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

#921

Post by Natsu » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 11:54 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…

I've never been able to make sense of these arguments. Can't parents already teach their kids that without sending them to a special school?

And what about the people who don't have some religious agenda, but simply want to get away from crazy school administrations like, well, this one? "We're worried that you might be religious, so we're adamantly against leaving you any option whatsoever to avoid a known bad local school" doesn't exactly make a compelling argument if it's your kid suffering.

FWIW, I did go to a normal, public school. Mine wasn't so bad, but some of the usual idiocy was still present, like getting punished for "fighting" when I was attacked, unprovoked and had not even touched the other party.

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

#922

Post by holyoly » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 11:55 PM UTC

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #566

nerd_stuff wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He lived in Arizona which is hot and a school full of space-heaters (humans) will probably run AC more often than heat. What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.

I wonder if anybody even so much as plugged a typical computer used into a Kill A Watt and compared with/without SETI running.

I have. I tested 3 models of HP that we had on campus which are kind of aging. Here's my results in Watts:

HP 6000 Pro SFF - Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHz - 100% CPU: 70, Idle: 26, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,

HP 6200 Pro SFF - Core i5 3470 @ 3.2GHz - 100% CPU: 83, Idle: 31, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,

HP 6300 Pro SFF - Core i5 2400 @ 3.1GHz - 100% CPU: 100, Idle: 30, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,

It's been a few months now, and I can't remember what I used to max out the CPU. It wasn't SETI @ Home, but it should give you a pretty good approximation. When it was off, it had Wake on LAN enabled, so it still drew some power. But it would fluctuate between 0 and 1.

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

#923

Post by NhanH » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 11:56 PM UTC

_ls7m wrote: post #905

NhanH wrote: post #896

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the purpose of being fully informed, and because you might forgot you have seen this photo, this is what happened when the police arrived: https://twitter.com/OfficalPrajwol/status/644011809351962625... Regardless of what someone looks like or what their name is, if they did not do anything wrong and is 14 years old, I think it's reasonable to expect them not being handcuffed and parade out of school in front of…

The police detained him until they could investigate the device and question him about his intentions, then released him. Sounds like a rough afternoon, but hardly a ruined life. He's been released and he's exonerated. > Hopefully some will learn that reasonable and probable cause needs to have some basis in certain priori, and that opportunity cost and the boy who cries wolf are really and very harmful issue. I put…

If you truly assume that the world is a dangerous place that we really need to be that careful, then it's the opportunity cost of the police force of NOT preventing the actual problems (there has to be some bad things being done/ will be done that is not prevented, right? That's the basis of your argument).

And if they truly believed it was a dangerous bomb, was the school evacuated?

> Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because it doesn't happen in the US often, doesn't mean it won't. 14 years old are involved in violence all over the world, especially in bombing incidents.

This is not even wrong, and it's terrifying if politicians would be thinking the same way as you does here. There is no guarantee EVER that anything will, or will not happen. But due to the limited resources and capability that we human have, we have to act and behave rationally based on the probability that something will happen. A scenario that comes from an unfounded basis and human imagination can not be treated with the same weight as a scenario that has some more reasonable chance to happen (based on past performance or what not). And note that P(something) indicate the probability that something can happen (or your belief of something to happen, in Bayesian interpretation), it has nothing to do with past performance/ events. The past changes your belief of P, but probability is predicting the future.

People in certain area of the world are involved in violence all year round, having bombed dropped on their roof, their hometown decimated. Are you preparing for that scenario to happen to you in the US in the present? Why or why not?

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

#924

Post by hdctambien » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:02 AM UTC

phonon wrote: post #917

hdctambien wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most teachers aren't teachers after a few years[0] so most teachers do not benefit from having old lesson plans, most teachers are not making the upper levels of salary, and most teachers will never collect on their not-social-security-pensions. The school day may be 6.33 hours (including lunch) but do you only count football players as working 3 hours a week when you watch them on TV? Teachers have to do a lot of "u…

It is a crying shame that there is so much teacher churn...why is that? In the article you reference, it's actually not primarily related to compensation, but to autonomy, support, and student behavioral issues. Yes, of course, like I said, there are many outside the class hours. And in fact, 6.33 hours/d are not the "hours in front of the camera" (I assume you mean instructional hours.) The exact number is a bit haz…

It's hard to say why there is so much churn. The churn related to changing schools pretty much can't be about pay because you get paid the same amount no matter where you teach unless to change districts, and even then you might only get a couple hundred dollars a year more. But changing schools can get you a better administration or a better pool of students to work with.

However, if you get offered a 9-5 job for $100,000 and you are looking at making $48,000 after several years experience ... you start imagining what you could do with an extra $50,000 a year. Just think of the compound interest!!!

If you can make lots of money, you almost owe it to yourself to get it. But who does that leave us to educate the kids that are going to run the country when we are old? Do we really want to leave that job up to people who can't do anything but teach (so they live and die by the dreaded tenure system) and people who don't have experience teaching (and will soon leave to make money in industry)?

Also, not all states have unions or tenure (my state included) and those states to not have industry-competitive salaries and they do not provide better educations. If unions were the problem, wouldn't we see better results from non-union states? Wouldn't it behove non-union school districts to out perform/compete union school districts to keep teachers from unionizing? (or is the fact that they can get laws passed saying that teachers cannot unionize better than trying to be competitive in the job seeker market?)

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

#925

Post by happyscrappy » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:03 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #907

happyscrappy wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

80% of crime goes unsolved, but if you have never lived in a bad neighborhood you might misunderstand.

You think "bad" neighborhoods are arguments in the police's favor ? I guess you've never had your door knocked down in the middle of the night...

You claimed most criminals were setup by the cops, it seems very unlikely you have had any interaction with either side.

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

#926

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:07 AM UTC

msandford wrote: post #844

taco_emoji wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 part…

Look I'm not suggesting that evolution is completely unfounded or anything like that. And I agree that we're witnessing it unfold with antibiotic resistance and the like. But what I am saying is that physics has a lot more rigor for the claims by virtue of how it works, and what people are looking for there. Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that p…

> Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.

I don't think this is really true. For most important effects in large domains of physics, directly witnessing the underlying processes is as impossible as directly witnessing the history of evolution (to the extent that "directly witnessing" is even meaningful -- on a detailed level, all witnessing other than of ones own internal subjective mental states is through several layers of indirection.) We witness them indirectly, through various media whose mechanism are explained by other well-tested scientific theories.4

> If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

IF there's really a "guy in the sky" exercising arbitrary power over the physical universe, even if he had not always handled the laws of physics in the same way, we couldn't necessarily tell the difference, since he would also have the power to make it so that our perception of evidence we examine at any given time (including our present recollection of what we might have done in the past) is always consistent with physical law always having been the same, even if it wasn't, and even if our actual observations in the past would have differed.

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

#927

Post by sarne777 » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:15 AM UTC

This doesn't surprise me. People are paranoid about bombs and terrorism, and most average people have never seen an exposed circuit board. To them anything with a circuit board and wires looks like the bombs they've seen on TV. I've had an arduino hooked up to an ipod for an art installation confiscated by police. Of course part of the problem was lack of communication by the administrators who had given approval for the project.

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

#928

Post by xaver » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:17 AM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #626

xaver wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...meanwhile in reality: http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-fing...

That's also bad, but not really related to the issue under discussion.

its related to the discussion inasmuch as the parent comment is related to the discussion.

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

#929

Post by hdctambien » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:20 AM UTC

phonon wrote: post #909

hdctambien wrote: post #900

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked for a big insurance company, a medium sized company that went public, and a couple startups, and two school districts. I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher. Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven…

No, you do not need a PhD to cap out. It's a Masters + 30 credits. http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro... One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix. My personal opinion is that some teachers are unde…

Programmers make more than teachers, so someone that is any good at programming is better off being a programmer than a teacher. Which leaves people who don't know how to program to teach high school kids to program.

Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.

Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?

It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]

Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.

Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.

I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.

[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.

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

#930

Post by vectorjohn » Thu, Sep 17, 2015, 12:26 AM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #732

digler999 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 350 watt psu, PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. That's the theoretical maximum you can draw from it. Sure, SETI was probably drawing a higher load than idle, vs off, but I highly doubt it was drawing 100%. Even more complicated is the heat. If they lived in a cool climate, at least some of the waste heat that was emitted would have been absorbed by the building, which they are (presu…

> PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. Yes, it will draw even more than 350 Watts at full load. 350 is the output power, whereas incandescent lightbulbs are measured in input power. So a 350 watt power supply, depending on efficiency of the PSU anyway, is probably using around 400-500 Watts at the wall at full load.

But this completely misses the point. You can put a 1000 watt PSU in a computer and it won't draw 1000 watts at full load. That's just the max the PSU can supply. SETI is mainly CPU intensive so even if they had the absolute smallest possible PSU, SETI isn't going to cause it to produce the full 350 watts.

And that's a pretty awful efficiency you suggest. It may be that bad, but I'd sure hope not.