301–310 of 994 posts
spaghetti wire, aluminum briefcase, digital display of some numbers
it could very well be that his intention was to create a hoax bomb
Perfect trifecta of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice. And at a school too, where any number of apparently educated staff could have verified what the device was in a moment. Great job!
He not only showed it around, but plugged it in during English class where it made beeping noises. Do you expect the English teacher should need to "verify" a box of wires and circuits? Who would she verify it with if the kid plays aloof when asked of its purpose?
Just because "authorities apprehend 14yo Muslim kid for home-made clock" doesn't mean you need to start making accusations of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Exploiting his race to further a political narrative as the author has done, is both intellectually feeble and misdirects away from the real issue: authoritarian government behavior targeted at school children.
Well, given that the police implied heavily that his religious background makes him a candidate for making a bomb...
"Yup. That’s who I thought it was."
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…
Probably not the whole story in this case. It seems improbable that little Johnny McFreckles III would have encountered as much trouble over his clock project.
One avenue is to focus on those victims that happen to be a racial minority, and force the authorities to treat members of that minority group with kid gloves. This literally forces all of us to keep race and other divisive demographics at the forefront of our consciousness whenever we deal with other people. That's not a good strategy to reach of goal of everyone being blind to race.
Another avenue is to focus on the powers that are being wielded unjustly. By taking away to power to cause such damage, or at least imposing accountability when it's misused, we can force those with power to rein in their abusive behavior to all. This latter seems the winning strategy to me.
From eastern europe... If a gypsy kid walks behind you you better keep guarding your belongings. Is that racist ? Yes maybe it is. But it is because most of the time THE gypsy kid is really trying to steal something from you. Should you start being careless because somebody tells you that it's racist ? Do you people really want to live in a world where gays,transgenders,gypsies,blacks,hispanics,yellows,purples are fa…
You're getting downvoted, rightly, but I wanted to explain why that is.
> Is that racist ?
Yes
> Do you people really want to live in a world where gays,transgenders,gypsies,blacks,hispanics,yellows,purples are favoured and put on pedestal
You've got a pretty distorted view of all this. No-one (sane) is advocating for putting any group on a pedestal, we're just asking people to treat others as if they were human beings, which they are. It's really not that hard to grasp.
For example, in this case we are discussing no-one is asking for the kid to get special treatment because of his race, instead they are pointing out that he should not be actively discriminated against because of his race.
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There's the case of WebCamGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
Holy shit, that is one of the most insane stories I've ever heard of. How was this not made into a prominent national news story? How have tons of school administrators not wound up in prison??
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If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] h…
People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school. We under value in society 1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces) 2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs) I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Chart…
People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system.
They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it.
Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story.
Stop forcing children to go to broken schools.
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…
Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300
Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
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Probably not the whole story in this case. It seems improbable that little Johnny McFreckles III would have encountered as much trouble over his clock project.
I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual ori…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/03/06/6-year-old-finge...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's the case of WebCamGate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
Holy shit, that is one of the most insane stories I've ever heard of. How was this not made into a prominent national news story? How have tons of school administrators not wound up in prison??