This reminds me of something my friend did. We had an assignment to try out EC2 with Hadoop and we needed 8 machines, and we were warned in class to turn them off or they'd keep charging.
Guess who didn't turn them off.
So he casually mentions it to me and tells me that he racked up a 500 pound bill, but his CC didn't have any money in it so it was fine. I asked "so did you turn them off?" He said "no, not really, but it's okay because they can't charge me".
So he racks up another 500 pounds, and only turns the instances off when he finds out that he didn't use the inactive CC but another, active one. Long story short, he's 500 pounds out (Amazon were kind enough to refund the first 500, which disappeared as soon as it hit his account, since he owed another 500).
reminds me of a friend who was studying for his MSc Physics at Warwick... the students had to do a lab experiment with a radioactive isotope and were warned to only have the box containing the isotope open for a few minutes in order to reduce exposure to safe limits.
Guess who forgot to close this box and after 2 hrs of exposure now has to worry about cancer and/or infertility in later life. True story.
Look at it this way: at least your friend took CS and not Physics and thus is only £500 in the hole.
Borderline negligent, though, on the part of the instructor. Lab assistant or supervisor should have been double-checking safe handling of something that dangerous.
he can't be expected to keep track of something for 2 minutes without someone watching over him, but we can let the fellow operate a car, have mains power in his home, purchase cleaning chemicals, etc?
loads of graduate students in the physical sciences are regularly given access to stuff that dangerous or worse. if we've got to have somebody watching over each and every one of them, graduate education will grind to a complete halt.
You are supposed to get training when dealing with anything different and dangerous. Say you rock climb for the first time... and the instructor talks to you for 10 minutes about various stuff and somewhere in the middle he says: "and make sure to check that you can't see 'danger' written on the clasp of the harness, you may fall if it's not secured properly". You have lots of stuff to think about... your posture, the grip, the path you want to take... in a group of 10 people, is it really that unlikely that one will simply forget?
That's why the first couple of times somebody more experienced will check everything about your harness.
Really? We have to hand-hold adults that much now? We worked with chemicals that could cause serious injury in freshmen chemistry. The instructor did an extra "yes this stuff is really dangerous" warning those weeks, but it was a bunch of 18 year olds.
This was a Masters level student, so I don't feel like the instructor has any blame here
Guess who didn't turn them off.
So he casually mentions it to me and tells me that he racked up a 500 pound bill, but his CC didn't have any money in it so it was fine. I asked "so did you turn them off?" He said "no, not really, but it's okay because they can't charge me".
So he racks up another 500 pounds, and only turns the instances off when he finds out that he didn't use the inactive CC but another, active one. Long story short, he's 500 pounds out (Amazon were kind enough to refund the first 500, which disappeared as soon as it hit his account, since he owed another 500).