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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

#411

Post by lloyd-christmas »

nadams wrote: 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…

I wasn't allowed to do my high school science scholars project on electromagnetic propulsion because it was around the time of Columbine: "You could potentially make a gun out of it".

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

#413

Post by smileysteve »

austenallred wrote: post #28
ahmad19526 wrote: post #3

Go into any Electrical Engineering department at any university and you'll find plenty of students with boxes filled with circuit boards and electronics. Everybody who's played with electronics knows that stuff is brittle and needs to be protected carefully. One wire coming loose renders your entire work obsolete and unlike software, there's no debugger to tell you where you potentially screwed up... Racial profiling…

To be fair it's a middle school, and most people don't really know what a circuit board is for. I don't think it's outrageous that they asked . It should have never, however, escalated as far as it did. You're going to handcuff a kid who is cooperating and trying to explain what this thing he built is? Give me a break. But worse still they're still not backing down. It's suspension of all logic and reasoning. They sh…

We're trying to promote stem in the U.S., not say, "middle school is too early"

Anecdotally; I was wiring together simple switches, electric motors, and solar panels in and out of the classroom in elementary school in the mid 90s. I was programming timers and games in middle school by the late 90s.

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

#414

Post by mikeash »

makecheck wrote: post #154

Of course the reaction to this is completely insane but what's even sillier is that they're continuing to assume that real threats would be things that they can see. If someone wanted to blow up a building they could hide a bomb in a backpack among hundreds of others and never show it to anyone. It's the same crap they pull at the airport where you must throw out your bottled water; and then their solution is to toss…

I think the liquids ban is dumb, but given that it exists, throwing confiscated liquids into a bin is completely reasonable.

It's one of those weird game theory things. Your goal is to prevent dangerous liquids from being brought onto planes, but you can't reasonably tell them apart from other liquids, so you ban all liquids. Because it's banned, you can be reasonably sure that nobody is going to try to bring dangerous liquids through security in the first place. (Not because people always obey bans, but just because they know it'll be confiscated.) So you can be confident that all the confiscated liquids are not dangerous, and it's safe to just throw them in a bin. Yet you still need to confiscate them if you want to keep people from bringing the dangerous materials through.

If someone wants to blow up a security line, there are much better ways to do it than allowing their liquid explosive to be confiscated, so you can be pretty confident that nobody is going to attack the system that way either.

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

#416

Post by digler999 »

Alupis wrote: post #372
DanBC wrote: 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…

> 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 (presumably) paying to heat at least a few months of the year.

Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?

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

#417

Post by aianus »

cschneid wrote: post #289
dopamean wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always find the "more funding" idea to be somewhat dubious. Don't we already spend a ton of money on education? Perhaps even more per pupil than other developed countries?

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. If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job. It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inher…

> It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways

That's exactly what it is.

When I was in high school we got a shipping pallet of new $100+ calculus textbooks that sat unused because they were the same as the old calculus textbooks but with material cut out because the curriculum had been dumbed down.

Thank god our teacher saw them as the worthless turds that they were and continued teaching us prohibited advanced material like gasp integration from the old books.

Meanwhile our CS teacher was actually a history teacher who stayed a chapter or two ahead of us in the book because who in their right minds would become a teacher making $50k if they actually knew how to write software?

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

#418

Post by BurningFrog »

Some true stories go viral because they "confirm" what a lot of people think is wrong with society.

Because they go viral, there is a lot of talk about them, which "confirms" even further that this is a Big Problem, and that it is caused by What I've Been Saying All Along.

In reality this is one single idiotic decision by some local knuckleheads. As a social science study, it has a sample size of 1 and a huge selection bias. The problems you think it "shows" may well be real, but retelling this anecdote does not prove that.

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

#419

Post by fudgy73 »

kmfrk wrote: post #407
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…

Of course, people would rather that part of his heritage weren't brought up, leaving us with Michael Fassbender portraying him on the big screen.

In Arabic, "fass" means fart. That's right, he's a Fart-bender, which I suppose is a type of airbender.

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

#420

Post by mikeash »

exodust wrote: post #302
sirtaj wrote: post #71

Perfect trifecta of bigotry, ignorance and cowardice. And at a school too, where any number of apparently educated staff could have verified what the device was in a moment. Great job!

You might have a point if the device was for a school project. But it was his own "invention" which is own engineering teacher warned him against showing around. He not only showed it around, but plugged it in during English class where it made beeping noises. Do you expect the English teacher should need to "verify" a box of wires and circuits? Who would she verify it with if the kid plays aloof when asked of its pu…

Bigotry, maybe. There's a chance (which I'd estimate at smaller than 1%) that there was no racial motivation here.

But I don't see how you can say there's no grounds to make accusations of ignorance and cowardice. Being unaware of what a bomb looks like is clearly ignorance, and being so terrified that you get an innocent kid arrested for it is clearly cowardice.

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