SETI@Home is not just ay-leen spacecraft anymore. Now you can get PAID in a major way for heatin' up your CPU.

Distributed.net estimates with all combined boxes they have a $100M computer. This monster has been cracking away at scientific curiousities like ay-leen radio and 7^20(mod 11)ish encryption formulae. Pointless, right? It is questionable whether or not money can buy love, but you know pointless information can't buy a satchel of weed. Process Tree, a company introduced shortly after Y2K (maybe they were scared of doomsday) is developing a plan to pay users up to $20 a month for their CPU cycles.

Yeah, I know you are sitting there, thumbs resting on your Model M, thinking ``A 20 snap for a machine, that's booty, I'd rather crack an ay-leen.''

Keeping my promise to the free world of cheapskate, knuckleheads, and hustlers, I bring you the Pao-Tzu guide to preparing a in-home distributed network.

Disclaimer: WARNING! Some of the techniques described in this educational guide are quite illegal in your area, I take no responsibility for your actions. Do not actually try this.

First of all you need tune up your electricity (fraud). Usually, if you own a house, you are fucked, as the monopolistic electric company owns you and your bank account. Fuck the man. OK, so what to do? Well, I have found the best way to scam electricity is to move either into a large shared apartment or a duplex with at least two vacancies. Run juice off the wires that nobody is in charge of. When they send you the bill addressed to the missing person(s), check the due date. If it is a 15-day notice, shred it. Do not act until you get the 48-hour notice. Simply call them and explain you have accidentally been running a power strip to the wrong outlet and had been using it for a two months but that it was not the responsibility of the landlord or the former tenant. You will get all that electricity for free. They will claim they will move the charges to your account. Nope, in 48 hours a technician will arrive and shut off all power. Essentially, the electric company cannot make charges from one account onto another after service is terminated. If you are lucky and act confused enough about who was using what power, they might start over your bill too. If you end up in jail, don't fret, by the time you get out the linux version of the client will be finished.

Otherwise you will have to wait around for processtree to develop a linux client and begin the actual payment program. Can't even get the beta windows client to work properly in wine at this point, but I suppose that will change.

Now you need computers. Check your bank account. If you have more than $10,000 to spare skip this step. Visit your local hydroponic store (there is a nice one in Santa Rosa) and buy five 1000 watt sodium bulbs/ballasts. Buy large quantities of vermiculite, perlite, and liquid fertilizer. If fans are not available in shop, head down to your local hardware store and buy two of the absolute biggest ones you can. Get a 2x8meter piece of mylar and fasten it to anchored wooden beams to create a room within a room. Stretch several lengths of black plastic over all your windows. Hang the lights from either the ceiling or a beam under your top sheet of mylar. Turn on all the fans & lights. Dump the perlite and vermiculite into 7 plastic pots, buckets, or whatever you have available. Line these in seven rows of seven. Plant a bunch of weed seedlings that you grew. Oh, no Cannabis handy? Just run to Canada or mail order from Holland for some. Cut tops of plants every few nodes that come out to force apical meristem of side branches to take off from the hormonal fluctation. Feed them regularly, but not too much. When monstro, flower plants by cutting light back to eight hours a day. You will know it is time to harvest when the electric company comes and shuts off your power. Cut off all leaves and leave plants in dark for 48 hours. Clip flowers, dry, sell on open market.

Have in pockets $10,000 in hundreds and twenties. $15,000 if you assigned an weed name to your harvest like ``White Widow'' or ``Chocolate Thai.''

Buy EDO RAM, MMX or K6-2 processors, motherboards, power supplies, used tower cases, cheap ethernet cards, crimpers, rj-45 plugs, and a few hundred feet of cable. Do not bother with hard disks, either netboot or diskette boot your systems with *bsd or linux. Load up the Process Tree and start cracking away their geographic oil-drill site packets. Let your computer annililate 100,000 year fractal mapping problems. Render for Pixar-nnabe companies. Collect your checks.

From my best estimation, you should have between 30 and 40 computers which yields between $600 and $800 per month, with an average of -$1000. Reinvest all your earnings into more computers, sodium lamps, alarm systems, guns, and buckets of fuck.

zales@pigdog.org