Important things first:
The number of computers I have running on a given day is usually 1 or 2, going as high as 5 - since I run the machines 24-7, most time they do not have an operator in front of 'em or a heavy lifting task, they are devoted to S@H - Do I have to establish my own "group" in order to have separate operating policies for each (when I go away, the laptop goes with me, and unless power is very good, little S@H work gets done. meanwhile the current #1 Machine needs to be fed as quickly as possible or all it does is raise the A/C bills. I'd love to see a better BOINC-to-fit policy per machine.

"Taxing" things second: Has anyone gotten a legitimate evaluation of how much a new BOINC "work unit" is worth in terms of tax deduction - donation in kind to a 501(c)3 NfP. The "old" system was easy - the fallback was CPU hrs at rate of power consumption * cost of a KWH, if one didn't wish to claim the actual value of a "gram or two" of computer time.

What is the value of a thousand Floating Point Operations or storage of a few megabytes, the relative value of a few milliseconds of ASDL vs a few minutes at 56KBaud?

I am looking for this fairly trivial value, not because I don't want to pay taxes, or wish, like large corporations and the wealthy, to pay next to nothing.

I do it because our current (US) spending policies are so misguided - paying out billions a week so we can slaughter our own kids and assorted Iraqis, while handing blank checks to those funny "family owned" secretive corporations like Bechtel and Haliburton which need report nuthin' publicly to anyone, while our space program marches backwards (imagine, sending humans on giant SRBs rathr than the original advanced shuttle design, with crewed booster and orbiter sections, both returning by wing, no throw-away parts, ready to be checked, refueled and relaunched to HIGH earth orbit, something like geosynch, with *maybe* a stop-off in LEO to transfer to a vehicle wasting nothing on aerodynamics.)

Note: I do believe in supporting our troops to the fullest - sending them into harm's way ONLY when there's a really threatening *nation* and diplomacy has failed. And taking great care of them when they return, whether it is due to somewhat-repairable injury or for the education bonus they were promised for enlisting.

The idea that more must die or the initial deaths of now more than 3,550 Americans alone will have been "in vain" is absurd. As John Kerry said, he would consider the most honourable hero's death to be the last person killed in a pointless war.

Let's bring them home *today* and help them get back on their feet, especially 'Guardsmen who signed up to help our nation in times of peril - whether due to the emergence of a genuine, non-political, immediate threat that requires fighting or reconstruction - like the levees around the lower Mississippi.

Let's remember the guy who sent planes smashing into NY and the Pentagon, black sheep of the House of Saud, remains uncaught, though he need be tried as a simple mass-murderer, something the Saudi government could probably arrange for in a day.

And al-Quaida Iraq has as much to do with him as any other outfit that pirates a brand name (see William Goldman on the value of being 'The Dread Pirate Roberts', rather than some newbe scruffy no-name upstart.)

<btw> WHY is the US one of the only, if not *the* only country left to have extra-territorial military bases around the world. I'm not talking about multi-national treaty groups like NATO or SEATO, but armed forces that subsidize, letsee, every Japanese company and individual, who pay nothing (and would suffer no personal losses) because they're protected by the US Army. Ditto Germany, where we still await the tanks of Cold War opponents, like.. uh .. like..

Or Thailand, where we're based to fight off Viet Namese forces and maybe even the Chinese, who have trillions of our dollars floating around through outsourcing, the reason everything we buy today is stamped "made in one of the least free nations on Earth." And the trillion-dollar "drug war" we're fighting in Columbia, where most of the cash we send ends up in the pockets of some very happy individuals.

Meanwhile, we spend billions of dollars a year protecting ourselves from that real Power of the Western Atlantic - CUBA! (where we also maintain a base for housing and torturing our own 'disappeared.'

Note: One of the things that brought Bill Clinton down (besides talking like a lawyer about Monica, rather than saying 'it's between me,my family and any other person involved - and since it didn't affect the running of the country doesn't concern YOU') was that Draft Dodger Bill was either present when US fighters returned home killed in action, mostly protecting Muslim Serbs from their Christian neighbors, who wanted to refight the 600-year-old Battle of Shrebertniza <leaving them now 0-2>, or, if he couldn't go, the Vice President (remember Al Gore? the guy who "won" the Presidential election by 51,000+ votes?) or a specific line of cabinet members would be on hand.

Chickenhawk Draft Dodger George W. hasn't made the trip once - and has ordered the flights bearing many times the number of coffins than arrived during the Clinton years, to come in at night, at bases off-limits to reporters, sneaking those shattered bodies back in the middle of the night.

Let's all of us from the 'States (at least those who itemize) deduct our SETI@Home costs, legitimately, maybe $11.34 a year or something the auditors declare official, to show the government where WE think our tax dollars should be going (though the War has been hidden in "off-budget" and "black" budgets, and will be paid for by our kids at this rate, though W inherited a profitable federal bureaucracy and a falling national debt).

<BTW> whether you liked this or consider me some sorta dangerous "Liberal" (to the rest of the world - the farthest-right Canadian parties are about like our Democrats, moderate though one would think, listening to some, they are a Fifth Column ready to destroy the 'States when the armies of uh? oh, according to GWB 'the enemy (that) we know is out there, but we don't know who he is but he isn't us'(First inaugural speech). Real Progressives walk around worrying they're going to be put on a new McCarthy/House Un-American Activities Committee list for daring to *read* a book by Gore, H. Clinton or Barak Obama, or some guide to al-Islam answering the difference between a Sunni and a Shi'a.)

Anyway, at least remember to VOTE and make sure your vote, and the votes of all your neighbors, with or against you, are really really counted this time.

There are different ways you can personalize each computer.
1. Set up different venues on the website account preferences - Default - Home - School - Work.

2. Use one of the account manager sites to control the preferences. I believe they offer more venues.

3. Use the local preference to override the general preferences. This is available with the new V 5.10.x, although, I think there may be some minor bug that have been noticed with this feature since it's release yesterday.

Sorry, I stopped reading once you went off topic. This is a help forum and not a place for political statements. That said, and not being a US citizen but fairly knowledgeable of US affairs, I doubt very much that the IRS would put a monetary value on CPU cycles in this context.

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Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

You are volunteering your time and computers. If you work in a soup kitchen, bring your own utensils and make food with them for the needy, none of that is able to be written off. I have sat with a tax lawyer for a few hours, we went back and forth and found the above analogy is what he told me that giving my time to these projects are.

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My movie https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/502242

There are different ways you can personalize each computer.
3. Use the local preference to override the general preferences. This is available with the new V 5.10.x, although, I think there may be some minor bug that have been noticed with this feature since it's release yesterday.

It is actually available with 5.8 - but only if you want to copy a file and hand edit the copy.

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BOINC WIKI

There are different ways you can personalize each computer.
3. Use the local preference to override the general preferences. This is available with the new V 5.10.x, although, I think there may be some minor bug that have been noticed with this feature since it's release yesterday.

It is actually available with 5.8 - but only if you want to copy a file and hand edit the copy.

Been there, done that. I tried to keep the answer simple for the average user.