Statistically you could win the RC5 competetion thousands of times before you'll ever get anything with this.

SO WHAT?

You are statistically more likely to get run
over by a bus. Is that any reason not to keep
an eye (or in this case, an ear) out for a  bus
that could "hit" you?!

RC5 is for Ubergeeks, not the masses, and
the long odds do not make the potential pay
off of SETI@Home any less exciting. Where
is your sense of adventure?

More on topic, this security vulnerability must
not exist for the Mac client as they have not
updated it for ages (still at ver. 3.03).

I'd settle for a client for AOS 4, though I
gather one can run the CLI version that
exists for Linux PPC (something kind of
cool to run on your A1 while waiting for
OS 4, perhaps). :-D

@Slimjim

Well, consider yourself the amazing coincidences that makes this planet suitable for long-term complex life at all, then add this with the amazing coincidences that let an intelligent life form evolve, and then the amazing coincidences that left it alone long enough to become civilised, I would say that, at a glance, nobody's going to answer SETI all that soon. The universe is a big place, but it's also vast one. There's absolutely no guarantee that there's another civilisation within a billion years of answering.

Using SETI to find alien civilisations is a bit like trying to get in touch with a lost brother on the other side of the world by throwing bottles with notes into the sea. Sure, if you throw enough, it might just work - but it won't be quick, for sure.

There's probably plenty of life in the stars near us. But it's probably too microscopic to answer. :-)

@cdog

I'm a scientist, I have no sense of adventure!

@Kenny R
 
You talk about amazing coincidences, but this is still a
very new field of research. Astrobiology is only some ten
years old as a serious academic subject. We know very
little about what is "amazing" or not when it comes to the
forming of life. Of course there is no guarantee anyone
will answer. But we also know nothing of the probabilities
they won't.
 
You (and me) can only make assumptions. We don't know
why no signals have been picked up yet. For all we know
we could just as well have had the darndest bad luck
not to pick up anything despite so many civilizations
being close to us. Or the reason for the silence is the one
you're proposing: there is nothing there to listen to.
 The problem is that the two solutions are symmentric;
both would give the same current situation. And despite
common belief, noone can tell which one is really the
correct assumption. We know too little of the universe and
indeed of life itself, to do that distinction.
 
In short, we lack that huge unknown constant named "# of
civilisations within reasonable range". Without knowing
that constant, all we can do is wild guesses.
.
SlimJim