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Is Distributed Computing Being Distributed Badly?
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Distributed computing could help researchers studying climate change or Alzheimer's, but SETI@home's search for extra-terrestrial intelligence continues to dominate. Wall Street Journal columnist Lee Gomes says that's a big waste, especially because SETI doesn't seem likely to yield results: 'This continued fascination with living-room SETI comes as professional setiologists concede that early assumptions about the search for intelligent life -- notably those popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan -- have proven naively optimistic. For instance, it's now conceded there is little chance of detecting the "leaking" transmissions of another planet -- its version of "I Love Lucy" broadcasts. Those signals are too weak to stand out from the universe's background noise.' Gomes also traces the origins of SETI@home to Berkeley computer scientist David P. Anderson, and explains that users stuck with the ET search rather than medical investigations in part because of nationalistic competition. Yet Anderson no longer runs SETI@home. 'Instead, he donates his spare computer power to a global warming project. But he doesn't presume to tell others what they ought to be doing with their CPU cycles.'"
Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!
You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap.
People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
I'd rather contribute my cycles to a treatment that I have to pay for rather than no treatment at all.
I don't like the way that some animal charities get more money than children's charities. Obviously the people making donations disagree. The point is the donor decides, if someone is giving something away then they decide.
of course the WSJ would much rather you where crunching numbers for their drugs companies under the guise of "fighting cancer" or "protein folding" so your results can be turned into their profit (you didnt think that cure/treatment would be free like your CPU did you?)
From the Folding@Home FAQ:
"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Personally, I think protein folding is lame because I know that the IP generated is going to be locked up for the next 70 years.
Since people posting FUD gets modded up like crazy here I guess I have to repost this:
From the Folding@home FAQ
"Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.
Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."
For instance, you can read the 37 papers generated so far here.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
And that is why I won't do the ones for the drug companies. My grandfather was denied a chance at surviving cancer in the 60's, but the big drug companies went to the FDA against the doctor who had a good success rate for curing colon/stomach cancer because one of the chemicals used was not FDA approved. The big drug companies are not looking for cures, they are looking for drugs to sell.
Bah! Anyone running on a P4 is contributing to a global warming project.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I currently work for a pharmaceutical company, and in a visit to a research lab I learned just how much computing power they throw at these problems. They do have supercomputers, intranet clusters, etc. to try to solve these problems. They are so incredibly complex, however, that those are not enough.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Number 1 - The Seti Experiment was not a waste. We now know that there are no signals of the kind we were hoping for in the areas we looked at. This is a finding. It is not a failure. Do not underestimate the importance of negative results in science.
Number 2 - Seti was the seed-corn for the whole concept of doing scientific computing as a distributed calculation. It was directly responsible for the development of BOINC, which is a very valuable tool for all the scientific community.
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.
... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.
Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.
Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.
So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges
However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy