Thiel continues to hand out $100K grants (plus non-cash support) to individuals to would receive full-scholarships to college and PhD placements anyway, some of whome already graduated college and provides no opportunities for average students -- the ones who take on debt.

The fellowhips are interestingm but don't help solve educational debt. The "college sucks" libertarian political agenda is stapled to the side, making the whole program smell bad.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/meet-hyv-a-startup-that-can...

Apparently the idea is to build a pay-to-use BOINC or Folding@Home, except for iPhones, where the startup steps in by actually *paying 3rd party app developers to bundle their distribution code in their app, thereby allowing them to run independent code on a user's phone using the unaware user's computing resources, data plan, and battery life without the user's direct permission?

Not only would this seriously inconvenience consumers, have ample security risks, have a dubious market for legitimate customers (Such a system could never outperform the price of AWS or a custom GPU cluster, let alone volunteer networks like BOINC and Folding@Home), only works at a ludicrously large scale (Are there even enough iPhones out there to reach Folding@Home's 45 petaflops?), would require those running complicated algorithms to port optimized code to Objective-C, but the icing on the cake is it only works on unlocked phones.

So, did Thiel just fund a ridiculous idea which is essentially malware or am I missing something?

One might argue about the pedigree & network you get from college, but couldn't motivated Thiel Fellows build equally powerful networks by virtue of being a Thiel Fellow too?