14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to School • Hacker News Board

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

#711

Post by eldude » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #622

eldude wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding, mischaracterizing, and conflating your own arguments. It's a rhetorical appeal to authority, so implicitly, in addition to anyone who shares my respect for and identifies with the values of the American legal heritage, I agree with it. Therefore, even though it has no direct application, as you unnecessarily point out, it is a rhetorical convenience for delineating our very different views of…

Oh yes, the good old "my argument is based entirely on facts, while yours is based entirely on nonsense, so they are not comparable." Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment. Sorry, but we're both in the same boat here. We're both making political comments while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions about how things went down. The difference is, I admit it.

    "my argument is based [...] on facts, [...] yours ... on nonsense, [they're] not comparable."

I said your stance was based on presumptions, mine on facts, which are by definition incomparable since one is the basis for a conclusion, the other is a search of evidence to fit a pre-concieved conclusion and is typically based on prior context or experience.

    Except I don't see a single fact in your original comment.

Then you missed it. The TechCrunch author's controversializing use of race is not supported by any specific facts and is merely a presumption based on circumstantial evidence.

Now, we're in agreement that you believe presumptions are sufficient to reach different conclusions, and I do not.

    while bringing in our own biases based on a lot of assumptions

You're confused and not following along. Not only do I make no assumptions on this issue; that assumptions should never be made is my whole point.

    The difference is, I admit it.

Your position is that we both make assumptions. My position is that assumptions should not be made and that your stance is justly objectionable. Do you see that admitting the above would not only be a self-contradiction, but, in fact, it would be a reversal?

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

#712

Post by happyscrappy » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #527

happyscrappy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have certain obligations by law and you would certainly pay a fine for wasting their time. A judge would not have much sympathy for a clown.

What do the cops ever do with their time that isn't a waste? They only rarely and incidentally protect anyone from any actual threat. Mostly they hassle, ticket, menace, and otherwise inconvenience the public. If they all went on strike next week, violence and mayhem would decrease .

Right, there are no criminals, that is all just made up by the police-industial-complex.

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

#713

Post by msandford » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:34 PM UTC

baldfat wrote: post #661

msandford wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not making very coherent arguments. What's wrong with a voucher system whereby the PARENTS of the children being educated are the ones who determine which child the school goes to? Doesn't that make it very easy for the parents to shut bad schools down very quickly? It seems like that solves all the problems you're worried about, while also providing more choices to parents and students. What's the downside?

Voucher and Charter School are two different things. Charter Schools are taking over Public School System. Vochers are evil for many social reasons. I'll just focus on one. So Vouchers really will be the new segregation tool for the 21st Century. Your money will be used to send kids to religious schools you don't like teaching Islam, Christianity in all its forms, or who knows what and if they want to teach the child…

So the money for education can only be spent on the kind of education YOU like, and not the kind of education that the parents like? You do realize that's incredibly arrogant, right? You and other enlightened people know what's best, but everyone else who disagrees with you about what's best is unenlightened swine? That's tautological.

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

#714

Post by zerohm » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

piqufoh wrote: post #271

austenallred wrote: post #143

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…

Exactly. To quote the Police spokesman; "He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation" and "The concern was, what was this thing built for?" Why shouldn't he make his own clock?! Why does there need to be a 'broader explanation'? How can one develop an interest in anything if you must first provide an adequate explanation? sigh

I shudder to think what this Police Spokesman would do to a kid that made a full adder in Minecraft!

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

#715

Post by logfromblammo » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

nether wrote: post #451

jameshart wrote: post #371

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…

Biological father. His (adoptive) father was white, and Jobs didn't look middle eastern , the key part. There's a whole spectrum of skin tones within ethnicities that affects how you are treated in the US more than where your parents originate.

There are actually psych studies out there that take a photo of a person, darken one copy of it, and lighten another, and ask the volunteer subjects to form first-impression opinions of the people shown in the photographs.

The results typically show that lighter-skinned people are viewed more positively than darker-skinned people, even when the person providing the opinions is a darker-skinned person.

This can be trivially verified by testing the hypothesis, "In the relationship triangle, the protagonist will always choose the lighter-skinned person in the end," against all existing Tyler Perry movies.

And that's just passive cultural enforcement. I'm sure that the regular two-minutes hate on that one photo of Osama bin Laden as the quintessential, stereotypical terrorist mastermind did no favors to anyone sharing similar facial features.

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

#716

Post by wedesoft » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

At my school somebody did build a small time bomb and he made it go off in the dust bin at the playground. Even then the police didn't get involved.

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

#717

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:38 PM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #561

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands can be wasted on dumb stuff like bad office-supply purchasing decisions. Those folks don't get fired. Sounds overblown - folks afraid of anything they don't understand.

dumb stuff My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.

What would you have them do? If they're over budget, they're over budget and non-emergencies will have to wait.

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

#718

Post by raarts » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

rm445 wrote: post #493

benevol wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it striking that you almost never hear about such behavior occurring in Europe (correct me if I'm wrong). Any ideas why things seem to be very different there?

I suspect there are similar incidents with much less overblown outcomes. There's no relative scarcity of ignorant and authoritarian schoolteachers, but consequences are likely to be confined to school, not involve law enforcement, and parents and pupils are more likely to knuckle down rather than fight or go to the press. So, taking "such behaviour" much more broadly than this specific incident (and of course grantin…

The sun of a (Dutch) friend actually 'hacked' his school network (he gleaned the password from his teacher). Grades were altered, he involved others, and they were caught. The police was not involved, and he was expelled. He is now attending another school. He was punished, but it did not ruin his future.

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

#719

Post by jameshart » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

Avenger42 wrote: post #266

sp332 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupidity does not adequately explain why they are considering bringing charges of a "hoax bomb", or sent this letter home with the other students: http://www.irvingisd.net/cms/lib010/TX01917973/Centricity/Do... [PDF] Therefore, malice.

"I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited ." As a parent, can I see the list of "items... that are prohibited"? I'd be pretty shocked if "clock" is actually on there.

To be fair, it wouldn't surprise me if 'replica firearm' was on there.

Then again, this is Texas.

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

#720

Post by Domenic_S » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

codyb wrote: post #342

xacaxulu wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.

I think thats a very cynical view point which reduces to a platitude an extremely complex issue especially when your evidence primarily appears to concern a smattering of cases among a system which serves millions of children a year. Technology is very esoteric and almost brand new in a sense. It's been as little as two decades since the advent of schools even having computers. The fact there are misunderstandings, g…

Perhaps, but each family with a child will need to make a decision about how to school that child, and one family doesn't have the power to fix the system.

Tragedy of the Commons and all that. Maybe it's best for society if we don't give up on the public school system, but for my kid, today, given the options I have, is sending them there the best option? Rarely is the answer yes.