Hacker News Reader

My university's physics department did the same thing with SETI@home. The SETI@home guys were smart enough to make their program run as a screen-saver that displayed Fourier Transforms so people thought it made the lab look more sciency and left it on.

View on HN

Another important note is that SETI@home actually did stop running when you were using the PC. If you left Task Manager up, you could see the difference on the CPU usage graph.

and that's why they didn't find any alien intelligence yet

Reply on news.ycombinator.com