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If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the stud

by nadams 11y ago

If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2]. - Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention. I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4] [1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our-kids-back.html http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our... [2] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5169 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5169 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20080313141623/http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/03/12/skittles.suspension.ap/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080313141623/http://edition.cn... [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

t2015_08_25 11y ago
Great list. How about teacher Julie Amero, whose browser was apparently hijacked, possibly while students used it while she was out of the room resulting in students seeing nudity briefly and uninentionally [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_v._Amero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_v._Amero
- HarryHirsch 11y ago
  Wikipedia says she pled guilty to disorderly conduct and handed in her teaching license because the school board wouldn't pay for IT support that would have kept the naked ladies off her computer. Incredible.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    And people wonder why its so hard to find teachers. Because the job conditions are terrible!
    - tomswartz07 11y ago
      Working in a school district, doing IT, I can agree. My buddies do the same sort of stuff I do and make 1.5x my salary.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Trust me the "Technical Experts" for prosecution are a joke. long story but my friend was jailed for 6 years based upon stuff like this concerning his IP address and it 100% identifies him though it wasn't the same IP address. What jury knows anything about IP addresses and how they don't identify a person?
- nadams 11y ago
  > Amongst the most noteworthy, Detective Lounsbury stated in the trial that a red link proved that Amero had deliberately clicked on the link to visit a particular pornographic page. Huge blown up pictures were shown to the jury. In fact, forensic investigation showed that the link visited color for the browser was olive green. The link was colored red because there was a font tag on the page turning the link red. I have no comment for that.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    I would think some enterprising employment lawyer would smell blood and there would then be a wrongful termination suit.
ebbv 11y ago
I'm all in favor of seti@home but it's not like running that on the school computers is free. If he didn't have permission to do it, then setting it up on those computers without getting that authorization was inappropriate. Obviously firing him is an overreaction, but I tend to believe their excuse that if he was fired for that, it wasn't just for that. He was already on thin ice before that incident and it was just the final straw. My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
- nadams 11y ago
  > If he didn't have permission to do it From a previous news article I've read (not linked) - he claimed the previous system administrator told him to do it and he continued following their instructions. Again this has to have some other side to it - because if someone told me to do that and I googled what it was I would definitely question it and bring it to the administration and let them decide what to do (which some reports claim he had permission from previous administration). Originally they reported firing him because of running seti@home - but then they changed their story quickly afterwards. > My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison. It's a great compare because it shows how out of touch with reality school administration is. Yeah it's two completely different cases - but if common sense was introduced to both then we wouldn't be here discussing it. And this wasn't a teacher - it was a system administrator that was running it for several years. I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away. How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?
xacaxulu 11y ago
More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.
- zaphar 11y ago
  In my day we called unschooling homeschooling. And it's a lot of work. It's a fix for those families that can afford to do it. However the families most harmed by public school policies are precisely the people who can't afford to unschool or homeschool which is perhaps the saddest part of all of this. [edit]: spelling
  - tmsam 11y ago
    I would like to point out that homeschooling and unschooling are not the same thing. From: http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooling-101/ http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooli... "Unschooling is a branch of homeschooling that promotes nonstructured, child-led learning. There’s no set curriculum or schedule."
    - zaphar 11y ago
      Homeschooling may encompass a lot of different methodologies but as I said Homeschooling back when I did it which was a long time ago it had a lot of similarities to unschooling as it's defined now. The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
    - logfromblammo 11y ago
      Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. In ordinary homeschooling, the parents set a curriculum, and direct the learning. In unschooling, the student decides what to learn, and the parent provides resources to support that. If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?" If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college. As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems. Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).
eldude 11y ago
Exactly. Exploiting his race to further a political narrative as the author has done, is both intellectually feeble and misdirects away from the real issue: authoritarian government behavior targeted at school children.
- cholantesh 11y ago
  Well, given that the police implied heavily that his religious background makes him a candidate for making a bomb...
  - eldude 11y ago
    You mean the non-specific 2nd-hand quote from the officer that makes up the entirety of the justification for the race baiting and exploitative behavior? "Yup. That’s who I thought it was." Like I said, it's an intellectually feeble argument.
    - nsxwolf 11y ago
      That either meant "Yup. The kid that's always building electronics", or "Yup, the Muslim." When in doubt, always assume the worst.
      - cholantesh 11y ago
        What part of his appearance gives the former away?
        nsxwolf 11y ago
        The cop may already know the kid or have heard about his hobbies? We have no idea, we just have a short bit of hearsay.
        7Z7 11y ago
        "He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: 'Yup. That’s who I thought it was.'" Almost certainly not known to him before this incident. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-9th-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall...
chejazi 11y ago
If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may02/vol59/num08/Unequal-School-Funding-in-the-United-States.aspx http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may0... [2] http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html (edit) More recent funding figures, from 2013: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...
- baldfat 11y ago
  People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school. We under value in society 1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces) 2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs) I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Charter School over Public Schools (But Charter Schools under perform on test scores and under pay teachers compared to Public Schools (Money goes to the top in Charter which gets 100% of the child's local funding)) My city per student was the state's lowest at $5,700. The next county over some districts were paying over $28,000 per student. My state has the greatest disparity between haves and have nots. Our school board loves to point to Teacher Union and Teacher Pensions as the problem. How about just give us the money. We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. Sadly I don't see this changing and I don't think funding is the number one factor for educational success but it is an easy thing to measure.
  - maratd 11y ago
    > We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system. They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it. Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story. Stop forcing children to go to broken schools.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. Actually, I agree with this. I remember when this got big and suddenly every IT department, school, etc had these things installed, clearly without permission. If you tried talking about wasted electricity, added pollution, and the social cost of running power hungry processors 24/7 for "alien points" on their forums (or any forums) you'd be shouted down. The reality is that sysadmin and helpdesk staff shouldn't have this kind of power. If they want to run these types of things on their employers hardware they need to get permission. You occasionally hear about this nowadays with Litecoin and Bitcoin mining, but it seems we've learned our lesson here. Power doesn't grow on trees. There are real costs and environmental effects here to seriously consider. This attitude of "fuck you, I understand computers and you don't" really needs to go the way the way of the dodo. Real professionals don't act this way. Also, comparing this guy to a 14 year old who was pulled out of his class and handcuffed for making a clock is fairly weak sauce.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  In an environment where kids are literally arrested for sending popup messages over the network, I think that attitude has some value. People are overreacting based on things they have no understanding of.
  - Gorgor 11y ago
    Do you have a link to this story about being arrested for sending messages?
vermontdevil 11y ago
There's the case of WebCamGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
- bedhead 11y ago
  Holy shit, that is one of the most insane stories I've ever heard of. How was this not made into a prominent national news story? How have tons of school administrators not wound up in prison??
  - Raphmedia 11y ago
    I remember it being all over the news up in Canada. It must have made national news in America too?
  - fluidcruft 11y ago
    It was a prominent national news story
  - lemevi 11y ago
    It was national news when it happened if I recall. It wasn't like 20pt font on the nytimes home page, but it was reported.
  - walshemj 11y ago
    I know I remember at the time talking to a couple of friends who are school governors in the uk. Overhear both the Head and It guy responsible would have been fired and be on the "not allowed to work with kids and vulnerable people" list for the rest of their lives. They would have been lucky not to get prosecuted for child porn as well
DanBC 11y ago
Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300 http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300
- nadams 11y ago
  > does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Advice used to be to not turn machines off but let themgo into sleep. This avoided power cycling which some people though caused problems. A sleeping machine still costs money, but much less than a machine churning SETI. 5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Quick and inaccurate estimate: Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
    - sean13013 11y ago
      If the machines were awake for 12 extra hours a day, and drew 100 watts, that's 0.1kW * 5000machines * 12hours = 6000kWh per day. Where I live, electricity costs about 20 cents per kWh. 0.2dollars * 6000kWh * 365days * 9years = $3.94 million.
    - 11y ago
jussij 11y ago
> If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence Unfortunately this is not a lack of intelligence, which in fact it was, but instead it is a Christian right society that fears everything and anything. The USA has become a country that is now scared of it's own shadow. The problem started when someone with a Muslim sounding name brought something clicking to the school and naturally everyone though it was Muslim terrorist with a bomb. Luckily it was not a bunch disenfranchised white youths, carrying hand guns, machine guns and grenades as they would have walked straight through the security check, because they had the correct skin color. Here is a simple lesson for the people of the USA. Clocks don't kill guns kill.
lloyd-christmas 11y ago
I wasn't allowed to do my high school science scholars project on electromagnetic propulsion because it was around the time of Columbine: "You could potentially make a gun out of it".
- elektromekatron 11y ago
  I used to use the bench power supplies to fire nails across the classroom with a coil. This wasn't for a project, I was just bored.
nailer 11y ago
Another boy makes gun gesture with hand, gets suspended: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-finger-gun/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-fing...
pdabbadabba 11y ago
President Obama has invited Ahmed to bring his "cool clock" to the White House: https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656
- lucio 11y ago
  LATEST NEWS: Terrorist-sounding-named boy Ahmed Mohamed gets into White House with ticking device! The boy was given safe-passage from a guy named Hussein. Both are being investigated.
  - lucio 11y ago
    I've got it. No jokes on HN.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Jokes can be fine, if they're good.
- xasos 11y ago
  As well as Zuck inviting him to Facebook's HQ: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ahmad-mohamed-clock http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg-fa...
- raarts 11y ago
  This is all over the news here in The Netherlands, so probably in other countries as well.
c3534l 11y ago
I got in trouble at school for having smarties candias because "it could be pills."
andrepd 11y ago
You cited three cases, it's anecdotal evidence that says nothing about the efficiency or intelligence of administration.

by nadams 11y ago

t2015_08_25 11y ago

Great list. How about teacher Julie Amero, whose browser was apparently hijacked, possibly while students used it while she was out of the room resulting in students seeing nudity briefly and uninentionally [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_v._Amero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_v._Amero

HarryHirsch 11y ago
Wikipedia says she pled guilty to disorderly conduct and handed in her teaching license because the school board wouldn't pay for IT support that would have kept the naked ladies off her computer. Incredible.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  And people wonder why its so hard to find teachers. Because the job conditions are terrible!
  - tomswartz07 11y ago
    Working in a school district, doing IT, I can agree. My buddies do the same sort of stuff I do and make 1.5x my salary.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Trust me the "Technical Experts" for prosecution are a joke. long story but my friend was jailed for 6 years based upon stuff like this concerning his IP address and it 100% identifies him though it wasn't the same IP address. What jury knows anything about IP addresses and how they don't identify a person?
nadams 11y ago
> Amongst the most noteworthy, Detective Lounsbury stated in the trial that a red link proved that Amero had deliberately clicked on the link to visit a particular pornographic page. Huge blown up pictures were shown to the jury. In fact, forensic investigation showed that the link visited color for the browser was olive green. The link was colored red because there was a font tag on the page turning the link red. I have no comment for that.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  I would think some enterprising employment lawyer would smell blood and there would then be a wrongful termination suit.

ebbv 11y ago

I'm all in favor of seti@home but it's not like running that on the school computers is free. If he didn't have permission to do it, then setting it up on those computers without getting that authorization was inappropriate. Obviously firing him is an overreaction, but I tend to believe their excuse that if he was fired for that, it wasn't just for that. He was already on thin ice before that incident and it was just the final straw. My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.

nadams 11y ago
> If he didn't have permission to do it From a previous news article I've read (not linked) - he claimed the previous system administrator told him to do it and he continued following their instructions. Again this has to have some other side to it - because if someone told me to do that and I googled what it was I would definitely question it and bring it to the administration and let them decide what to do (which some reports claim he had permission from previous administration). Originally they reported firing him because of running seti@home - but then they changed their story quickly afterwards. > My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison. It's a great compare because it shows how out of touch with reality school administration is. Yeah it's two completely different cases - but if common sense was introduced to both then we wouldn't be here discussing it. And this wasn't a teacher - it was a system administrator that was running it for several years. I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
- DanBC 11y ago
  > I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away. How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?

xacaxulu 11y ago

More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.

zaphar 11y ago
In my day we called unschooling homeschooling. And it's a lot of work. It's a fix for those families that can afford to do it. However the families most harmed by public school policies are precisely the people who can't afford to unschool or homeschool which is perhaps the saddest part of all of this. [edit]: spelling
- tmsam 11y ago
  I would like to point out that homeschooling and unschooling are not the same thing. From: http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooling-101/ http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooli... "Unschooling is a branch of homeschooling that promotes nonstructured, child-led learning. There’s no set curriculum or schedule."
  - zaphar 11y ago
    Homeschooling may encompass a lot of different methodologies but as I said Homeschooling back when I did it which was a long time ago it had a lot of similarities to unschooling as it's defined now. The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling. In ordinary homeschooling, the parents set a curriculum, and direct the learning. In unschooling, the student decides what to learn, and the parent provides resources to support that. If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?" If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college. As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems. Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).

eldude 11y ago

Exactly. Exploiting his race to further a political narrative as the author has done, is both intellectually feeble and misdirects away from the real issue: authoritarian government behavior targeted at school children.

cholantesh 11y ago
Well, given that the police implied heavily that his religious background makes him a candidate for making a bomb...
- eldude 11y ago
  You mean the non-specific 2nd-hand quote from the officer that makes up the entirety of the justification for the race baiting and exploitative behavior? "Yup. That’s who I thought it was." Like I said, it's an intellectually feeble argument.
  - nsxwolf 11y ago
    That either meant "Yup. The kid that's always building electronics", or "Yup, the Muslim." When in doubt, always assume the worst.
    - cholantesh 11y ago
      What part of his appearance gives the former away?
      - nsxwolf 11y ago
        The cop may already know the kid or have heard about his hobbies? We have no idea, we just have a short bit of hearsay.
        7Z7 11y ago
        "He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: 'Yup. That’s who I thought it was.'" Almost certainly not known to him before this incident. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dallas-county/headlines/20150915-irving-9th-grader-arrested-after-taking-homemade-clock-to-school.ece http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall...

chejazi 11y ago

If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may02/vol59/num08/Unequal-School-Funding-in-the-United-States.aspx http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may0... [2] http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html (edit) More recent funding figures, from 2013: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...

baldfat 11y ago
People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school. We under value in society 1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces) 2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs) I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Charter School over Public Schools (But Charter Schools under perform on test scores and under pay teachers compared to Public Schools (Money goes to the top in Charter which gets 100% of the child's local funding)) My city per student was the state's lowest at $5,700. The next county over some districts were paying over $28,000 per student. My state has the greatest disparity between haves and have nots. Our school board loves to point to Teacher Union and Teacher Pensions as the problem. How about just give us the money. We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. Sadly I don't see this changing and I don't think funding is the number one factor for educational success but it is an easy thing to measure.
- maratd 11y ago
  > We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system. They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it. Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story. Stop forcing children to go to broken schools.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

>A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. Actually, I agree with this. I remember when this got big and suddenly every IT department, school, etc had these things installed, clearly without permission. If you tried talking about wasted electricity, added pollution, and the social cost of running power hungry processors 24/7 for "alien points" on their forums (or any forums) you'd be shouted down. The reality is that sysadmin and helpdesk staff shouldn't have this kind of power. If they want to run these types of things on their employers hardware they need to get permission. You occasionally hear about this nowadays with Litecoin and Bitcoin mining, but it seems we've learned our lesson here. Power doesn't grow on trees. There are real costs and environmental effects here to seriously consider. This attitude of "fuck you, I understand computers and you don't" really needs to go the way the way of the dodo. Real professionals don't act this way. Also, comparing this guy to a 14 year old who was pulled out of his class and handcuffed for making a clock is fairly weak sauce.

Karunamon 11y ago
In an environment where kids are literally arrested for sending popup messages over the network, I think that attitude has some value. People are overreacting based on things they have no understanding of.
- Gorgor 11y ago
  Do you have a link to this story about being arrested for sending messages?

vermontdevil 11y ago

There's the case of WebCamGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...

bedhead 11y ago
Holy shit, that is one of the most insane stories I've ever heard of. How was this not made into a prominent national news story? How have tons of school administrators not wound up in prison??
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  I remember it being all over the news up in Canada. It must have made national news in America too?
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  It was a prominent national news story
- lemevi 11y ago
  It was national news when it happened if I recall. It wasn't like 20pt font on the nytimes home page, but it was reported.
- walshemj 11y ago
  I know I remember at the time talking to a couple of friends who are school governors in the uk. Overhear both the Head and It guy responsible would have been fired and be on the "not allowed to work with kids and vulnerable people" list for the rest of their lives. They would have been lucky not to get prosecuted for child porn as well

DanBC 11y ago

Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300 http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

nadams 11y ago
> does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
- DanBC 11y ago
  Advice used to be to not turn machines off but let themgo into sleep. This avoided power cycling which some people though caused problems. A sleeping machine still costs money, but much less than a machine churning SETI. 5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Quick and inaccurate estimate: Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
  - sean13013 11y ago
    If the machines were awake for 12 extra hours a day, and drew 100 watts, that's 0.1kW * 5000machines * 12hours = 6000kWh per day. Where I live, electricity costs about 20 cents per kWh. 0.2dollars * 6000kWh * 365days * 9years = $3.94 million.
  - 11y ago

jussij 11y ago

> If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence Unfortunately this is not a lack of intelligence, which in fact it was, but instead it is a Christian right society that fears everything and anything. The USA has become a country that is now scared of it's own shadow. The problem started when someone with a Muslim sounding name brought something clicking to the school and naturally everyone though it was Muslim terrorist with a bomb. Luckily it was not a bunch disenfranchised white youths, carrying hand guns, machine guns and grenades as they would have walked straight through the security check, because they had the correct skin color. Here is a simple lesson for the people of the USA. Clocks don't kill guns kill.

lloyd-christmas 11y ago

I wasn't allowed to do my high school science scholars project on electromagnetic propulsion because it was around the time of Columbine: "You could potentially make a gun out of it".

elektromekatron 11y ago
I used to use the bench power supplies to fire nails across the classroom with a coil. This wasn't for a project, I was just bored.

nailer 11y ago

Another boy makes gun gesture with hand, gets suspended: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-finger-gun/ http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-fing...

pdabbadabba 11y ago

President Obama has invited Ahmed to bring his "cool clock" to the White House: https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656 https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656

lucio 11y ago
LATEST NEWS: Terrorist-sounding-named boy Ahmed Mohamed gets into White House with ticking device! The boy was given safe-passage from a guy named Hussein. Both are being investigated.
- lucio 11y ago
  I've got it. No jokes on HN.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    Jokes can be fine, if they're good.
xasos 11y ago
As well as Zuck inviting him to Facebook's HQ: http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ahmad-mohamed-clock http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/16/9338747/mark-zuckerberg-fa...
raarts 11y ago
This is all over the news here in The Netherlands, so probably in other countries as well.

c3534l 11y ago

I got in trouble at school for having smarties candias because "it could be pills."

andrepd 11y ago

You cited three cases, it's anecdotal evidence that says nothing about the efficiency or intelligence of administration.