No harm, no foul.

It’s impossible to burn out a modern processor if it doesn’t overheat. On the other hand, if they’re just machines sitting in labs and if the school’s AC doesn’t run at night, it’s pretty plausible that they could overheat.

“The extra energy costs probably came from leaving computers on at night, which *is* clearly wasteful. ”

Not exactly. Having the computer run at night isn’t a big deal because it can spin down the hard drive, sleep the monitor and drop usage way down. The extra energy costs came from the processors never idling. If you pull up Task Manager on Windows or run top on a Unix system, you’ll see an “idle” process. That’s not a real program, it’s the CPU turning itself off (partially) to save power.

“They should have run the program only when computers were on anyway, and when it didn’t interfere with other software.”

SETI@home runs at the lowest possible priority, so the operating system will never make you wait while it’s processing. It also does very little disk or network I/O, so it’s not making anything wait. But, if you have a program running in the background like SETI, your processor will never switch itself off. So that means that even if you run it while the machines are on, you’re going to be using a lot of electricity.

Whether or not his actions were wasteful hinges on the question of whether SETI@home is wasteful. In terms of wise use of electricity, it would be best if everyone would just donate some money for SETI to build a supercomputer. They don’t , so given that the science really is important, I think it’s reasonable to have the option for people to donate some cycles and foot the electric bill. But to donate other people’s money for them is theft, and the guy’s lucky they didn’t throw the book at him.

They should have run the program only when computers were on anyway, and when it didn’t interfere with other software. That would be a legitimate and very low-cost way to share the school’s resources, and could actually be made part of the science curriculum.

According to the linked newspaper article, the district had many other grievances with this employee. But they seem to be inflating the financial side of it in order to back up their decision to fire him. I don’t think this should be used to scare people away from using SETI@home.

He did not need approval, he was the Director of Information Technology, not simply “a network systems administrator” as you claim.

Do some more research next time and present a less biased slant.