That's a fantastic way to encourage kids to go into science and technology fields: make them think it's criminal activity and then send them to counseling. I love the irony that this happened at a science and technology magnet school where one might, by some off-chance, presume the teachers are better informed. Way to go, educational system overlords.
Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.
To be fair, it was the vice principal, not a teacher, who was concerned that "it might be harmful" and notified the police. Certainly, school administrators get promoted based not on their teaching or academic credentials, but on degree to which they adopt the "erring on the side of caution" mentality. What's terrifying is that it takes just one call of an ill-informed, over-reacting person to set this kind of disproportionate response into motion.
Personally, I think this story has broader implications than simply that American students are discouraged from pursuing interests in science and technology. I think it illustrates two socially destructive trends:
1. To perceive anything science or technology related that has not been marked with the corporate stamp of approval as a potential threat. Any device with exposed wires that are not hidden behind a slick case with a logo must be a bomb. Anyone that's using command-line instead of a slick GUI must be a hacker, etc.
2. To consider perception of safety above all; that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal. It's normal to send a bomb squad to a kid's house on a mere suspicion of a school official. It's normal to close down a major airport because of a battery explosion. And so on, and so on.
> that is an over-reaction on a massive scale is not considered anything short of normal.
I think it is more subtle than that. If it was about safety, they would cancel cheerleading and football. I know I have been repeating myself in 2 other comments on the same thread, I feel strongly about this, see here http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5538a1.htm for some CDC stats on 2005-2006 ).
What seems to happen is that schools are interested not in safety but in avoiding litigation. So they are only concerned with the perception of safety. It all revolves around "Would we get sued?" or "Legally, did we cover our asses?"
Schools should just merge with TSA, they both seems to share their delusions about safety.
I think the key word here is perception: both perception of safety and perception of threat are at play. Sports are not perceived as dangerous, technology -- unless contained as I described above -- is. I'm not sure about degree to which the threat of litigation plays here. Certainly one would think that millions of dollars lost in airport shutdowns would have some weight, but it does not appear so.
Not by AOSSM: "With more and more kids participating in sports, injuries are on the rise – an estimated two million occurring each year, resulting in 500,000 doctor visits and 30,000 hospitalizations" [http://www.sportsmed.org/tabs/newsroom/AOSSMPressReleaseDeta...]
"Almost one-third of all injuries incurred in childhood are sports-related injuries." [http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P01650]
I'm not going to comment on that - I just wondered what the actual injury rate is and found this.
In the TSA grunt's defense, the training course probably involved something like "look for the hard drive, it's blue with a circle thing", "look for the battery, it's green", etc. Replacing a hard drive with C4 could yield a pretty sizable explosion...
I think it's less of a reaction to technology than it is to the post-9/11 terrorist scare.
Ever since then America's developed severe allergies to everything bombs and explosives or dangerous.
What's worse is an incompetent TSA that's trying too hard all in the wrong places. The only reason the recent terrorist attempt failed was because the guy just happened to be as incompetent as the TSA. Or maybe the plane would have landed on my house and killed me (and would have disrupted my stream of consciousness; I live in the Detroit area) and so in my universe he failed.
But to be completely fair, China's TSA seems to be just as incompetent, probably more so since they really don't have as many terrorist attacks to test their strategies. I had a really small bottle of children's Moltrin confiscated, but it got through USA TSA. I wouldn't be surprised the next time I get on a flight with two sticks to be stopped and questioned. God forbid I start a fire by rubbing the sticks and burn everyone to death while they are sleeping.
In my mind I want the child to go to counselling but it goes like this:
Kids gets dropped of at a massive imposing building, he walks endless corridors looking for room 101, with fear in his heart he opens the door and enters a dark room. When he shuts the door, the lights click on and Woz is there and tells the kid... "don't worry, the world is full of idiots, let's make something cool"
That's what the kid really needs and more importantly deserves!
When I was in school we had friggin' ROCKETS! That's right, we had an after school ROCKET club headed up by one of the science teachers. He'd show us how to build the different Estes models and then supervise us as we launched them, and in class would blow shit up and set things on fire and we all loved him for it. That was 1992. It's sad to know that such would never be tolerated today.
I was expelled from a "science and technology" magnet school for finding some holes in their network. The IT admin's password was "north" so I could basically do anything.
Based on the way they did logins (Novell on Win2k workstations) any time a user logged in on a machine, I could get their password. It was a matter of booting a live linux distro, mounting a usb stick, copying a few files from the windows drive over to the usb stick, and then brute forcing once I got home.
I screwed around a little bit, rebooting various Netware servers from the web admin for fun. Unfortunately the "shut down" button does a graceful shutdown and sends a message to every single machine on the network... so it wasn't very stealth. All in all, I never did a single malicious thing. I explored their network, restarted some servers, and logged in as a teacher occasionally to screencap the "Logout blah teacher name" to show off to my buddies. Never once did I look at anyones personal documents or change any grades. I was a pussy, just an explorer.
Long story short, being a cocky 16 year old kid with a ton of user passwords, I blogged about it and got nailed. The way they handled it wash horrible, literally dragging me and my buddies out of class by the arm and cursing at us for embarrassing the school. This all happened the day after returning from a thanksgiving break, but the interesting thing is one of the teachers there was dragged into the "investigation" (every single post/page on my blog was printed into little booklets for the majority of the staff to read and analyze) and personally called me the day before the break, to let me know that I better watch my ass.
I'm a good guy, I give money back to people who drop it on the sidewalk, give up my seat on the bus to women, kids, and the elderly, etc... but they didn't realize it. The staff there is so elite because their public magnet school only gets the "smart" kids in the district. They kicked me out as soon as they had the chance. Their infrastructure is probably still vulnerable and their IT staff are just as clueless. I'd have happily done anything that I could to prevent other jacknobs in the school from doing what I did, if they had just asked for my help or even just noticed there was a problem and made changes. Instead... I'm some crazy hacker kid who doesn't belong amongst the elite kids.
I remember booting a live cd once before I even had a reputation at the school, and it was as though I was beating off in church. People were so incredibly offended by the terminal and lack of gui, like I was some kind of hacker just waiting to destroy everything.
Looking back.. I wish I hadn't been such a wimpy 10th grader. I should have screwed around way more in high school. For some reason the second I was expelled and sent to the "normal" high school I grew some balls and started acting like a regular teenager.
Oh yeah the dump I speak of is called Clark Magnet and it's in La Crescenta, California.
Imagine if Jobs and Wozniak had lived today during this sort of thing. They'd be sitting in Gitmo.