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Online Fame Distracts 9th-Grader Who Built That Clock Mistaken For A Bomb (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: This week the Washington Post ran a long profile of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old boy whose home-made clock got him arrested after school officials and the local police mistook it for a bomb last summer. The Justice Department is currently investigating the incident -- while the school district is suing the Texas attorney general, and the boy's family is suing the school district. But Ahmed has just returned back to Texas, and spoke to the press -- including a local Fox news affiliate which later broadcast a commentary saying his family was obsessed with fame and plotted the arrest.
Over the last year Ahmed's read everything that appeared online about him, but never responds because he doesn't want to give in to anger. The Post writes that while some kids at school called him ISIS Boy, "Sympathetic crowdfunders raised $18,000 for his education. He visited the White House, the Google Science Fair and the president of his home country of Sudan (a wanted war criminal, but Mohamed said it would be rude not to accept the invitation)." Though he'd like to return to the U.S. someday for college, he's been living in Qatar, where a government organization paid for private schooling for him and his sister. But the Post says he still sometimes imagines what his life might've been like if the incident had never happened. "By now he could have invented something new -- not just a clock that only took him a few minutes to put together from parts in his family's garage, which was full of '90s-era electronics from when his uncle ran a chain called Beeper Warehouse."
Over the last year Ahmed's read everything that appeared online about him, but never responds because he doesn't want to give in to anger. The Post writes that while some kids at school called him ISIS Boy, "Sympathetic crowdfunders raised $18,000 for his education. He visited the White House, the Google Science Fair and the president of his home country of Sudan (a wanted war criminal, but Mohamed said it would be rude not to accept the invitation)." Though he'd like to return to the U.S. someday for college, he's been living in Qatar, where a government organization paid for private schooling for him and his sister. But the Post says he still sometimes imagines what his life might've been like if the incident had never happened. "By now he could have invented something new -- not just a clock that only took him a few minutes to put together from parts in his family's garage, which was full of '90s-era electronics from when his uncle ran a chain called Beeper Warehouse."
Only the mentally inept pigeonhole people in such a way.
While repackaging a digital clock may not appear to take much in the way of technical skill to the minds of most of the highly technologically literate folks here at slashdot, truthfully even that is still something that most people would not necessarily think of ever trying to build, or at least not without following some instructions. However small the creative spark might seem here, I'd say that the term invention is still apt.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
despite mounting video evidence that is almost never the case.
Citation needed. I'd be willing to bet that the GP was alluding to that Gentle Giant (TM) in Ferguson, where the evidence supported the officer. But hey, let's perpetuate the lie that was "Hands Up, Don't Shoot!"
Even if your claim is true and he did plan the whole thing as a publicity stunt, it only worked because he knew that if the school saw a brownish Muslim student with some electronics they'd go into full bomb-scare-panic, while a white Christian student with exactly the same device would have been ignored.
It is more about it being the rule that when a police officer kills an unarmed black man they are almost never held accountable. That is a rule. You can argue a case here or a case there, but it is literally almost unheard of for a police officer to be fired let alone prosecuted for killing an unarmed black person. Even when they are caught on video using an illegal choke hold against a man who is not resisting, or shoot a guy trying to pull out his wallet after he said "I am about to pull out my wallet."