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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.
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.
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.