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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

#771
post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't have ShowDead turned on. I guess that enables showing flagged comments as well? That certainly would explain it.

Ah, yes, sorry. ShowDead allows you to see flagged comments.

That's OK, I learned something new. I thought it was just for shadowbanned accounts.

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

#772
post #305
post #255

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…

This is the dumbest thing I've read all week. 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 peo…

Ahmed Mohamed invited to White House, Facebook, Google after clock incident

Yeah tell me more.Also gl to america when one day again a person named ahmed mohammed blows up a zillions of people with some bomb. But no you are not putting these people on pedestal.

I am sick of you people. Russia should have burned USA to the ashes. At least the russians are just drunk idiots.

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

#773

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

Man, have these people never heard of "art for art's sake"?

Why does anyone do anything that isn't obviously beneficial?

Why climb K2? Why spend years writing a book only a handful will read? Why paint? Why make free software? Why modify a car?

Everything about this damn incident is making me angry

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

#774

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…

I would like to do a little more than reach out to him. He is a nerd and we should protect members of our tribe who are in trouble. Can we make a go found me for getting him into a private school?

Reports say that his family is does pretty well for itself.

He's also been invited to the White House afaik. That should be a confidence booster :)

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

#775
post #372
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advice used to be to not turn machines off but let themgo into sleep. This avoided power cycling which some people though caused problems. A sleeping machine still costs money, but much less than a machine churning SETI. 5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.

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…

> Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...

That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and designed to use a full load is a bitcoin miner.

Taking in consideration that these computers might have been left on already. I would argue that he used MAYBE an extra 50 watts of electricity [2]. So assuming $0.10/kw/hr (which is the cost of where I live) - he wasted a whopping $0.12/day or ~$50/year.

You have to take into account if the computers were already on. He didn't waste electricity because someone left their computer on - his "waste" would be electricity use that is above that of an "idle computer". It should also be pointed out that if the computer has Mcafee or some other crappy AV the CPU usage would be 100% anyways due to poor programming of the AV software (I have personally seen this many times and you don't know how many times people complain about their slow computer because the AV is using 100% of the CPU).

There is no way he wasted $7m - and even if he did and no one noticed that is part of a larger problem. Besides they only claim he wasted $1.2m - $1.6m [3] - with no evidence of how they came up with that number. That is saying he managed to waste over $100k/year (over 9 years) in equipment purchases, electricity etc - and NO ONE noticed this? I find it hard to believe that the people managing the budget were like "$100k unaccounted for this year? no big deal...". And even if it was accounted for and signed off - there should be 2 people fired - his and the guy who approved the purchase.

Even from the article:

> would find that in a middle of a lesson, the SMART Board had turned off.

This has happened to me personally on my own laptop. Not because I was mining bitcoins or running seti@home. In fact I've seen them installed and they are such POS that no instructor I know actually uses it as a SMART board.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...

[2] http://i.stack.imgur.com/4HQPY.png

[3] http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130se...

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

#776
post #255

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…

This is dumb on so many levels.

This kid didn't show up with a homemade alarm clock at a Confederate Flag rally.

He showed up at a school

You know, those places where you go to learn? Where you have these people called "teachers" who are supposed to have a college degree and promote learning?

Context matters. If you can't trust educated teachers in a school to know the difference between an alarm clock and a bomb, who else can you trust?

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

#777

QOTD from dallas news article: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall... "He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.” what a place of learning!

That's always the lesson from these sorts of things: don't try, don't explore, or possibly don't trust people in authority to know anything.

Which is a double whammy considering all of the other ways schools crush enthusiasm and willingness to explore. Because grades are a measure of "achievement" that discourages people from exploring new subjects or taking challenging courses outside their comfort zone, since that could lower their GPA. And because all course work factors into your grade, not just your ultimate competency in the material, that creates even more incentives to not try anything new. Struggling with new material for even a week or two could irreparably harm your GPA.

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

#778

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.

I don't get how this point is debatable. I did this when I worked as a network administrator for a new school campus. It was folding@home vs. SETI but same concept. Once the administration realized all the computers were running folding@home they compared the bills after turning it off and it was tens of thousands of dollars difference (granted this was 2001 and full-size desktops). Now, one could say they overreacte…

> tens of thousands of dollars difference

I still don't believe that - unless this was 10k computers+. I'll bet that if you used watts up on an idle computer, then used it on a computer running seti@home I'll bet the difference would only be 100 watt difference at the max (probably more like 50 depending on what is running on the computer).

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

#779
post #283
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…

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

Yes, running 5000 computers on 100% CPU instead of idle is a lot of money and a lot of electricity spent:

If these were typical desktop computers, the CPU working at 100% can use some 50 W more than the one staying idle. 5000 computers at 100 % CPU produce then the load of 250 KW, resulting in 6 MWh per day which at 10 cents per KWh costs 600 USD per day, or 220000 USD per year. Finally, 9 years that he did it make almost 2 million dollars (!) for electricity that he managed to spend.

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

#780
post #105

I have kids at school and I'm actually for the responses from the teachers, yes it's overacting and could be dealt with _much_ better, but being overly alert on this is better than ignorant. and it's better to show it at his house instead of at school for things like this I feel.

A 14-year old was interrogated without notifying his parents.

You don't think that's a gross violation of civil rights?

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