The Federal Government subsidizes SSI with hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and on the back end SSI recipients receives severely discounted services and cutbacks. It is not solvent by any rational definition.
Ummmmm..... Where the hell did you hear this? The converse is actually true. The federal government has been spending the Social Security surplus as if it were general tax revenue.
How many times can you swing at this one and miss?
But Social Security is bad insurance and a terrible investment.
Repeat after me: "Social Security is not an investment."
It offers a negative return on your money as a retirement program
Repeat after me: "Social Security is not a retirement program."
and negligible benefits as insurance.
Which are better than no benefits at all to those who need them.
The death benefit, for example, is $255, which isn't enough even for the most skimpy of funerals.
Repeat after me: "Social security if not life insurance. It's there to make sure you can eat at least once a day, even if you lose everything else."
I have a right to say that I want a specific fire insurance policy. If it's sold, I can buy it.
Yes, but this is not an individual policy. It's "social insurance." Insurance for society. Your retirement benefit is only one aspect and it's there to make sure you get to eat when you get old. The reason is that society benefits if you aren't starving. Society also benefits if you get to enough money to afford food after you get brain damaged in a motorcycle accident.
You have the right to buy any supplemental retirement insurance you want. In fact you'd better, assuming you want to do anything besides eat in your retirement.
I have a right to invest with about ten billion companies. If there's an investment approach, there's a fund to support it.
Yes, and you have a right to purchase any auto insurance that you want, but you still need that basic liability coverage (at least in California). If you want comprehensive, spend the extra bucks, but you can't drop your liability coverage. It's part of the social contract you entered when you got your driver's license.
What if I could invest in anything I wanted under the umbrella of social insurance?
I'm assuming that, out of self interest, you would choose the policy that you think benefits you the most, and that benefits society the least. Apparently you are short sighted enough to think that if your neighbor is starving, it doesn't affect you.
That's what Bush is proposing with Social Security Private Accounts. Tell me what's wrong with that. It seems to me that it's common sense that if you invest money for your retirement, or to protect you when you're sick and disabled, you should be able to manage that money on your own.
You are currently able to do all of that and much, much more with your own money. Go right ahead. I reccomend that everyone do exactly that. Invest for your retirement. Buy disability insurance.
Repeat after me: "The FICA taxes I paid are NOT my money. It is money that I am required to spend for the benefit of society. The benefit I receive from this is beyond the financial benefit I receive during my retirement."
And, of course, that is most definitely not why GWB wants private accounts. The purpose of private accounts is to bankrupt a successful social insurance program in order to demonstrate the "failure of the welfare state" which "places undue burden on the wealthy."
Social Security hurts the poor more than anyone else, since they don't have the investment money we do. SS/is/ their investment money. If they had the freedom to invest it as they wanted, everyone would be better off. That's my argument, pure and simple.
Another GOP myth (i.e. lie). It is predominantly the poor who receive more of social security than they paid in FICA taxes. (That would be even more true if we got rid of the damn FICA ceiling.) For the wealthy, the converse is true, which explains the GOP maneuvers to kill it.
There won't be enough younger people working to pay all of the benefits owed to those who are retiring. At that point, there will be enough money to pay only about 73 cents for each dollar of scheduled benefits.
Yeah, like this isn't another GOP tactic to make people think there's really a problem.
This entire discussion would go away if, for example, people in George W. Bush's tax bracket paid the same percentage in FICA tax that someone earning below the poverty line does.
Last year, George W. Bush paid about 1.3% of his earned income in FICA tax (about 0.6% of his adjusted gross income). His employer paid another 1.3%.
A wage earner below the poverty line paid 6.2% of their earned income in FICA tax. Their employer paid another 6.2%.
The GOP whines "flat tax" when the income tax is discussed, but they never mention it when discussing social security.
Taxes of 12-odd percent of our income are taken for SS.
That's 12.4% (6.2% of which is paid by the employer). Unless, of course, you make more that $87,000, in which case, your rate can be significantly lower. Someone with an annual income of $500,000 would pay about 2.16% in FICA Tax (Federal Insurance Contributions Act, a name we will get back to in a minute). Someone with $500,000 of unearned income (i.e. dividends, capital gains) would pay 0.00% in FICA tax. That makes the Social Security tax a regressive tax, in that low wage earners pay a higher percentage than high wage earners.
If you invested that money in private accounts, you'd be wealthy by the time you retired, even if you made some seriously bad investment decisions.
Yes, and if twinkies grew on pine trees, nobody would ever go hungry. The money is not a pension. It is not a retirement plan. It's not even yours. It's a fee you pay for the privledge of working in this country. In addition, it is an insurance policy. (Note the acronym above "Federal INSURANCE Contributions Act") It's poverty insurance. Congratulations! You're covered.
I'll assume you own a home and pay for fire insurance. I would even bet that your state or local government requires that you purchase fire insurance. With a little luck, your house will never burn down. After 20 years of good luck, are you going to start calling your insurance company to demand "return on your investment?" Feel free to try. Give them a call and tell them you're being "ripped off" because you haven't collected on your investment. Tell them that you're tired of them giving "your" money to people who weren't smart enough not to burn down their houses.
There's a difference between an investment and an expense. Insurance is an expense. Get used to it.
I know it's a social program, it's about the social contract and so on, but if the social contract is as one-sided as SS is, well, I want out. Period.
It IS a social contract. And if you want out of the contract move to Argentina, asshole. That's ssuming they'll take you. That's your way out of Social Security. Go somewhere else. Get a job making sneakers for Nike in Southeast Asia. Do it today and you'll never pay another cent in FICA.
I've never understood how so many the rich in this country think that they get no benefit from taxation. Do you think that your investments would be doing well if senior citizens were starving in the streets. Do you think that the social unrest that comes with extreme poverty is going to leave you untouched? (That's not to mention that the rich are the primary beneficiaries of most of the government spending in this country.)
You want to live here, pay your fair share and stop bitching. If you don't want to pay your fair share, what makes you think we want you here?
If you're making over $100K and you can't find another 12% of your income to stash away, you're doing something wrong. If you're making significantly less than $100K, you're probably going to need social security and you'd better hope it's there when you need it.
What kind of unit is miles per watt? I could see watt per square mile, or preferably watt per square meter.
If 80 meter radiation penetrated the ionosphere, the detection at a range of 880 km would be about 5*10^-17 W/m^2. I'm fairly sure 80 meter bounces both from the ionosphere and the earth itself, which results in some amplification over the inverse square law value.
In contrast the detection threshold for SETI@home is about 5*10^-25 W/m^2, or a factor of 100 million smaller.
Oh? Well, that certainly clears things up, no privacy concerns then, its not like anyone bribeable will have access to it...
Don't worry, it's just the administration keeping track of potential troublemakers. You wouldn't want those liberals on college campus to escape should they need to be rounded up in a time of crisis. At no point during their deportation to Gitmo will their Social Security Numbers be compromised.
Seriously, I'm not very surprised at this development given the recent George Will editorial complaining about the lack of diversity (read lack of conservative ideologues) among university faculty. I'm expecting that the administration will propose a new type of affirmitive action that will ensure that God-Fearing Creationists in the bioscience departments of public universities outnumber the heathen Darwinists.
This candidate is still the best scoring candidate that we have. That doesn't make it likely that it is ET. If you find a penny, the likelyhood that it will turn into a hundred dollar bill is small.
At some point the telescope will swing past this point again. If we don't see anything at that point, this whole discussion will go away. If we get the chance, (right now we don't have any allocated telescope time and we don't know when we will get any), we might swing the telescope that way just to lay this to rest.
Unfortunately, reporters, editors and scientists often work at cross purposes. Reporters want to sell stories, editors want to sell magazines, and scientists want the public to hear about their research. When the science won't sell the story, there is often some creative writing that goes on.
That said, I was both misquoted and quoted out of context in the New Scientist article. The crux of the issue is that there really isn't much chance that the "signal" is actually extraterrestrial or even real. The point I was trying to make to the "New Scientist" reporter was that the combination of a stable frequency between observation and the rapidly changing frequency during an observation meant that it was unlikely that it was real, and that it was likely to be a spurious signal due to noise or interference. I reiterated that several times.
I don't know how that got misinterpreted to the point where the article claims I said the signal was unlikely to be interference or noise.
We don't have any plans for reobservation or monitoring, and I'd give 1000:1 odds that there's nothing there.
It's time for my usual rant... SETI isn't a guy, SETI isn't an organization, SETI isn't a project. Saying "SETI predicts we'll find ETs by 2020" is like saying "Political Science ate tuna for lunch today"
This prediction wasn't made by "SETI," it was made by a person, Seth Shostak. Seth Shostak doesn't work for "SETI," he works for an organization called the "SETI Institute." Some people at the SETI Institute do search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would guess that most do not. As a corellary to that, most people in the world that search for extraterrestrial intelligence professionally are not associated with the SETI institute.
Seth is also an optimist and to some extent a salesman. He's not going to get donations for the SETI institute and the Allen Telescope by saying that it's never going to happen. Therefore he uses an optimistic Drake equation that results in 50,000 communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
I, on the other hand, am more inclined to base my predictions on what we actually know, rather than optimism. My computation of the Drake equation puts an upper limit to the number of civilizations in the galaxy at 750,000. It also puts a lower limit of one civilization per 2 million galaxies. We don't have enough information to make a more specific prediction than that!
This is, of course, one of the reasons why I won't use SETI@Home until it is GPL or similar [Would it be GPL with BOINC?]
Um, the SETI@home version that runs under BOINC is GPL, and has been so for some time. The BOINC client is BOINC Public License, which, because of a legal settlement, restricts commercial use until late this year. After the agreement expires, BOINC will transition to Mozilla license or GPL. I don't think we've decided which.
You are also free to download both BOINC and SETI@home and compile them on your home machine under the "anonymous platform" mechanism. That way you don't need to download binaries.
BTW, we sign our BOINC/SETI@home binary code on a non-networked machine kept under lock and key.
Give me one good reason it's not a stupid waste of time and effort and I'll change my mind.
While the freedesktop.org screenshots are pretty, they ignore that X11 was developed too long ago. To many of those items in the pretty pictures would, on most X servers, give messages ranging from "extension 'this_weeks_version_of_something_like_render' not found" to "SIGSEGV".
X has some serious problems. Too much functionality has been put into optional extensions. Not to mention that widgets and toolkits should be part of the server, not compiled into the client. We've learned some things about windowing system design in the last 25 years.
The freedesktop demos wouldn't look so good if the server was running on Solaris and was displaying clients running on the other side of a 56 kbps link.
X has outlived the usefulness of its design. It's time to move on.
Who wants to be the first to write to EV1Servers.net to tell them to cease using Linux? Paying SCO for a GPL-incompatible license to Linux invalidates the license they have to use and distribute Linux. If it were my intellectual property they were stealing, I'd be on the phone to my lawyer right now.
There is nothing preventing a BOINC project from doing just that. If someone wants to make a Java (command line) port of SETI@home, feel free to send it to us.
Running multiple projects on one machine isn't going to make the projects faster since the same amount of CPU cycles are now being divided up amongst the number of projects that you're running.
The default BOINC operating mode on single processor machines is to alternate projects to balance work between projects.
But that's not really the point. I'll assume you donate to charities. Do you only donate to one charity? Probably not, becase there is more than one worthy charity.
I think that there is more than one worthy distributed computing project as well. One of the design goals of BOINC is to allow volunteers/donors to spread their contribution among worthy projects.
Another goal is to unify the donor base. Projects may have a varying processing load depending upon data source. Some projects may be I/O intensive rather than processor intensive. Some may be network intensive. (Running an I/O intensive and a processor intensive process simultaneously DOES make better use of the machine.) It's no big secret that SETI@home has somewhat more processing capacity than it needs right now. (That may change soon, but that's another story.) BOINC allows projects and their donors to shift resources to where they are needed. Assuming everyone signs up for more than one project, excess processing capacity will flow to where it's needed.
A meta-app that exists to download yet more closed-source code without telling me... nope, that's over the line.
The SETI@home (under boinc) source code is available under the GPL. The AstroPulse code should be available shortly. Yes, now you can see how bad my code really is.
What you won't get with the code is our code signing key (which is under lock and key on an isolated machine) or the ability to distribe your version from our servers, but you are welcome to compile versions for use on your machines and/or distribute your own versions. We won't guarantee to anyone that your version doesn't erase harddrives or distribute child porn, though.
Linux users aren't getting any value from paying the licence fee. The only thing they're getting is a promise not to be sued.
It's worse than that. If they pay the license fee they lose their rights to copy, modify and distribute Linux under the GPL, since the GPL is incompatible with SCO's demands. In essence, paying SCO violates the copyright of all of the other contributors to Linux.
IMHO, Linux contributors should be bringing suit against SCO and against anyone who pays SCO their "license fee." It would be nice to see anyone agreeing to SCO's promise not to be sued end up in court over copyright violations.
I'm curious about whether there's any correlation between the signals they find most "interesting" and the locations of known extrasolar planets. I'd say if any of the interesting signals come from a place with planets, it has to be significant.
When checking for interesting signals we did check against locations of known extrasolar planets. Since our measure of "interesting" is how likely the signal (or correlation of signals and objects) is to be due to random processes. The less likely it is, the better the score.
On top of that, when we did our reobservations, we threw in a few extrasolar planets without nearby signals in the "dead spots" between observable candidates.
We're looking at the results of the reobservation now. Expect some news items on the site in the near future. No real WOW! signals so far, but there are some things that might we worth another reobservation. Call them "maybe... kinda... could be..." signals.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummmmm..... Where the hell did you hear this? The converse is actually true. The federal government has been spending the Social Security surplus as if it were general tax revenue.
Talk about your morons.
But Social Security is bad insurance and a terrible investment.
Repeat after me: "Social Security is not an investment."
It offers a negative return on your money as a retirement program
Repeat after me: "Social Security is not a retirement program."
and negligible benefits as insurance.
Which are better than no benefits at all to those who need them.
The death benefit, for example, is $255, which isn't enough even for the most skimpy of funerals.
Repeat after me: "Social security if not life insurance. It's there to make sure you can eat at least once a day, even if you lose everything else."
I have a right to say that I want a specific fire insurance policy. If it's sold, I can buy it.
Yes, but this is not an individual policy. It's "social insurance." Insurance for society. Your retirement benefit is only one aspect and it's there to make sure you get to eat when you get old. The reason is that society benefits if you aren't starving. Society also benefits if you get to enough money to afford food after you get brain damaged in a motorcycle accident.
You have the right to buy any supplemental retirement insurance you want. In fact you'd better, assuming you want to do anything besides eat in your retirement.
I have a right to invest with about ten billion companies. If there's an investment approach, there's a fund to support it.
Yes, and you have a right to purchase any auto insurance that you want, but you still need that basic liability coverage (at least in California). If you want comprehensive, spend the extra bucks, but you can't drop your liability coverage. It's part of the social contract you entered when you got your driver's license.
What if I could invest in anything I wanted under the umbrella of social insurance?
I'm assuming that, out of self interest, you would choose the policy that you think benefits you the most, and that benefits society the least. Apparently you are short sighted enough to think that if your neighbor is starving, it doesn't affect you.
That's what Bush is proposing with Social Security Private Accounts. Tell me what's wrong with that. It seems to me that it's common sense that if you invest money for your retirement, or to protect you when you're sick and disabled, you should be able to manage that money on your own.
You are currently able to do all of that and much, much more with your own money. Go right ahead. I reccomend that everyone do exactly that. Invest for your retirement. Buy disability insurance. Repeat after me: "The FICA taxes I paid are NOT my money. It is money that I am required to spend for the benefit of society. The benefit I receive from this is beyond the financial benefit I receive during my retirement."
And, of course, that is most definitely not why GWB wants private accounts. The purpose of private accounts is to bankrupt a successful social insurance program in order to demonstrate the "failure of the welfare state" which "places undue burden on the wealthy."
Social Security hurts the poor more than anyone else, since they don't have the investment money we do. SS /is/ their investment money. If they had the freedom to invest it as they wanted, everyone would be better off. That's my argument, pure and simple.
Another GOP myth (i.e. lie). It is predominantly the poor who receive more of social security than they paid in FICA taxes. (That would be even more true if we got rid of the damn FICA ceiling.) For the wealthy, the converse is true, which explains the GOP maneuvers to kill it.
Yeah, like this isn't another GOP tactic to make people think there's really a problem.
This entire discussion would go away if, for example, people in George W. Bush's tax bracket paid the same percentage in FICA tax that someone earning below the poverty line does.
Last year, George W. Bush paid about 1.3% of his earned income in FICA tax (about 0.6% of his adjusted gross income). His employer paid another 1.3%.
A wage earner below the poverty line paid 6.2% of their earned income in FICA tax. Their employer paid another 6.2%.
The GOP whines "flat tax" when the income tax is discussed, but they never mention it when discussing social security.
Taxes of 12-odd percent of our income are taken for SS.
That's 12.4% (6.2% of which is paid by the employer). Unless, of course, you make more that $87,000, in which case, your rate can be significantly lower. Someone with an annual income of $500,000 would pay about 2.16% in FICA Tax (Federal Insurance Contributions Act, a name we will get back to in a minute). Someone with $500,000 of unearned income (i.e. dividends, capital gains) would pay 0.00% in FICA tax. That makes the Social Security tax a regressive tax, in that low wage earners pay a higher percentage than high wage earners.
If you invested that money in private accounts, you'd be wealthy by the time you retired, even if you made some seriously bad investment decisions.
Yes, and if twinkies grew on pine trees, nobody would ever go hungry. The money is not a pension. It is not a retirement plan. It's not even yours. It's a fee you pay for the privledge of working in this country. In addition, it is an insurance policy. (Note the acronym above "Federal INSURANCE Contributions Act") It's poverty insurance. Congratulations! You're covered.
I'll assume you own a home and pay for fire insurance. I would even bet that your state or local government requires that you purchase fire insurance. With a little luck, your house will never burn down. After 20 years of good luck, are you going to start calling your insurance company to demand "return on your investment?" Feel free to try. Give them a call and tell them you're being "ripped off" because you haven't collected on your investment. Tell them that you're tired of them giving "your" money to people who weren't smart enough not to burn down their houses.
There's a difference between an investment and an expense. Insurance is an expense. Get used to it.
I know it's a social program, it's about the social contract and so on, but if the social contract is as one-sided as SS is, well, I want out. Period.
It IS a social contract. And if you want out of the contract move to Argentina, asshole. That's ssuming they'll take you. That's your way out of Social Security. Go somewhere else. Get a job making sneakers for Nike in Southeast Asia. Do it today and you'll never pay another cent in FICA.
I've never understood how so many the rich in this country think that they get no benefit from taxation. Do you think that your investments would be doing well if senior citizens were starving in the streets. Do you think that the social unrest that comes with extreme poverty is going to leave you untouched? (That's not to mention that the rich are the primary beneficiaries of most of the government spending in this country.)
You want to live here, pay your fair share and stop bitching. If you don't want to pay your fair share, what makes you think we want you here?
If you're making over $100K and you can't find another 12% of your income to stash away, you're doing something wrong. If you're making significantly less than $100K, you're probably going to need social security and you'd better hope it's there when you need it.
By the way, I'm rich... I'm also undertaxed.
What kind of unit is miles per watt? I could see watt per square mile, or preferably watt per square meter.
If 80 meter radiation penetrated the ionosphere, the detection at a range of 880 km would be about 5*10^-17 W/m^2. I'm fairly sure 80 meter bounces both from the ionosphere and the earth itself, which results in some amplification over the inverse square law value.
In contrast the detection threshold for SETI@home is about 5*10^-25 W/m^2, or a factor of 100 million smaller.
Don't worry, it's just the administration keeping track of potential troublemakers. You wouldn't want those liberals on college campus to escape should they need to be rounded up in a time of crisis. At no point during their deportation to Gitmo will their Social Security Numbers be compromised.
Seriously, I'm not very surprised at this development given the recent George Will editorial complaining about the lack of diversity (read lack of conservative ideologues) among university faculty. I'm expecting that the administration will propose a new type of affirmitive action that will ensure that God-Fearing Creationists in the bioscience departments of public universities outnumber the heathen Darwinists.
This candidate is still the best scoring candidate that we have. That doesn't make it likely that it is ET. If you find a penny, the likelyhood that it will turn into a hundred dollar bill is small.
At some point the telescope will swing past this point again. If we don't see anything at that point, this whole discussion will go away. If we get the chance, (right now we don't have any allocated telescope time and we don't know when we will get any), we might swing the telescope that way just to lay this to rest.
Unfortunately, reporters, editors and scientists often work at cross purposes. Reporters want to sell stories, editors want to sell magazines, and scientists want the public to hear about their research. When the science won't sell the story, there is often some creative writing that goes on.
That said, I was both misquoted and quoted out of context in the New Scientist article. The crux of the issue is that there really isn't much chance that the "signal" is actually extraterrestrial or even real. The point I was trying to make to the "New Scientist" reporter was that the combination of a stable frequency between observation and the rapidly changing frequency during an observation meant that it was unlikely that it was real, and that it was likely to be a spurious signal due to noise or interference. I reiterated that several times.
I don't know how that got misinterpreted to the point where the article claims I said the signal was unlikely to be interference or noise.
We don't have any plans for reobservation or monitoring, and I'd give 1000:1 odds that there's nothing there.
It's time for my usual rant... SETI isn't a guy, SETI isn't an organization, SETI isn't a project. Saying "SETI predicts we'll find ETs by 2020" is like saying "Political Science ate tuna for lunch today"
This prediction wasn't made by "SETI," it was made by a person, Seth Shostak. Seth Shostak doesn't work for "SETI," he works for an organization called the "SETI Institute." Some people at the SETI Institute do search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but I would guess that most do not. As a corellary to that, most people in the world that search for extraterrestrial intelligence professionally are not associated with the SETI institute.
Seth is also an optimist and to some extent a salesman. He's not going to get donations for the SETI institute and the Allen Telescope by saying that it's never going to happen. Therefore he uses an optimistic Drake equation that results in 50,000 communicating civilizations in the galaxy.
I, on the other hand, am more inclined to base my predictions on what we actually know, rather than optimism. My computation of the Drake equation puts an upper limit to the number of civilizations in the galaxy at 750,000. It also puts a lower limit of one civilization per 2 million galaxies. We don't have enough information to make a more specific prediction than that!
Currently available projects are...
SETI@home
Predictor-Protein structure prediction
Coming soon....
climateprediction.net
Folding@home
Farther in the future (i.e. pending funding)...
Einstein@home -- a search for gravitational waves.
In the conceptual stage, since sometime last week...
neuralnet.net -- studies of the nature of intelligence using neural nets and genetic algorithms
Um, the SETI@home version that runs under BOINC is GPL, and has been so for some time. The BOINC client is BOINC Public License, which, because of a legal settlement, restricts commercial use until late this year. After the agreement expires, BOINC will transition to Mozilla license or GPL. I don't think we've decided which.
You are also free to download both BOINC and SETI@home and compile them on your home machine under the "anonymous platform" mechanism. That way you don't need to download binaries.
BTW, we sign our BOINC/SETI@home binary code on a non-networked machine kept under lock and key.
Yeah, it's great, assuming you neither need nor want it to be X11 compatible.
And the OS, no I can't worship it, either, especially in a mixed environment because of
- its obscene, and often non-functional NFS automounter,
- its inablility to understand that when I say I want the local disks mounted before certain startup items are run I mean it,
- its lack of NIS compatibility,
- its assumption that a logout on the console means "unmount all volumes"
- its inability to use the 64-bit capabilities of the architecture
I'm seriously considering a move to Linux on our G5's. I'm also pretty sure I won't recommend further purchases.Is this a troll? Is Ashcroft really your last name or part of the bait?
I thought even preschoolers knew their moral obligation is to oppose unjust laws and to break them when necessary.
While the freedesktop.org screenshots are pretty, they ignore that X11 was developed too long ago. To many of those items in the pretty pictures would, on most X servers, give messages ranging from "extension 'this_weeks_version_of_something_like_render' not found" to "SIGSEGV".
X has some serious problems. Too much functionality has been put into optional extensions. Not to mention that widgets and toolkits should be part of the server, not compiled into the client. We've learned some things about windowing system design in the last 25 years.
The freedesktop demos wouldn't look so good if the server was running on Solaris and was displaying clients running on the other side of a 56 kbps link.
X has outlived the usefulness of its design. It's time to move on.
40 Megasiemens? Don't you also need to know the capacitance and inductance of the connection in order to figure out the ping time from that?
Who wants to be the first to write to EV1Servers.net to tell them to cease using Linux? Paying SCO for a GPL-incompatible license to Linux invalidates the license they have to use and distribute Linux. If it were my intellectual property they were stealing, I'd be on the phone to my lawyer right now.
BOINC was initially distributed under the Mozilla Public License. The reason for the (temporary) change to the BOINC public license is described here.
Some people have expressed interest in getting BOINC to do that. It may happen.
There is nothing preventing a BOINC project from doing just that. If someone wants to make a Java (command line) port of SETI@home, feel free to send it to us.
BOINC is primarily a client API library and server side task scheduler. The API should be callable from any language (eventually). Communication with clients is done through a web server (apache).
The default BOINC operating mode on single processor machines is to alternate projects to balance work between projects.
But that's not really the point. I'll assume you donate to charities. Do you only donate to one charity? Probably not, becase there is more than one worthy charity.
I think that there is more than one worthy distributed computing project as well. One of the design goals of BOINC is to allow volunteers/donors to spread their contribution among worthy projects.
Another goal is to unify the donor base. Projects may have a varying processing load depending upon data source. Some projects may be I/O intensive rather than processor intensive. Some may be network intensive. (Running an I/O intensive and a processor intensive process simultaneously DOES make better use of the machine.) It's no big secret that SETI@home has somewhat more processing capacity than it needs right now. (That may change soon, but that's another story.) BOINC allows projects and their donors to shift resources to where they are needed. Assuming everyone signs up for more than one project, excess processing capacity will flow to where it's needed.
The SETI@home (under boinc) source code is available under the GPL. The AstroPulse code should be available shortly. Yes, now you can see how bad my code really is.
What you won't get with the code is our code signing key (which is under lock and key on an isolated machine) or the ability to distribe your version from our servers, but you are welcome to compile versions for use on your machines and/or distribute your own versions. We won't guarantee to anyone that your version doesn't erase harddrives or distribute child porn, though.
It's worse than that. If they pay the license fee they lose their rights to copy, modify and distribute Linux under the GPL, since the GPL is incompatible with SCO's demands. In essence, paying SCO violates the copyright of all of the other contributors to Linux.
IMHO, Linux contributors should be bringing suit against SCO and against anyone who pays SCO their "license fee." It would be nice to see anyone agreeing to SCO's promise not to be sued end up in court over copyright violations.
Like there's a "right" way to write it in this character set....
When checking for interesting signals we did check against locations of known extrasolar planets. Since our measure of "interesting" is how likely the signal (or correlation of signals and objects) is to be due to random processes. The less likely it is, the better the score.
On top of that, when we did our reobservations, we threw in a few extrasolar planets without nearby signals in the "dead spots" between observable candidates.
We're looking at the results of the reobservation now. Expect some news items on the site in the near future. No real WOW! signals so far, but there are some things that might we worth another reobservation. Call them "maybe... kinda... could be..." signals.