[Puke]

i always liked the molecular analysis program that is akin to SETI@HOME. its sponsored by cisco and intel and friends and uses the same parallel processing technology to search for cures to cancer and other ailments by using peoples CPU cycles to look for matches between different molecules and.. well, whatever the hell they match up with. amino acids or something i would suppose.

the fineprint is that the sponsors rent out a few of the cpu cycles to crunch numbers for corporate financed private research projects, which is a pretty clever way of squeezing some profitibility out of bleeding-heart types. wish i thought of it myself. of course if you get down to the nitty gritty, most cancer research is done by profiteers anyhow, so i guess its hard to draw a line one way or the other.

there are also things like distributed.net and such that use your processor time to crack ungodly long encryption algorythms and to perform other such tasks. there enough projects out there to donate your CPU cycles to that you can pick and choose fairly freely. now if it was just tax deductable..