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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

#701

Post by bargl »

eropple wrote: post #472
txru wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better- start by quietly calling him to the principal's office. Ask him about his clock. Tell him people were thinking he might be wanting to pull some bomb pranks, and that would be a very bad idea. Ask him to tell his teachers the day before the next time he wants to show off his gadgetry. Send him back to class.

Or don't do that, either, because it is not right to assume people are going to pull off bomb hoaxes. (Doubly so when the only real reason for the suspicion is skin color.)

Yeah but you also don't want to be the admin at a school with a bomb where there were "signs a student was creating bombs before he went ape shit". I agree with the color statement, but not addressing the issue at all can be just as bad as an overreaction.

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

#702

Post by rconti »

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…

It's definitely worth pointing out, but his electricity estimate is so low that the numbers effectively work out for Tier 1 in the SF bay area. I'm sure a school is not in tier 1. But maybe they get beneficial commercial/educational/government pricing, I don't know.

They may be off for 3 months over the summer. Which might mean they were actually off, or it might mean that they ran 24/7 and NONE of that time was for 'educational' purposes.

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

#703

Post by emergentcypher »

onegene wrote: post #646
mef wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason you don't know of any is because they're not cast in big roles, because leading roles almost always go to white actors.

My skin color is I guess white but my heritage is mixed between old European (possibly Scotland and/or Ireland) and definitely Native American Indian. If I were an actor and got a big role; are you saying a white person got the part because my skin is what people usually call white? I'm fairly certain a lot of famous actors who it sounds like you would categorize as white are probably more like me, mixed.

We would hire an actor who both looks reasonably like you. If you're mixed but have X-colored skin, it makes sense to have someone with X-colored skin portray you.

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

#704

Post by rhino369 »

makecheck wrote: post #288
TillE wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be completely fair about the stupid liquid rule, it was prompted by fears about someone making TATP on the flight. The precursors are not particularly dangerous on their own.

Given that control of liquids was a reactionary measure to an event that didn't actually harm innocent people or endanger an airplane (and was incredibly unlikely to begin with), it's debatable if it warranted any attention at all.

TAPT is somewhat commonly used in terrorism, most well known attack was the 2005 subway bombings in London.

The plan that caused the liquids ban called for 500ml of each component.

The TSA certainly is reacting to a threat, but I'm not sure how much of an over reaction it is.

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

#705

Post by zb »

twoodfin wrote: post #375
cschneid wrote: post #289

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. 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…

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 people are not able to serve out their career on a still-very-modest salary quite mad.

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

#706

Post by greggman »

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…

Maybe you have more info but... Somehow, if I understand correctly. The USA spends more per student than any other country. Yet, somehow, other countries have better outcomes.

Is my info bad or does that suggest that more money isn't the problem. Is the problem how the current money is being spent or is it that we need more money. Are those articles making stuff up?

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf

As for salary I also think it's a crime that teachers get paid so low. At the same time low is probably relative. A teacher in Berlin making $40k a year is doing a lot better than a teach in NYC/LA/SF making $40k a year. I've tried to talk myself into becoming a teacher but salary is a big reason I can't quite get myself to take the leap.

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

#707

Post by jerf »

leoc wrote: post #489
jerf wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ori…

> but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fac…

You can not assert a consistent behavior off of one example. You're finding something you seem to be looking for. I was not kidding about being arrested and getting ordered to not touch computers for some period of time. Wigs have been flipped.

I do not know that school administrators have "consistently" flipped out at white kids, either. I don't know what the baseline occurrence of these events are. My suspicion would be that every case we've ever heard of, including this one, is still an outlier, and thus not suitable for drawing sweeping conclusions from, and in fact kids probably do stupid stuff like this every day without making the national news.

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

#708

Post by [deleted] »

leoc wrote: post #489
jerf wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ori…

> but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fac…

[deleted]

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

#709

Post by rhino369 »

dovereconomics wrote: post #125

Honestly, more and more, I challenge the idea of ever having a child: bright and smart kids have never been so intimidated. Many of the hacks I did as a child could have gotten me in jail today. Something 'silly' or 'funny' becomes dangerous/offensive/harassment; creativity, ingenuity and imagination are turned into dullness, self-hatred and nihilism.

Ironically, you are engaging in the same sort of fear mongering and paranoia that these schools and police are engaging in. You are taking a rare event (idiotic profiling or terrorism) and concluding they are very common.

These sorts of overreactions are very uncommon. That isn't to say these sorts of zero tolerance, jail what you don't understand, actions shouldn't be strongly condemned.

But there are probably hundreds of thousands of kids who are into tinkering and hacking who haven't ever been bothered.

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

#710

Post by traverseda »

Stubb wrote: post #14

Stupid kid confused school with a place that supported learning and curiosity. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't make it through high school today.

I didn't. Growing up with access to the worlds largest library makes high school even more painful.
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