From: Rich <someone@somewhere.com>
Evidence is for the real world, and unless you are a UFO buff, their
ain't any and there is no reasonable expectation that any SETI search
will generate any.

What's "reasonable" when we have so little information to go on at
present? Is it reasonable to look a while, or to give up alrady without
even looking any reasonable amount? How can you really be sure there's
no reasonable expectation? Do you know something the rest of us don't
know?

I consider negative evidence as worth having, but not as an infinite
resource sink.

I agree. The question is, giving competing uses for the resources we have
at our disposal, what is the best distribution of uses? (See later below.)

So my question is, what's the point? Don't we have better uses for
our resources?

(See later below.)

How much are you willing to spend? How much of your own money have you

seti@home is basically using compute resources on people's home
computers that otherwise go completely to waste, so except for a few
people who consume electricity because otherwise they'd turn their
computers off at night but now they keep them on, seti@home doesn't
consume any resources there, it's free! Only the radiotelescope time
has any significant cost, and that's a small cost too.

Please suggest other worthwhile uses for the compute power.
Factoring large numbers is not a good idea, because that would
basically violate somebody's privacy by cracking their
public-key cryptosystem. Harassing many many people by floods
of e-mail containing viruses/trojans is already being done and
needs to be stopped. What other ideas do you have instead?
It has to be something that requires only a little bandwidth to
download a work unit input data file, then consumes many hours of CPU
time, then requires only a little bit more bandwidth to upload the
result of that work unit.