You know what I realized the other day? You know how like there are all these things now where you can download some program for some research people, and it will use your computer’s idle time to run calculations and shit. Grid computing, basically, which is really interesting.

But yeah somebody recently was like “yeah, you can help support cancer research.”

And at first glance, this seems great. Who doesn’t hate cancer, right? But then I got to thinking about it, and was like, hey, wait a minute here. Who’s benefitting from this “research”? Is this actually being funded by a pharmaceutical company, so that they can use MY resources to enable them to create treatments, and then FUCK PEOPLE OUT OF HAVING THEM cause they are too expensive?

Cause I’m guessing that’s the ultimate end result of this research: unaffordable, and possibly unsuccessful treatments. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t donate your computer’s idle processor time. By all means, go nuts. But just look into what you are donating, and who owns it, and where their information is ultimately being sold. Another thing, there are ones run by universities and shit, for all kinds of purposes. Again, most people are conditioned to equate universities with some sort of benevolent institution. But again, what are their research efforts being funded by, and where are their results being sold and used? There are so many big brand name universities who get huge contracts from the defense industry, and you oughta look into that shit before you go pimping out your computer’s spare time.

You know what would be cool though, is if some company WAS admitting they will profit from your computer time usage, and was willing to give you a cut of that, and just considered it part of their overhead. I’d be more into it if I was getting compensated, and there was a clear trail laid out of where this data was going and what it was being used for. I’d also like to see some transparency built into these things, so you could actually look at the data that you are crunching and transmitting, and there was some sort of explanation of how it fit into the larger datascape of the project.

Also, I wish I had some big huge project that I could make my computer work on while I’m not on it. Like, if I could teach it to scour the web for information I want, and then have it crunch it all down into cool articles, which I could then slap my name on. Or if there was just some huge astronomical calculation that I could make it work on. I don’t know what kind of calculation, but that doesn’t really matter.