I know, I know… you’ve probably heard my speech before. 
But let me do it one more time.
For those of you unaware, Folding@Home (http://stanford.folding.edu ) is a distributed computing project that is actually already producing useful and valuable results for the medical and scientific world. Basically, since optimized folding algorithms are so easily parallelizable, folding @ home allows you to use you computer’s processing cycles to help your future health.
Now, I’m with the group "VinylVortex" on folding at home, and I like their answer to this question for people who know about distributed computing projects, but are willing to waste their cycles for seti@home. (from http://vinylvortex.com/ )
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Why Folding? Why not distributed.net or SETI?
The distributed.net and SETI projects, as well as others, are interesting/cool in their own ways but there are some problems. Some major cons against these other metacomputing projects include:
Political motivation - the distributed.net project mainly concerns itself attempting to defeat RSA encryption cyphers with brute-force metacomputing. We feel that the point that "we need strong encryption" has already been proved many times over and we don’t need to go any further. The entire contest also smacks heavily of advertising RSA’s patented cyphers. The monetary motivation behind cracking a key by simple brute force, which could happen at any time in the contest, comes off as not only un-academic, but very silly and lottery-like.
Misplaced Priorities / Project Validity - While it’s nice to dream and acknowledge that we may not be the only ones in our universe, we feel that the SETI project has suffered from two main setbacks. A large portion of the results are known to be invalid due to excessive cheating which makes it unlikely that if any little green men are found the results will be considered reliable; And, this project does not have any immediate benefit to mankind, considering how much processing power is being thrown at it simply for the "cool" factor. These resources could be better used elsewhere.
Which brings us to the pros of the Folding project:
Benefits to Humans - The project results are likely to provide all sorts of insights to medicine in treating a wide variety of diseases, ranging from disorders like alzeimers, to AIDS and even cancer. In addition, scientific results like this have a wide ranging “butterfly/domino” effect. New theories and projects will build on the results from this project, others from those, and so on.
Non-profit - Stanford university is making the results of this project free to anyone, any researcher or organization. This is important in a society where we have large pharmaceutical corporations accepting donations towards cancer and other diseases from compassionate people for years, and then, when a cure is found, turning around and screwing them by charging big money for the cures and treatments that are discovered. We do not agree with companies that patent genetic research. Treatments and benefits should be available to everyone and all medical research shouldn’t be simply motivated by shareholder interests.
Popularity - Once distributed.net and SETI were ruled out as candidates, Folding@Home was left as the current most popular metacomputing project out there. There is a really strong competition happening with team
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So basically what I’m saying is that folding @ home is a quite stable (I run it on my laptop, and don’t even notice it) program which not only allows you to donate your computer cycles to the advancement of science, but also helps medicine and has already generated useful results.
see http://folding.stanford.edu for more information, and join today.
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