'Clock Kid' Ahmed Mohamed and His Family To Leave US, Move To Qatar 621
theodp writes: The curious case of Ahmed Mohamed, the 9th grader who was cuffed for scaring school officials with what turned out to be a repackaged digital clock, has taken yet another twist with news on Tuesday that the 'Clock Kid' and his family will move to Qatar. Less than 24 hours after Ahmed met President Obama at the White House, the family issued a news release saying, "After careful consideration of all the generous offers received, we would like to announce that we have accepted a kind offer from Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) for Ahmed to join the prestigious QF Young Innovators Program, which reflects the organization's on-going dedication to empowering young people and fostering a culture of innovation and creativity." Prior to the announcement, some in the press sensed something was amiss when the President seemed to give Ahmed the cold shoulder on Monday after personally inviting Ahmed to the White House for "Astronomy Night." Last month, Ahmed enjoyed a decidedly warmer welcome at Google, where he was literally put front and center before the Google Science Fair winners (including Grand Prize winner Olivia Hallisey, who came up with a novel way to detect Ebola), and enjoyed a meet-and-greet with Sergey Brin.
Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invited (Score:5, Insightful)
get invited by Google and President
Fucking genius, durrrr.
It was a mass produced clock, not any "invention".
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Remove casing from a Wallmart clock
get invited by Google and President
Fucking genius, durrrr.
It was a mass produced clock, not any "invention".
Unfortunately true. He is not a particularly bright kid and is being unduly celebrated. He took apart a clock. While we should celebrate kids taking apart clocks, we shouldn't call it an invention.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
I took apart 2-3 clocks growing up. Where's my medal?
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I took apart 2-3 clocks growing up. Where's my medal?
As I recall, he was arrested, not get a medal.
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I partially destroyed a bridge when I was growing up. Yes, for real. I exploited the harmonicities in a simple, symmetric truss-bridge. Anyone can do it – by hand.
I neither received a medal, nor was arrested. The statute of limitations is long-expired on this prank.
If anyone wants to give me a medal, or some (precious) metal, or perhaps even the mettle to go on living in this insane world, then please do. Just don't meddle in my affairs.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but you need to be part of a celebrated group, re-assemble your clock into something that some people say resembles an IED, and then have the school go apeshit and overreact to it.
Only *then* you can get your medal... but you'd better hurry up, the political landscape will most likely change in the next 18 months.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
... but you'd better hurry up, the political landscape will most likely change in the next 18 months.
How so? The US will still be run by the ultra-rich, privileged upper-class aided by their well-fed lackeys, the lobbying companies. Oh, you mean the puppets office will be different? Doesn't really count.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Informative)
... but you'd better hurry up, the political landscape will most likely change in the next 18 months.
How so? The US will still be run by the ultra-rich, privileged upper-class aided by their well-fed lackeys, the lobbying companies. Oh, you mean the puppets office will be different? Doesn't really count.
To hazard a guess, I think he means most of us are getting fed up with the so-called social "justice" warriors who are continuously up in arms and having hissy fits over any perceived (though probably not real) slight. Yesterday provided a perfect example. Two guys on twitter made up a #boycottstarwarsvii [twitter.com] hashtag, claiming the movie was racist against white people. Of course, SJWs went apoplectic with self-righteous indignation, and it even made CNN [cnn.com] & The Daily Show [ew.com], but it turns out it was all just a troll from the get-go. [theverge.com] SJWs seem to go full retard every day.
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At this point, anything that proves that these SJW's are stupid is the best thing possible. So I salute those two guys who trolled SJW's and showed the entire world that they're nothing but hyper-emotional individuals that only do stuff because it "makes them feel good" while ignoring actual problems.
Re: Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invi (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're being stifled by women or people whining on the Internet the chances are you just suck at life.
The Internet I couldn't give two shits about. It's when they dox your ass and start harassing you (and especially your employer) in real life that a pretty important line gets crossed.
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What would you suggest? I don't have a senator in my back pocket, and it's illegal to shoot the oligarchs.
It may well be illegal to shoot the better off, even if they so richly deserve it, but there are other ways. Grassroots movements do actually achieve things, and the power of the internet is that it makes organising yourselves across the nation so easy. Now, I know what the first objection is going to be: "What chance do we have to even get off the ground, when [any of a number of reasons]?" There are many answers to that - one is: you never know until you try. Another is: look at the history of some of the
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Informative)
According to Irving police, Ahmed's case contained a digital clock that the student had taken apart and rearranged. Police said the student had the briefcase in his English class, where he plugged it into an electrical outlet and it started to make noise.
Ahmed said his English teacher confiscated his case. A few hours later, the student said the school's principal and resource officer pulled him out of class. Police confiscated the case along with Ahmed's tablet computer.
Why the heck was the kid playing with his clock, plugging it into a wall during english class. He either was bored with a short attention span, or was looking for attention, since he already showed it to his science teacher.
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So, repeatedly telling your teacher it is a clock is a bomb threat now? Wow, that is pretty amazing.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Interesting)
PS: In 1979, I disassembled my mother's one and only (analog!) alarm clock (It was a GE - came with an AM/FM radio) to see how it worked.
I was extremely careful about it, but that didn't stop her from issuing an ultimatum: re-assemble it into full working order, or get my ass beat into oblivion. I had three minutes to spare once I demonstrated it's functionality to her satisfaction.
My reward was to get it back and keep it after she went out and bought another one; I think I added a couple of little speakers to it and a small amplifier (courtesy of an old Radio Shack 120-in-1 electronics kit). Sounded like pure crap, if I recall.
(Strangest part of it all? I still have the damned thing...)
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Re:Extra parts... (Score:5, Funny)
Extra parts do not exist; they're always there for a reason
That's not tru. I had a coupl of parts lft ovr from rassmbling my kyboard and it works just fin.
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I was extremely careful about it, but that didn't stop her from issuing an ultimatum: re-assemble it into full working order, or get my ass beat into oblivion. I had three minutes to spare once I demonstrated it's functionality to her satisfaction.
In one sentence, you managed to beat out every bomb-defusing scene in every movie I've ever watched. Sir, I would like to buy the rights to your story and make it into a short film :-)
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Would you have benefitted from more praise/recognition for your experiments while you were in school?
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Probably, but in the 70s and 80s stuff like this was kinda downplayed in school. Most of us were regularly getting our asses beat from the football team for being who we are, so flaunting it wasn't a priority.
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Around twenty years ago I was having problems with a really nice CRT, and I wanted to fix it. So, I bought a book on CRT repair, and got about as far as how much voltage is still hanging around in the electronics, and I decided, nope... I can get a new CRT.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Good Riddance.
It appears this family has tried this grab for attention more than once, with the daughter at least once....
So, they finally got their 15min of fame, and now let's just be happy to have them out of the country and back where they want to be in the first place.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying you're right, not saying you're wrong but can you please cite some references? I did a (quick) Google and didn't find anything untoward.
Yes, it's not a proper invention but he's just a normal boy, taking things apart. From reading some posts here, you'd think he'd lied about having cured cancer and then been humiliatingly debunked.
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I just grabbed the first link of many I found when googling "Clock Boy Sister" [wnd.com].
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Informative)
Here you go:
The Surprising Backstory Behind #IStandWithAhmed’s 2-Time Sudanese Presidential Candidate Father [okayafrica.com]
What’s the Story with Ahmed Mohamed and his Ridiculous Briefcase “Clock”? The Answer Lies with his Father [wordpress.com]
The sister of the boy who brought a suspected hoax-bomb to his Texas high school said she was suspended from a school in a prior bomb scare. [breitbart.com]
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep.... I hate to say it, but I think a LOT of us just got fooled on this one, at least initially. As techie "geeks", we *wanted* to believe this was all about a young, brilliant kid getting held back by "the system".
In reality, it's shaping up to look like this was all a political ploy.... Research the background of the kid's parents and you'll start to see what I mean.
IMO, this was all part of a preconceived plan to scare people at school by bringing in a suspicious-looking device and then cry discrimination when called out on it.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep.... I hate to say it, but I think a LOT of us just got fooled on this one, at least initially. As techie "geeks", we *wanted* to believe this was all about a young, brilliant kid getting held back by "the system".
I'm a geek, and nothing about how I reacted to the first story has changed. It doesn't matter at all if he built the clock from scratch, from parts or just took one apart. This is a kid, taking a clock apart is fun, it should be encouraged. Showing up with clock parts in a pencil case and immediately show it to your teacher and tell exactly what it is should not in any civilized country lead to a 14 year old being handcuffed and questioned while denied access to parents.
The fear Americans let overrule the freedoms you used to have seems very disproportionate to the actual threat.
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You're simplifying what happened, and thus changing the story. He showed it to his science teacher who thought it was cool. He then took it to English class, plugged it in and caused a distraction by having the alarm go off. When the non-technical english teacher saw it, he said it's just a clock. This version of the story sounds a whole more lot like he didn't get the attention he wanted from the first teacher, so intentionally created an incident with a second teacher who did not have the technical bac
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody knew it wasn't a bomb. The evidence is clear: nobody evacuated, and the bomb squad wasn't called in.
Therefore, it did not look like a threat, and reactions as if it looked like a thread were incorrect.
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So the appropriate response to a kid with something that looks like a bomb is to ask him to "put it away", and only then if he refuses, call the cops and have him arrested?
It makes no sense that "put it away" is an appropriate response if they thought it actually might be a bomb. In this scenario, evacuating the whole school and calling the bomb squad might make more sense.
It makes no sense to cal the cops and have him arrested if they knew it was not a bomb.
Maybe the kid and his whole family are trolls. My
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Research the background of the kid's parents and you'll start to see what I mean.
IMO, this was all part of a preconceived plan to scare people at school by bringing in a suspicious-looking device and then cry discrimination when called out on it.
You're assuming a lot.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Merely a sign of the times we live in. Politicians cater to the press, and the press is only loosely based on reality. But mostly on what sounds like a good story to sell a point. Journalistic integrity is dead and the self titled historians have decided instead to become fantasy writers. In this case, the poor oppressed muslim boy genius image is a winner because it's something to throw into the face of "islamophobes" in a day of islamic terrorism and the islamic invasion of Europe. Look - not ALL muslims are bad! Poor little kid got oppressed by our nasty school system it's not his fault he's a genius.
And then the President (with abysmal ratings) decides to stick his oar in and see if he can salvage any credibility. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread. No one bothered to check to see if his "story" is actually true. Turns out it's not. But it DOESN'T MATTER because we'll just ignore the facts and bury any naysayers under a torrent of racism accusations. And if they don't shut up after that, we just have to direct our PC sheep towards them in the ultimate social DDOS attack. People love to hate and if you start pointing out facts you might just find yourself being the next Emmanuel Goldstein or worse, dragged before a court on hate-crime charges. Welcome to the Brave New World.
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Emannuel Goldstein, the guy edited 2600?
No. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5)
The point isn't "Wow, kid took apart a clock, how amazing, we should celebrate!!!"; but "When somebody does something other than text messaging with a gadget, we should encourage them to pursue even more interesting projects in the future; not pretend that exposed FR4 is somehow a WMD." Patting kiddo on the back just happened to be the most efficient way of telling the school district that they'd made themselves look like total morons in front of everyone.
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Who gives a shit if anybody ever said the word invention? This is such a huge distraction. So many people on slashdot are more concerned with the specific words you use than the actions you take.
It's not about whether he's a genius. It's about whether innocent and safe intellectual curiosity is being punished by society. When the president, and Google, etc. invite Ahmed over, they are trying to counter the signal from police and school which said that it was unacceptable.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have correctly pointed out that this was a publicity stunt without using the moronic racist claptrap.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:4, Informative)
There's no irony here.
Being born of a certain racial background is something you can't help, and which also doesn't make you a piece of shit.
Being a Trump supporter is your own free choice and is also undeniably directly correlated to your political beliefs. You can argue that it's not correlated to the specific belief that it's okay to call children "half-nigger pieces of shit" for bringing a disassembled clock to school, but it's certainly not in the same ballpark.
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He was absolutely celebrated for being a nerd. People viewed it as authority stifling the creative and innovative spirit.
If a black muslim threatens to kill a bunch of people at his school or join ISIS or whatever, it would get nowhere near the news attention as this did. If you're focusing on his ethnic background or the word "invention" in this story, then you're probably a fucking moron who is out of step with most of America.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:4, Insightful)
No you forgot, he set it up like a suitcase bomb to get attention. Much more inventive than just taking it apart. Getting attention is the only route to success in America.
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Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Remove casing from a Wallmart clock
get invited by Google and President
Fucking genius, durrrr.
It was a mass produced clock, not any "invention".
Don't forget the part about meeting with the leader of...Sudan, of all places. Yeah, he lost my support and all hope of my thinking he's interested in fairness and equality after that.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not about it being an invention. This is about him doing something interesting for his age and at the very least he did some re soldering there and instead of getting a pat on the head from his teachers, they overreacted the police. On top of that, he was illegally questioned by the police since his parents were not allowed to be present even after he asked for them. They made this kid feel like an isolated second class person and to be honest, I can't imagine a more effective way to turn this kid into an actual terrorist.
The attention he got was more about undoing the damage than rewarding any actual genius.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Undeserved praise as a way of atoning for undeserved punishment does not show that we are more enlightened. In fact, it exposes further ignorance on our part.
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This is not about it being an invention. This is about him doing something interesting for his age and at the very least he did some re soldering there and instead of getting a pat on the head from his teachers, they overreacted the police.
To be fair, if you were technically not-literate, then saw a suitcase with a bunch of wires and what looked like a timer in it...
I agree they overreacted, but when you build something that looks passingly like an IED, and then you take it to school, what the hell else can you expect?
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully expect the teachers to check it out, that's just being responsible I might even expect them to confiscate it for safety reasons (those transformer connections look a bit suspect to me) or based on the fact that he was disrupting class with it. What I don't expect, would be for them to take him out of school in handcuffs and then illegally question him without his parents present or for that matter, having the principal send a letter to all of the parents implying the kid was potentially dangerous.
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I agree they overreacted, but when you build something that looks passingly like an IED, and then you take it to school, what the hell else can you expect?
US Army and other armed forced handbook provide instructions creating explosive devices from materials randomly at-hand, when in a dangerous, covert, or captured situation.
When Americans do it, is it an IED, or just an explosive device?
Why is it that the public has swallowed wholesale this new term of "IED" to mean, basically, "a bomb that someone we don't like prepared."?
Do Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, or whichever military contractors make the bombs put s "stamp of approval" on the things... one that notes th
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There are certain things you don't do....If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb... if you're anybody you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb really, but especially if you're muslim.
it shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does.
Thank you for your recipe for how to ensure that systemic prejudices remain in place, that the world never changes for the better.
To be blunt, this is the same attitude a bunch of white people had in the 1950s and 1960s when they said, "If you're black, you don't vote. You don't sit in the front of the bus. You don't eat at lunch counters. It shouldn't matter yada yada yada, but it does."
Is Ahmed some sort of boy genius? Eh, I doubt it, but the simple fact is that NO ONE, Muslim or otherwise, should hav
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If you're muslim, you don't bring anything to school that can be mistaken for a bomb...
And don't forget, if you're a girl, you don't wear provocative clothing that invites rape.
this is the world we live in.
This is the world we made!
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Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
Kid experiments with electronics. Local government wrongly detains him and accuses him of being a t'rrist. President demonstrates that's exactly how we're not supposed to act by inviting him to the White House instead of a jail cell.
As pointed out before: The kid 'invented' a bigotry-detector.
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Regardless of that.. this whole thing is now sounding like it was some sort of setup from the beginning, a publicity stunt, intended to make the U.S. look bad to the rest of the world -- even worse than we already look, that is.
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It's not a clock. It's an islamophobe detector, and it works perfectly.
Re:Remove casing from a Wallmart clock - get invit (Score:5, Insightful)
He had the thing beep on purpose during english lesson. That is: he discreetly took it out of his bag during the lesson, opened it, plugged the adapter to a power outlet, and set it to beep. Then he was purposely evasive in his answers to the english teacher.
The whole event was plain race-baiting.
OK lets be real (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, lets be 100% honest about this kid. This entire thing was a setup by his FATHER to get attention for his "cause". His father is a well known activist and Imam who plans these types of events. Now that the whole thing has been exposed as a fraud the father is moving. Of course the media never follows up, and the public never learns the truth.
Re:OK lets be real (Score:4, Informative)
I hope whatever that "Sharia" reference is turns out to be some kind of "OMG Ponies!" -based legal philosophy; maybe worth a look though.
Re:OK lets be real (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:OK lets be real (Score:5, Insightful)
The media doesn't want to admit they got played.
Re:OK lets be real (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just for fun let's say your assumption is one hundred percent correct and that's exactly what happened. Guess who remains the bad guy of the story? I'll give you a hint: They ain't purchasing plane tickets.
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At the end of the day a whole community of Texans were frightened by a kid named Ahmed playing with electronics. Even if he were a master activist with the supernatural skills you wish he had so it'd fit your narrative, he'd still be saying: "Holy shit that went way better than I ever could have hoped!"
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But it is honest. If you read the followups and investigate the fathers background you will learn the truth as well. But you won't bother and continue to believe the narrative that the media fed you.
Re:OK lets be real (Score:5, Insightful)
If you explain your point and site sources then people don't think you're making things up.
What better source do you need than the actual photos of his arrest and the clock? You can see the circuit board was etched by a company that sold alarm clocks to Radioshack in the 1970s. You can see the logo for the company silkscreened right onto the board. Unless you think that the young lad decided to put a company logo on his 'invention'?
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> What better source do you need than the actual photos of his arrest and the clock?
It is not in dispute that the kid tinkered with and soldered the guts of a radio shack clock. What is in dispute is that the father put him up to it with a plan to gain publicity.
This is standard conspiracy-theory bullshit - you are assuming that what happened after the event was planned. That's borderline insane - the idea that anyone could have foreseen the series of events and deliberately kicked them off is on the
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Even some of the initial media reports indicated that the father was an activist. I even commented about it at the time.
If your father is the Sudanese version of Al Sharpton, it spins things in a different direction.
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The Wikipedia article provides no indication of a conspiracy theory. It has a section on it it that cites only one reporter, who later apologized for having suggested it. A Google search for "Ahmed Mohamed clock conspiracy theory" turns up articles pointing to extreme right-wing pundits with vague theories about a 9/11 conspiracy, but no actual concrete claims of any wrongdoing.
The clock kid AND The World Cup (Score:4, Interesting)
Yawn...The family monetizes its 15 minutes of fame.
Worker's Paradise! [theguardian.com]
Mission accomplished? (Score:5, Insightful)
The invention turned out to be nothing of the sort, and supposedly his sister had been trying to stir shit up w.r.t. Muslim oppression.
Re:Mission accomplished? (Score:5, Insightful)
Their entire family are activists. The whole thing was a setup from the start. And everyone fell for it, including Google and the President.
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So, if you provoke a racist authority into displaying it for the world, they then not liable for said actions? Bull.
This is the exact same garbage people tried to use to discredit civil rights activists 50 years ago.
Hell, they still use these arguments.
bigots never change.
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahmed should invent a stopwatch too (Score:2)
Quatar (Score:2)
I think I will learn a lot and have fun too.
Maybe. Maybe not. [wikipedia.org]
Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
Ahmed didn't just not invent anything, he disobeyed a science teacher who saw the clock and told him not to show it to anyone else in the school. Ahmed plugged in the clock and set an alarm to go off during his English class. The mess of unsecured components and wires was dangerous when plugged into 110V AC, if not scary for what it might be. The English teacher quite understandably freaked out.
Ahmed's father had to have known the clock was not the invention of his son, yet he set up fundraisers.
Last November, Ahmed's father registered a company named Twin Towers Transportation.
Obama should be ashamed of his rush to judgement, as should Google.
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Qatar is not the typical arab oil sheikdom (Score:5, Interesting)
Among the OPEC nations, Qatar has the lowest "survival" oil price. Saudi Arabia has the lowest production cost, less than 5$ a barrel. But the government has so many obligations, borrowings, interest obligations etc etc, it needed oil to be at 105$ a barrel to survive. Other countries were even higher. Sensing the danger fracking is posing to OPEC, Saudi Arabia decided to take care of itself first. It built a large fund slowly to weather the storm and dropped the oil price. It was hoping it would stabilize at 80$ a barrel, making fracking not worth the investment, while stretching its reserve funds. But it took all other OPEC nations by surprise, there was no concerted action, no help from Saudis for immediate budget needs, so all hell broke loose and oil went south all the way to 40$ a barrel. It is hurting them all. But least hurt nations are Qatar, its survival price was about 60$ a barrel last Dec, and Saudi Arabia because it built a reserve fund and its production costs are so low.
OPEC is hoping fracking will stop, inventories will dwindle and the oil price will go back up. But fracking does not need large lead times. The fracking leases already bought have been paid for, and new leases are coming in at low prices. So if oil goes back over 60$ fracking will start to thaw and it will keep oil below 80$ all the time.
It is bad for global warming, renewables and all that, but for sustained economic growth there is nothing like low energy prices. Qatar might be the only country there to become an Arabian Singapore. So this invitation to the clock kid seems a natural fit for them. The clock kid's dad was a Presidential candidate in Sudan. Not some impoverished African, he got connections too.
Re:Qatar is not the typical arab oil sheikdom (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been in Doha on business. It is a smoggy, dry and loud nouveau riche shithole and the only civilised people there seem to be the Thai guest workers.
You know what would be ironic? (Score:5, Funny)
That they miss their plane because their alarm clock failed.
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perhaps he will take his Radio Shack clock pieces through TSA at the airport and make all hell break loose.
Fleeing potential criminal charges? (Score:3)
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I'm pretty sure the Irving police department won't have a problem letting them go. Where they have likely defrauded folks with their story and enriched their bank accounts in the process it obviously didn't rise to the level of a crime. Defamation might be an issue, but that is a civil matter between individuals and would not preclude foreign travel.
In my view, let them go, help them go even. I'd be happy to help pack up their stuff for shipping. Have a long and healthy life young man.
Who cares about the kid? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who cares about the kid? (Score:4, Informative)
Like I said when this thing all originally broke....
Once the administration of the school got on the "bomb hoax" path with this thing, there is no getting off. People need to understand that there are processes and procedures in a post 9/11 world to deal with this kind of thing that we legally required from public schools. People also need to realize that we don't have the full story, only the story as told by the kid and his family, because the police and school are prohibited from releasing the records until the parents allow it.
The administration and police *may* have overreacted, but I seriously doubt it. Even with what we know, the case that this was perceived as a "bomb hoax" by the school is not totally far fetched. I can see how somebody mistook this thing and the kids actions as a hoax, just on it's face. But we don't know if the kid wasn't doing stupid stuff like leaving the device behind and running out the door yelling "it's a bomb!" or not. All we do know is that his 1st period teacher tells "him to put it away, don't show it to anybody, just take it home" yet it ends up plugged in and going off in 3rd period English class. Somebody thought the situation warranted being called a possible "hoax bomb" and with that, the train had left the station and you have to run the procedure rails dictated by what you are required to do for a possible "hoax bomb".
The evidence is that *something* was amiss with all this, because not only did the school administration treat this like a hoax bomb, the police did too. The police have their own set of policies and procedures to follow and they claim they did exactly that in this case. Somebody said that the boy was verbally combative, evasive and aloof when the police where there questioning him. Enough so to raise suspicion that their might be more to this situation, that an actual crime may have been committed, so they detain the boy until they can investigate, which is totally legal and reasonable as they can hold you for at least 48 hours without charges. Once they determine no crime was committed (or the prosecutor declines to charge him) they release the boy.
None of this seems outlandish or illegal to me. In hind sight it might be a bit much, but I expect that the family is refusing to release the school and police records of this for a reason and that reason is likely that the kid actually DID make a "hoax bomb threat" then acted inappropriately when interviewed by the administrators and police. The school believed it's case was good enough to expel him, and they haven't backed down from that. The only thing that saved him from being criminally charged is the DA refused to charge and try a minor for something like this.
So, we really don't have good evidence that the school or the police where over reacting to the situation. It's very possible (and IMHO likely) that if all the facts where known, if the family would release the records, that the school and police did the right things. And until the family releases the records, it is premature and inappropriate to critique the school or police without all the facts.
This will be embarrassing to a certain DC family (Score:2)
The family who gave Clock Boy a dinner invitation.
Does anyone know the Arabic for schadenfreude?
How the times have changed... (Score:3)
No credit for Fox News... (Score:3)
I recall that Fox called this whole thing out as a hoax from day one. Which was right about the time that the rest of the national media was drooling over this supposed boy genius.
It just goes to show that politics has invaded every segment of society. The folks at Google don't think this kid is a genius any more than I do. But it was promoted for political reasons. Same with Obama. It advances their agenda to push for more H1-B visas. It also advances various "diversity" agendas. Too bad it wasn't a little girl - could have pushed that agenda too.
So as usual when the national media gets the story wrong there is not retraction. There is no follow up. It's just on to the next story. This is pretty much why I have given up on CNN and CBS and NBC, etc. Every story is twisted to advance some sort of political agenda. Now some might say that Fox does the same thing, and they do, but at least Fox will correct the story if they make a mistake.
Oh yeah, good riddance you little prick. Hope you enjoyed your 15 minutes of fame.
Leaving one 3rd world country for another? (Score:4, Funny)
Except for the food, religion & clothes, are Texas & Qatar that much different?
Germany did the same thing ... (Score:4, Interesting)
... ran off the greatest minds on the planet at the time.
America made great strides because of the "brain drain" caused by persecution.
Next up:
All white spelling bee participants with watered-down list of words.
Re:Tic tic tic (Score:5, Funny)
Cool post, AC. Want to bring it to the White House?
Re: (Score:2)
is that people loved Ahmed, but when he leaves the U.S he's suddenly a traitor
Of all the people that give a crap about Ahmed, whether they be fans or detractors, this particular point of view is expressed absolutely none of them. It's a complete non sequitur.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
but he didnt make a clock he or his father took a clock out of its case in an attempt for another bomb scare following up behind his sisters bomb scare all to promote his extremist cause
so shut the fuck up
Re: (Score:2)
Well yeah, taking apart clocks is serious business in the middle east.
Re: (Score:2)
U.S education would most likely fail this kid, as most other American children. Or get him arrested. Again. What I really wonder is how many Americans are now thinking he's "aiding the enemy", for leaving the country and taking his talents elsewhere.
They're welcome to him - they're wasting a scholorship on someone who can just about take the insides of an alarm clock out!
can come back as a h1b and get jobs that USC can't (Score:2)
can come back as a h1b and get jobs that USC can't get.
Re: (Score:2)
also, what the hell is he showing it to his english teacher for? and during the middle of class? if he wants his teachers' approval, after class so as to be non-disruptive. Also... he's trying to impress his teachers with a clock he took apart?
Look, it's a school kid. If you look him up on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], previous teachers are cited for explaining that he likes to hack electronics and bring them along to show.
According to Wikipedia, the English teacher didn't freak out, but thought that it looked like a bomb, so the school decided to crack down on him for making a "hoax bomb" which is apparently a legal term in Texas.
Re: (Score:3)
I've pretty much had it with Slashdot. Between the quality of stories going into the toilet and the comments burrowing into the septic tank, this place is done.
I've been here since 1998 and I'm done.