I'm me. :) Hopefully I can help out a little bit here.
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1. I have no clue. To any of those questions.
2. It doesn't matter what info we send - ETs probably aren't going to know what the beep we're trying to send.
3. To help the Trillian team beat AOL. AOL is a snotty *insert dirty word*.
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.