Better the Seti i think a Free Screen Saver that helps work on a Cancer Cure

[Kirk Pearson]

Better the Seti i think a Free Screen Saver that helps work on a
Cancer Cure Make Your Computer Help with a Cancer Cure
http://www.grid.org/download/gold/download.htm
Download and install this screensaver
it can help work on a cure for cancer

And you will get what for helping some drug company make BILLIONS???
SQUAT, that's what you will get, me I prefer to help find "little
green men", at least I KNOW they won't be making any money off of me.
But if that makes you happy, finding a cure for cancer IS a very noble
thing, go right ahead. If the project were run by some company that
was going to GIVE the cure away if you/we found it, they couldn't keep
the people away with a stick!

You will get the chance to be cured of cancer if you ever get it. That's
quite a bit more than squat. United Devices IS going to give the cure away.
See the final question in http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/faq_results.htm :

Q: Are you going to sell the results of this project to large pharmaceutical
companies?

A: No. The results of this study are the intellectual property of the
University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research, who
will make the scientific findings of this project available to the greater
scientific community.

Yes, some drug company may eventually make billions from creating a
cancer-fighting drug based on the results of the project, but it may have to
spend millions licensing the intellectual property from the NFCR and Oxford,
if those organizations own the property, and it will have to spend hundreds
of millions developing and testing the drug. And no company or organization
can afford to spend hundreds of millions developing a drug and then give it
away.

A more appropriate place for discussions about grid.org's Cancer Research
project (and all non-***@home distributed computing projects) is
comp.distributed.

[Rolf Leggewie]

Post by Kirk Pearson

And you will get what for helping some drug company make BILLIONS???

You will get the chance to be cured of cancer if you ever get it. That's
quite a bit more than squat.

Agreed, but I think the issue issue raised is nonetheless valid.

Post by Kirk Pearson
United Devices IS going to give the cure away.
Q: Are you going to sell the results of this project to large pharmaceutical
companies?
A: No. The results of this study are the intellectual property of the
University of Oxford and the National Foundation for Cancer Research, who
will make the scientific findings of this project available to the greater
scientific community.

They promise to give away the *aggregate* results. They do *NOT*
promise to publish individual computation results. Neither do they
promise to let other researchers work on otherwise non-disclosed data.
That is definitely something I'd want to see.

IMHO if they get all this data through a collaborative effort they ought
to make publicly available *all* results including disaggregate data
(maybe after a short period to let them generate and publish their
scientific findings).

Just my 2cents.

[newsreader]

Post by Kirk Pearson
You will get the chance to be cured of cancer if you ever get it. That's
quite a bit more than squat. United Devices IS going to give the cure away.
See the final question in

http://www.grid.org/projects/cancer/faq_results.htm :

Erm... No.

UD isn't giving anything away but some processor time to collate results for
other people's projects. In exchange, they get advertising, a tax
write-off, and a body of software users that they can test their distributed
processing software on.

Post by Kirk Pearson
Q: Are you going to sell the results of this project to large pharmaceutical
companies?

They can't. They don't own the results -- their client Oxford does, as
noted in your clip from UD's FAQ. Oxford and NFCR own the results and they
aren't promising anywhere that they'll be giving those rights away for
*free* to anyone. In short, UD is a 100% commercial venture.

Another oft neglected item to mention is that UD is not a "cure cancer"
project. When you sign up for UD, you sign up for whatever project they
happen to be running and any projects that happen to come along in the
future. (You can opt-out of individual projects if you happen to notice
them, but the default is opt-in for *all* projects.)

UD isn't a bad bunch. But their software is dated and has some buggy
features (which is why I rarely run it anymore). If you want to try
something other than ***@home classic, BOINC is a better alternative.



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