into "people shredders" and flat-out poison gas attacked its own citizens who stepped out of line. These murders are documented and/or verifiable from excavation of the hundreds of mass graves around Iraq where they bulldozed in the bodies.
Now, consider the current deaths occurred during a time of actual War, that the people have been liberated, and that the insurgents have to import terrorists because the Iraqi people are not sympathetic to their cause. Then please try to restate your case how the Iraqi people were better off under Hussein.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)