The entire crux of the SETI project is that narrow-band radio signals cannot be produced naturally. They have absolutely no basis for this, and there is in fact no way to prove this unless we observe a natural phenomena producing such a signal, because it is proving a negative. Until something like that happens it is like trying to prove God doesn't exist.
The basis of the search - that there is extraterrestrial life out there - is not a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a prediction based on a theory describing what the observations mean. You have collected X data, it seems to work by a, b, and c, therefore I predict this experiment will produce Y. That's not at all what the SETI team has done, which is why it is largely a side project for the radio-telescope array.
It would be a completely different story if we had been seeing narrow band radio signals aimed directly at us and had not been able to come up with a natural phenomena to describe what caused them. In that case, ET would be a cop out, but still a hypothesis that would be somewhat testable - communication with another species would likely take hundreds of thousands of years between signals, given that it would almost certainly be coming from somwhere outside our observable range.
The scientific method is the cornerstone of science, and it it's simplistic form it is simply observe, measure, and repeat. The basis for the SETI project has never been observed, it has obviously not been measured, and certainly has not been repeated. It's not science (though there are plenty of scientific techniques used by the project).
It has only been observed once, even though they've looked for it over and over again. Given that we are constantly discovering new natural phenomena that we don't understand, jumping to conclusions based on a single observation is foolish. Even Ehman, the guy who observed the signal, is skeptical of it being artificial. Hell, when the first pulsar was discovered it was named "LGM-1" for "Little Green Men". It was done half in jest, but what if it were true? Turns out they are collapsed stars that blast out radio waves, apparently pulsing because of the way the axis and magnetic poles are canted.
Beyond that, the universe is enormous. Unless you believe there's something supernaturally special about human life, the chances of ours being the only planet with intelligent life are ludicrously small.
It's true the universe is massive beyond comprehension, but that fact alone does not mean life occured anywhere else. Given the fact that we have never been able to find another planet capable of supporting life (let alone having the unique requirements for life to form ever occur on the planet), it's ludicrous to assume there is a high probability of life forming elsewhere when there is absolutely no evidence for it. I would think differently if we had found a number of planets that are the right type and composition, sitting in the right type of solar system, but lacking life. But we dont' even have that much. What we have is absolutely zero evidence that there is life out there besides us.
The rational assumption is that we are alone, since that is what all our observations bear out. However, recognizing that our observations are limited must go hand in hand with that, and also the fact that we ourselves exist means we must not rule the possibility out. Thus I don't think SETI is a bad thing, I was merely pointing out that the reasons people are devoted to it are less related to science and more related to a belief and hope.
That doesn't mean they can't do good science, but it does mean we should not applaud an IT professional for misusing government resources in such a blatant and costly way.
From what I read it sounded like he had set very tight screen-saver policies to maximize his SETI@home time. It was so bad that teachers using a whiteboard application in class would turn around for a couple minutes to explain something, and SETI@home would kick in and hose the whiteboard app. The only way to get the whiteboard back at that point was a reboot - likely a buggy app itself be the teachers should be able to do their jobs. The point of a school is not to "win" on SETI@home, but to teach kids their three R's. It sounds like this guy was becoming a significant hindrance to that.
The point is, he had no business putting SETI@home on his or anybody elses computer. He is actually the person who should be removing that application and any other unapproved software from teacher's machines whenever he finds them. He should have been configuring the computers to minimize operational costs by setting reasonable idle and sleep policies. Someone said they did not want him turning the machines off at night, well that's fine, sleep mode lets them wake instantly and it cuts the power consumption to almost nothing.
That's what his job was - efficient management of the school network. Not only was he not doing his job, he was doing the exact opposite of his job, and doing it for notoriety among the SETI@home community.
This is a school district, it practically shuts down after 5-6pm in the evening, and generally any network intensive activity shuts down by 4pm.
There are also 3 months out of the year where there is little to nothing happening, when all of this should be taken care of. There is absolutely no reason to have that rat's nest there, or to not have an accurate inventory of the network, or to have inadequate cabling. In some cases the last part can be hard to fix (like running new lines through the building), but rolls of Cat5e are cheap, and if you have 3 months with nothing to do you should be cleaning up the cabling if nothing else.
He also apparently made firewall exceptions for SETI@Home on 5,000+ machines across the district. Think about that, if you did any kind of computer security at all you should be screaming bloody murder at this guy for being so incompetant and unethical, if not outrite malicious toward the district's network security.
It wasn't until SETI@home began interfering with the teacher's ability to teach that anybody actually investigated this guy (though he had been told to remove SETI@home in the past). That's when all the crap came up.
He isn't being fired because of SETI@home (though that triggered it), and he isn't being fired for a rat's nest in a cable closet. He's being fired and brought up on criminal ethics charges because his unethical and incompetant behavior is going to cost the school district upwards of $2 million to fix. Removing SETI@home from 5,000 machines will cost in the neighborhood of $50,000-$100,000, though he may have fucked up the computers bad enough that they decide to start with a fresh build, save everyone's data off, and re-build all the computers. That will cost considerably more, but will bring the computers back to a clean state. The rest of it is cabling, inventory, and infrastructure costs which this guy should have been making sure got done on an incrimental basis, mitigating the costs.
You should probably re-read your article, because you forgot some things, like:
- Taking computer equipment home (at least 18 computers and other equipment for personal use) - Downloading pornography - Inhibiting the teacher's ability to do work (SETI@home) - Increasing network usage (SETI@home) - Punching holes in the firewall to allow unapproved software to run (SETI@home, massive security risk if done improperly) - Generally not doing his job
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately severely impacted their system.
It also wasn't like he installed it on just the lab computers or whathaveyou, something he might be able to get away with. No, he installed it on EVERYTHING.
They are estimating close to $2 million to fix all the problems this guy caused, and based on what I've seen I can believe it. I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000, and if they are contracting the work out (they will probably have to) it will cost more like $100,000-$150,000 because of project overhead and profit markup for the consultant. That's serious business.
You say it's all political, but what ever happened to ethics, huh? If this guy had time to download porn at work, why the hell wasn't he fixing the absurd rack wiring in the photo? If they had a firewall policy, why the hell was he breaking it run some pet project (on thousands of school district machines, no less, I'd have some simpathy if he kept it to his own machine). He apparently compromised the security of the entire network just to run this app, if that doesn't scream unethical and incompetant to you, then I don't think anything will.
SETI doesn't have a whole lot to do with science, other than the fact that they do use nice big radio telescopes. These are people with wishes and dreams and faith to test instead of hypothesies and observations. We've observed nothing, as yet, to suggest there is anybody else "out there", and yet these people are scanning for radio signals they may have sent to us. That's great, and more power to them, but I wouldn't call it serious science by any reasonable definition.
Criminal charges are completely appropriate for dealing with an employee who knowingly mis-appropriated government resources, disregarded his employers when told to remove the application, and showed more regard for his own notariety than the school district he was hired to support.
See we have this concept called ethics, and what this guy was doing was very, very unethical. The school district did leave the legal system as a last resort, they told him repeatedly to remove the software and he refused, and continued to load it on new machines. He needs to pay restitution for what he cost the school district, and it is not an insignificant amount.
The school computer may be "on" all day, but you can bet your ass any half way competant IT manager is going to have those computers sleep after 10 minutes or less of inactivity. In sleep mode, most of the PC is off, with primarily just the BIOS and RAM recieving power. It sips, as opposed to guzzles power like even an idle desktop does. If he had set it up to hibernate during off-school hours, they would have used no power at all for 16 hours a day. That's a massive difference.
Besides that, even a complex screensaver (like thos nifty aquarium screen savers) uses almost no resources and adds very little to the power consumption of an idle PC, but SETI@home is a number crunching app, and number crunching is extremely CPU intensive.
Why the hell do you think they need to do this distributed number crunching and data sifting in the first place? It's because they cannot afford the super-computer it would require to get the work done in a reasonable amount of time.
It's not cheap to run, SETI@home will tell you that your power consumption will definitely go up, but for an individual user it ends up costing $20-30 per year for something they care about. In the case of this guy, he was costing the school district upwards of $300,000+ every year, and if he was doing this for several years the total cost could easily be in the millions of dollars.
That screen saver will also allow the computer to go to sleep mode after a few minutes, slashing the power consumption. SETI@Home cannot allow this, or it would defeat the entire purpose of the program (which is to crunch numbers during idle time).
When a computer is in sleep mode, it is essentially off. The only power flowing through it is the power that keeps the data in RAM, and the power that allows the BIOS power management to monitor for that little mouse wiggle and bring everything back up. The CPU is off, the hard drive is off, virtually all of the motherboard is off, and the monitor is off.
To compare that to a program crunching numbers (which is a CPU intensive task) is silly, the number crunching app needs the CPU at almost full throttle, obviously the motherboard powered up, the NIC powered up and actively sending and recieving data. Depending on how well it was written, they may get away with little or no hard drive usage, but that's iffy.
I don't know if you know this or not, but for more than 10 years now when a computer isn't doing anything, it generally goes to sleep. In sleep mode, even the most ancient, piss-poor power management cuts the power consumption of the PC by a large fraction.
I don't know if you know this either, but generally applications like SETI@home are designed to monitor your computer usage, and if you aren't doing anything with it cranks up the CPU share to 60-70%.
I'm not sure if you know this too, but generally a computer that is actively sending data across a network cannot go into sleep mode, nor can a computer that is consuming large amounts of processor time (30%+ definitely).
If you want proof, try starting a download and then putting your computer to sleep. It will do one of two things: It will either kill the connection and go to sleep, or it will simply not go to sleep. You can't do both, it is not possible, and in either case the computer won't go into sleep mode automatically.
In other words, Starry Night and My Pictures stop running after 10 minutes, cutting their power usage to nill, while SETI@home continues crunching away, burning up 100-150w (I doubt they used much more than that though) as opposed to 10-20w. Some quick arithmatic shows that the Starry Night PC is using about 240-480wh per day, while the SETI@home is using roughly 2400-3600wh per day. The SETI@home PC would use about an order of magnitude more power per day than your standard screen-saver laden PC. Multiply these rough figures out by 5,000, and the SETI@home is costing the school district 18mwh per day more electricity usage than a standard PC with a standard sleep mode.
Now that's worst case scenario, it's probably costing more like 10mwh per day more energy consumption, because they are using these computers for school. Since the average cost per-kwh is about 10 cents (it varies a lot by region, it can be as low as 5 and as high as 25), we can estimate that this guy was costing the school district between $1000 and $1800 per day with his SETI nonsense. If he ran it for several years (I did not RTFA, so I don't know how long he ran it) he could have cost the school district several million dollars.
If that's the case, not only should he lose his job, he should probably face criminal charges for stealing government resources.
It sounds like they mishandled it in a couple of ways. First, there was no need to completely eliminate the ability for non-paying players to aquire the best gear and they DEFINITELY should not have broken the gear old non-paying players already had. They could have simply adjusted the difficulty of getting the items and lowered the cost of buying them and a whole flod of new players would have opted to buy instead of grind for the gear. Second, they were not up front about the changes coming down the pipe. If they had said "Hey, this was a great experiment, but it isn't working out, so we are going to make some changes, be prepared!" people still would have been upset, some would probably be upset enough to leave the game for good. However, if they had been honest about it the only people who would leave were those who never had any intention of paying anyway. By not being up front and honest about the changes, they also piss off people who might have otherwise been willing to pay, but decide they'd rather leave now.
The final piece would be changing the structure gradually so the customers don't notice the hurt so bad. It's like trying to boil a frog - if you throw it in boiling water it will immediately jump out , but if you frow one in cool water and slowly raise the heat, it simply cooks in comfort.
That's bullshit, and you know it. People are upset because they have to pay $100 for a bottle of 30 little white pills, and that's it. If it were $10 a bottle they'd have no problem, but when it costs them so much, and they see the industry leaders making so much more than they do, they get angry. But there is a very good reason the people at the top make so much more than the people at the bottom, and it's because they have a very particular set of skills and qualities necessary to run a huge company. The reason pharmeceutical companies should and do profit so much from their drugs is because of the amount of investment they put into it.
It's called Risk/Reward. There is -very- high risk in making a new drug. It can take decades to synthesize a drug, only to discover it doesn't do its job half as well as something that is already on the market. Millions, sometimes even billions of dollars, down the tubes. So when they spend 15-20 years to make a drug that actually works, it sure as hell better pay off big-time, else you will eventually go bankrupt on the failures.
The reason people are upset about about CEO compensation is because they have no idea what a CEO is being compensated for. The fact is, there are a very small number of people who are capable of running a very large organization successfully. It's the same reason most small businesses stay small businesses - the owners reach the limit of their management potential and can go no further.
If you were to replace any fortune 100 company's CEO with the an average joe off the street, I guarantee that company would not be a fortune 100 for long. If the board of directors did not fire his ass pronto, he could easily drive the company into bankruptcy.
A CEO is compensated so much because he is capable of what nobody else (relatively speaking) is capable of. Just because you don't know what the hell the difference is doesn't mean there isn't one, and a big one. Shareholders pay out these salaries for a reason (absurd though they may seem to us).
What do you want, battery power? They'd need a building full of them and it is only going to last so long, diesel power is energy dense and is about as efficient a way of producing power as we have available. I am of course exlcuding nuclear power, and if you think we should be using nuclear for the backup power of one facility, well you're a dumbass and the rest of my post is wasted on you.
The LHC uses about 400mwh of electricity every day when all powered up. That's a ton of energy, but it is not by any means the most a facility has ever used. A wind farm of that size would need acres of land to run on, and would -not- be suitable for backup power due to the variable nature of wind power. Same goes for solar. Backup power needs to be flip-a-switch-and-it-works reliable. With diesels they can truck in gas if they start to run low, but how do you truck in wind or sunlight?
In fact, anybody who has lived off the grid knows that diesel is usually the only practical option. If the wind isn't right and the sunlight isn't right and you don't happen to be sitting on top of a magma chamber close to the surface, the only options are IC engines, and diesel is the king.
Lastly, if you think the diesel generators we use today use the same technology (aside from the basic internal combustion principles) as engines 100 years ago did, you're an idiot, and I mean that in the most traditional sense.
Nobody outside the town without power gives a shit about a town without power. I don't even know what town it is in, and don't bother telling me because I won't care.
The LHC is the only thing interesting there, so the LHC without power is all we care about.
Well, since the Bradley Fighting Vehicle actually drives, and the Large Hadron Collider has not, as yet, collided any hadrons, the LHC is easilly the bigger waste.
Now, if they ever get the damn thing running and start colliding hardrons largely (:P) then yeah, the Bradley wins hands down for biggest waste.
You do realise that the UK is in Europe, right? It's even been a member of the European Union for 36 years.
Obviously, since these are supposed to be the best minds of Europe building this thing, and obviously since the UK plugs are supposed to be the best in the world (even though they had to compare their's to gimped US plugs and not standard 3-prongs to achieve that), they should obviously be using UK plugs for the LHC.
That the UK plugs failed (and failed, and failed, and failed) shows the inherant weaknesses of European design.
That's the most plausible explanation I've read yet for why Obama got the Nobel Peace Price, and it manages to maintain the prize's legitimacy! (such that it has)
There is no Article 10 of the US Constitution, it only has 8 articles - you referenced section 10 of Article 1, which lays out the restrictions on the States.
Since it's short and sweet, here's the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The federal government has somehow managed to get around this to a large degree by citing inter-state commerce (which the constitution states is the purview of the Feds). SOX would fall under that as well, and actually a heck of a lot better than most of the federal government's interferance into State afairs do.
Have you ever heard of Management of Change or Separation of Duties?
Both of those are a direct result of SOX that have a massive impact on everything IT does. SOX affects backup policies, email policies, network policies, even instant messaging policies!
I recall telecom wanting to upgrade a 100mb line to a 1000mb line, they finished all the work, everything was good to go, it's an easy change, so when they were ready the sent in the MoC request necessary to unplug the network cable from the 100mb port and plug it in to the 1000mb port. It came back a few days later that something on the form wasn't filled out quite right, ok no big deal, it's a complicated form for a stupid simple change, it can be hard to fill in all the blanks for that type of thing. So they fixed it and sent it back. Well, they didn't believe it, or something, and wanted a bigger impact study done on it. I mean, for Christ's sake it's a frickin port swap! NOBODY is going to lose connectivity during the swap, you'll know in 10 seconds if it didn't work, and fixing it is as easy as plugging it back into the old port. There is no impact at all. In all it took about a month and 20-30 man-hours to unplug a network cable and plug it in to another port.
What does that have to do with SOX? Well, the only reason telecom has to go through that bullshit is because there are a helluva lot of accountants in the building, working with sensitive financial material, and even though there is no way such a change will ever affect them or the integrity of that financial data, it must all still comply with SOX.
This kind of crap costs IT departments buttloads of money, I mean, that was at least $1200 just to plug a network cable into a new port, it's 99% of the cost of the entire job. This crap happens on a regular basis, hugely inflating the cost of projects.
Separation of Duties makes some sense in some situations, but half the time it must be applied in an area that makes absolutely no sense, and that is determined entirely by these independant audit boards that have no oversight.
There is no reason one person can't do all of it, from developement to operations, if he follows best practices in each case. Anything more than a one-man shop should always have another person checking the work at each stage, but that does not make separation of duties necessary. It also very rarely makes sense in an IT support environment, but often the rules are made to apply to the support guys anyway.
The easiest way to prevent midnight coders is to impliment a source control system and a daily build (or weekly or monthly, depending on the type of project, but you probably want daily builds) policy and require all new code to be in the daily build by noon each day. Your change must build and run correctly, or you can't update the build. If the code doesn't work, then the last person to update it must fix it. If a coder refuses to follow these guidlines, fire them. No matter how brilliant they may be, they will almost certainly cost you more more money than they make for you because of their disrespect for your organization.
It sounds like you're a dumbass who doesn't give a shit about your clients' data if you think you don't need authentication and logging for a web app. You're about the only type of idiot SOX actually protects us from. If IT guys didn't need to SOX to tell dumbasses like you to fuck off, we wouldn't be stuck with SOX in the first place.
I hope you don't do work for any systems that hold my data, that's all I'm saying.
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The entire crux of the SETI project is that narrow-band radio signals cannot be produced naturally. They have absolutely no basis for this, and there is in fact no way to prove this unless we observe a natural phenomena producing such a signal, because it is proving a negative. Until something like that happens it is like trying to prove God doesn't exist.
The basis of the search - that there is extraterrestrial life out there - is not a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a prediction based on a theory describing what the observations mean. You have collected X data, it seems to work by a, b, and c, therefore I predict this experiment will produce Y. That's not at all what the SETI team has done, which is why it is largely a side project for the radio-telescope array.
It would be a completely different story if we had been seeing narrow band radio signals aimed directly at us and had not been able to come up with a natural phenomena to describe what caused them. In that case, ET would be a cop out, but still a hypothesis that would be somewhat testable - communication with another species would likely take hundreds of thousands of years between signals, given that it would almost certainly be coming from somwhere outside our observable range.
The scientific method is the cornerstone of science, and it it's simplistic form it is simply observe, measure, and repeat. The basis for the SETI project has never been observed, it has obviously not been measured, and certainly has not been repeated. It's not science (though there are plenty of scientific techniques used by the project).
What about the "wow" signal?
It has only been observed once, even though they've looked for it over and over again. Given that we are constantly discovering new natural phenomena that we don't understand, jumping to conclusions based on a single observation is foolish. Even Ehman, the guy who observed the signal, is skeptical of it being artificial. Hell, when the first pulsar was discovered it was named "LGM-1" for "Little Green Men". It was done half in jest, but what if it were true? Turns out they are collapsed stars that blast out radio waves, apparently pulsing because of the way the axis and magnetic poles are canted.
Beyond that, the universe is enormous. Unless you believe there's something supernaturally special about human life, the chances of ours being the only planet with intelligent life are ludicrously small.
It's true the universe is massive beyond comprehension, but that fact alone does not mean life occured anywhere else. Given the fact that we have never been able to find another planet capable of supporting life (let alone having the unique requirements for life to form ever occur on the planet), it's ludicrous to assume there is a high probability of life forming elsewhere when there is absolutely no evidence for it. I would think differently if we had found a number of planets that are the right type and composition, sitting in the right type of solar system, but lacking life. But we dont' even have that much. What we have is absolutely zero evidence that there is life out there besides us.
The rational assumption is that we are alone, since that is what all our observations bear out. However, recognizing that our observations are limited must go hand in hand with that, and also the fact that we ourselves exist means we must not rule the possibility out. Thus I don't think SETI is a bad thing, I was merely pointing out that the reasons people are devoted to it are less related to science and more related to a belief and hope.
That doesn't mean they can't do good science, but it does mean we should not applaud an IT professional for misusing government resources in such a blatant and costly way.
From what I read it sounded like he had set very tight screen-saver policies to maximize his SETI@home time. It was so bad that teachers using a whiteboard application in class would turn around for a couple minutes to explain something, and SETI@home would kick in and hose the whiteboard app. The only way to get the whiteboard back at that point was a reboot - likely a buggy app itself be the teachers should be able to do their jobs. The point of a school is not to "win" on SETI@home, but to teach kids their three R's. It sounds like this guy was becoming a significant hindrance to that.
The point is, he had no business putting SETI@home on his or anybody elses computer. He is actually the person who should be removing that application and any other unapproved software from teacher's machines whenever he finds them. He should have been configuring the computers to minimize operational costs by setting reasonable idle and sleep policies. Someone said they did not want him turning the machines off at night, well that's fine, sleep mode lets them wake instantly and it cuts the power consumption to almost nothing.
That's what his job was - efficient management of the school network. Not only was he not doing his job, he was doing the exact opposite of his job, and doing it for notoriety among the SETI@home community.
This is a school district, it practically shuts down after 5-6pm in the evening, and generally any network intensive activity shuts down by 4pm.
There are also 3 months out of the year where there is little to nothing happening, when all of this should be taken care of. There is absolutely no reason to have that rat's nest there, or to not have an accurate inventory of the network, or to have inadequate cabling. In some cases the last part can be hard to fix (like running new lines through the building), but rolls of Cat5e are cheap, and if you have 3 months with nothing to do you should be cleaning up the cabling if nothing else.
He also apparently made firewall exceptions for SETI@Home on 5,000+ machines across the district. Think about that, if you did any kind of computer security at all you should be screaming bloody murder at this guy for being so incompetant and unethical, if not outrite malicious toward the district's network security.
It wasn't until SETI@home began interfering with the teacher's ability to teach that anybody actually investigated this guy (though he had been told to remove SETI@home in the past). That's when all the crap came up.
He isn't being fired because of SETI@home (though that triggered it), and he isn't being fired for a rat's nest in a cable closet. He's being fired and brought up on criminal ethics charges because his unethical and incompetant behavior is going to cost the school district upwards of $2 million to fix. Removing SETI@home from 5,000 machines will cost in the neighborhood of $50,000-$100,000, though he may have fucked up the computers bad enough that they decide to start with a fresh build, save everyone's data off, and re-build all the computers. That will cost considerably more, but will bring the computers back to a clean state. The rest of it is cabling, inventory, and infrastructure costs which this guy should have been making sure got done on an incrimental basis, mitigating the costs.
You should probably re-read your article, because you forgot some things, like:
- Taking computer equipment home (at least 18 computers and other equipment for personal use)
- Downloading pornography
- Inhibiting the teacher's ability to do work (SETI@home)
- Increasing network usage (SETI@home)
- Punching holes in the firewall to allow unapproved software to run (SETI@home, massive security risk if done improperly)
- Generally not doing his job
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately severely impacted their system.
It also wasn't like he installed it on just the lab computers or whathaveyou, something he might be able to get away with. No, he installed it on EVERYTHING.
They are estimating close to $2 million to fix all the problems this guy caused, and based on what I've seen I can believe it. I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000, and if they are contracting the work out (they will probably have to) it will cost more like $100,000-$150,000 because of project overhead and profit markup for the consultant. That's serious business.
You say it's all political, but what ever happened to ethics, huh? If this guy had time to download porn at work, why the hell wasn't he fixing the absurd rack wiring in the photo? If they had a firewall policy, why the hell was he breaking it run some pet project (on thousands of school district machines, no less, I'd have some simpathy if he kept it to his own machine). He apparently compromised the security of the entire network just to run this app, if that doesn't scream unethical and incompetant to you, then I don't think anything will.
SETI doesn't have a whole lot to do with science, other than the fact that they do use nice big radio telescopes. These are people with wishes and dreams and faith to test instead of hypothesies and observations. We've observed nothing, as yet, to suggest there is anybody else "out there", and yet these people are scanning for radio signals they may have sent to us. That's great, and more power to them, but I wouldn't call it serious science by any reasonable definition.
Criminal charges are completely appropriate for dealing with an employee who knowingly mis-appropriated government resources, disregarded his employers when told to remove the application, and showed more regard for his own notariety than the school district he was hired to support.
See we have this concept called ethics, and what this guy was doing was very, very unethical. The school district did leave the legal system as a last resort, they told him repeatedly to remove the software and he refused, and continued to load it on new machines. He needs to pay restitution for what he cost the school district, and it is not an insignificant amount.
The school computer may be "on" all day, but you can bet your ass any half way competant IT manager is going to have those computers sleep after 10 minutes or less of inactivity. In sleep mode, most of the PC is off, with primarily just the BIOS and RAM recieving power. It sips, as opposed to guzzles power like even an idle desktop does. If he had set it up to hibernate during off-school hours, they would have used no power at all for 16 hours a day. That's a massive difference.
Besides that, even a complex screensaver (like thos nifty aquarium screen savers) uses almost no resources and adds very little to the power consumption of an idle PC, but SETI@home is a number crunching app, and number crunching is extremely CPU intensive.
Why the hell do you think they need to do this distributed number crunching and data sifting in the first place? It's because they cannot afford the super-computer it would require to get the work done in a reasonable amount of time.
It's not cheap to run, SETI@home will tell you that your power consumption will definitely go up, but for an individual user it ends up costing $20-30 per year for something they care about. In the case of this guy, he was costing the school district upwards of $300,000+ every year, and if he was doing this for several years the total cost could easily be in the millions of dollars.
That screen saver will also allow the computer to go to sleep mode after a few minutes, slashing the power consumption. SETI@Home cannot allow this, or it would defeat the entire purpose of the program (which is to crunch numbers during idle time).
When a computer is in sleep mode, it is essentially off. The only power flowing through it is the power that keeps the data in RAM, and the power that allows the BIOS power management to monitor for that little mouse wiggle and bring everything back up. The CPU is off, the hard drive is off, virtually all of the motherboard is off, and the monitor is off.
To compare that to a program crunching numbers (which is a CPU intensive task) is silly, the number crunching app needs the CPU at almost full throttle, obviously the motherboard powered up, the NIC powered up and actively sending and recieving data. Depending on how well it was written, they may get away with little or no hard drive usage, but that's iffy.
I don't know if you know this or not, but for more than 10 years now when a computer isn't doing anything, it generally goes to sleep. In sleep mode, even the most ancient, piss-poor power management cuts the power consumption of the PC by a large fraction.
I don't know if you know this either, but generally applications like SETI@home are designed to monitor your computer usage, and if you aren't doing anything with it cranks up the CPU share to 60-70%.
I'm not sure if you know this too, but generally a computer that is actively sending data across a network cannot go into sleep mode, nor can a computer that is consuming large amounts of processor time (30%+ definitely).
If you want proof, try starting a download and then putting your computer to sleep. It will do one of two things: It will either kill the connection and go to sleep, or it will simply not go to sleep. You can't do both, it is not possible, and in either case the computer won't go into sleep mode automatically.
In other words, Starry Night and My Pictures stop running after 10 minutes, cutting their power usage to nill, while SETI@home continues crunching away, burning up 100-150w (I doubt they used much more than that though) as opposed to 10-20w. Some quick arithmatic shows that the Starry Night PC is using about 240-480wh per day, while the SETI@home is using roughly 2400-3600wh per day. The SETI@home PC would use about an order of magnitude more power per day than your standard screen-saver laden PC. Multiply these rough figures out by 5,000, and the SETI@home is costing the school district 18mwh per day more electricity usage than a standard PC with a standard sleep mode.
Now that's worst case scenario, it's probably costing more like 10mwh per day more energy consumption, because they are using these computers for school. Since the average cost per-kwh is about 10 cents (it varies a lot by region, it can be as low as 5 and as high as 25), we can estimate that this guy was costing the school district between $1000 and $1800 per day with his SETI nonsense. If he ran it for several years (I did not RTFA, so I don't know how long he ran it) he could have cost the school district several million dollars.
If that's the case, not only should he lose his job, he should probably face criminal charges for stealing government resources.
It sounds like they mishandled it in a couple of ways. First, there was no need to completely eliminate the ability for non-paying players to aquire the best gear and they DEFINITELY should not have broken the gear old non-paying players already had. They could have simply adjusted the difficulty of getting the items and lowered the cost of buying them and a whole flod of new players would have opted to buy instead of grind for the gear. Second, they were not up front about the changes coming down the pipe. If they had said "Hey, this was a great experiment, but it isn't working out, so we are going to make some changes, be prepared!" people still would have been upset, some would probably be upset enough to leave the game for good. However, if they had been honest about it the only people who would leave were those who never had any intention of paying anyway. By not being up front and honest about the changes, they also piss off people who might have otherwise been willing to pay, but decide they'd rather leave now.
The final piece would be changing the structure gradually so the customers don't notice the hurt so bad. It's like trying to boil a frog - if you throw it in boiling water it will immediately jump out , but if you frow one in cool water and slowly raise the heat, it simply cooks in comfort.
That's bullshit, and you know it. People are upset because they have to pay $100 for a bottle of 30 little white pills, and that's it. If it were $10 a bottle they'd have no problem, but when it costs them so much, and they see the industry leaders making so much more than they do, they get angry. But there is a very good reason the people at the top make so much more than the people at the bottom, and it's because they have a very particular set of skills and qualities necessary to run a huge company. The reason pharmeceutical companies should and do profit so much from their drugs is because of the amount of investment they put into it.
It's called Risk/Reward. There is -very- high risk in making a new drug. It can take decades to synthesize a drug, only to discover it doesn't do its job half as well as something that is already on the market. Millions, sometimes even billions of dollars, down the tubes. So when they spend 15-20 years to make a drug that actually works, it sure as hell better pay off big-time, else you will eventually go bankrupt on the failures.
The reason people are upset about about CEO compensation is because they have no idea what a CEO is being compensated for. The fact is, there are a very small number of people who are capable of running a very large organization successfully. It's the same reason most small businesses stay small businesses - the owners reach the limit of their management potential and can go no further.
If you were to replace any fortune 100 company's CEO with the an average joe off the street, I guarantee that company would not be a fortune 100 for long. If the board of directors did not fire his ass pronto, he could easily drive the company into bankruptcy.
A CEO is compensated so much because he is capable of what nobody else (relatively speaking) is capable of. Just because you don't know what the hell the difference is doesn't mean there isn't one, and a big one. Shareholders pay out these salaries for a reason (absurd though they may seem to us).
What do you want, battery power? They'd need a building full of them and it is only going to last so long, diesel power is energy dense and is about as efficient a way of producing power as we have available. I am of course exlcuding nuclear power, and if you think we should be using nuclear for the backup power of one facility, well you're a dumbass and the rest of my post is wasted on you.
The LHC uses about 400mwh of electricity every day when all powered up. That's a ton of energy, but it is not by any means the most a facility has ever used. A wind farm of that size would need acres of land to run on, and would -not- be suitable for backup power due to the variable nature of wind power. Same goes for solar. Backup power needs to be flip-a-switch-and-it-works reliable. With diesels they can truck in gas if they start to run low, but how do you truck in wind or sunlight?
In fact, anybody who has lived off the grid knows that diesel is usually the only practical option. If the wind isn't right and the sunlight isn't right and you don't happen to be sitting on top of a magma chamber close to the surface, the only options are IC engines, and diesel is the king.
Lastly, if you think the diesel generators we use today use the same technology (aside from the basic internal combustion principles) as engines 100 years ago did, you're an idiot, and I mean that in the most traditional sense.
Who doesn't search with safe-mode off? Jeeze people, you can set that sort of thing!
Nobody outside the town without power gives a shit about a town without power. I don't even know what town it is in, and don't bother telling me because I won't care.
The LHC is the only thing interesting there, so the LHC without power is all we care about.
Well, since the Bradley Fighting Vehicle actually drives, and the Large Hadron Collider has not, as yet, collided any hadrons, the LHC is easilly the bigger waste.
Now, if they ever get the damn thing running and start colliding hardrons largely (:P) then yeah, the Bradley wins hands down for biggest waste.
You do realise that the UK is in Europe, right? It's even been a member of the European Union for 36 years.
Obviously, since these are supposed to be the best minds of Europe building this thing, and obviously since the UK plugs are supposed to be the best in the world (even though they had to compare their's to gimped US plugs and not standard 3-prongs to achieve that), they should obviously be using UK plugs for the LHC.
That the UK plugs failed (and failed, and failed, and failed) shows the inherant weaknesses of European design.
That's the most plausible explanation I've read yet for why Obama got the Nobel Peace Price, and it manages to maintain the prize's legitimacy! (such that it has)
I think you meant Amendment 10.
There is no Article 10 of the US Constitution, it only has 8 articles - you referenced section 10 of Article 1, which lays out the restrictions on the States.
Since it's short and sweet, here's the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The federal government has somehow managed to get around this to a large degree by citing inter-state commerce (which the constitution states is the purview of the Feds). SOX would fall under that as well, and actually a heck of a lot better than most of the federal government's interferance into State afairs do.
Who the hell cares about Oxley? Of course it should be SarBanes-oxley.
Pfffft.
Have you ever heard of Management of Change or Separation of Duties?
Both of those are a direct result of SOX that have a massive impact on everything IT does. SOX affects backup policies, email policies, network policies, even instant messaging policies!
I recall telecom wanting to upgrade a 100mb line to a 1000mb line, they finished all the work, everything was good to go, it's an easy change, so when they were ready the sent in the MoC request necessary to unplug the network cable from the 100mb port and plug it in to the 1000mb port. It came back a few days later that something on the form wasn't filled out quite right, ok no big deal, it's a complicated form for a stupid simple change, it can be hard to fill in all the blanks for that type of thing. So they fixed it and sent it back. Well, they didn't believe it, or something, and wanted a bigger impact study done on it. I mean, for Christ's sake it's a frickin port swap! NOBODY is going to lose connectivity during the swap, you'll know in 10 seconds if it didn't work, and fixing it is as easy as plugging it back into the old port. There is no impact at all. In all it took about a month and 20-30 man-hours to unplug a network cable and plug it in to another port.
What does that have to do with SOX? Well, the only reason telecom has to go through that bullshit is because there are a helluva lot of accountants in the building, working with sensitive financial material, and even though there is no way such a change will ever affect them or the integrity of that financial data, it must all still comply with SOX.
This kind of crap costs IT departments buttloads of money, I mean, that was at least $1200 just to plug a network cable into a new port, it's 99% of the cost of the entire job. This crap happens on a regular basis, hugely inflating the cost of projects.
Separation of Duties makes some sense in some situations, but half the time it must be applied in an area that makes absolutely no sense, and that is determined entirely by these independant audit boards that have no oversight.
Ahh, that really clears it up.
I thought it meant "Penguin Dynamite".
Yeah, it didn't make much sense to me either.
Still, it should have been Troubleshoot instead of "problem determination". Why use big words when a diminutive word will suffice?
I'm not sure, but I don't think you qualify as one of the brilliant leaders across the nation that the GP was talking about.
What about operations where 3 people is overkill?
Didn't think about that one eh?
There is no reason one person can't do all of it, from developement to operations, if he follows best practices in each case. Anything more than a one-man shop should always have another person checking the work at each stage, but that does not make separation of duties necessary. It also very rarely makes sense in an IT support environment, but often the rules are made to apply to the support guys anyway.
The easiest way to prevent midnight coders is to impliment a source control system and a daily build (or weekly or monthly, depending on the type of project, but you probably want daily builds) policy and require all new code to be in the daily build by noon each day. Your change must build and run correctly, or you can't update the build. If the code doesn't work, then the last person to update it must fix it. If a coder refuses to follow these guidlines, fire them. No matter how brilliant they may be, they will almost certainly cost you more more money than they make for you because of their disrespect for your organization.
It sounds like you're a dumbass who doesn't give a shit about your clients' data if you think you don't need authentication and logging for a web app. You're about the only type of idiot SOX actually protects us from. If IT guys didn't need to SOX to tell dumbasses like you to fuck off, we wouldn't be stuck with SOX in the first place.
I hope you don't do work for any systems that hold my data, that's all I'm saying.
But I like SarBox...