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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

#801

Post by mikeash »

efa wrote: post #769
exodust wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't just "something", it was a case with a timer inside and wires and circuits. His "invention" was not anything useful. The only useful function I can think of for such a device, is actually a hoax bomb for drama class. What good is a clock inside a case? I'm getting down-voted to all hell, but that's what one gets for backing one's argument in a den of trigger-happy bigot-hunters. He showed it to his engineer…

>> den of trigger-happy bigot-hunters Yep, that's the US today. And of course Obama doesn't waste a second to exacerbate the situation by vilifying the school/policeman/whatever. It's amazing how in 5 minutes everyone knows all the facts and concludes these school officials are racist xenophobic knuckle-draggers.

Where did Obama do that? The only comment from him I've seen was his tweet that just said, "Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great."

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

#802

Post by elektromekatron »

eldude wrote: post #671
boomlinde wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only irony here is your complete failure to understand my original comment and your own failure to provide reasoning for your own false conclusion. Which exactly is my false conclusion? Weren't you referring to the real issue ? Doesn't the determiner in that mean that there is a only a single such thing? Did you offer any basis for the assumption that it was indeed the single real issue? Those are the assumptions…

You falsely conclude that I have a singular (implicitly subjective) "real issue", to which I "offer" "no other explanation." In fact, despite your projecting, by "real" / "original" issue, I meant the mistreatment of children by authority in schools, which is both the context of the parent comment and the original article from which the TechCrunch article derives. Again, for clarity, I am asserting that the original…

"All my comment served to do, was concisely articulate the issue of the preceding contexts, which is self-evident when reworded to be less generic"

I doubt you could concisely articulate anything if your preceding contexts depended upon it.

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

#803

Post by chippy »

andrewpi wrote: post #197

This really reminded me of the Star Simpson case. The police actually held her at gunpoint so it was perhaps even worse: http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html

She ended up with a criminal record, had to plead guilty, and had to state that she feels like she did the wrong thing.

This case put me off living in the USA.

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

#804

Post by mikeash »

makecheck wrote: post #782
mikeash wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dangero…

The ban means little because the punishment is nothing. If I want to bring something bad on board, there are two outcomes: I succeed, or I don't, and maybe I have to endure a brief scolding. The difference now is that if I fail, I know my mixture will be stuck in the middle of a huge crowd of people for who knows how long, probably giving me time to go far away. The decision to throw all liquids into a bin has create…

What danger is created that wouldn't exist otherwise? If people are bringing explosives through and they're being confiscated and thrown in a bin, then without the confiscations those explosives would be making it onto airplanes instead. Having them explode in a bin would be much preferable to having them explode on an airplane.

Again, I don't agree with the liquid ban, but it's a problem with the goal, not a problem with the methods. There's no real evidence that liquid explosives pose a threat that needs to be countered. However, if you take as a given that you're tasked with stopping them, the system as it's set up is a decent way to go about it.

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

#805

Post by rtkwe »

samstave wrote: post #596
DanBC wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

Were the machines always on regardless? Wouldnt they have consumed some portion of the said electricity no matter what? Or was he preventing the machines from being shutdown or sleeping?

Even if they were always on running *@home increases their power load a lot during non school hours when they'd normally be at dead idle. The way @home software usually works is once the CPU has been at low utilization for a certain period it cranks up it's computation. If he was top of SETI@home then the computers were definitely up 24/7.

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

#806

Post by tinalumfoil »

DanBC wrote: post #283
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…

Running seti / etc on the school computers does result in thousands of dollars spend on extra electricity. He was number one on SETI for years, running the client without approval on 5,000 machines. It's not surprising that people get fired for increasing costs by that much without getting approval first. See also http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

That's ridiculous. Now you're going to say I'm "breaking the law" for installing a bitcoin miner on all the computers I support and donating the money to charity (well, some of it;rent doesn't pay itself)!

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

#807

Post by jcromartie »

joeclark77 wrote: post #783
kaitai wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The father is an anti-Islamist. Anti. It means opposite. The guy is sufficiently anti-Islamist to go run for president of Sudan. That takes some dedication. Muslim != Islamist, just as Christian != Westboro Baptist.

The article said the father is outspoken against (presumably imaginary) anti-Islamic policies. You may not know this, but Sudan is ruled by its Muslim, Arab north and is often quite happy to enslave or murder the black Christians in its south. Hardly a model of an anti-Islamist republic.

I'm not sure what kind of policies he's outspoken against, but if someone is against policies that they perceive to be hostile to Muslims, how does that make them Islamists who want to establish Islamic rule?

He is a Sufi (mystic, esoteric) and more than a bit eccentric. I saw his brand of Islam described as "New Testament" elsewhere. He has tried to argue (contrary to most Islamic scholarship) that the earlier peaceful Meccan sections actually abrogate the later warlike Medinan sections of the Quran. I don't think he's any sort of Islamist at all.

"He says he has serious issues with the hardline, traditional readings of the text, and he's writing a book about his reading of the Koran -- with working titles like Jesus Among Us With the Quran, or The New Understanding of the Quran."

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/why-mohamed-elhassan-the-...

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

#810

Post by Alupis »

nadams wrote: post #775
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…

> Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on... That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and…

Even using your math:

~$50 per year per computer * 5,000 computers = $250,000 in additional power consumption per year

He ran this scheme for 9 years:

$250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs

No matter what way you run the math, he blew millions of the school district's budget.

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