Hardware Projects (and Pranks) That Have Scared Observers 193
In the wake of the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed in Irving, Texas, for carrying to school an electronics project believed by a teacher to look like a bomb, Make Magazine has a timely reminder that Ahmed's project is one of many home-brew efforts that sparked (or could have sparked) extreme reactions. Make's list includes a few from tinkerers -- and pranksters -- that not only looked like bombs, but were fully intended to look that way. ("Back in 1967, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was arrested for building a metronome and storing it in a friend’s locker. He rigged a tin-foil contract sensor to the metronome in the locker, and set up the device to tick faster when his buddy opened the locker.") The article doesn't note the 2007 incident in Boston in which a guerilla advertising campaign for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" raised fears of a terrorism and led to two arrests. Gawker has a slightly more pointed article about other students who have specifically brought home-assembled clocks to school, without being arrested.
Poptarts have gotten the same response (Score:4, Insightful)
but nobody invited that kid to the whitehouse. Ahmed's race has gotten media outrage on his side, but what happened to him was not remotely unique. Everything from pointing at someone and going "pow" to chewing poptarts into the wrong shape has gotten kids anything from arrested to expelled. The only commonality is it seems to be universally boys treated this way, likely due to society's compulsive need to pathologize everything about them and ascribe nefarious motivations to their every action.
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Re:Poptarts have gotten the same response (Score:4, Informative)
Show us the word school in the Title or lead paragraph.
Re:Poptarts have gotten the same response (Score:5, Insightful)
ahmed was trying to do something constructive, in the STEM area. the usa is trying to focus on STEM education. and here's a kid who goes out of his way to do something on his own initiative in the area, and he gets treated like a criminal because of his race/ religion. that's why it is so egregious
the other overreactions by school for stupid things happens too, and are fucking stupid and the school admins should be punished. but they don't merit an invite to the white house because they are a different topic
like this:
http://kfor.com/2014/08/21/stu... [kfor.com]
the kid wrote a short story about shooting a neighbor's pet dinosaur *as requested by his teacher*. and he gets treated like a criminal and suspended for a week
that's obviously fucking stupid. the school admins should be punished, the kid should be apologized to
but there's no anti-muslim hysteria angle, and there's no STEM angle. so it doesn't pique people's interests above the local area
the usa is trying to encourage STEM education. and the usa has a problem with anti-muslim bigots. therefore ahmed's case rises to national attention
ahmed's case is simply not the same as the other cases you mention
Re: Poptarts have gotten the same response (Score:2, Interesting)
Really? I initially thought the kid had a kit clock or something more innovative. When you find out he took the guts out of a commercial clock and put it in a box and to boot he is 14? I was tearing things apart at half his age. Tying this to stem is interesting even with reports that the stem issue is pretty bogus. Take the things he did to an airport and also claim you invented it -- they should rightly give you a heck of a hard time. Then look at his father. The whole thing wreaks of a publicity
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correction: i treat stupid people with tons of disrespect. is there a better approach to dealing with morons?
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The AC got every bit of respect after the fact that they demonstrated that they deserve.
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Are you not aware of the Iranian diplomat's daughter who pretended to be someone else and pretended to have knowledge of babies being ripped out of incubators and left on the floor to die? Her words started a war in which people died. Children of diplomats have been used for evil purposes. The AC suggested this might be happening in this case, and you feel that is deserving of disrespect?
We must have differing definitions of "respect".
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why don't get back to your herp derp alex jones low iq douchebaggery. you've strayed from your remedial propaganda bubble, social retard
paranoid schizonphrenia is not an actual replacement for intelligence
"FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG FALSE FLAG... whargarrbl drool SNORT"
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Your own link disproves your claim of racism. Boys all over the country of all races are treated exactly the same by schools. What happened to Ahmed has nothing more to do with his race than poptart kid's race had to do with his situation.
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a white christian was treated badly
therefore, racism and anti-muslim hysteria do not exist
do you listen to yourself or is the grey matter in your skull really that thin?
this is real:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
i suppose the next step is to claim it's all a set up. the alex jones "false flag! false flag!" crowd will come to defend good old american bigotry being framed and misconstrued by the mass media
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Racism in general can exist in the same reality where Ahmed Mohamed was not a victim of racism but of silly zero tolerance policies. Anti-Muslim sentiment can exist in the same reality where Ahmed Mohamed pulled a stunt that pranked even the President.
You're right that individual cases don't by themselves disprove aggregate phenomena, but aggregate phenomena also doesn't mean all individual cases can be explained in the same way.
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oh i'm sorry, you have inside knowledge that ahmed wasn't a victim of anti-muslim bigotry and racism, got it
to assume a brown muslim kid with an electronic doodad getting arrested for a bomb hoax when he said it wasn't a bomb: this wasn't at all motivated by hysteria or fear based on race/ religion. obviously, of course
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I can't prove a negative, and I won't presume the positive without some convincing evidence that rises above the mere fact that the kid is brown and Muslim. Being brown and Muslim doesn't make every bad thing that happens to you racially motivated.
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keeping an open mind doesn't mean so open your brains fall out. if you can't see some anti-muslim prejudice at work here, you are being intellectually dishonest
the larger point being that it is so, so, so important to you for this not to be islamophobia. why is it so difficult for you to admit that islamophobia exists and is obviously at work here if you have half a fucking brain?
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oh i'm sorry, you have inside knowledge that ahmed wasn't a victim of anti-muslim bigotry and racism, got it
to assume a brown muslim kid with an electronic doodad getting arrested for a bomb hoax when he said it wasn't a bomb: this wasn't at all motivated by hysteria or fear based on race/ religion. obviously, of course
This is a really easy game to play, isn't it? Any time any minority is treated unfairly, we can claim it's because of bigotry and racism! Win! Nobody can prove the opposite, no evidence to the contrary is adequate.
Let's keep this going as much as possible. We don't want people mixing in with people outside their own group, now do we?
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Maybe you should read about Beth Van Duyne. It is illuminating to read about her. You might also try reading what the Dallas Morning News (a libertarian/conservative leaning newspaper) has to say about her and the police dept staff. Again it is illuminating. You cann't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge the Irving Texas administration by the words and deeds of its administrator
Well, I did as you suggested. Other than looking into some rumors that a local Mosque may have implemented a Sharia Law court for local Muslims, her biggest claim to fame appears to be pissing off former administration officials and bureaucrats for trying to clear the corruptions and good-old-boy networks from running the city and wasting public money. So, again, nothing there but innuendo and race-card whining bullshit.
I can't agree with her position supporting the school administration and local police,
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why is it so, so, so important to you for this case not to be islamophobia? why is it so difficult for you to admit that islamophobia exists and is obviously at work here if you have half a fucking brain?
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why is it so, so, so important to you for this case not to be islamophobia? why is it so difficult for you to admit that islamophobia exists and is obviously at work here if you have half a fucking brain?
Because it ignores the real issues of our failing public school system and militarized, reactionary police. Making it all about islamophobia (which, yes, of course exists) just plays into the MSM narratives which create conflict for the masses, selling out the people for the benefit of the elites.
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A brown muslim was treated badly in the exact same way as an enormous number of other non-brown non-muslim people in the exact same situation.
Therefore, racism and anti-muslim hysteria is to blame.
Do you listen to yourself?
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your position is all these cases are exactly the same
well sure, if you're purposefully a know nothing "it's all the same, the details don't matter" kind of social retard then indeed everything is ok and everything makes sense. but in which case why are you even arguing? enjoy your world where it's all the same and nothing matters. leave the arguments to those of us who can actually look to motivation and intent and are interested in the details
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Your position is that all these cases are the same until it happens to the Designated Victim, then suddenly it's proof america is drowning in islamophobia and racism. You're not "looking to motivation and intent", you're fabricating it to fit your prejudices.
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there is no islamophobia in the usa?
this is your honest position?
where do you blind retards come from?
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I never said that at all, what I said is Ahmed was treated the exact same as dozens to hundreds of other boys across the country. The only thing his race has gotten him is beneficial treatment like an invitation to the white house. What I will say is that islamophobia is a bullshit panic considering that there are 1.5 billion muslims in the world, over 30 officially muslim nations, and is so far from oppressed that the victims of shootings by islamic terrorists are blamed for provoking their own brutal murd
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ahmed was trying to do something constructive, in the STEM area.
Unfortunately, it sounds like the whole thing may have been a hoax in a misguided attempt to draw attention to Islamophobia - or at the very least a cry for attention.
Apparently the kid didn't build anything, he just took apart a 1980's Radio Shack digital clock and put it inside a very strangely "suspicious" looking metal briefcase with padded interior.
http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech... [artvoice.com]
So at the least, the kid lied about "building a clock" and
Re:Poptarts have gotten the same response (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking of guns... when I was a HS sophomore (1978-79) we needed a "gunshot" sound effect for the school play. Finding it too difficult to synchronize a tape recording with the action on stage (not to mention, it just sounded like a recording, which was distracting), one of the sound crew guys brought a .410 shotgun from home, along with some wadding-load shells (ie: blanks). That way, he could stand in the hallway, looking in through the backstage door, and deliver the sound right on cue.
This was all done with the school's full knowledge and approval. And Andy kept the gun and shells in his locker for the last few days of rehearsals and performances. Alas, those were different times.
Funny thing though, on the night of dress rehearsal, he was paying such close attention to the onstage action that he didn't really notice where he was aiming. He ended up shooting the face off the clock on the opposite side of the wall. We still razz him about that to this day. ;-)
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ah yes, another responsible gun owner, never having any accidents
statistically speaking, owning a gun increases the danger to you and your loved ones, a notion your anecdote supports
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Cherry picked & misrepresented statistics do say that yes.
If someone is desiring to kill themselves or others, having a gun around does sometime lead to an uptick in deaths due to guns... if they don't have a gun around it causes an uptick in knife, auto, blunt object and other deaths... which never seem to matter for some reason.
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actually it does. guns make killing easy. therefore it happens more often
if you have a bunch of hammers lying around a kindergarten class, kids tend to get hit with hammers. if there were no hammers, people would still be getting hit, but the injuries would be hell of a lot less severe
just look at australia or the uk. they actually have higher violence rate than the usa, and lower ho
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Off topic: We're talking about "zero tolerance" policies in schools and the overlap with racism. (And I have never owned a gun.)
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Speaking of guns... when I was a HS sophomore (1978-79) we needed a "gunshot" sound effect for the school play.
In the same approximate timeframe, we had the actual gun on stage, actually fired by one of the student actors ;-)
Friend of mine have an actually dangerous machine (Score:3)
A friend of mine owns a large metal machine that powers itself by a series of small explosions. It can travel upwards of 100 MPH, and weighs over a ton. Similar machines have been responsible for well over a dozen of deaths already, yet he thinks nothing of riding it to work every day. The police have never questioned him about his giant metal death machine.
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Clear evidence of over-reaction (Score:4, Insightful)
In the guerrilla advertising campaign for "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" there were blinkies spread around 12 cities, 11 of which managed to figure out that LEDs are not explosives. Only Boston cops freaked out, locking the city down (despite being told by MIT that there were no explosives) and wasting $millions. Of course Boston cops aren't big on apologizing after their screw-ups; they tend to double down despite reality. The silver lining is that 11 other cities' cops were rational and did the right thing, which is cause for some optimism.
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The problem is Boston repeated the scare later, closing down their airport briefly when an MIT student brought an electronics project to the airport.
And again, after the Marathon bombings, they illegally shut down the entire city in order to catch the bombers that turned out to no longer be in the city. Oops!
Basically, Boston police don't know what the fuck they're doing and people should stay the fuck away from Boston if they value their freedom.
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Bomb vests have blinking lights?
I always thought that they were manually detonated.
Re: Clear evidence of over-reaction (Score:2)
Except the ones that are remotely detonated, like, when strapped to a child that can't be trusted to 'do allah's bidding'.
Re: Clear evidence of over-reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Her claim of 'absent-mindedly' putting it on before going to the airport to pick up a friend (as I recall) was about as dubious as Ahmed's 'I invented this clock and wanted to show it off' claim.
You have never met real nerds. They do these things all the time, completely oblivious to the real world.
It's the kind of people that if you ask them how to make a bomb, the answer is: "Let me show you right now".
And I know from experience that they will have a working bomb, or at least an explosion within a few minutes, just from the stuff lying around.
Re: Clear evidence of over-reaction (Score:2)
Yes I have, I attended a prestigious east coast engineering school and worked for a time at a bell labs spin-off... Nerds do these things to either solve a problem or provoke a reaction from the 'straights'. Putting a breadboard on your shirt with blinking lights solves no problem I'm aware of, so in my experience it was most likely done to provoke a response. She arguably could have been going for whimsy, but if that was the case she missed the mark.
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The girl in Boston didn't just 'bring an electronics project to the airport' - she had a breadboard on her shirt/sweater with blinking lights which, from a distance could cause someone to think she had a bomb vest on.
Could you please provide an example of an explosive belt (or, as you put it, "bomb vest") with external blinking lights?
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I am sure that there are lots of examples to be seen in movies and TV: fictional movies and TV. Real life, not so much
But that's the reality of security and law enforcement in the USA today: they get their ideas about technology and our constitutional rights from Hollywood.
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But that's the reality of security and law enforcement in the USA today: they get their ideas about technology and our constitutional rights from Hollywood.
Well, I believe the standard in court is often "a reasonable person". Perhaps we should stop hiring unreasonable persons to work in law enforcement. It seems to have unfortunate side effects.
Re: Clear evidence of over-reaction (Score:2)
Sorry, they all got 'blowed up.'
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And blinking lights on a wireless router make people with a certain brand of stupidity sick.
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So is this a project or a prank? (Score:4, Insightful)
Young Mr Mohammed seems to have
a) not "built" anything, merely taken the case off a clock, and put it in a box....
b)...which looked astonishingly suspicious with lots of bare wires all kludged in there...
c) which was then closed with a cord (why? Why not just latch the case closed with its latches?)
http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech... [artvoice.com]
Personally, I don't see this as a binary issue where one has to pick one "side" or the other. ...and the media ate that narrative shit right up.
I believe that:
- Young Mr Mohammed was either deliberately trolling his school authorities, or he was used to do so.
AND
- the authorities overreacted as did the cops who absurdly put a non-threatening willowy boy in cuffs why again?
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Perhaps its something much simpler. Face.
People behaved like asses, making fools of themselves. They now need to rationalize this foolishness. By cognitive dissonance. In other cultures we call it "saving face".
Nothing special, a normal human trait, so now they say "well it was a clock, but we were MISLED into thinking it was a bomb by the cunning of Mr Mohammed who pranked us by repeatedly telling us it was a clock!".
Cognitive dissonance doesn't get anymore extreme than this.
Normally what happens at this p
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That could just as easily have been myself when I was his age. That would be a naive young kid wearing a NASA t-shirt who likes to take stuff apart and muck around with it.
"Look what I invented mom!"
Media/police get involved and everything is blown out of proportion for the young man.
So, was Ahmed an inventor? No. He just repackaged a clock in about 20 minutes. That would make him a budding 'Maker' or 'hacker'. Ahmed probably wouldn't know the difference.
Anyways, he's heading in the right direction, and I h
I made a Gameboy in 1987 when I was 12 (Score:2)
OK it wasn't that portable. But I stripped an NES and put it in a casset tape case with enough D cells to get it to run. Then I took one of those small Casio pocket TV's and connected it. I also put in a car adapter plug since it didn't run long on batteries. It was pretty cludged together but we could play NES games in the car during long road trips.
Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
The teachers believed Ahmed wanted the teachers to believe it was a bomb. The school called the police about a possible bomb hoax, not a possible bomb, as evidenced by the police response that did not include sending the bomb squad to the school and the school's decision not to evacuate.
Can we talk about the really troubling thing about this story - that a 14 year-old high school student thinks removing the case from a store bought clock radio is a process of 'invention' as evidenced by his repeated claims he 'invented' this clock and that he was 'proud' of his project and wanted to show it off to his teachers?
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Seriously - when this story first broke, I was on Ahmed's side, because - well, he was presented as a tinkerer, and who doesn't want to stand up for people who tinker?
But it's become clear that he doesn't tinker. He didn't make anything. He took the pieces out of a clock and shoved them into a pencil case. I can break a clock and dump it into a pencil case. Anyone can. It reminds me of a story I read growing up about a 10 year old "building a computer." He didn't. He shoved parts into a case. I can do that.
Re: Actually... (Score:2)
+1
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, a kid repackages a clock to look like .... a clock. The kid tells anyone who asks that it's a clock. The police believe it is a clock. The whole "prop bomb" idea was invented whole cloth by the police.
What you are accusing the kid of is pure thought crime.
Who cares? It was a clock. He did not display the clock in any manner that would suggest that it was a bomb.
Perhaps the police and school were being trolled. But like the truism "you can't con an honest man", it's clear that the actions of the police were not motivated by rational thought. Instead, they were most likely motivated by racism. Racism that this device demonstrated most effectively.
What this kid built (perhaps deliberately, perhaps inadvertantly) was a racism detector. Perhaps you would advocate a law against "racism detectors"?
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You should stop getting your news from Fox news. It wasn't in a suitcase.
Again, you show your bias. Mostly, clocks are on all the time. And the "apparently" shows clearly that you are condemning him based on something that you as
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What level of cognitive dissonance (or just plain stupidity, or bigotry) does it take such that you want to make stuff up in order to support your argument?
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"But it's become clear that he doesn't tinker. "
Which is entirely irrelevant.
" And the police wanted to know what he was planning on doing with prop bomb at school, which Ahmed simply wouldn't answer."
At the time of his arrest for building a hoax bomb there was absolutely no evidence that he was attempting to perpetrate a hoax. He couldn't answer what he was planning to do with a "prop bomb" since he didn't have a prob bomb to plan to do anything with. They might as well have asked him when he stopped beati
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Informative)
The kid never claimed to have 'invented' anything, or that he'd even built the clock from scratch, he came right out and said that he'd thrown it together in 20 minutes out of junk parts, to take to school with him, to show his teachers what he was capable of; but of course once the media (not to mention the public) got hold of the whole thing, the story started getting distorted very quickly. What we have here is a 14-year-old boy who did something as ill-advised and devoid of forethought for possible consequences as any other 14-year-old boy might have done; he never considered that some dumb adults at his school would freak out because they have no understanding of what they were actually looking at. I'll bet that if he had told his folks he was going to take that to school with him, and showed it to them, they might have told him it wasn't a great idea simply because something like this would happen.
Re: Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
Watch this interview [msnbc.com]with Chris Hayes from MSNBC - within the first minute he claims to have bought a bunch of parts and put them together himself.
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Watch this interviewwith Chris Hayes from MSNBC
Do you have any sources that can be viewed without permitting every piece of shit spyware ad tracker fuckhead in the universe to run scripts on your computer?
You know, if he bought defunct electronic devices, then he bought parts. And if he put them together himself, then he put them together himself. Are you sure you just aren't having problems with English? I'm not going to view your shit cite to find out.
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Except that story defeats your point.
"Ahmed Mohamed â" who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart â" hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday"
and
"...He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front...."
There's almost nothing homemade about it; read my link: he took the COVER off a clock, and
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"a 14-year-old boy who did something as ill-advised and devoid of forethought for possible consequences as any other 14-year-old boy might have done; he never considered that some dumb adults at his school would freak out because they have no understanding of what they were actually looking at."
No rational person could anticipate that level of irrational response.
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No rational person could anticipate that level of irrational response
Sure; but you have to admit, 14-year-old boys aren't exactly noted for thinking things through thoroughly.
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Unfortunately having dealt with school administrators recently, I could have. It really is "watch what you say or you're out" these days in public schools.
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I'm guessing he's got a bit of the Aspergers. Such kids really have no clue what is going to freak out adults. Yes, if he'd asked somebody, he might have found out in advance, but Asperger kids don't do that, either.
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why does the fact you're not impressed by his tinkering more important than a kid getting railroaded by moronic police and school admins?
your priorities are... stupid. sorry, but that's really the best word for what you think is the important issue here
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He doesn't seem to have been "railroaded" though. If this account of what happened [youtube.com] is correct, he took it to school, showed it to a bunch of teachers, most of whom ignored it until in a later class period an English teacher asked him to put it away, at which time he refused, and was sent to the principal. When the principal didn't get an adequate answer as to why he brought it to school, the cops were called in based on the thinking that it was an attempt to scare the teachers with a hoax. He was handcuffed
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/. removed the time, I think, or maybe I didn't copy/paste right. Mark Cuban's second hand account starts at ~1:40 in that video
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is your point to say it's not a big deal to handcuff a kid, deny him his parents, and coerce him to sign a "confession", just for showing an interest in building things?
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The wrongfulness of his being handcuffed should not be reason for us to lionize him or create myths about him. We can condemn what we factually know (arrest, handcuffs) without jumping to conclusions about the rest (teachers were racist, he's a genius kid, etc)
The evidence right now actually points to a prank meant get a rise out of teachers, which didn't work (since most ignored it until it started to make noise in class), but which did result in him being referred to the principal for being uncooperative
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you are a lying scumbag
to see the facts of this case, and write those works, makes you nothing less than that
i pity anyone who has to interact with you in the real world, that instead of accepting real life evidence that goes against your ill-informed ignorant bigotry, you have to invent alternate reality delusions. someone in real life, a friend, a relative, a significant other,a coworker, is going to pay a heavy price for be
Re: Actually... (Score:3)
He's 14 years old and he thinks what he did was 'inventing' something? In an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC he describes how he has been tinkering with things since he was 8 or 9 - his clock project is something I would expect an 8 or 9 year-old to do.
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When I was 15 (in 1990) I built one of those as well. Except it was an official project in my electronics class. Those were the days.
A what? (Score:2)
A contract sensor? The guy had to sign a NDA before being pranked?
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* I actually have no idea if it was Jobs, and doubt it was since that fact would likely have been mentioned.
This was a dangerous project (Score:2)
From the pictures it looked like the 120V from the power cord was not protected in any way. If you plugged it in and touched the wrong place you could have had a nasty shock.
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Same with the energy stored in flywheels, i wondered why the metal cylinder i was spinning was deforming so badly then calculated it was because the g-force of acceleration exceeded 2 thousand gravities. Luckily no one was killed in the second one. It sure gave me som
My favorite was Bonsai Kitten (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
I remember animal rights groups getting up in arms about this a decade and a half ago.
shit article (Score:2)
just make having some hero worship and nothing else, much like every other self masturbatory article on that pretentious site
The best has to be the "Atomic Boy Scout" (Score:2)
I mean, he was just a curious youth and his project was mostly harmless, right?
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The story that he was arrested for bringing a repackaged clock into school, because clocks in custom packaging are like movie bombs to the idiot Hollywood generation?
Or that he lacked the hindsight to design a clock from discrete components in anticipation of global media attention, all to avoid strawmen such as that provided by the idiot article writer?
FWIW I'm a casual electronics geek and I'm shit at building neat boxes. This has always frustrated me, and while it was immediately obvious from the photos
Re: Ahmed's story doesn't hold up under scrutiny. (Score:5, Interesting)
His accomplishment was repackaging a clock using a box of his own design. To me, this is more creative than simply soldering a kit off eBay. It's also an accidental flavour of what made Jobs great: he identified someone else's decent electronics and repackaged it in a way that caught the attention of the world!
Since clocks were invented thousands of years ago, and digital clocks decades ago, it is up to you to not deliberately misinterpret the word "invent" just to start a pathetic Internet argument with a 14 year old boy who can't even answer back. He "invented" it in the simple sense that he designed and built a style of clock packaging that did not exist before. Similarly, the original creator of the innards did not "invent" the digital clock - merely lay out a familiar design. His invention was that design.
Now, this previously non-celebrity non-English-professor child could have chosen words that were harder to deliberately misinterpret, to deal with people like yourself who would surely come out with the perfect choice of language. The availability of pictures demonstrates that he did not want to mislead, though, so who cares?
You seem salty about the fact that he got (I wouldn't say "earned") a visit to the WH and MIT. You do realise that he wasn't invited because of his accomplishment, but as a message to encourage people to carry on tinkering even in the face of authoritarian dullards? Sometimes people enter the limelight, even if only for a few days, not because of what they did, but because of what was done to them. Unless you're an eternally bitter sort, there's no need for this to bother you so.
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very well said
thank you
Re: Ahmed's story doesn't hold up under scrutiny. (Score:2)
No, he didn't - that would have been something to talk about, he stuffed the pieces into a store-bought pencil case... Which had to be opened to plug it into the wall for power and the display was only visible when the box was open.
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Exactly this. Let's say that Ahmed's story ended with his arrest and release. No White House invite or national social media attention. Let's also say that his clock project wasn't even that impressive. He had shown interest in taking things apart, seeing how they work, and putting them back together again. That's at least the first s
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So I did about eighty times as much work as Ahmed did, and I STILL didn't i
Re:It's A Different World Today (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's really not. In the US, you're more likely to die from toenail fungus than from terrorist attacks.
It just serves the purposes of the plutocrats to have every scared.
The best things you can do for your family's safety is check the wiring in your house and not own a gun.
Re: (Score:2)
I was with you until you threw that not own a gun thing in there. I'm not sure how you can see right through the terrorism smoke screen but buy the gun lie hook line and sinker.
Re:It's A Different World Today (Score:5, Informative)
I was with you until you threw that not own a gun thing in there. I'm not sure how you can see right through the terrorism smoke screen but buy the gun lie hook line and sinker.
GP is supported by evidence [oxfordjournals.org]. I didn't even have to look hard - it was the first result of my first google search. tl;dr; you and/or your family members are more likely to die if you have a gun in the house.
Now, if you are a person who respects the lethality of a gun, are responsible enough to keep it in a safe place when not in use, and are mindful enough to teach the rest of your family how to properly handle and respect the weapon, your experience might be quite different. But let's be honest - the average person likely does none of those things. And even if you do everything right most of the time - it still takes only one lapse for things to go bad, hence the emphasis on responsibility.
Re: (Score:2)
You really should read more than the headline... the study started by looking at households where a death had already happened and then asking if there were any firearms in the house and so largely ignores the rest of the homes where firearms exist safely and without killing anyone.
Correlation != causation.
Choosing statistics (Score:2)
tl;dr; you and/or your family members are more likely to die if you have a gun in the house.
I do statistics for my day job, and have looked into the "gun ownership" statistics extensively.
What you are citing is narrowly chosen numbers to support one side of the issue. It's one of a vast sea of misleading statistics used to promote one side of the gun control issue. (And the other side does the same thing.)
To show the fallacy, note that this particular statistic can be applied to vaccinations. "You are more likely to die from an allergic response to than to actually get the disease".
Does this mean
Re: (Score:2)
No. That attitude led to them investigating his device. This is appropriate if someone has a concern. Arresting him was some combination of pig headed stupidity, racism, and a "double down" attitude of the police.
Re: (Score:3)
it's a simple statistical fact that owning a gun increases the danger to you and your loved ones, it does not decrease it
people who leave barrels of gasoline around their property don't suffer from fuel shortages, but they tend to have problems with inhaling vapors, increase in cancer, and the occasional accidental fire. it's a joke analogy but i have to make it because the propaganda around guns is so deeply ingrained simple reason on the topic disappears
if you understand keeping dangeorus things around yo
Re: (Score:2)
Way to completely discount the rather significant # of defensive uses of firearms which appear to out number offensive uses: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/ar... [cnsnews.com]
Re: (Score:2)
ah, i see, let's make it a joke. because tens of thousands of pointless deaths every year in the usa due to easy guns is a joke, not really a problem
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up!
Re: (Score:3)
Today's post 9/11 world is a dangerous one, where terrorist evildoers looking to exploit and destroy the free society we have.
Nice way to spread more Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt there, buddy.
I'm ok with a few innocent people being inconvenienced for my safety and my family's safety
I'm OK with you getting modded down to "-1, Troll" for posting such verbal diarrhea. Know what's really ruining 'the free society we have'? It's not suicide bombers and gunmen screaming 'allahu akbar!', it's people like you who keep spouting bullshit like this. In an ideal United States, there is, of course, going to be potential for abuse, and that unfortunately includes some whack-jobs with guns and bombs. The solution to that problem is NO
Re: (Score:2)
The UK had over 30 years of terrorist attacks by the IRA, the bonus value of that being they weren't committed by those conveniently of a different race / colour so all of them could be tarred with the same brush of automatic guilt. In all that time we didn't succumb to your pathetic whiny surrendering of common sense, so go fuck yourself you racist coward.