Idle CPUs are the Devil's Playthings

It's a familiar scenario: You're at your desk "working" one day, when all of a sudden your computer wakes up and, bored with watching you play Solitaire and surf blog sites, decides that world domination sounds fun, goes out on the Net, gangs up with other ennui-afflicted computers, and bam!--next thing you know, we're all living in some post-Singularity apocalypse, where our computers treat us like goldfish. Not a pretty picture, I know.

To avoid this catastrophe, one remedy is to never let your computer sit idle by participating in a distributed computing project. I signed up for folding@home, a Stanford University project that studies protein folding and how it relates to diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. That way, rather than twiddling its processors and plotting world takeover schemes when I'm not working (which is most of my "writing" time), my computer can help find a cure for these diseases. If you've taken your immortality pill (or perhaps your immorality pill) and don't care about curing cancer, you could have your computer search for alien intelligence or find really big prime numbers instead. Distributedcomputing.info has a list of active projects.

Of course, it's possible that, were your computer ready to overthrow humanity, the combined processing power of these networked projects would be the ideal playground for it and participating in one of them would only hasten our demise. But at least we'd have a cure for cancer.