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Hardware Projects (and Pranks) That Have Scared Observers
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.
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.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Here's a guy who reverse engineered the clock he built.
http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech...
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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Get used to it guys. We don't live in the safe, lily-white world of yesterday where innocent pranks can just be ignored.
Today's post 9/11 world is a dangerous one, where terrorist evildoers looking to exploit and destroy the free society we have.
I sympathize with the innocent kids like Ahmed, but his situation is a small price to pay for waging the war on terrorism. I'm ok with a few innocent people being inconvenienced for my safety and my family's safety.
for membership. To work I'm 3oing, 'doing something'
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...
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?
-Styopa
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?
Ken
A contract sensor? The guy had to sign a NDA before being pranked?
tea party prank that went wrong been terrorising the world in the name of HAVING to buy shit every since.
It's really too bad Ahmed's clock is in fact not a home brew one. He just took an existing radio alarm clock from the 80's and moved the parts to a suitcase. He didn't even rewire anything.
Basically, in the USA, if you are carrying something that is not a bible, or a gun, or a gun with bible verses on it, people will be scared.
Wrap up anything in the bible, or the american flag, or both, and people will accept it, just look at most of the government surveillance programs.
Bibles, Guns, and Flags, you can wrap up shit in any one of them, and Americans will line up to eat it.
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
In the 90's, came home from work for lunch and the fire dept. and bomb squad (with spherical steel-container on truck) had shut off my apartment building. Maintenance people went into an apartment and saw a bomb on the coffee table and called 911. Bomb squad was actually fooled for a while but it turned out to be fake. Turns out, the guy made fake bombs as a hobby. He didn't show them off, just kept them in his apartment.
The police looked at how he could be charged but there is nothing illegal about having a home-made fake bomb in the privacy of your own home.
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.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten
I remember animal rights groups getting up in arms about this a decade and a half ago.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
just make having some hero worship and nothing else, much like every other self masturbatory article on that pretentious site
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 you shouldn't get vaccinated?
A better statistical view is to look at society as a whole, and all causes of death.
While having a gun may raise your family's chance of death, it *lowers* the chance of death for everyone in your neighborhood. Having someone who could grab a gun and come out onto the porch gives a measure of protection to the neighborhood. It encourages criminals to go elsewhere.
And that particular statistic you cited isn't about "likely to die", it's "likely to die by gunshot".
Even though the likelihood of "death by gunshot" goes up, the total likelihood of death goes *down* with gun ownership.
This is because "total likelihood of death" also takes into consideration things like reduction of lifestyle after being robbed. That $300 from your wallet has to be made up somehow, and the after-effects show up in things like reduced nutrition and health care.
None of this is obvious to the public because there's so much political wrangling on both sides.
But when you look at the total picture, the statics seem to show that gun ownership as a whole, for a society, seems to decrease the mortality rate.
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.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
;-)
I mean, he was just a curious youth and his project was mostly harmless, right?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
and profits. Ahmed is just a nasty little misogynist who does not like white women telling him what to do. How has that got anything to do with pranks between friends by talented geeks?
Was the school evacuated?
Was the bomb squad called?
Did the student visit the Principal's office with the device?
Did he ride in police car with the device?
My son, who certainly appears white and has an innocuous whitish name, got suspended from middle school for making a "knife" out of Lego pieces. Ahmed's case does seem to have some additional factors, but I believe that boys are being demonized in traditional schools.
Note to those whose job it is to detect bombs and such things:
Real bombs do -not- have Big Red Numbers on them. That is just Hollywood fakery for movies. 8-)