Posted on 12/02/2009 10:33:50 AM PST by JoeProBono
A computer administrator with the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert, Arizona, has resigned during an investigation into suspicious activity.
He's accused of wasting district resources, totaling more than a million dollars to search for UFOs.
The IT administrator is accused of installing a program on every one of the district's 5,000 computers.
The school district was unknowingly the largest contributor to the "SETI" program, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence.
Authorities say 38 year old Brad Nezloochowski rigged up Higley School District computers to help look for intelligent life in outer space.
Superintendent Denise Birdwell says the district recently discovered Nezloochowski installed U.C. Berkley's "SETI At Home" program, which uses volunteer's computers to process mass amounts of information.
Energy use and equipment loss is estimated to be as much as $1.6 million over 9 years.
Nezloochowski's mother said she's not aware any obsession with UFOs, but says she has heard her son talk about "SETI."
Gilbert police said they've been investigating the former employee for the last two months.
Higley's superintendent says she expects he will face criminal charges.
How much did this school spend on “Mann-made” global climate change “studies”?
OMG this is so silly!
If he was smart he would just fess up.
this is a harmless screen save program.
It wakes up when the computer IS NOT IN USE and does some processing of data.
He should not have installed it without permission, but it is harmless and does not waste resources- it only works when computers are on and sitting IDLE anyway
“The IT administrator is accused of installing a program on every one of the district’s 5,000 computers.”
Don’t they mean ET Administrator!
I think Art Bell was the first guy to suggest people do this to help Seti around 10 years ago.
Until we learn to communicate with the colonies of bees on earth, we can forget SETI and communicating with extraterrestrials.
I thought the seti@home project was over. LOL
AND....it wasnt set up to find UFOs.
This is the type of BS accounting crap they used to use to tell us not to program infinite loops in our FORTRAN programming. Not that you would program an infinite loop on purpose anyway.
People need to relax.
This is either very hard to believe, or not hard to believe at all. I haven’t decided which one, yet.
What “equipment loss”? This is a screensaver program that goes to work only when the computer is otherwise idle. At most, it might have caused a minor (unlikely to reach 1.6 thousand dollars, much less 1.6 million, over nine years) increase in electricity usage.
It looks to me like the sysadmin committed a minor breach of protocol that was seized upon by an office-politics enemy.
School Administrator. Our expectations of critical thinking are obviously too high.
Well, these are the same School Administrators that brought us the "Zero Tolerance" concept that expels kindergardeners for drawing pictures of guns.
Give the guy credit for looking for intelligent life somewhere. The poor guy worked for a school system all day.
Post of the Day!
He did wrong. But let's check that cost.
Equipment lost
Whether there was "equipment loss" depends on how he rigged them. If they only used after hours or spare capacity and didn't impact the students or users, then there really is no "equipment loss". If he impacted the students, it's not really an equipment loss, but a loss of education.
Electrical cost
What was the school policy? To leave the computers on or off? And did he influence that policy? And did the computers have a sleep mode?
Because if policy was that the computers were left on and they didn't have sleep modes, then it's questionable that he used any incremental electricity. They would have been running idle anyway.
$6,462,700. Ok the $1.5 million passes the smell test. That dude is so screwed.
Did you ever consider maybe he was leaving the computers on so they could run it?
Er, what makes you think we can’t? Because we haven’t bothered to?
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