Actually, if you are in the USA, you can do this too. You choose not to. All you have to do is declare a home business which doesn't have to be profitable but once every so many years and is quite frankly smart for every household to do. Do the research and you will see what I mean. I wrote off a big percentage of my electric bill for years because the PC's I had were built for my (part time) home PC repair business. 9 years later Mr. IRS still hasn't looked twice. I no longer do the PC repair, but have had other home businesses like rental property and in those cases if you pay the entire electric bill for the property, it is all write off. No laws say you can't have a PC running in the garage or basement. Also, if you run the computer only during your home business hours, technically the whole electric bill is wrote off regardless of what the business is. So, you choose not to have those write offs. The type of business in home doesn't matter.

Maybe they could even develop a 'friendly' competition between Companies and Organizations, Teams and Individuals etc, kind of like other projects do with their Challenges. Have a corp challenge of who can get the most credits on x project in the next 5 days, corps ONLY for example. The winner gets their name in highlights on the webpage as a contributor, the runners up get their names listed too but on a linked webpage. To do this though means they have to separate them into categories, with something being the decider. The something being rac per day under the account for example, or anything else but somehow fair to all. As I said it is unfair to pit my ranch up against someone with one or two pc's just starting out, or even a long time cruncher with one or two pc's doing all they can! I am NOT at the likes of Marist but I am closer than alot of people, and that would put me at the top of alot of lists, but is not why I crunch! I think WCG can figure out how many cpu's are being used in my attached pc's in my account, maybe that can be the separator?

That kind of competition is probably the only kind that makes any sense. Perhaps what is needed is a forum for competitions and challenges. People could set up events of whatever type they desired. There could be an event for single quad core devices. Another for the family "farm". People with large amounts of devices, for whatever reasons could have their own events. Some events could be very open and others very personal "head to head". Nothing has to change with the system other than creating a forum.

Not really skgiven. Competition events can be only between Teams, not between specific members, and you cannot create categories.

and why do we have to make everything a competition? Can't we just do the work? Unless you missed it, even the scientists who have the most at stake here at WCG, are not competing against each other. Can't we follow their lead?