All Brad Niesluchowski wanted to do was help out a good cause. In 2000, he installed the SETI@home software program on the computers of the Higley Unified School District in Mesa, Arizona. After all, he was the school district’s information technology director, so if anyone could do it, it’d be him. Emphasis on was, because once Superintendant Denise Birdwell found out about Niesluchowski’s actions, she fired him for using school computers to search for aliens.
Here’s the kicker. At one point, back about the time Niesluchowski was installing the SETI software on school computers, I was doing the same thing on my personal computer. Seti@home, the program which Superintendant Birdwell claims will cost the district $1 million dollars to remove, is a free program that functions as a screen saver. It uses the computer’s free time to do number crunching for SETI’s radio telescopes in an attempt to track down alien life and nothing more. If she thinks it’s going to cost $1 million to remove a free program that can be uninstalled in TWO seconds, then she’s either A) completely incompetent as to how computers work (which is probable given her industry) or B) lining her pockets with that $1 million.
Yes, SETI@home uses bandwidth when it downloads or uploads information. Other than that? It’s harmless. Those computers are going to stay on all day and go unused for hours at a time, so they may as well be doing something while they passively drain electricity.
Tags: Mesa, Arizona, Brad Niesluchowski, Higley Unified School District, SETI, Seti(at)home, SETI@home, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life, Denise Birdwell, aliens, search for alien life