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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

#431

Post by tomjen3 »

martincmartin wrote: post #34
userbinator wrote: post #21

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…

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Power corrupts. As such we should always assume malice when dealing with people in power.

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

#432

Post by Alupis »

digler999 wrote: post #416
Alupis wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (presu…

> PSU's arent light bulbs

You are right. I was just going off the source I found, which accounted for some of the aspects you point out, but not all. These numbers simply provide a rough estimate, and detail how the sys admin certainly did cost the school district real (and potentially very substantial) sums of money.

> Even more complicated is the heat.

You make a good case for the winter months, but the opposite would hold true for the summer months when the heat becomes a real issue and additional air conditioning may be necessary, etc...

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

Not necessarily. Usually over the summer months (for a traditional schedule school as opposed to a year-round schedule like many public schools are these days) some of the staff is typically on campus monday-friday doing various administrative tasks, workshops, prepping for the next school session, moving classroom furniture, cleaning, etc... IT staff would be included in this, and therefore we can reasonably assume the sys admin was still running his systems.

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

#433

Post by lisper »

sixothree wrote: post #401
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #319

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.

Having lived in the deep south most of my life I think I understand what's going on here. It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people. The police department…

I think it's both: ignorance is the source of their power, and they are afraid of losing it. (I also grew up in the South.)

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

#434

Post by tomjen3 »

triangleman wrote: post #280
ryanlol wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hanlon's razor is a pretty stupid quote here, there definitely is no need to distinguish stupidity from malice here. The people responsible for this mess should probably lose their jobs. (Based on the story as it was presented here)

Yes but should the be fired on account of malice or stupidity? (Both valid causes for firing)

Which ever is fastest.

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

#435

Post by cholantesh »

boomlinde wrote: post #402
eldude wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you focus on attacking my point with insinuation and equivocation, yet ignore the exploitative anti-intellectual (fact-less) position of the TechCrunch author, whose sole contribution to the story was to inject race? Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exa…

Perhaps surprisingly, to a small amount of people, "Exactly" isn't the source of the irony that I pointed out, but the fact that you are referring to the real issue , by which you dismiss that there are any other real issues involved. You did so without making a factual argument and without sharing any of the reasoning that had you arrive at that conclusion. The mystical real issue for which no other explanation is o…

The spirit of Murray Rothbard personally touched the poster and imbued him with sacred realisation, obviously.

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

#436

Post by tw04 »

return0 wrote: post #421
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…

What if he were a communist instead?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had communist viewpoints for at least a period of his life. The dude was a full-blown hippie.

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

#437

Post by goldenkey »

Karunamon wrote: post #373
marnett wrote: post #262

This whole situation screams a breach of the poor boy's liberties. According to TEX. FAM. CODE §51.095 [1]: In order for a custodial written statement to be admissible, the following sequence of events must occur: 1) the officer must take the child to a magistrate; 2) the magistrate must then inform the child of his rights to remain silent, to have an attorney appointed and present during questioning and to terminate…

How in the unholy bleeding fuck is a child supposed to understand the ramifications of the right to remain silent?!

Well even if he did it wouldn't matter much. 5 police officers, multiple school officials in a room, he's the only child. And effectively being bullied, manipulated, into feeling like a guilty sack of shit that should count his blessings and admit their version of his intent and give thanks and apologies. Par for the course. Public school systems are ran by political patsy thugs when you inspect the few ranks below the top.

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

#438

Post by marincounty »

chejazi wrote: post #235
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…

If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool. If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point. [1] h…

"If public schools are going to succeed, then many states need to "catch up" when it comes to funding. More funding will attract more teachers, creating a stronger candidate pool.

If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point."

I used to think on these lines too. After talking to two teachers in different districts, they both said the same things. More money is fine, but it usually goes to Administration.

The two teachers I knew, and talked to, lived and taught in California. They were both tenured. I talked to them a decade ago. They were both making, I belive 150k a year. At the time, they weren't complaining about wages. In fact, they had no complaints. Maybe, they just got lucky? I don't think money is the answer?

(Actually, I just remembered--my ex'es mother-inlaw was a school teacher, and she told me countless times the money always goes to bloated Administration. I don't know why I just remembered her? She taught high school back east.)

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

#439

Post by jkestner »

maratd wrote: post #307
baldfat wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People HATE TAXES. People HATE paying school tax when they don't have children in school or never had children in school. We under value in society 1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces) 2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs) I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Chart…

> We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system. They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it. Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story. Stop forcing children…

I agree that lots of money is wasted in the public school system, but we don't need University of Phoenix brought to elementary schools.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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