Student Arrested for Clock 'Bomb'

[mirth]

This country needs to get a friggin grip

http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/16/us/texas-student-ahmed-muslim-clock-bomb/

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/heres-bomb-clock-got-ahmed-mohamed-arrested/

[Bison]

I've seen contraption with similar construction.  They did go boom or timed the boom.  Frankly in hindsight it may seem pathetic, but I think they made the right call.  You never know these days.  All it took was a couple of rice cookers in Boston lest we all forgot too soon.

[mirth]

This looks like an overreaction

[mirth]

Clearly, no one seriously thought it was a bomb. The teacher confiscated it and held on to it for a few hours before calling the police to question and arrest the kid. No bomb squad, no evacuation of the building.

If they did actually think it was a bomb, then they were grossly negligent.

[endfire79]

Hopefully his friends, classmates and teachers will give him encouragement and warm welcome after he comes back to school and this doesn't deter the kid's interest in electronics.

It's kind of amazing.  Years ago we'd bring stuff like this to school (or some other 'contraption'). Nobody would care. This kid gets stopped, and now has support tweets from Google, Aaron Levie, and the President 

[mirth]

Yeah when I was a kid, my buddies and I were always hacking together stuff like that. Usually it was for some kind of role playing game, but we were always bringing it to school because one of the science teachers ran the school gaming club. We'd all be in jail today.

[BanzaiCat]

Remember the old RPG called Assassin? A version of it was shown in the movie Gotcha!. I didn't get to college until 1987 but I remember hearing about how dudes played this in the early 80s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin_(game)

Apparently it's still a thing. Surprisingly so. I wouldn't think the hand-wringers leading today's campuses would tolerate any of it.

[mirth]

We played a variation of it when I was in high school.

[Barthheart]

We played a variation of it when I was in high school.

Ditto.

[bayonetbrant]

We'd all be in jail today.

the 5th grade puppet show that 2 of us put together was plotting to kill our teacher for giving us hard words on a spelling test.

the parents all had awkward looks on their faces but she fell off the chair laughing so hard

[bayonetbrant]

Remember the old RPG called Assassin? A version of it was shown in the movie Gotcha!. I didn't get to college until 1987 but I remember hearing about how dudes played this in the early 80s.

We had a 6-month game of it my sophomore year at NC State.  The tough part there is that there's a set of RR tracks through the middle of campus, and only 3 tunnels and a bridge cross them.  You've got natural choke points to hunt your prey, or force them to be late for class going way out of their way to avoid the most direct-route choke point.

[LongBlade]

From about 6th grade forward I carried a Swiss Army knife to school every day. The scissors came in handy when girls had a loose thread on their shirt which needed trimming.

Oh, and it had a corkscrew.  ::)

[LongBlade]

Guys used to drive their pickups to school and leave their deer rifles in the truck during deer season, too. The practice ended not because of policy or misuse but because some burglars got the bright idea to break into trucks that had a gun rack in the back displaying the rifle.  ::)

[mirth]

Guys used to drive their pickups to school and leave their deer rifles in the truck during deer season, too.

We had plenty of that too.

[BanzaiCat]

Doesn't seem smart to steal a gun from someone that carries an arsenal in their personal vehicle. Then again I guess we're not talking about MENSA members here.