[deleted]
14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
101–110 of 994 posts
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#102It seems Amazons recommendation system has acquired 'irony' - it's recommending http://www.amazon.ca/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pri.... If I acquire it, I will then have to hide it from my son lest he build something and show it to his high school teacher.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#103Apparently the authorities have determined that the best way to stop terrorism is to discourage any manifestation of personal intelligence, so that the population turns into mindless sheep. "If you don't know how to make a clock, you won't know how to make a time bomb" is their reasoning. It is seriously disturbing. I am reminded of stories of kids opening a command prompt and being accussed of "hacking", only this i…
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
There's a variant of Clarke's third law which applies here: "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#104You can't legislate intelligence. Yesterday I went to my daughter's school's open house. When I entered, I was cornered by an administrator and told I had to sign some paperwork before I left. It was the computer policy. After I signed it, the admin said my daughter had to sign it too. She's 4.
Similar thing happened when my son started kindergarten. His "signature" was in red marker that smelled like cherry, took up half the page and kind of looked like an alligator to me.
What exactly does that accomplish? It's not like it's a binding contract, it's a child.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#105I have kids at school and I'm actually for the responses from the teachers, yes it's overacting and could be dealt with _much_ better, but being overly alert on this is better than ignorant.
and it's better to show it at his house instead of at school for things like this I feel.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#106It is definitely profiling and I bet his race had a lot to do with it. But I think the same thing would've happened if I had brought such a device to school - having been a super dark dressed goth in school, the fear would've been it's a bomb. Schools are generally very very extra worried about everything these days, suspending him was unnecessary but with it only being three days I don't see it being a terrible thin…
It's also interesting in light of the supposedly meritocracy we live in - if you're smart and work hard, you'll succeed!
Unless your skin is the wrong colour because then your hard work is seen as suspicious!
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#107You can't legislate intelligence. Yesterday I went to my daughter's school's open house. When I entered, I was cornered by an administrator and told I had to sign some paperwork before I left. It was the computer policy. After I signed it, the admin said my daughter had to sign it too. She's 4.
The intent is not to legally bind her, which it obviously wouldn't. Usually the idea of having a child sign too is the idea having a child explicitly agree makes them more likely to be invested in complying. Whether or not there's any evidence that works, I don't know, but it's not quite as stupid as it might seem at first glance.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#108What the hell is a fake bomb? How does a schoolteacher know what a "bomb" looks like? Are we talking about an IED here? That could be literally any fucking thing. I really doubt that this clock looked even remotely like any of the industrially made ready-to-use explosives. Sometimes I can't help feeling like some people should be forcibly removed from the gene pool.
The ignorant portion of our society thinks bombs have flashing lights and tick thanks to Hollywood. In reality anyone wanting to do harm is not going to make their bomb noticeable. It reminds me of the Aqua Teen bomb scare back in 2007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Even then, for an IED to actually be of any use it needs to have an explosive compound, likely in a container of some kind.
Anyone with half a brain would understand that you can't just magically make circuitry explode. That's a whole new level of ignorance, they teach this stuff in elementary school for gods sake.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#109The real question here is: how can we help this kid? I'm not talking about from the legal perspective, but rather what can we (me, you, the larger tech world) do to make it so that this kid and others like him keep tinkering. He needs to know that what he built wasn't wrong, it was awesome.
Exactly my thoughts. Depending on the kid, this experience could be so traumatizing to the point of killing his enthusiasm and curiosity. We need more tinkering not less. It starts with teachers. Too many teachers turn up in body only. Teaching is a role that should be held in much higher esteem than it is but instead we irrationally hold high paying but stupid money jobs like finance in high regard and leave the teaching jobs to the 'failures' of society.
Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School
#110The real question here is: how can we help this kid? I'm not talking about from the legal perspective, but rather what can we (me, you, the larger tech world) do to make it so that this kid and others like him keep tinkering. He needs to know that what he built wasn't wrong, it was awesome.
Offer support: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ws7e8WyQvrsLfhSFvdGot3n9NWK...
Sign up to be notified when some plans are made: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1zCtwhsEh_zB4PkuwlgAVZRTFV4I...