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One Million AOL discs to be returned to AOL
nicedream writes "Two guys from California are trying to give AOL a taste of its own medicine. They're asking people to send them AOL discs, and they're going to drop them off at the company's doorstep once they collect 1 million discs. My favorite quote: "We're going to AOL and say, 'You've got mail"." seems like a better taste would be to dial out and use all 1000 free hours. A million people do *that* and I bet they'd stop filling our mailboxes with the landfill of tomorrow.
They pay a lot of money to the post office, and this money helps keep the cost of regular mail, that you and I send, cheaper. If AOL stops, and other companies stop, we'll all end up paying more for our mail. So, I say, keep sending the discs!
Ooo, that's really going to hurt AOL. I bet these guys get arrested for littering or AOL refuses the package.
Or maybe AOL will rethink its number one marketing ploy (ubiquity) and go to something more subdued. Uh huh.
I'm sure AOL won't give a damn. They'll just call a waste company and have picked up within an hour. That or have them repackaged and sent out...
Drop off a million discs in a truckload, and they'll just have someone on the maintenance staff cart them off. End of problem. But if you just mail each disc *back* to AOL, then they'll have to continually weed out all of the discs they get, possibly for years.
On a somewhat related note, my Dad simply writes on the outside of the AOL disk mailer:
"REFUSED DELIVERY - PLEASE REMOVE FROM MAILING LIST"
AFAIK he has yet to receive another disk from AOL (he was getting several a *month* at one time).
He's also dramatically cut down on the number of amount of other junk mail he gets.
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
AOl sends their CDs 4th class bulk, meaning that if you try to return to sender the post office just throws them away. AOL won't pay a dime.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
I find that CD's really don't make good coasters. That little hole in the middle allows moisture to reach the surface of whatever it's sitting on. Let's rename them from "Coasters" to "Wow put it in the microwave for 5 seconds".
...of geeks. I really wish AOL had put these on CD-Rs or CD-RWs... I think that if you make a buttload of them, it's probably doable. If, everytime you got an AOL disk, you knew you could put another 650 meg on it, would you throw it away? (Maybe). But you'd probably keep them around as spares.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
"seems like a better taste would be to dial out and use all 1000 free hours. A million people do *that* and I bet they'd stop filling our mailboxes with the landfill of tomorrow."
How about we follow through on that idea? How about Monday October 28th at 8PM we dial in using the free hours and start downloading huge files, for as long as you can stand tying up your phone line. We can continue every night at 8 PM for the next 2 weeks.
Do that for two weeks...what do you think that will do to the already floundering AOL?
I know you must provide a CC # to sign up, we'll just have to ensure that we all cancel service within the first month. Anyone had experience cancelling AOL service? Is it hard?
I'm sure most of us could find an old machine to do this on.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Supported by the USPO. My friend just changed his address, and in changing his address the Post Office sends you a "Welcome to your new Address" package thing. Inside of it was an AOL 1000 free hours disk - with "welcome to your new address" or some such slogan printed on it.
Lame. I dont need the post office advertising my new address to companies (dont knwo if it actually does that though)
But what if you changed email addresses or ISPs and the new ISP or email provider would then send you a welcome email, and you would also receive a bunch of other spam emails from spammers saying "Welcome to your new Email account. Get a bigger penis free by clicking here"
I hope AOL eats it.
As a dumpster diver, let me say that when AOL used to send out floppy diskettes, that when they did a software update they just threw the old labeled and unlabeled media out by the thousands. I have boxes and boxes of rescued AOL floppies that I reformat when I need to pass out a small file over old media.
Given that they treated reusable media with such discontempt, it only makes sense that they are already accustomed to disposing large quantities of non-reusable media.
Will this action even be a blip on their radar? Probablly not, unless environmentalists and the media are dragged into the lot.
I realize that. However, if one million people did this the USPS would be none too pleased, and may require AOL to either pay for the additional trash, or use a different rate. It will cost the post office time, money, and space, and they will pass that back to AOL.
Either way, it would be more trouble and more costly to AOL than delivering a million CDs on convenient string spindles to their doorstep. Chances are they'd mount them somewhere as a tribute to their fans who'd go to so much trouble.
Now, if they were going to make art out of this then I'd understand, but I still think the same objectives could be accomplished more efficiently and more pointedly through other means.
-Adam
My kids have these guns that shoot foam "flying saucer" disks. They are battery powered and use a spinning wheel inside to launch the disks. I'd love to see something like that for cd's!
"the universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle" - Stapp's Law
The CD's make decent coasters. If you have some acrylic paint you can paint 'em and they actually look quite cool. Getting a whole crapload of these in a month is annoying though. However, on to use #2
My last AOL CD came with a rather nice thick plastic black case. This case is similar to the ones used with most DVD's. I wish they'd send me more CD's with these cases, as I tend to have a case shortage (buy my CD-R's in 50-packs) quite often. Take off the logo'ed AOL paper and these are great for putting discs in when I lend them to friends etc.
AOL disks. The most useful things that AOL used to send. While I rarely use disks anymore, I used to have a small stack of post-AOL formatted diskettes.
Can anyone tell me where I sign up for more free coasters/cases/disks, I'm running low again?
p.s. AOL CD-holders were also nice for storing disks that you don't want people to pick up, few people open an AOL CD-case.
Must be the weather . . . .
m l
BBC Radio 4 put out a very old story about Micro$oft on the news this morning. You can read about here
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/27688.ht
(the Register)
N
I always thought it would be cool to wallpaper my room with CDs (shiny side).
The ultimate in geek sheik.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
AOL sends out a lot of their discs in those nice plastic DVD cases (which I usually keep, tossing the CD and inserts).
Warner Bros. DVD come in those cheap cardboard DVD cases.
I'm not keeping the AOL CDs! Use the plastic cases for the movies! I wanna keep those!
</RANT>
Could someone write a script that would log into AOL and use all 1000 hours of each of these disks? Since 1000 hours = 41.67 days you would need more than one computer making simultaneous connections to use all the time in one month. In my house I could dedicate 5 comps to the problem through a broadband router (would this count as a separate connection?) to use up all the time in 8 days 8 hours. If the script were written and posted to a popular website (example) I think that could go a long way to ending the free coaster flood.
I still remember when Prodigy was giving out floppies. I created a macro that ran repeatedly overnight. My college mailroom must've hated constant deliveries of THOUSANDS of disks each week. But, it was a good money-making deal...peel the labels, format, sell to poor college students!
Does anybody besides me find it odd that this story is being carrried by CNN? Who's going to be there to cover the story when the CDs are delivered? CNN?
Something smells fishy about this...
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I keep considering getting the people who live in our subdivision to do the same thing. All these clowns who think it's effective marketing (it ain't) to put a flier and some little rocks (for weight) in a baggy and throw it in my lawn, just ANYWHERE in my lawn, have another thing coming.
I think it would be really cool to have everybody in my subdivision (96 houses) to contribute these offerings, and we can make weekend trips to the "advertisers" and throw them onto their property.
RP
I've had no previous problem with using the cds as coasters (condensation only happened on the outside of the ring for me). However, that is not my main usage.
I have, in fact, walked off with hundreds of them carefully swiped into a bag from various movie theatres, pharmacies, and book stores (the place where I usually see them in massive cartons full).
Then I proceed to clear-tape them all together and reflect light into my apartment. My apartment gets light only from a single window and sliding glass door on one short side of the rectangle of the apartment. Since it faces south-east, it works rather well to reflect lots of light in.
I'd actually like to do up the whole patio outside the sliding glass door (I've got about a third of it done) but that would involve swiping more handfuls of cds.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
if you have THAT many of these things obviously you should bundle them in stacks of 100 and let your kids use them as fort making bricks!
people that want to get back at AOL for snail spam (besides possibly wanting to go back to the hobby buffet for something a little more productive) should just put "return to sender", although IANAP (I am not a postman), I think that AOL would have to pay for that and it's a much more costly thing than the 100$ it will cost AOL to have a million CDs hauled from their lawn to the dump.
-pyrrho
I'm a recovering letter carrier... I recall seeing clerks at the carrier station spending hours recycling undeliverable AOL disks. Because the USPS has mandatory recycling for all UBBM (Undeliverable Bulk Business Mail - junk mail to endusers), someone gets to make $17/hour tearing the plastic shrinkwrap open, recycling the paper and discarding the disk and shrinkwrap. I swear the USPS must lose money on handling these things, especially as they're not easily automatable, unlike letter mail, which is sorted - with OCR - at 40-60,000 pieces per hour in one machine.
DoC
In almost seven years as a carrier, I wasn't bitten once. By a dog, anyway.
We're lucky that we don't get AOL marketing like this due to CD-use being illegal up North (I think it's because the silver coating freezes in the computers causing poisonous vapours?) but we occasionally still get the AOL floppies but not very often as it probably costs a lot of postage to deliver the 82 disks by sled to all 40,000 habitants, eh?
From the project's inception on 8/1/01 to the last update on 10/15/02, they collected 64,346 CDs. At that rate of 4,438 CDs per month, they'll finish collecting 1,000,000 sometime in May of 2020.
I'll check back around then for the Slashback.