S@H email from Arthur C. Clarke

Biffa

Biffa

Biffa

Man of Honour
Joined
30 Oct 2002
Posts
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Location
Surrey
Anyone else get one of these this morning?

(Donate to SETI@home at http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php)

Dear Biffa,

SETI@home needs your help. But before we tell you why - and how you can
help - Dan and I would like to thank you for your role in the SETI@home
success story.

We would first like to thank you for your participation in SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu). During the first SETI@home project you
personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 200445
data chunks and providing 108.067 years of computing time. We want you to
know we appreciate your efforts and the efforts of the other 5.4 million
volunteers who have donated over 2.4 million years of processing time.
When we started, people thought our projection of 100,000 users to be
overly optimistic! You helped us prove that public participation in
scientific computing could work. You also helped us to see that this type
of community effort deserved to be more common. That's why we developed
the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC. BOINC has
the benefit of allowing our volunteers the option of sharing their
processing power with other worthy projects in addition to SETI@home.
These projects range from looking for gravitational waves to searching for
cures to diseases.

But all these successes are just a beginning. As you are aware, SETI@home
has successfully transitioned to operating under BOINC. Because of this,
new searches are on the horizon for SETI@home. We are releasing a new
version of our processing software that increases the sensitivity of our
search by a factor of two or more. We are building and installing a new
data recorder at Arecibo. This data recorder operates in conjunction with
a newly installed receiver that has the capability to observe seven places
on the sky simultaneously. It also increases our sensitivity by another
factor of five. These increases in sensitivity mean that SETI@home will
have capability of detecting signals that are three times more distant
than we could before. The region of space we can search will expand by a
factor of thirty. That's thirty times the chance that your computer will
detect that faint signal from another star.

This increase in capability isn't without cost. Following the "dot com"
bust, the commercial support that kept SETI@home running has largely
disappeared. Because of this loss of support, we can no longer count on
matching funds from the University of California. We are rapidly
approaching the end of what funds we do have. We we will need to raise
about $750,000 to pay for these new capabilities and to keep SETI@home
operating for the next year. Without this support SETI@home may be forced
to shut down (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_budget.php).

We hope that you will consider making a donation to SETI@home
(http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php). You can make a secure
donation by credit card by clicking this link. Instructions for donation
by check or money order are there as well. Unless you specify otherwise,
your donation will be noted by a star icon next to your username on the
SETI@home pages and your username will appear on our list of donors. If
you do not wish to have this recognition you may indicate that as well.
Please be assured that regardless of whether or not you choose to have
your donation be anonymous, SETI@home will not share your address with
other organizations.

You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

Thank You,

Sir Arthur C. Clarke (Author and Futurist)
Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist, SETI@home)

For more information about how to donate:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/donate.php
Click to expand...
 
Biffa said:
Looks legit to me from the headers.
Click to expand...

yes the WUs are correct, and other Teammember get this E-mail also

from my E-mail

...During the first SETI@home project you personally assisted us by searching for extraterrestrial signals in 20000 data chunks and providing 10.258 years of computing time...
Click to expand...

that is right,

regards
Sir Ulli
 
Hmm, not good news - if that email is legit then it seems like they're almost desperate for money at the minute. Not that they weren't in need of it before, of course... but an email asking people to donate just hammers it home how bad the situation seems to be :(

I would gladly donate, but don't have a credit card and don't really fancy the idea of sending a cheque all the way to America.

EDIT: Everyone's going to get an email eventually:

E-mails are being sent to all our users asking for their help. This process takes time. If you haven't gotten your e-mail yet, you can read your personal email online.
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All i need to know is where to donate via paypal. Its the only way I pay online. :D

I got my letter today too..


But mine has this bit at the bottom..

You can check on our fundraising progress by visiting our main site at
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

One last thing Bully, I can see from my records that your once again climbing the ranks of OC UK, and that any day now your going to issue a statement and parrrrp to:

20) Whitestar 25.3 days and counting..... :eek:

You may of upped your output, but your only delaying the enevitable...
Now put on your marigold gloves and start cleaning out that room.. :p
 
more info, because they dont use Paypal...

I bet Matt wishes he could get back the months he spent trying to wrangle the ability for us to accept Paypal. The biggest issue is that the Univeristy won't let us open a bank account. We approached other non-profit organizations in an attempt to get them to accept donations on our behalf through an account of theirs. We even went so far as to develop the code to interface to paypal. Unfortunately the organizations that initially agreed to help us out with this withdrew (at the last minute).

We considered using a personal account, but the tax implications were frightening.

About our only option would be to start a non-profit foundation to accept donations on our behalf. It would take years to get the IRS 503(c) designation.
So we're stuck with what the University offers.
Click to expand...

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=29076#263068

for Info

regards
Sir Ulli
 
Berserker said:
It's nothing new. They've been running on a shoestring for about 30 years. Might eventually cause the end of SETI@home, but SETI itself will survive.
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good Post, but what we will do without Seti@home

call a project with what...

only for Info

regards
Sir Ulli
 
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