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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."
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!
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 that he had just re-used the innards from an old clock, I admired that this young kid was thinking more about the usability and elegance of the finished product than I seem able to. But now have I learnt that my shortcoming is a virtue: any small box containing electronics that doesn't look like an iPad or an iPhone should be regarded as probably the work of a bomber or hoaxer.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
Friend.. read the original news story: http://www.dallasnews.com/news...
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.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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. 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.
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"?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!