News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by jerf on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @10:26AM (#10226818)
I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. This stupid is well-distributed.
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by owen_griffiths on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @11:10AM (#10227172)
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by goldenkey on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @12:10PM (#10227640)
These administrators are so politically correct and political with how they get their jobs (usually favorites get promoted, etc.) My father was a teacher for 40 years and never stopped telling me stories about the people at the top. The school system is ran by circus animals.
Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by leoc on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @12:35PM (#10227845)
> but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too.

Of course they have. However, the authorities everywhere don't consistently flip their wigs—certainly not as badly as this—every time a student does something like bringing in this project. So the fact that they wigged out badly in this particular case probably—not certainly, but really pretty likely—does have some relation to the fact that the student just happened to be Ahmed Mohamed.

(OTOH there pretty certainly is a selection bias in the fact that this particular case is getting so much publicity. It's the social-media catnip of the perceived (and again, let's be serious here, probably partly real) discrimination that has pushed this one up the charts while others go mostly unremarked.)

Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by jerf on Wednesday September 16, 2015 @02:31PM (#10228740)
You can not assert a consistent behavior off of one example. You're finding something you seem to be looking for. I was not kidding about being arrested and getting ordered to not touch computers for some period of time. Wigs have been flipped.

I do not know that school administrators have "consistently" flipped out at white kids, either. I don't know what the baseline occurrence of these events are. My suspicion would be that every case we've ever heard of, including this one, is still an outlier, and thus not suitable for drawing sweeping conclusions from, and in fact kids probably do stupid stuff like this every day without making the national news.

Re:14-Year-Old Boy Arrested for Bringing Homemade Clock to S... by leoc on Sunday September 20, 2015 @12:18PM (#10248041)
Hm? I didn't assert any consistent pattern of behaviour, I only denied one.