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From the Independent:
The family of Ahmed Mohamed, the Texan schoolboy who was arrested after taking a homemade clock to school, has demanded $15m in compensation and written apologies from the local mayor and police chief.
In letters sent on Monday, the lawyers said if the City of Irving and Irving School District did not agree to the apologies and compensation, they would file a civil action.
"Ahmed never threatened anyone, never caused harm to anyone, and never intended to. The only one who was hurt that day was Ahmed, and the damages he suffered were not because of oversight or incompetence," said the letter to the city authorities.
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Ahmed The Clock Kid Suing School and Police For $15,000,000.00
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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday November 25 2015, @12:59AM
Really? If his parents had bought him a birdhouse kit and he built that and brought it to school, nobody would blink twice at him calling it a homemade bird house that he built at home. Hell.. I've even made clocks in woodshop in highschool... and my contribution to the "clock" part was little more than affixing a purchased clock movement to a clockface I cut, and decorated myself. Nobody has ever challenged me on the claim that I made that clock.
This kid did something quite a bit more adventurous than that, presumably on his own initiative.
Why are you so dead set against giving him credit for "making" a clock? He took clock parts from a clock, and a case that was not a clock, and combined them to 'make' a new clock.
Assembling existing parts into a whole object is the definition of building. Whether your building a lego project, a birdhouse, a gaming computer, a car, or an ikea bookshelf. Demanding that this boy must design the circuitry himself before he can claim he made a clock is just silly.
Implying that he designed the circuitry when all he did was assemble the parts is always wrong, and the media should get slapped for that. But the kid, he did make a clock. Don't take that away from him. Its nonsensical that. My son made a clock the other day too, out of a snap together electric kit with 100s of 'projects'. The week before that he made a voice modifer with it.
If we can say my kid 'made' a voice modifier without feeling like I'm abusing the english language (and I did just that in the last paragraph)... then we can say this kid made a clock.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:40AM
I really don't get why people are trying to hold him to that standard. He tinkered. Tinkering shows an interest in learning. Unless you've got a citation for a fair number of students at that school showing off their own projects I'm out of ideas about what's so wrong about his puffery. Heck, I changed a title screen on a game once and tried to pass that off as a creation of mine to a teacher in grade school. She didn't care a whole lot (In retrospect I wish she had either been impressed or really angry at me, either would have served me better as life-lessons...) but my explorations led me to make programming part of my work-life. My dad is a Ham radio operator and several of his radio buddies spent time with me to learn various electronics/computing skills. My career-skills are self taught, I credit each of them for that for all the faith they showed in me.
I don't really get why it being a repackaged clock is a big deal, I wish all the kids in his class would try that.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday November 25 2015, @01:48AM
I really don't get why people are trying to hold him to that standard.
It's weird really, the amount of criticism of this boy I've seen on the Internet. The whole clock building thing seems like an attempt to make him the bad guy instead of the arsehole who called the cop, or the drooling idiot of a cop who put him in chains.
They're the ones who should be held accountable for this, but sadly probably won't be.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday November 25 2015, @07:27AM
It's weird really, the amount of criticism of this boy I've seen on the Internet.
There's plenty of weird all around. Here is my view: this entire situation is a gigantic ball of fucked up and retarded. No one wins and it is not clear at all who needs to be "blamed" as if that would fix something. There are so many valid and invalid opinions being spread around I still have not increased my signal to noise ratio on this topic. On one hand when I brought electronics to high school that I had tinkered with it made people nervous and I stopped doing it. That was 20 years ago and I'm not brown. The kid should definitely tinker and play with electronics, that is a good thing.
On the other hand: if this kids parents are not carefully explaining to him what is going on he is going to be warped as fuck when he hits the workplace. Imagine this conversation after his first day at work:
clock kid> Hi boss, here I took apart an automatic cat water dispenser and duct taped it to the inside of a suit case. It'll be the best selling product in history. When do I get my promotion to CEO?
boss> Uhm. What? It doesn't work that way.
clock kid> Oh really? The last time I did this I wound up on the news and I had dinner with the president in his house. What is your problem?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 26 2015, @02:38AM
> It's weird really, the amount of criticism of this boy I've seen on the Internet.
You are seeing bigotry in action. I am not joking. Every bigot with an IQ over 80 knows he has have to have a reason to hate the people in his chosen group of persecution. It doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny, it just has to be enough to satisfy himself that his hate is founded in fact. Most of the time it is the application of negative stereotypes associated with that group: "muslims are terrorists." When that doesn't work he goes for generic negative stereotypes: "fame seeker. " And if that doesn't work he just shades any facts about the case with the worst possible light: "he didn't 'build' a clock."
If you point out what the bigot is doing he denies it, because he has convinced himself that his "facts" are sufficient justification. You'll get statements like "I'm just stating facts, how can facts be bigotted?"