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

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

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is what happens when you have stupid police and school officials that are tough on everything. There are enough outrageous cases in the last year for students of a lot of different backgrounds.

In this case it's definitely about the Muslim thing.. Their mayor is known nationally for being an ignorant bigot.. http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/2015/03/20/anti-muslim-sent...

Was the mayor involved in this?

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

#682
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Were the machines always on regardless? Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what? Or was he preventing the machines from being shutdown or sleeping?

> Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what?

Some yes, but there's a lot of difference between a machine idling at 0% CPU and one fully loaded with SETI or Folding and running 100% all the time.

Would be even more worse now with deep sleep states and GPGPU, but even back then the difference between an idle and a fully loaded machine was absolutely significant.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you trying to teach me English? This teacher should be arrested for trying to overthrow the government... What is the "broader explanation" for this English textbook?

Communicate with others.

Sounds like a way to organise the overthrow of the government. Are you some sort of community organizer?

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

#685

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.

> they teach this stuff in elementary school for gods sake.

Haha. No, they don't. Not anymore at least.

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

#686
post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its for their safety so you cant fight back when they are beating / tasing / shooting you.

The handcuffs are actually helpful so they can't claim you punched yourself.

You'd think.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/handcuffed-black-...

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

#687
post #95

The 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.

Also, I'm a member at Splatspace, the hackerspace in Durham, NC. I've just sent an email to our group list, soliciting ideas for ways we could make a show of support to Ahmed. My first thought is maybe send him a box with some parts, kits, tools, and/or books of some sort. Nothing is definite yet, but I have a feeling we'll be able to put something together.

If anybody else is in a hackerspace, let me encourage you to try and get your group involved, and do something as a group. Better yet, do it and send out a press release and announce it to the world.

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

#688
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, people would rather that part of his heritage weren't brought up, leaving us with Michael Fassbender portraying him on the big screen.

Really, that's why? Or is it because most people would rather watch a movie where the actors look like the characters? I don't know of any Syrian actors that look like Steve Jobs. And I definitely don't know of any Syrian actors who could play him as well as Fassbender could.

I know this is slightly off topic, but after watching the trailer I just can't see Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a great actor, and I can't think of any Hollywood leading man that could do a better job, but their personas are so different that it's hard to watch and not constantly be reminded that you're watching an actor act and not a character in a biopic.

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

#689

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…

I think this kid is going to get quite a few summer job offers from people and find it easier to make friends with people that want to start big electronics companies off the back of this. Even the President of the United States just tweeted "cool clock Ahmed".

I suspect going to look back on those awkward handcuffed minutes answering stupid questions in a few years' time and think "bringing that clock to school was the best mistake I ever made"

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