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There is likely more to this story. I'm basing this on 3 facts: 1. In 2015 it's highly unlikely that you could build a home-made clock that would be of the si

There is likely more to this story. I'm basing this on 3 facts: 1. In 2015 it's highly unlikely that you could build a home-made clock that would be of the size and shape resembling a bomb - that is, unless it was made to look like a bomb. 2. Ahmed, his father, and anyone else with a phone camera (that is on Ahmed's side) would have posted a picture of the clock, or given a full description of it (size, shape, etc), in defense of Ahmed - that is, if it made sense, otherwise they would not. And I have not been able to find an image, nor a good description. 3. The initial teacher told him not to show it to anyone. You can break this down into that teacher having one of two opinions: A) It really did look like a bomb or B) its all about racism / hate / being anti-Muslim / anti-brown in that school (check the school's panel http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031 http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031 - that school is half brown and black).

Gigablah 11y ago
At 1:13 in this interview, Ahmed shows a product page for the case that he put his clock in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE It's a "Vaultz Tiger Pencil Box". Here's a video review of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e40YqLF1Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e40YqLF1Rs
lucretian 11y ago
re: #2, the device was confiscated. it's in the hands of the police now, presumably.
jandrese 11y ago
#3 could be that the engineering teacher knows some of the other teachers and administrators are a bunch of panicky idiots and will freak out when "the brown arab kid" brings in something they don't immediately recognize.
hnpc123 11y ago
Sad that you're being downvoted (and probably flagged) for expressing a reasonable opinion. Hacker News has been a left-wing echo chamber ever since the crazies started flowing in during that period when every story on the front page was NSA related. Now it's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion on any non-technical issue without SJWs using the voting system here to silence dissent.
- pfg 11y ago
  Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven, as demonstrated by the other replies? I don't get how this can possibly be about left vs right. Common sense hopefully doesn't depend on which side of the political spectrum you fall into.
  - powertower 11y ago
    > Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven Which of the 3 points have been dis-proven? Also take into concideration that - 1. The kid had a metal box containing PCBs and probably large components, all tide together around with a wire, and it was making beeping noises in class. 2. The school body and school district is almost 90% non-white, with the majority being "brown".
    - pfg 11y ago
      re. 1: His claim that it is "highly unlikely" that a home-made clock would look like a bomb needs some citation. Unless your definition of "looks like a bomb" is "anything with PCBs and wires, stuck in some kind of box", at which point I would argue that any home-made clock will look like a bomb. re. 2: He's asking the father to provide an image of something that was confiscated by the police or school administration. Furthermore, the first video with the boy contained a fairly detailed description of the clock, and the second video even contains an image of the box (or at least a similar box). re. 3: Well, he provided an alternative explanation for that himself.
mikeash 11y ago
You're assuming that it actually looked like a bomb. It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.
- deleted 11y ago
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  - mikeash 11y ago
    To have a bomb you need explosives. Did this "looks like a bomb" have anything that looked like explosives? No. Therefore it did not actually look like a bomb. I assume that you meant to google image search IED. Doing so, I see one image with an exposed PCB. I see several images with cell phones. One shows a Coke can. Are we to believe that an exposed Coke can also "looks like a bomb"? Or should we maybe believe that showing up in a Google Image search for a particular term is not sufficient to "look like" something?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      - mikeash 11y ago
        The claim is that the device looked like a bomb. That he's being charged with "creating a hoax bomb" makes no difference to this. Either a hoax bomb still looks like a bomb, or we're giving control over to idiots to declare that a hoax bomb is anything that looks like their crazy and inaccurate ideas of what a bomb looks like. Certainly IEDs can have exposed PCBs. So do hard drives. It's irrelevant. What do explosives look like? I don't know. But I know that they look like something, and they probably don't look like electronics. So when you have a device that is a bunch of electronics and nothing else, I can pretty safely say that it does not look like a bomb, because there are no explosives.
    - 11y ago

Gigablah 11y ago

At 1:13 in this interview, Ahmed shows a product page for the case that he put his clock in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mW4w0Y1OXE It's a "Vaultz Tiger Pencil Box". Here's a video review of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e40YqLF1Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e40YqLF1Rs

lucretian 11y ago

re: #2, the device was confiscated. it's in the hands of the police now, presumably.

jandrese 11y ago

#3 could be that the engineering teacher knows some of the other teachers and administrators are a bunch of panicky idiots and will freak out when "the brown arab kid" brings in something they don't immediately recognize.

hnpc123 11y ago

Sad that you're being downvoted (and probably flagged) for expressing a reasonable opinion. Hacker News has been a left-wing echo chamber ever since the crazies started flowing in during that period when every story on the front page was NSA related. Now it's nearly impossible to have a reasoned discussion on any non-technical issue without SJWs using the voting system here to silence dissent.

pfg 11y ago
Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven, as demonstrated by the other replies? I don't get how this can possibly be about left vs right. Common sense hopefully doesn't depend on which side of the political spectrum you fall into.
- powertower 11y ago
  > Maybe he's being downvoted because the so-called facts he's basing his suspicion on can be easily disproven Which of the 3 points have been dis-proven? Also take into concideration that - 1. The kid had a metal box containing PCBs and probably large components, all tide together around with a wire, and it was making beeping noises in class. 2. The school body and school district is almost 90% non-white, with the majority being "brown".
  - pfg 11y ago
    re. 1: His claim that it is "highly unlikely" that a home-made clock would look like a bomb needs some citation. Unless your definition of "looks like a bomb" is "anything with PCBs and wires, stuck in some kind of box", at which point I would argue that any home-made clock will look like a bomb. re. 2: He's asking the father to provide an image of something that was confiscated by the police or school administration. Furthermore, the first video with the boy contained a fairly detailed description of the clock, and the second video even contains an image of the box (or at least a similar box). re. 3: Well, he provided an alternative explanation for that himself.

mikeash 11y ago

You're assuming that it actually looked like a bomb. It clearly did not. (There are pictures linked elsewhere in this comment thread, so you can see.) What happened is that a bunch of complete idiots thought it looked like a bomb, only because they have no idea what a bomb looks like, and they are additionally ignorant of their own ignorance.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- mikeash 11y ago
  To have a bomb you need explosives. Did this "looks like a bomb" have anything that looked like explosives? No. Therefore it did not actually look like a bomb. I assume that you meant to google image search IED. Doing so, I see one image with an exposed PCB. I see several images with cell phones. One shows a Coke can. Are we to believe that an exposed Coke can also "looks like a bomb"? Or should we maybe believe that showing up in a Google Image search for a particular term is not sufficient to "look like" something?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - mikeash 11y ago
      The claim is that the device looked like a bomb. That he's being charged with "creating a hoax bomb" makes no difference to this. Either a hoax bomb still looks like a bomb, or we're giving control over to idiots to declare that a hoax bomb is anything that looks like their crazy and inaccurate ideas of what a bomb looks like. Certainly IEDs can have exposed PCBs. So do hard drives. It's irrelevant. What do explosives look like? I don't know. But I know that they look like something, and they probably don't look like electronics. So when you have a device that is a bunch of electronics and nothing else, I can pretty safely say that it does not look like a bomb, because there are no explosives.
  - 11y ago