"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
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.
stupidity + malice
Calling it a hoax bomb is ass covering by shifting the blame to the person who happens to be the only adult in that bumfuck town's government.
Honestly, when I was 14 I would have thought it was cool as hell to have a realistic looking suitcase bomb if I had the skills to make one. I am kind of leaning towards this being a publicity stunt, as a digital clock project really wouldn't require much circuitry, wiring or case space(with the result looking nothing like a bomb ). That being said I find it absurd for the child to be detained over any of it.
In the little video, it looks like a lot of it was just cannibalized parts. I'd be interested in the actual thought process that built the monstrosity (and I say that as a person who just loves that sort of gizmo work). When I was his age, I didn't know anything about proper electronics, and so I only took stuff apart and tried to figure out how to get it combined. I remember one of the big problems I had was figuring out enclosures, and frankly a $5 box from Target really would be the perfect thing; the other stuff likewise followed similarly.
Think of it as the Git-R-Done philosophy, like installing Postgres for a single two column table. It ain't elegant, but I wouldn't make a kid feel bad for trying.
You really mean suspending him is not so terrible because it was only 3 days? I hope I'm misunderstanding you. The child learns to not trust anyone and that his best intentions are twisted into punishment. I'm pretty appalled by this.
To explain myself, in a Texas Highschool I was sentenced to In School Suspension INDEFINITELY with my laptop confiscated for having shortcuts to directories on the network that I "shouldn't have had access to." After about a week of that I'd had enough, asked for OSS - got it, which I thought was enough but apparently wasn't. They ended up wanting to reassign me to an "alternative school" (the type with a dress code,…
What is wrong with American schools? The more I read the more disturbing it is. Where is the proportionality and common sense?
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…
I'm all in favor of seti@home but it's not like running that on the school computers is free. If he didn't have permission to do it, then setting it up on those computers without getting that authorization was inappropriate. Obviously firing him is an overreaction, but I tend to believe their excuse that if he was fired for that, it wasn't just for that. He was already on thin ice before that incident and it was just the final straw.
My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
Apparently the authorities have determined that the best way to stop terrorism is to discourage any manifestation of personal intelligence, so that the population turns into mindless sheep. "If you don't know how to make a clock, you won't know how to make a time bomb" is their reasoning. It is seriously disturbing. I am reminded of stories of kids opening a command prompt and being accussed of "hacking", only this i…
Probably not the whole story in this case. It seems improbable that little Johnny McFreckles III would have encountered as much trouble over his clock project.
I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. This stupid is well-distributed.
When I was in high school there was a guy there we all nicknamed terrorist because he always played for the terrorists in Counterstrike. When the school found out they expelled him and sent the cops out to his place. The cops found nothing, and the school didn't actually have anything to go on, but they still kicked him out for a week, all over a nickname.
You can't legislate intelligence. Yesterday I went to my daughter's school's open house. When I entered, I was cornered by an administrator and told I had to sign some paperwork before I left. It was the computer policy. After I signed it, the admin said my daughter had to sign it too. She's 4.
The intent is not to legally bind her, which it obviously wouldn't. Usually the idea of having a child sign too is the idea having a child explicitly agree makes them more likely to be invested in complying. Whether or not there's any evidence that works, I don't know, but it's not quite as stupid as it might seem at first glance.
It is as stupid as it sounds. 4 year old will listen to instructions and if they disobey you take away toys or have silent time, etc.
But signing something? That's just really stupid. It's not enforceable and not even understandable.