I just don't see the benefit of spending electricity on something of dubious value. Scientists have access to all sorts of computers, including clusters of off-the-shelf PCs connected by ETHERNET, as well as actual supercomputers. They don't need my $20 in wasted electricity per month. Besides, I'm firmly convinced that cancer has been cured several times over. They just won't let us have the cure, since chemotherapy is so profitable. And let's not forget that the Georgia Guidestones call for a world population of only 500 million people -- curing a killer like cancer would be counter-productive to that goal.
Long story short -- I'm not a sucker. They don't need my computer, or my electricity.
Why remain ignorant. If you don't want to fold then don't but why make up claims that are false.
Folding isn't dubious. It has already resulted in numerous breakthroughs.
Building and running a supercomputer is expensive insanely expensive. Folding has a combined computational power of 6404 TFLOP.
To put that into perspective the most powerful supercomputer in the world is ~8000 TFLOPs. The 2nd largest is ~4700 TFLOPS.
No international medical research program in the world even makes the top 100 supercomputer list ( sub 80 TFLOPs).
Simply put without access to Folding @ Home the computational power available to protein researchers would be maybe 1% of what they have access to. The amount of simulations completed this year w/ Folding program would have taken a century. More likely without access to computational power that would lead to discovers in a researcher's lifetime the research would never even be undertaken.
The downside, once a major cure is found from one the results that thousands of people put their computer to work on there will be some big pharma outfit come in, patent the drug or process and then turn around and charge those same helping hands a 5000 percent markup for access to the cure.
