That's not a problem with flat management - no matter what the org chart says, there's the people who get listened to because they know what they're talking about, or because they golf with the boss. I've seen cases where someone could order around folks who were several layers higher on the official org chart (and in a different department to boot) because they had the phone number of the president on speed dial. It's why you're polite to the receptionist and the payroll clerk - they can easily make your life miserable without being remotely in a "position of authority".

And yet, Valve is by all accounts still making money (or at least enough money to keep the owners happy). So it's hard to argue that it's a failure, if it's making the people who pay the bills happy.

Of course, great managers have the same problem as great IT - the best evidence that they're doing their jobs really well is, a lack of evidence that anything is going wrong. But unfortunately the managers who get promoted are the ones who are running around putting out fires.

We can be a bit charitable and say that once they got the results they wanted/expected, they weren't as rigorous at checking the numbers as they should have been. (By contrast, I would expect that if the mistake had disproven their theory, they *would* have found that spreadsheet error.)

I do kind of feel for those guys - that's got to be embarassing to find out that you've made your bones on a typo.

Why uninstall software they might need? Much simpler and more effective to simply refuse the ads.

Of course, what I would really like is an ad-blocker that still "hits" the page (so the owner gets credit), but simply blackholes the image/video instead of displaying it. (I'm firmly in the camp of "my browser does what I tell it to do, not what you tell it to do")

There may be grounds if the "web host" is putting ads on the site and therefore profiting from it.

After all, that's the real play they're making here - it's not Yelp, it's an extortionist version of Facebook or LinkedIn, where you'll need to regularly log in (and look at their ads and such) in order to make sure your next employment interview doesn't bring up some puppy-drowning incident you've never heard of before that moment.

And it's entirely possible that he's right - a lot of the lost episodes are being found in the archives of foreign television stations. So it's not impossible that the network *did* air it, and then did whatever you do with old shows you didn't care about pre-reruns.

Of course, you're also not required to answer questions unless you're under arrest. (See the classic "Don't Talk To Police"). And the child was obviously not free to go. So something is still wrong here. And it still doesn't answer why they didn't allow him to call his parents.

Which is still on you, not him. And it begs the question of "where was he supposed to put it"? Is anyone going to claim that this would have went better if it was found in his locker?

But all this still misses the key problem - no one has shown any hint that this kid, at any time, intended this clock to be interpreted as a bomb. We can dissect the relative merits of a teenager's mechanical aptitude, judge his family life, and cast doubt on his character - but that doesn't change the fact that faking a bomb threat does, by definition, require claiming, hinting, or otherwise acting in a manner consistent with the idea that you have a bomb.

The fact that he's fourteen, and people seem to be forgetting that in junior high, being able to disassemble and (correctly) reassemble a COTS device is actually a bit ahead of the curve in most schools? It's junior high - most kids have never seen the inside of their Xbox, much less know how to do anything with it.

I'm not saying let's give the kid a Nobel. Hell, let's go one step further and take your idea - the kid is a total fraud who patched together something to brown nose a teacher. Last I checked, that wasn't cause for suspension and arrest. So *at worst*, he's the equal of every parent who does their child's science fair project so Little Timmy looks awesome.

Putting it that way, maybe we should be making more arrests...

He's a minor. And if that's not enough, then Miranda says he should get a lawyer. But what you have is a combination of the police questioning him and the school not permitting him to leave (or call anyone). And I'm sure when the inevitable lawsuits come, the story will be that the school wasn't questioning him, and the cops weren't preventing him from leaving - while dismissing the reality that you've now confined someone without due process. And that still ignores the question of "why isn't the school calling the parents". Isn't this a disciplinary issue?

No, this still smells like BS. How is it a fake bomb? At any point, did this kid do *anything* to suggest, hint, or otherwise indicate that he wanted people to think he had a bomb? Or is this just another case of a school deciding that pop tarts in the shape of Idaho are a clear and present danger?

And now we're adding "the US is a war zone" to the list of assumptions, along with "there's a mastermind and this kid is merely a pawn in his Dark Machinations", except that our mastermind is an idiot because he gave the "bomb" to the kid and told them to show it to the shop teacher. Also, since the school at no point reacts in a manner consistent with a suspicion that it was, is, or could possibly be a bomb, it doesn't matter that there could have been a Sooper Sekret Explosive there, because they didn't act in any manner consistent with such a concern.

Is there a reason we don't believe the answer he gave - that he was showing off to his shop teacher? (I think you may be underestimating the average electrical know-how of a junior high kid, by the way.) And that also begs the question - even if he's a complete suck up and show off who didn't do anything noteworthy... since when did that justify what happened to him?

No, they're due process at that point. He's at school and he's a minor. If you're going to call cops, you should be calling parents at the same time.

Also, what story do you expect this kid to have? He brought a clock to school, and everyone lost their freaking shit. They asked him what it was. He said "it's a clock". They said "you're lying". What else can this kid say? He's locked in a room, they won't let him call his parents - buttoning up was probably the best possible result for him. Hell, he did better than I would have done at his age.

Well, chicken finger kid got a suspension and sent home for the day. Pop-tart kid got a suspension. Only the Dinosaur Hunter (who interesting, is also the only other teenager on this list) got arrested. And Dinosaur Hunter (in theory) actually *did* talk about guns in school.

So for why, I'd give a couple reasons:

Clock Kid didn't even *do* the thing he's accused of. Which moves us up a rung from "massive over-reaction" to "teachers and cops are just making shit up".

There's some escalating reaction from the community as things just get dumber. Dinosaur Hunter's article even references PopTart. So, every time we hear about this sort of stupidity, you get just a bit *more* angry - which we should, because it gets harder to write it off as "oh, just an isolated incident / overzealous teacher".

To be a bit cynical and flippant for a moment, Dinosaur Guy was doing a creative writing exercise, and no-body cares about liberal arts in America. Meanwhile, Clock Kid may be a case of chasing away a potential STEM graduate (you know, future of the nation, shortage in the country, etc etc).

Also, he's getting a lot of attention from geeks who are watching this and thanking our lucky stars that we didn't grow up in this period. Half the stuff the teachers had us do in school in the 90s would get us arrested these days, I'd think.

Also, we've now added "manufacture of explosives" to the skill set of this kid, while leaving out "how to write ransom demands" or "being smart enough not to carry an explosive on your person all day". Not to mention that we've now created a scenario where the school can recognize that C4 could be hidden inside this box (meaning IT COULD BE A BOMB!1!), but is either (a) smart enough to see that there *isn't* C4 present (and thus there's no need to evacuate), or (b) is too stupid to live, because they *didn't evacuate the school in the presence of a possible bomb*

Simply put: if we're going to say "oh, there COULD have been a bomb there", then we also need to ask "if they thought there could be a bomb, why didn't they follow procedure and evacuate?"

This is a good time to mention that the kid asked for his parents to be called, and they refused. And then interrogated him, without the presence of either his attorney or his parents. It's not too far a stretch to suggest that being hauled into a room and being denied the opportunity to leave or call anyone is throwing distance to straight up unlawful confinement.

(Not to mention, I haven't heard a reason *why* the school and cops decided that calling a minor's parents was such a terrible idea.)