421–430 of 994 posts
A story. So, this thirteen year old kid with a Syrian father once got flagged up by Hewlett Packard because he was ordering electronic components. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next... Yeah, Bill Hewlett offered him a summer job, he got hooked on making stuff, wound up founding a company out of his garage with his buddy Steve Wozniak, and created the biggest electronics company in the world. Thank goodness h…
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Well, far from being definitive, but it looks like a regular pc will cost around $227.52 (350 watt psu, $18.96 per month) in electricity per year to run 24/7.[1] (calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US) So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone. Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume…
Something is wrong with your math. $227.52/year is $0.62/day Also, bear in mind that PSUs do not use their full rating unless the hardware they are powering requires it. [0] Your number could easily be double what the machines actually used, if the PSU was somewhat oversized, as they typically are. [0]: https://superuser.com/questions/106792/does-a-power-supply-d...
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> We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. 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…
> Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story. Allow it to go where there is little to no public over sight, no public school board or checks and balances, under performing scores, teachers paid $20,000 less with no pension, and CEOs making millions. Charter Schools are a part of the problem with American education. Sure some Charter Schools are g…
A lot of people want "vouchers" so that private schools are more affordable. And plenty of private schools have a good track record, while having similar per-pupil costs as public schools.
If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends? Why not let parents choose the school?
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The nice thing about private school is that the student and parents are customers.
the unfair thing about private school is only people who have money can go, thus increasing the social gaps.
Sure those are not the super fancy private schools, but they will always be out of reach of anything but the very rich.
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I'm sure it's always diatribe when you don't agree. "Asking for trouble" is what I mean. The default processes in the USA are not what I'm talking about, but everyone here is defending his "right to be creative". Nobody is saying "hang on, he put a clock in a case, brought it to school, not part of any school project, advised not to show it around, showed it around anyway and was passive aggro when asked about it". H…
> showed it around anyway A teacher discovered it when it beeped. I'm not sure how you've lept from that to "showed it around". EDIT: > and was passive aggro when asked about it I'm not sure where you got this from either.
This hits way too close to home. Not because I have brown skin, or because I've ever been arrested for making "a bomb" that is not a bomb, but because when you're that age you're constantly surrounded and disciplined by people who don't understand you. Or what you're doing. Or why it's cool. I'd be willing to bet part of the reasoning around his arrest is, "Why would a student need to make his own clock?" I wish I co…
Can we make a go found me for getting him into a private school?
Go into any Electrical Engineering department at any university and you'll find plenty of students with boxes filled with circuit boards and electronics. Everybody who's played with electronics knows that stuff is brittle and needs to be protected carefully. One wire coming loose renders your entire work obsolete and unlike software, there's no debugger to tell you where you potentially screwed up... Racial profiling…
To be fair it's a middle school, and most people don't really know what a circuit board is for. I don't think it's outrageous that they asked . It should have never, however, escalated as far as it did. You're going to handcuff a kid who is cooperating and trying to explain what this thing he built is? Give me a break. But worse still they're still not backing down. It's suspension of all logic and reasoning. They sh…
Also, asking doesn't need to get the police involved: "Hey, what is this?" "Oh it's a clock I built" 'Why'd you bring it to school?" "Cuz I'm proud of it and wanted to show you"
If there was still doubt, ok, find someone who knows something about it (there's gotta be a tinkerer SOMEWHERE in the school district) and ask them to take a look. Maybe couch it as "Why don't we show it to X, I think they'd get a kick out of it?"
But arresting a 14 yr old tinkerer for a clock? Whatever happened to having sane reasonable conversations?
There is likely more to this story. I'm basing this on 3 facts: 1. In 2015 it's highly unlikely that you could build a home-made clock that would be of the size and shape resembling a bomb - that is, unless it was made to look like a bomb. 2. Ahmed, his father, and anyone else with a phone camera (that is on Ahmed's side) would have posted a picture of the clock, or given a full description of it (size, shape, etc),…
It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.
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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…
This was my 'favourite' http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/03/06/6-year-old-finge...