14 year old arrested for bringing home made clock to school

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Everyone but his shop teacher thought it looked like a bomb.

Oh, if it matters, his name is Ahmed Mohamed.

Irving 9th-grader arrested after taking homemade clock to school: 'So you tried to make a bomb?'

And here we have another bright, intelligent, young mind, beaten into submission by the savage and regressive American "education" system.

This is insanity. When are white Americans going to stop acting like every single Arab is a potential terrorist?

I really feel for the kid. This is like an overblown version of the way I was addressed in grade school, made worse by the obvious blind prejudice going on here. As far as I'm concerned, let 'em fire all the teachers who feel invalidated by robotics clubs, they invariably treat the A/V kids like unpaid interns, or worse, like this. And yeah, people who get territorial and deferential about technology are obsolete, sorry, they just obviously are. They're welcome to get out of the way and go live as Mennonites or in this case, live with the karmic implications of letting one piece of silicon (and their frankly pathetic ineptitude) present them a threat; the actual threat is that these are the same people who in five years be demanding that the same kid fix their laptops without so much as an apology for their hatred and cowardice.

I thought after half a decade we would be over this s**t. I guess smart people just aren't whiny enough for modern America. My local paper almost ran with my story when a friend & I faced expulsion over a webpage. We had our bomb scare about a geocache on the lawn.

Hardware hacking means staring down the rifle barrels of fifty states' worth of militarized police. The U.S. is only safe for people too spineless to question it.

Cberg, the kid isn't even questioning the government or whatever. He is smart enough to know he's better off in Dallas than Khartoum. He likes tinkering. So did Henry Ford, and this kid has far more common sense than Henry could dream of. I've actually seen the attic of one of those TV repair shops (referencing the article's "back room of Radio Shack" comment) after it went out of business, and this kid would go bananas. Old transistors in their original boxes, various other parts that I still don't know what the f**k they were for. Keep in mind that this place was selling vacuum tubes under the counter until it closed, and had the last public tube testing machine in Sacramento. Now the building is a Mexican supermercado. In the 50s kids had chemistry sets with stuff that is illegal today, and if a boy didn't own a soldering iron by age 14 he was dragged to a psychologist because his folks would worry he was gay. Today, you build cool stuff and you're an enemy of the state.

I just have basic radio shack ones but I get weird looks for my soldering gear.

I know the kid learned a tough lesson out of nowhere - that when they see engineering talent, Americans will find any proximate, flimsy excuse to alienate it, because with the exception of the electronics they demand, this country really sucks at engineering; just drive an American car and a VW Golf in one day if you don't believe me. Most major successful American engineering projects were disasters during R&D as a result of cheapskate investing. 747s use Rolls-Royce turbines for good reason. The kid probably would've had more time to practice his craft in Khartoum actually, as long as we're not dead, hackers are quite resourceful. Oppression in American schools DEFINITELY doesn't help anybody survive, even if the schools are in safe places. All this means is that we're expanding the prison state mentality to younger and younger citizens, as well as widening the racial paranoia that led to this thread in square one. Don't forget all the disrespect these kids have to put up with just because someone made the shortsighted assumption that they should be graded on everything but their primary talents.

That reminds me of the case where a guy was arrested for "stealing" a couple cents worth of electricity from a school by plugging his Tesla into a power outlet while he was watching his kid's game. The police launched an "official investigation" that spanned for about a week, then they arrested him for a day or two. I can't believe the stupidity of the people who have authority sometimes.

...When you built it and are aware it's not a bomb?

Yes. He should have figured out that other people would consider it a bomb.

According to the article, the shop teacher said
‘That’s really nice, I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’
Apparently even he thought it looked like a (movie) bomb.

I'm not surprised.
I have a friend that likes "toys" like this (he makes radio controlled plane models as a hobby).
He has a lot of cables and electronics that look suspicious and make suspicious sounds. Like an accumulator he always brings with him. It's basically a ducktape covered block with two loose cables. He connect it to some kind of controller that does nothing but pi-pi-pi-pi till the cables are improperly attached to it and then he attach something to the controller.

It looks really suspicious and I am always uncomfortable when he starts playing with the "toys" in public because it really seems like a homemade bomb although I already know it is only a battery. I worry what other people might think.

Last time he took it out in a crowded train and used the mechanism to charge is cell phone. It was risky. Fortunately people in Poland are not that cautious. Or rather - even if they see something suspicious they prefer not to react because they don't want to get attention.

" a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front".

so it was not a clock and the kid was lieing apparently

Lieing to police is a crime by itself.

That entire family should be deported. The kid should have bloody well known his device, however benign, would be trouble post 9/11/2001, had he studied recent history in school.

I actually had a nightmare about something like this a few nights ago, where I fixed a video game controller or something and had it wrapped in electrical tape. I made the mistake of explaining to this one person, who otherwise may not have noticed, that what I had was not in fact a bomb, and I had it taken away from me. It seemed like I was in some sort of an airport or hotel, but I can't really remember.

It's sad just how much s**t DIYers get.

It would serve these racist, technophobic scum right if a white kid shoots up their school this year.

Your racist, "whites are to blame" won't work here.

He attends Macarthur High School which has a 86% minority enrollment.

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-hi ... hool-19313

No, it's a clock. A home made digital clock.

The major, visible component that people should be able to recognize when people are trying to determine if something is a bomb, is an explosive payload.

No explosive, no bomb. It really is that simple.