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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

#821

Post by panzagl »

zb wrote: post #705
twoodfin wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day). She makes $35k / year. How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make? The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but…

How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make? In my state, which has comparable starting salaries, $56k assuming they obtained some professional certification along the way. Otherwise, $50k. (For comparison, an engineer straight out of college could expect to make maybe $75k.) I find the idea that we should destroy the entire school system to ensure that a small handful of undeserving p…

Yeah, wait until these Javascript beasting brogrammers reach 35- all of a sudden experience will become much more valuable to them.

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

#822

Post by confiscate »

The police knew it wasn't a bomb the moment they saw it. Otherwise they would have called in the bomb squad right away.

The fact that they continued to play games and arrest the kid is not for "safety". It's clear they arrested him because of racism.

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

#823

Post by taco_emoji »

msandford wrote: post #764
baldfat wrote: post #749

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your missing the point. They can spend their money where you would be mad. So if they go to a school where history is through the lens of white supremacy and teach that science is evil because it contradicts their narrow version of the Bible and that God created black people because of the curse on Noah's son for having homosexual sin with Noah your fine? By the way a LOT of people believe this especially in the sout…

I am saying that if you apply that argument inductively, then nobody should be able to do anything because there will always be someone to object to it. Public money can't be used by anyone for anything because someone will have a problem with it. You do see how that could be, don't you? I am in group X and I object to things that you value in group Y. You in group Y object to things that I, in group X, value. What d…

> I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too

This was largely demonstrated to be a ruse by so-called "Intelligent Design" proponents in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial[0].

I would respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked into the evidence that carefully if you question the degree of rigor that underpins evolutionary science.

Large parts of evolutionary theory are indeed based on circumstantial evidence. But the quantity of such evidence is so overwhelming[1] that questioning its explanatory power is rather foolish. It's the sort of evidence where coming up with any alternative hypothesis besides evolution quickly becomes an exercise in futility. Unless, that is, you don't care if the hypothesis is testable or not, in which case creationists have many.

Moreover, evolution does not only have circumstantial evidence. You and I are living through the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - an evolutionary change that is being observed and documented as it occurs. Fruit flies from the same species have been split into physically isolated groups, allowed to breed over many generations, and subsequently reintroduced, only to discover that they had become reproductively isolated.

There's more evidence discussed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent

Or here:

http://amazon.com/dp/1416594795/

Or here:

http://www.talkorigins.org/

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...

[1] For example, here's Wikipedia's list of transitional fossils (so-called "missing links" between divergent extant species) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

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

#824

Post by peter303 »

malisper wrote: post #537
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…

> Thank goodness he never took a clock he'd built into school. Uh... From Steve Jobs's biography: In twelfth grade he [Woz] built an electronic metronome—one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class—and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Late…

In the 1960s people werent as uptight about in-school murders and international terrorism.

However the 60s did have their share of domestic terrorism- leftwing anarchist protesting the war or big government. They deployed bombs.

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

#825

Post by TallGuyShort »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #806
DanBC wrote: 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

That's ridiculous. Now you're going to say I'm "breaking the law" for installing a bitcoin miner on all the computers I support and donating the money to charity (well, some of it;rent doesn't pay itself)!

Maybe not breaking the law, but if you're not the person ultimately responsible for the costs and they're not actually your computers, that's still a dick move. I'd fire you if you worked for me and caused a massive increase in my power bill for something that had no relation to what I asked you to do.

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

#826

Post by vacri »

nadams wrote: post #778
nowarninglabel wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"compared bills after turning it off" is a direct measure of costs.

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

#828

Post by tajen »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #648
slg wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahmed will "get away with it in the long term" as well. He will probably be even better off after this episode. He is going to have the attention of all sorts of great people including the president. But of course that isn't particularly the problem here. When something like this comes up and catches our attention, there is outrage until that specific situation is fixed. We all pat ourselves on the back for helping t…

I have an extremely unpopular and possibly incorrect notion that you can learn a substantial amount from being treated unfairly.

Well, among all the people who get treated unfairly, maybe some of them learn, but some others take revenge. I was once in a situation which couldn't be managed by laws, and since then I vote extreme right in my country. As much for learning from unfair situations.

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

#829

Post by TallGuyShort »

01Michael10 wrote: post #788
xbryanx wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irving, Texas is not typical of what most consider the deep south. It's part of the DFW metroplex which is in the nation's fourth largest population center[1], and it's in a county that went 57% for Obama in the 2012 election[2]. So let's just be careful about painting wide swaths of the country with an singular view. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic... [2] - http://elections.nytimes…

I guess you are not familiar with Irving's Mayor, Beth Van Duyne... Sorry to blow your theory right out of the water.

Are you saying the Mayor defines this area more than the numerous other demographics that show it is not simply a backwoods hillbilly town?

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

#830

Post by benihana »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #319
DanBC wrote: 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

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.

It's much easier to justify wasting money on normal business things every day people understand, like buying office paper. Most people can relate to that, even when things go wrong and money is wasted.

Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.

I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.

The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.

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