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So, this thirteen year old kid with a Syrian father once got flagged up by Hewlett Packard because he was ordering electronic components. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next...
Yeah, Bill Hewlett offered him a summer job, he got hooked on making stuff, wound up founding a company out of his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, and created the biggest electronics company in the world.
Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
(calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US)
So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone.
Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume 8 hours of each day the district expected to pay for them to run, so that leaves ~16 hours the district expected the machines to be asleep or off.
24 - 8 = 16 (about 66% of the 24 hour period)
So, the admin was consuming about $12.51 per machine per month the district did not expect.
This comes out to around $750,600 the sys admin potentially cost the district, for a single year. He ran this scheme for 9 years -- so...
$750,600 per year * 9 years = $6,755,400 in additional electricity costs
Keep in mind this is likely rather low, since most places in the US have a significantly higher per kWh fee than the $0.06 per kWh used in these calculations.
I'm certain that this sum alone was enough cause to terminate the sys admin.
Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
This whole situation screams a breach of the poor boy's liberties. According to TEX. FAM. CODE §51.095 [1]: In order for a custodial written statement to be admissible, the following sequence of events must occur: 1) the officer must take the child to a magistrate; 2) the magistrate must then inform the child of his rights to remain silent, to have an attorney appointed and present during questioning and to terminate…
> The newspaper quoted a police spokesman, James McLellan, as saying that Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, and the police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still did not believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story. “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation. “It coul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always find the "more funding" idea to be somewhat dubious. Don't we already spend a ton of money on education? Perhaps even more per pupil than other developed countries?
At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day). She makes $35k / year. If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job. It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inher…
She makes $35k / year.
How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?
The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but rewards older, mediocre teachers with "time served" is part of what's stopping "more money" from being the answer. Higher teacher salaries under the current system would largely reward the oldest, not the best.
In the article it mentions that his engineering teacher advised him to hide it from the other staff. Which is confusing to me. The teacher obviously knew it wasn't a bomb and obviously knew the other staff would misinterpret this. So why didn't the teacher preempt this whole thing by advising the school that "Yes, this kid brought in a clock to show me. No, it's not a bomb no matter how scary it looks."
It must be one hell of a clock if a teacher actually told the student to hide it from plain sight! EDIT: A picture of the actual device is here. http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local/dallas-county/2015/09/1... https://archive.is/Q0OLb
I would "stand with Ahmed", but if that means being attached to race baiting and Islamophobia accusations, I won't.
What's incredibly sad to me is all the kids whose parents wouldn't let them leave the house with a homemade clock. "What are you doing? If you take that to school they'll think it's a bomb!" Even Ahmed's engineering teacher advised him not to show his clock to any other teachers. Fear and suspicion are the default now. That's heartbreaking.
On the plus side, where the end is coming into sight, so is a new beginning.
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…
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] h…
Under what circumstances would you consider that public schools are a failure and that we should try another approach?