> I hate the charity idea only because it seems to me that a "Mersenne
> Scholarship Fund" would do much more for our project in many ways:
>
> 1. We could control where the money goes to a greater extent.
> 2. It would allow us to contribute a great deal more mathematics in
> general.
> 3. More notariety.
I doubt that we could actually get many scholarships out of the $100,000.
Maybe scholarships for 6 or 7 people, any more and we start sending them to
community colleges.
(though, if you want to send someone to college, I wouldn't mind it ;)
I like the idea of using some of it to get George some computers, and
maybe pay his electric bill for a year :)
Ok, that's maybe 10K at the outside, then we run the risk of just cluttering
his house with computers.
I also like the idea of giving some of it to Scott. And though I think that
Colin Percival is right when he says that Scott gets most of the reward
from the publicity, he would get this anyway. Especially if newpaper
articles read $15,000 was given to Scott Kurkowski, who gives his
server time to run the primenet software...
Different message, same author:
> 10% for George
> 10% for Scott
> 10% for Discoverer
> 10% Charity/Scholarship (The Mersenne Scholarship Fund)
> 60% divided evenly to everyone who contributed, based on CPU cycles
> contributed after the last Mersenne prime found.
~6,000 people in gimps. $60,000/6,000=$10 on average. Hardly worth doing...
Though personally, I'm not to comfortable with the idea of splitting the money
away from the winner. I doubt that the winner would actually do anything to
deserve the money, but I also think that many, many people would be discouraged
to read "if you are the lucky discoverer, you don't get to keep 90 grand that
the EFF would give to you were it not for the software you are about to
download." This would also entail a restrictive license agreement, which
some lawyer would write, and we all know that a "volunteer project's"
credibility goes straight down the tubes when lawyers get involved.
Hey, if you don't believe it, try reading your bank statment, and your
credit card bill's fine print. Then tell me how much respect we would
lose in the name of legality.
I think the only reasonable way to get any money out of the hands of
the finder would be to ask them to give some of it away. I should
think that there would be many people who would be willing to do this,
but I don't think it would make us look good to write and ask to give
it away.
-Lucas Wiman
_________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
