Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 994 posts

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#151

Post by kailuowang »

userbinator wrote: post #21

Apparently 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…

I think you overestimate the intelligence of the authority in this particular case. I think this is more a case of collective stupidity than authority turning people to mindless sheep.

What worried me is where is the engineering teacher he first showed the clock to? He or she could've clarified everything in 5 seconds.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#152

Post by mikeash »

happyscrappy wrote: post #138
mikeash wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make three boxes. Label them BOMB 1, BOMB 2, and BOMB 4. Put them in various places around the school. Grab some popcorn and a comfy chair.

And then you will complain when they bring charges against you.

For something like this, "I never imagined the authorities could possibly be this stupid" ought to be an affirmative defense.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#153

Post by coldtea »

sakri wrote: post #141

This story is at 1 and 2 on both reddit and Hacker News. Why is this so interesting?

Because it's a person making something, authority denying him that for stupid reasons, etc. It has all the elements of something that appeals to hackers (in the "maker" sense).

But seriously, if you have to ask you will never know. This is more of a "you get it or not" thing, related to how HN's targeted demographic feels on such issues.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#154

Post by makecheck »

Of course the reaction to this is completely insane but what's even sillier is that they're continuing to assume that real threats would be things that they can see. If someone wanted to blow up a building they could hide a bomb in a backpack among hundreds of others and never show it to anyone.

It's the same crap they pull at the airport where you must throw out your bottled water; and then their solution is to toss this bottle, which was classified a minute ago as a serious threat, into a pile of other unverified "threats" in the middle of a densely-populated area of the airport. How this kind of thing has gone YEARS without any serious backslash is amazing to me.

It is so out of hand. While certainly bad things have happened and could happen, statistically modern society is pretty safe and we all have to stop being so damn scared of every little thing.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#155

Post by vbcr »

ryanlol wrote: post #55

What 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.

How can they think that the clock was a bomb when it is ticking up rather than down.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#156

Post by bargl »

chipgap98 wrote: post #37

That letter from the school just adds insult to injury. > talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduact and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited Since when can you not bring a clock to school?

If the school and the police had acted in the correct way this would be no big deal. Hey, we have a device here that could be a bomb. Police show up, call bomb specialist. Bomb specialist laughs in a few peoples faces, the school apologizes, the kid keeps tinkering.

But no they had to go and dig in. Which makes this really wrong on their part. I hate it when organizations take a stance around stupidity.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#157

Post by rbshadel »

kailuowang wrote: post #151
userbinator wrote: post #21

Apparently 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…

I think you overestimate the intelligence of the authority in this particular case. I think this is more a case of collective stupidity than authority turning people to mindless sheep. What worried me is where is the engineering teacher he first showed the clock to? He or she could've clarified everything in 5 seconds.

that's exactly what I came here to post. I find it even more troubling that the teacher was clearly aware of this possible outcome - going so far as to tell the kid to hide it from other teachers. but for all we know maybe he did speak up and was shushed by administration? who knows...pretty frustrating either way.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#158

Post by venomsnake »

I guess he realizes how lucky he is, that he had not had his soldering gun on him. He would have been shot on sight. /not sure if sarcastic, sadly.

And back in the day we played with sodium, benzene, nitroglycerin, nitrogen triodide as part of the curriculum.

With the way current students are treated - the surprising thing about pupils going postal, is that so few of them are.

On the other hand that is a great way to incubate terrorists. Local and organic.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#159

Post by knowaveragejoe »

ryanlol wrote: post #108
stormcrowsx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't a "whole new level" of ignorance. If you think so, then you probably don't understand how stupid a significant portion of the population is. There are people out there who think that Google, Facebook, so on, are actually on their computer. It makes complete sense that some people think a bomb looks like some caricature envisioned for the audience's benefit in a movie or TV show. Many people's entire lives revolve around motion picture entertainment of some sort.

Re: 14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School

#160

Post by t2015_08_25 »

nadams wrote: post #121

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…

Great list. How about teacher Julie Amero, whose browser was apparently hijacked, possibly while students used it while she was out of the room resulting in students seeing nudity briefly and uninentionally [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_v._Amero

Post reply on HN