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Space Software Technology

New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects 236

Posted by CowboyNeal from the time-shares-available dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc" will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."
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New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects More

New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects

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  • Authentification (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Angram ( 517383 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:33PM (#7178973)
    What kind of authentication process will be in place? Basically, what will stop someone from using this for illegal/dishonest purposes under the guise of academic research? Will this be exploitable for virus/spam propogation?

    • What projects you process data packets for seems to be user selected. So, user choice is the authentication process.

      I suppose there will be the SETI@home team people choosing which projects are initially offered, so that would be be the authentication initally to make sure you weren't getting shady non-academic data.

      But, with that said, I don't see why we'd necessarily need to limit ourselves to academic data. I think it would be cool to use a distributed computing application for a massive render farm

    • Re:Authentification (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lord Prox ( 521892 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:26PM (#7179393) Homepage
      BOINC is not a Distributed Computing Program. It is a architcture for running DC apps. Good crypto will be used to ensure that a system (server) gets clean data and clients only run apps from that server. You the user will select what DC project you will run on BOINC.
      Really all boinc does is help reduce development time for DC projects by establishing a common framework to work within. Someone could run a "Build a better Smallpox program" to build a super Bucket-O-Death (tm) and advertise it a traveling salesman NP hard app to help the girlscouts sell cookies more efficently. There are no safegaurds (AFAIK) on that type of No-NO use.

      Is mankind ready for this type of supercomputer (UltraComputer? Hypercomputer?) Seti@Home already blows away all other supercomputers on the planet (I think by at least 1 order of magnitude or so I was told), now with all these different DC projects runnning under the same framework things should get interesting.
      Perhaps the IETF will formalise a protocol for DC and take the next step toward a global grid processing system. Think Jabber protocol turned RFC proposal/standards track.
      • Scary thought: WMD@Iraq Scarier thought: WMD@Home

      • Seti@Home already blows away all other supercomputers on the planet

        Where did you get this idea? I'd honestly like to know. It's very misinformed.

        There are many problems for which Seti@Home distributed-style computing would be worthless. One of the major selling points of real supercomputers [psc.edu] are the interconnects between nodes. Big problems require fast interconnects [myrinet.com] so that nodes don't have to wait for data from other nodes working on other parts of the same problem. The Internet is way too slow for p

    • Basically, what will stop someone from using this for illegal/dishonest purposes under the guise of academic research?

      What, dishonest? You mean like running out of data to process, but lying to all your users and feeding them the same data over and over, while their systems burn energy by the megawatts, running useless calculations?

      • Is that true? Does anyone have more details on that subject?
      • What, dishonest? You mean like running out of data to process, but lying to all your users and feeding them the same data over and over, while their systems burn energy by the megawatts, running useless calculations?

        For those of you haven't heard this idiocy before, shortly after the project began, a bug in the server code caused the same 100 workunits to be sent to everyone many times over. Of course the bug arose on a weekend, while I was in Chicago for a conference, and David Anderson was on vacation

  • suggested use (Score:3, Funny)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:34PM (#7178979) Journal
    maybe thye culd use disributed computingto fix all teh speling errors on salshfot!

  • Let calculate Pi! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stfvon007 ( 632997 ) <<enigmar007> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:34PM (#7178982) Journal
    It would be interesting to use this to try and find more digits in pi. Maybe we will finally find a repeat. Barring that we will have very accurate circles :) There are a great deal more mathmatical problems that would benefit greatly from this!

    • Re:Let calculate Pi! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by shfted! ( 600189 )
      The calculation of Pi is not a parallel problem. Granted, a method exists for calculating the nth digit of Pi, but this algorithm increasing exponentially for greater n. Also, it hasn't been proven to be infinitely accurate, iirc. So really, calculating Pi using the seti@home network would be terribly inefficient and a waste of resources, which would be much better used for protein research or something with scientific value.
    • You mean more than 3.14?

      Oh Gawd, head hurting, can't go on... Rosebud...

    • Re:Let calculate Pi! (Score:4, Funny)

      by N7DR ( 536428 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:56PM (#7179159) Homepage
      It would be interesting to use this to try and find more digits in pi. Maybe we will finally find a repeat.

      If by "find a repeat" you mean "find a sequence of digits that repeats itself ad infinitum", or if you mean "a non-negligible sequence of digits that repeats itself at least once", then I'm afraid you'll be out of luck no matter how many times the age of the universe you want to spend looking, since pi is irrational.

      The perspicacious will have noticed the sleight of hand covered by the use of "non-negligible". I leave the selection of a more exact phrase as an exercise for the reader (who clearly has plenty of time on his hands, since he's reading slashdot...).

      • I build my own program that does this. I got the results back, too! It was really fast.

        3.141
        >Repeat found. The number "1" has been repeated.
      • "If by "find a repeat" you mean "find a sequence of digits that repeats itself ad infinitum", or if you mean "a non-negligible sequence of digits that repeats itself at least once", then I'm afraid you'll be out of luck no matter how many times the age of the universe you want to spend looking, since pi is irrational.

        The perspicacious will have noticed the sleight of hand covered by the use of "non-negligible". I leave the selection of a more exact phrase as an exercise for the reader (who clearly has plen
        • Just because PI is infinitely long, and contains a non repeating set of digits, does not mean that it contains all possible sequences of digits.

          Here's a sequence that is also infinitely long and is non-repeating: 1221112222111112222221111111...

          It does not contain the Linux source code "number."
        • Your phrase "non-negligible" is defined as anything less than infinitely long.

          Actually, it's not.

          I am slightly puzzled by the fact that my post is modded funny. True, it is written in a semi-humourous vein, but actually it was quite serious. And there is a quite precise mathematical definition for what I slipped in as "non-negligible"; I just couldn't be bothered to go to the trouble of extending the post by a silly amount (and trying to do it in ASCII) just to make the posting mathematically sound,

      • We might not find a repeat, but perhaps we will find a sequence of numbers that reproduce famous works of art (like DNA/Shakespeare's infinite number of monkeys).

        I'm guessing, though, that stating the position of pi to start at would take a similar amount of data to the original book/song/movie, so it wouldn't be that great a form of compression. Neat to ponder, though!

    • Trivial!

      #define PI 3
    • 206 billion [berkeley.edu] isn't enough? I like that graph at the bottom. 10^14 digits by 2010!

      (these people [u-tokyo.ac.jp] actually did the calculation, but don't have much to look at on their site)
    • Unfortunately, that would mean I needed a longer sig. With the /. limitations, there's no point in calculating more than a couple of decimals.

  • I think theres better distributed computing causes (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jonas the Bold ( 701271 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:34PM (#7178987)
    Not cooler, but better. More important ones, like folding [stanford.edu], for instance. A very (VERY) small chance of finding intelligent life out there isn't quite worth it, I don't think.
    • As you said, SETI is cool. Who wouldn't want to be the owner of the computer that discovers intelligent, extra-terrestrial life? However I think the coolness is what is needed to attract volunteers... while protein-folding is more relevant to immediate advances in science/ medicine, it lacks the mystique of SETI and the unknown factor which the general public can easily grasp. SETI is romantic, protein folding isn't - although I agree it is more important. Having said that, I'm more likely to donate my sp
    • A good system to let you run one well-supported client program but choose your projects is a great idea.

      For example, while SETI is cool, I'm currently running ZetaGrid. For a while I was running folding, but they don't seem to be working on the screen saver as promised. Given my interests, I most want to donate my time to something related to evolution. I have tried Evolution@home, and while it does work in WINE, it's not automated enough for general use. So I'll be glad to have more choice, and to not

    • I used to run SETI@home because I thought it was more 'adventurous' than other distributed computing systems. But then, one day I thought, what are the chances that we will find extraterrestrial life vs. the chances that I will get cancer? I now run folding@home.
    • Indeed. And there are dozens of distributed computing projects, so everyone can find one to his likings.

      Click here for an overview of active distributed computing projects [aspenleaf.com]. Also have a look at the lists at the bottom of the page: these are projects you donate some of your own time to, instead of spare CPU cycles (from Distributed Proofreaders [pgdp.net] to The Hunger Site [thehungersite.com]).

      Further info on distributed computing: Bottomquark has reviewed [bottomquark.com] a number of projects.
  • Can I run SETI@Home over a dialup connection?

    Do aliens run SETI@home, also?

    Can I run it on my palm pilot?
    • Yes. My modem connection works just fine. I use SetiQueue so I don't always have to dial when I need a work unit. The new version "BOINC" will not support SeqiQueue as it will cache files locally for you.

      Probably. I think they are skewing the results so that we get a big "no, we don't exist".

      Yes. If you use your palm pilot for shimming the corner of your computer, technically it would be running ON your palm pilot.
    • Do aliens run SETI@home, also?

      No, they run STI@home. I also run a simple version of STI@home in daily conversations.
  • BOINK/BOINC has a totally different meaning in countries outside the US.

    This client could have hundreds of millions of people boinking all over the world.

    Imagine... the population explosion.

    This could be the world's biggest cluster....

    This is not the first time this mistake has been made.
    I remember when FoxPro for windows was first released
    with buttons that deppressed and bounced back up(Oh Wow).
    Their (Fox Software (not yet M$)). Caught onto this
    boinking the buttons theme. When they did their first
    demo

  • Time == money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:37PM (#7179014) Journal
    Unless you give it away for free.

    Is the cost of power that you use while you are running these programs tax-deductible?

    Doing something out of the goodness of your heart is awfully sweet. Getting the government to lower your taxes because of it is sweeter.
    • Problem: do it based on # of clock cycles, and some rich bastard will set it going with a Beowolf cluster for no other purpose than to get tax breaks... he might even claim the cluster as a business expense! Give the tax break based on individual participation, and someone could get a Zaurus and run BOINC on it, and get every bit as much back in taxes as Mr. Rich Bastard. So, therein is the problem: screw those that can't afford a personal Beowolf, or screw those that can.
      • It's not a problem. You're donating the expense of running a CPU (or many CPUs) - More electricity == more tax break, and if it's 100% used for that you might get depreciation back too. Fiar is tax breaks proportional to costs, not "per person".

  • Intelligent life? (Score:4, Funny)

    by LittleBigScript ( 618162 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:37PM (#7179015) Homepage Journal
    Can I use it to find intelligent life in my apartment complex? The neighbors are keeping me up all night with their parties...
  • I installed the advanced toolbar from google and turned on the client to do calculations in idle time. I observed system processes and saw that the client takes up to 97% of the CPU resources. Even mozilla becomes slow. Is anyone else facing similar issues?

  • License review, not Free Software or OpenSource (Score:3, Informative)

    by ciaran_o_riordan ( 662132 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:41PM (#7179046) Homepage
    yeh, I just had a read of the license-1.0.txt

    2.1. The Initial Developer Grant.
    Subject to the restrictions on commercial use set forth below, the Initial Developer hereby grants You a world-wide, Royalty-free, non-exclusive license, subject to third party intellectual property claims:


    (a) to use, reproduce, modify, display, perform, sublicense and distribute the Original Code (or portions thereof) with or without Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work, provided, however, that You are not permitted under said license to create, sell, or distribute commercial products based on the Source Code;
    So, without permission to sell it or to sell derived works, it's not Free Software, or OpenSource.

    (this is important, because it means you can't integrate the code into existing commercial software, and it's incompatible with the GNU GPL, so you can't integrate this code into the majority of the software packages that come with a distro)

    • Re:License review, not Free Software or OpenSource (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lord Prox ( 521892 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:15PM (#7179304) Homepage
      Do you know why? United Devices [ud.com] filed a law suit over some bullshit IP non-sense. BOINC did not have the $ to fight so they had to give in. One of the stipulations was that it could not be used for commercial purposes for the next 18 months. I tried to find the page on BOINC's web site that had the lawsuit info but can't. Rest assured that they will make it OpenSource (OSI approved) as soon as possible.
      • "Do you know why? United Devices filed a law suit over some bullshit IP non-sense."

        I really do not like United Devices. The last time I checked, their distributed computing services only ran on x86 machines under Windows, and they did not specify if they were compatible with AMD chips (Intel is a major contributor). No Linux, no OS X, forget it...

  • Just had to say it (Score:5, Funny)

    by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:47PM (#7179099) Homepage Journal
    Scientific progress goes "BOINC"?

  • Is it Skynet yet? (Score:3, Funny)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @09:48PM (#7179103) Homepage
    How many computers does it take before they finally "wake up"?

  • Optimizations? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:05PM (#7179227) Homepage Journal
    Will this new client allow for platform specific optimizations? For instance, the RC client took advantage of Altivec which allowed for Macs to absolutely dominate the small computer benchmarks in those ranking whereas they did not perform nearly as well in the SETI rankings. And just so the Wintel weenies don't feel left out and flame me, other platform specific optimizations could also be taken advantage of for Pentium specific calls or even SGI specific calls.

  • A Better Way (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:20PM (#7179341)
    I wrote my Honors thesis [theari.com] on general-purpose distributed computing. I also implemented something I think more projects should use, which is presence awareness and work accounting. No more downloading of work units and sitting on them without ever uploading the results - with my system, you can immediately reassign a work unit when someone stops working on it. This eliminates double simultaneous assignment of individual work units. I used Jabber [jabber.org] for my communications, and it would be pretty easy to implement hashing and cryptographic signing of work units and shared objects to ensure the integrity of your computation.

  • Support a good cause (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DeadBugs ( 546475 )
    Folding@Home [stanford.edu] is a great cause. We all know this. Finding a cure for a terrible disease is very noble.

    But to really make it that much better you could sign up using my name and team number and help me crush the competition and fold the most protiens. Just install Folding@Home and use Screen Name: PRIME1 & Team#: 2630

    If you are already using it from Google and just running the default setting make the change today. You will feel better knowing you helped out a good cause.

    You can check my team st [stanford.edu]
    • Actually, instead of helping random people on Slashdot, I prefer to join the Linux-related teams - maybe high rankings (and higher Linux usage stats) will convince more interesting projects to support Linux.
    • Medical research receives millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars a year. Private charities donate, universities donate research in the form of science and laboratory labor, the government funds research and offers grants, and private individuals who've had a personal interaction with a particular disease strike up their drum bands to thump for whatever cause is now very near and dear to their heart due to the affliction of a loved one.

      SETI has to fight and claw
    • Folding@Home is a great cause. We all know this. Finding a cure for a terrible disease is very noble.

      I'm very curious about how and why you think these two are related. If you'd actually read the papers that have resulted from this project, you'd find that they're doing really interesting theoretical work that bears little relation to human disease. It's worthy research, but the link to curing Alzheimer's or BSE is tenuous at best - it just makes it seem more relevant.

      I do agree it's a more useful appl

  • So basically... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GrodinTierce ( 571882 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:43PM (#7179512) Journal
    they're going to do what distributed.net [distributed.net] has already done, provide a client that can work on multiple projects, chosen by the user. Oh well, in this game I suppose it's really the size of your user base that matters.
  • Does the fact that they are finally open-sourcing the client mean that there will eventually be a Seti@Home xscreensaver [jwz.org] module that actually works?

  • noooo my stats! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) * <asv@@@ivoss...com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:49PM (#7179963) Homepage Journal
    From the FAQ:

    What will happen to my workunit totals?

    BOINC keeps track of your computer's work in terms of actual computation, not workunits. This is necessary because BOINC projects may have workunits of many different "sizes". Because of this change, all SETI@home/BOINC accounts will start with zero credit.

    So after 4 years of building my seti@home stats I will be starting from scratch! I guess now is the time to upgrade my equipment so I can get a jump on the competition :)

  • A little late to the party... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:07AM (#7180073) Homepage
    This is not a troll. SETI@Home is a very popular project, and the guys that run it do great alien hunting FFTs.

    But didn't we all launch general purpose distributed computing frameworks about... 5-6 years ago? SETI's mastery of the press aside, I'm pretty sure we all stopped playing this game and started using the standards a year or so ago.

    So that battle is long over. OGSA also known as "web services" or GRID or [10 other things] won in case you missed it. Every major company on Earth is using the standards already. Python, Perl, .NET/C#, Java, C++, and FORTRAN all have native bindings into the standards as well.

    BOINC is late to the party, in fact they completely missed it.
    • Adam, I'm not convinced your argument holds water. I'm unfamiliar with OGSA/web-services/etc. but it would appear to me that they have nothing to do with the problem of allocating computing resources on a personal preference basis. Right now I dedicate spare cycles to folding [stanford.edu]. But in the future I would most likely want to allocate some or most of them to nano@Home [nanoathome.org]. That has little to do with distributed communication protocols or Grid computing. It has to do entirely with an underutilized resource alloc
      • Yes, and Folding uses Cosm. But there are ENORMOUS reasons why the projects don't use the same frameworks. And none of those reasons have anything to do with technology.

        Back when I was running d.net (which I made a generic framework too actually) we offered SETI and dozens of other projects that framework code, but they all turned it down and wrote their own from scratch complete with old bugs.

        It's all about keeping users from leaving when the next project comes along. About NOT having a menu where people

  • BOINC good; SETI@Home Bad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bradbury ( 33372 ) <Robert DOT Bradbury AT gmail DOT com> on Friday October 10, 2003 @05:02AM (#7181109) Homepage
    I disagree with Adam Beberg's (Duncan3)comments regarding BOINC as being somewhat outdated. In contrast I view it as being potentially very usefull in allowing users to allocate their spare CPU resources to the most useful projects. [Adam I believe was a significant contributer to the Folding@Home [slashdot.org] project, so he can be considered an informed source with regard to the perspective of the distribution of "work-units".]

    However, the promotion of SETI@Home by anyone demonstrates they have not looked at the problem in detail.

    There is reasonably extensive documentation on the probable intelligence of advanced civilizations (for example see papers by Dr. Anders Sandberg (here [jetpress.org]) or myself (here [aeiveos.com]). As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!

    Furthermore the entire SETI effort does not take into account the information content of an advanced civilization. By my estimates this is of the order of 10^50 bits (probably more). One cannot communicate even an extremely small fraction of that information content across interstellar space using radio waves. They simply lack the information carrying capacity. So the SETI Institute [seti.org], Drake, Tarter, Shostak, et al have sold millions of computer users (as well as Paul Allen) a "bill of goods" without having done their fundamental homework on the limits of evolution of civilizations. Why on earth would one attempt to communicate with a civilization that is fundamentally less sophisticated than a nematode worm and with whom it is impossible to exchange a significant amount of information that one has at ones disposal?

    In contrast Marvin Minsky (probably one of the leading AI experts in the world) and Freeman Dyson (a brilliant mathematician/physicist who should have won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman contribution to quantum electrodynamics were it not for the Prize limits of 3 individuals) had this worked out in 1971 at the conference between Russian and foreign scientists at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory. Direct quote from the proceedings edited by Sagan:

    MINSKY: Since radiation at any temperature above 3 deg. K is wasteful and a squandering of natural resources, the higher the civilization, the lower the infrared radiation. We should look for extended sources of 4 deg. K radiation. There should be very few natural such sources.

    DYSON: I don't quite go along with this but to some extent you are right.

    Minsky obtaining a concession from Dyson is significant. It has been ignored by the "radio waves from aliens" camp. They *will not* be trying to talk to us. But we *might* be able to observe them in the IR detection region. (Unfortunately IR detection is difficult to do from ground based telescopes.)

    So the bottom line -- reallocate your spare computer resources to projects like folding [stanford.edu] or in the future to Nano@Home [nanoathome.org]. SETI@Home is never going to succeed. It is based on outdated fantasies. Telescopes like the failed WIRE mission or the recently launched SIRTF *may* be able to detect alien civilizations but efforts such as SETI@Home are pointless until such time as the supporters make the case that advanced civilizations would want to waste their time communicating with sub-worm civilizations.

    Robert

    • ok two other replies already..

      but the point is not to communicate by any means(heck, of course it would take thousands of years for one way message anyways) but just prove it's existence.

      proving such a thing with reasonable certainity would also prove quite a number of other things(were not alone in the universe, other systems have suitable habitat for life as well, of course, it would ruin quite number of belief systems, religions. and hopefully for once and for all turn back a bit of superstition).

      howe
      • Reasonable points. And so the question one has to ask is whether it is more probable that there are nearby civilizations sending out TV signals or broadcasting from Arecibo type dishes or whther it is more probable that civilizations around the galaxy may have long since passed that stage and the only detectable signals that they produce are heat radiation?

        Charley Lineweaver -- a card carrying astrophysicist from New Zealand has estimated that approximately 70% of the "Earths" in the galaxy are older th

    • ...perhaps because worms can't talk.

      Atleast not on our level.

      Trying to explain 10th grade algebra to a worm might be somewhat pointless. But.... we CAN indeed communicate with them at the level in which **they communicate amongst themselves.**

      We can trick them into thinking it is time to reproduce (thru pheramones), lead them to food by leaving a chemical trail, ect. This is the level of communication that they are capable of. We understand it, we can replicate it (maybe not perfectly because we lack
      • Point granted -- but once you have the genome sequence and the complete protein structures of nematodes(we have the first and some of the second) combined with sufficient computing capactity one can simulate a worm as much as you find it to be interesting. Once one has done a complete simulation and verified it experimentally once or twice it becomes entirely uninteresting (IMO). How many times do you want to verify something before it becomes so boring you pick watching soap operas as a primary entertain

    • Alterior Motives? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Nerdgasm ( 714484 )
      It may also be important to note that Robert was the person that authored the first nano@home proposal. So he has a vested interest in seeing users move from seti@home.

      nano@home proposal [aeiveos.com]
      • Yep, perhaps I should have pointed that out.

        But since at the rate Nano@Home has been developing it may be several more years before there is something the average individual can use, my current interests can be considered somewhat more altruistic. I run Folding@Home on my Linux machine and regularly promote becoming involved in F@H to others.

        I support the BOINC work because it may allow users to tune the allocation of their spare CPU cycles to some combination of what may best benefit humanity. For me

    • I suppose it could be true that an extraterrestrial society MAY be so advanced today that they consider it wasteful to transmit RF and have since shifted to IR, or that there is no point in communicating with lesser beings TODAY.

      But consider than any signals we receive will most likely be millions/thousands of years old already, originating from a state of the sending civilization that predates the present. At one time they may have attempted in vain to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations them

    • As I have pointed out at conferences and in papers the difference between an advanced civilization and the human civilization is ~10^24 Ops. The difference between a single human and and a nematode worm is ~10^15 Ops. We don't talk to worms and advanced civilizations don't talk to us!

      There are a number of problems here.

      First, ultimately you're guessing. We just don't know because extra-terrestrial life hasn't wandered by to say hello. Comparing guesses against each other is a risky activity and not pr

      • First, ultimately you're guessing. We just don't know because extra-terrestrial life hasn't wandered by to say hello.

        Ca-ca. I'm completely willing to allow for the fact that the Earth is infested with a nanoscale ET lifeform that we haven't bothered to look for. We could easily be under observation on a continual basis (on-world or off-world) but be completely unable to verify that. The majority of the current SETI searches depend on the fact that advanced civilizations are going to "talk" to worms. T

  • Q. What's better than free software?
    A. Cheaper-than-free software that you actually get paid to use!

    How about if someone with money to invest in a project, paid broadband users to run the project's own custom Linux distribution which would incorporate their project's client software? The client would run from a non-privileged account in user space, and the inherent features of Linux itself should provide sufficient protection for all but the most terminally stupid users. Obviously, payment to users w
  • Sine this could be used to "create aliens" by simulating stuff. :-) Question is; will I be credited for crunching the unit that gave the answer to creating flying pigs, and do I want it? :-)

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