SETI finally found somethin...

For those who dunno.. SETI is short for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Its the collective name for a number of organized efforts to detect intelligent aliens. The generic approach of SETI projects is to survey the sky to detect the existence of transmissions from a civilization on a distant planet, an approach widely endorsed by the scientific community as hard science.

One of its sub-categories is SETI@home; an extrememly user-oriented distributed computing project that was launched by U.C. Berkeley in May 1999, and is heavily sponsored by The Planetary Society. Any individual can become involved with SETI research by downloading and running the SETI@home software package, which then runs signal analysis on a "work unit" of data recorded from the central 2.5 MHz wide band of the SERENDIP IV instrument.
Over 5 million computer users in more than 200 countries have signed up for SETI@home and have collectively contributed over 19 billion hours of computer processing time. As of December 4, 2006 the Seti@Home grid operates at 257 TeraFLOPS, making it equivalent to the second fastest supercomputer on Earth!

Comin back to the topic... read this...

SETI@home is a distributed processing client from UC Berkeley that installs on the vounteers' home computers and harnesses their processing power in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far nothing noteworthy has comeout of this massive project... that is until today!
One of the voluteers was able to track down his wife's stolen laptop using the IP address that SETI@home client reports back to the server. After getting back the laptop his wife said, 'I always knew that a geek would make a great husband.

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All this search power boils down to a stolen lappie yet! Hope some +ve results crop up sometime soon.