Slashdot Mirror
Henrico County iBook Sale Creates iRiot
pikester writes "What do you get when you combine 1000 used iBooks being sold for $50 and 1000 people desperately wanting to buy them? You get an iStampede of course! Add into the mix one guy who watches too much wrestling and one gal who re-lived her first Backstreet Boys concert by wetting herself and you'll being looking for video of the whole thing. CNN has some extra details as well." From the article: "Officials opened the gates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting for hours in line. When the gates opened, it became a terrifying mob scene. People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd."
"In the ghetto...."
That's my state's citizens, neighbors, and friends at their best!
I couldn't be more proud.
*tear*
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
Everyone is at the sale...
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Good to see that iCivilization means iPoliteness.
At the heart of it, we're all monkeys.
iDontCare
Who saw this one coming?
The obvious point here should be that the countyr was sellign them too cheap. Wasting taxpayer dollars. They should have sold them on ebay where they could have gotten much more than $50 without the liability of riots.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
This is just another reason I prefer the anonymity of online auctions.
OMG! Zerg Rush!
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
I had submitted this article this morning, with a little more information in case people were interested here is what I had posted:
Henrico Co. Schools of VA decided to change laptop suppliers at the end of their contract with Apple, opting instead for a contract deal with Dell and Microsoft. The result was a couple thousand laptops of no use. In a first attempt, Henrico Co. was going to sell laptops in a free for all at $50 dollars each, but subsequent meetings and enraged tax payers made them change to limiting the sale (at least this first sale) to Henrico citizens and tax payers. The sale occurred at the Richmond International Raceway where 1000 laptops would be given on a first come first serve basis with proof of residency/tax payments. The facilitators of the event decided to close the main gates of the area until 7 AM and begin the sale at 9 AM. This did little to deter people arriving as early as 1 AM and circling the area until the main gates opened. At 6:54 AM the main gates were opened and a massive stampede of over 12 thousand attendants for the event fought to be the first in line. Injuries (albeit minor according to the Times Dispatch) and chaos ensued. One unconfirmed report I was given by an attendee was of a lady who.s ankle was broken and her baby carriage trampled by the sheer number of people shoving to get through the gates. Police support was supposedly small with off duty officers working, the event planners obviously underestimating the popularity of this event. The details of the event including the specs for the iBook (12 inch, G3 500 MHz) can be seen at this posting on the Henrico Co Schools website. In the fall there is to be another sale of which no restriction will be made on buyers, but after today.s incident, one could only imagine that it will differ highly from the chaos of today. Photos of the scene can be viewed at the article in the Richmond Times Dispatch website .
...Europe's soccer stampedes! Somehow it doesn't suprise me that it has to do with consumerism.
I usually only piss myself over new apple products...
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
As a matter of fact, no, iWont.
"What do you get when you combine 1000 used iBooks being sold for $50 and 1000 people desperately wanting to buy them?"
Looks a lot like one each to me...
I just seen this on the news about 30 minutes ago, while channel surfing.. I think it was CNN.
I'd imagine the instant resale value on eBay would be several times the cost of the laptop. It's almost like getting something for free... and where there's a free giveaway, you should expect craziness.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
iDidntSeeThatComming
local richmond newspaper link
another local link with slideshow pictures
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Whenever someone does something like this (selling something for much less than its value) scenes like these always happen.
Ikea did this with a new store in the UK, selling a £500 sofa for £50 and mob scenes resulted, with people fighting in the aisles, people trampled and people stealing sofas off feeble old people who were unable to hang onto their purchase.
When it comes to a bargain, I'm amazed people don't pack heat before setting off for the store.
As geeks living in the area my friends and I were interested in getting some cheap computers to set up as servers and various low intensity jobs. The local papers and Henrico County made such a huge deal over this that I am really not that surprised by the turnout. They were selling off used and discarded low end macs, and making it sound like the deal of a lifetime.
I personally think the county would have been better off finding a way to distribute them to low income families and possibly offering classes in their use, but what do I know.
"It is sad to see a family torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs."
All white and promising good stuff. then you get really disappointed by the quality and want to knife your dealer.
From: pschiller@apple.com
Steve,To:sjobs@apple.com
I think we've found the perfect price point to really boost Mac sales. I'll have marketing look into it, but as best I can figure, we'll lose money on every sale, but we'll make it up in volume.
See you in Paris next month,
Phil"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
BAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
In related news: Microsoft files patent for iRiot trademark.
--
Are you a Chipotle Fan?
Now you can get the tshirt too.r t-kicked-in-the-balls_W0QQitemZ8327177210QQcategor yZ15687QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/HENRICO-COUNTY-50-iBook-t-shi
Seriously, they had to expect this. They should've had a more orderly way to deal with this sale.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWExtraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Come on, doesn't everyone know they found all the golden tickets already?
i guess this means they've sold out?
Were these G3 or G4 iBooks?
Look what happens when you undersell something worth a lot more you dirty commie hippies.
1. What about those laptops couldnt still run spelling programs? Are the kids teaching programs really running framerates they cant handle? :)
2. Who is the moron that decided that the school didnt need the $? I'm sure those laptops could have paid for quite a few of the new computers they seem to need.
3. Any left?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I'm really starting to think that money is the #1 concern in most Americans' lives right now. We see it every day with the Wal-Marts, the Best-Buys, the eBays, and anecdotal things like this. Don't people give a shit about anything other than themselves and how much crap they can acquire? I live in a small community that isn't quite as consumerist as most parts of the US, and I'm always amazed when I have to go into "the real world" and see how insane people get over money. Wow.
I don't respond to AC's.
iDiots
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
School District Offers City Residents Three $100 Bills for $50; District Officials Suprised by Ensuing Riots!
o ps-Notebooks_W0QQcatrefZC12QQfsooZ1QQfsopZ1QQsacat Z25447
http://computers.search.ebay.com/ibook_Apple-Lapt
You would get everyone living happily ever after with their iBooks. But there were actaully about 3000 people, which changes everything.
Mac Users.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I dragged a purple jolly rancher iMac about two miles and let me tell you, that cute little thing has the most painful plastic handle evar.
After a few blocks I picked up some newspaper to pad my poor plastic-groove indented fingers. Not that it helped much. To think: if I had waited a few weeks I could've tried my luck with a baby-stroller-crushing stampede and saved a few bucks!
( This is the pain I'm going through to bring out a Mac version of UNC drive client. You Mac people better like it. ; | )
I can't imagine any reasona person would do things like taht for an ibook, maybe an alienware, but not an ibook.
or in jail.
Prolly because she got smacked by the dude with the lawn chair.
What the hell is wrong with people? Jesus..its a 4 year old computer!!! Sure it's only 50bucks but come on!! That one chick pissed herself!!! People like that should still be living in caves flinging feces at each other. People are like that here too (Winnipeg, MB). Some crappy radio station was giving away 10bucks in free gas to people. Woopdee-friggin-do!! That wouldn't even be 10litres (1.05 a litre). People waited in line for hours. I think it's time to start sterilizing people. Too much stupidity in the world.
They decided to switch from apple ibooks, to machines made by Dell... which is why they had 1000 Apple ibooks to sell.
/hugs my powerbook. //it's shiiiiny. :)
After seeing how popular the ibooks are, I wonder if they'll rethink the change to PCs?
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
Actually, I bet most of 'em were Windows users, driven around the bend by viruses, bugs, and bloat, and desperate to switch. It's the only thing that could explain it.
will it run Linux?
you should be wearing one of these when you go to these kind of events. You'll have a clear path in no time.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Weren't these iBooks school district property? I guess it's good to see that the schools in Henrico County are so flush with cash that they can dump their iBooks at what is obviously below market value plus pay for whatever damages and lawsuits may result from their lack of planning.
I've been at similar mega-sales and all it took to prevent chaos was to pass out numbers to people as they arrive then let people enter in small batches. Problem solved and injuries prevented for the cost of a couple dollars of paper.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Now they've just got a find a happy medium in there somewhere and they can get some market share!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I said N/T dangit!
To this day, I am pissed off by people who organize things like this and cannot get beyond the mechanism of having people physically waiting in line for things. Isn't this 2005 already? We do understand how to allocate things based on first come, first serve, without having to actually be there in a crowd, right?
People in charge of stuff like this never seem to forsee what's going to happen when the gates are opened. How much more effort would it be to have someone give out numbers to each person standing in line, then tell them to go away until their number is called? No one gets served without a number. Problem solved.
It's like gas rationing back in the 70s. Who was the brilliant idiot who came up with cars waiting in line for gas? Just have one person standing there taking license plate numbers and telling people when to come back at a reserved time. Is it so hard?
At the worst, crowds turn into a nightmare like in India where several dozen people were crushed to death trying to get free clothing being given out. It's ridiculous that you could be crushed to death by other people in this day and age... So even in Virginia, some semblance of order should be possible.
According Jason Coleman, a reader of the Unofficial Apple Weblog, "the estimate was that about 12,000 people showed up." On the other hand, CNN claims that "more than 1,000 people" showed up.
One of the sources is either over- or understating the number of people in the "stampede".
Who can't count here?
Fitzghon
It sounds like the revolution scene from Woody Allen's Bananas, or Eisentein's Battleship Potempkin.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
that fucking iPeople are iSenseless, iSelfish, and most iMportantly - iStupid.
Theyre gonna be iPissed when their iOld machines don't run iAnything.
s'wut i sed.
"Blandine Alexander, 33, said one woman standing in front of her was so desperate to retain her place in line that she urinated on herself. Pics?
...... Dozens of lawyers were seen following the ambulances carrying away the injured.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
You can tell the iPod craze is reaching it's peak if people are willing to beat each other up to get to _buy_ an ancient machine from the same company.
So, we have a real live meatspace slashdotting.
Sigh.
No wonder everybody steers clear of this planet.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Perhaps this will help dispel the myth of Mac users being sophisticated, educated, or classy. What a bunch of rabid buffoons.
Oh My God!
They're Not Even Human!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Oh, great idea. Of course, selling them on ebay would mean that the only people who could buy them would be people who already had access to a computer. But at least they would have maximized the cash flow, which is the most important thing, right?
Man, how fucking CHEAP are we getting? Not only do we not give a shit about the WalMartization of the world while we kill jobs here to send to Chinese workers, but "bargains" seem to drive people into mindless frenzies. Yeah, $50 is a great deal on an iBook, but jesus h christ morons, get a grip on your lives! But, this DID happen in the "south" so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
You can blame the media for this one. The blew this way out of proportion. From what I gathered from the county's budget, the money for these iBooks came from the state--not the county. Yet, they limited the sale to county residents only (for a period of time).
And when the gates were opened, was the background music "In the flesh?" by Pink Floyd, like the begining of the film "The Wall" when the mob gets in?
You think this is an American attribute?
Try human attribute
Do you honestly think it's any different in China or Brazil or India?
What magical place or time do you imagine exists where this kind of human behavior isn't the rule?
You're out of touch with reality. You're either a hopeless romantic or you're just simply deluded about human behavior: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"The obvious point here should be that the countyr was sellign them too cheap."
Ladies and Gentlemen. I give you a Neiman Marcus post, on a WalMart forum.
--
The "are you a script" word for today is disdain.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
first official slashdot post from a $50 iBook.
e. All of the above.
"NBC12 will have Apple iBook experts in the Call12 Center tonight from 5-6:30 p.m. to answer all of you iBook questions. Call tonight, 345-1212."
http://www.wwbt.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WW
Being a Henrico county resident, I tried to go to the iBook sale this morning. I have younger siblings who could use a computer and this was a pretty good deal for that.
I got to the Richmond International Raceway where the sale was held at 6:55. It was pretty obvious to me that there was no way I was getting a laptop based on the number of cars trying to get in and the number of people lining up outside. So I left. The police were doing their best to try to keep the siutation under control, but you could tell that it was rapidly getting out of hand just because there were too many people. Driving back home, I think there was at least a good mile or two of cars still trying to get into the sale. I can't imagine how long those people ended up sitting there.
I'm not sure why more people didn't just decide to leave when the saw the number of people there. I'm also not sure why the county didn't make the price higher. Having it at $100 - $200 would have made a lot of money back for the county and would have discouraged a lot of people. This has to be a net loss in profit for them based on the number of police officers that were there. It could have been handled much better.
Rumor has it that there may be more laptops laying around (they did give one to every high school student in the county and only sold 1000). Hopefully, they are smarter next time. I guess at least I know where my tax money is being spent...
They went through the hassle of setting up the sale, renting out the location, dealing with the crowds, etc. - It seems to me it would have made more sense to offer them to another district that might be struggling to include computers in their budgets.
I can think of very few other things that make people behave so irrationally. Money, women (or men?), power. Computers should not be on that list.
How else do you explain The Cult of Mac?
None of those people ended up with their lappy because some guy bought them all online while the mob was busy crushing strollers.
Yesterday people were fighting over toilet paper in Denmark because it was sold at around $1 pr. package instead of the normal $2:
t icleID=269201 (in Danish)
http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/indland/article.jhtml?ar
I happen to live in the Henrico area, and honestly - a fifty dollar computer is a deal you can't beat. I went there with my mother and my sister, however, after people started running, I just wanted out. I only stayed for my sister.
It was chaos. The first people who started running, I don't know what they were thinking, but after that, you HAD to run. There is just something about 12,000 people running at you from behind that kind of makes you run away.
Ended up getting stuck in a huge crowd for several hours, left when the police in riot gear started telling us they only had 300 left.
I don't know if imageshack likes Slashdot or not, but it's worth a try.
I took some pictures of the crowd, I'll post them if anyone is interested. Mine aren't as good as the ones from the times dispatch, but they gave a decent view of how many people were packed in.
Seriously, now, how hard is it to have someone there hand out tickets to only let the first 1,000 people in, starting at the head of the line? Once the tickets are gone, everyone else goes home; no ticket, no entry.
this
Article IV
Section 1. Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records, and proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.
Section 2. The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
or this :
Amendment XIV
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
although one could argue the 14th was not properly ratified. Many "unreconstructed" southerners still hold the view that you are a citizen of your state first, and these united states second.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
"Can't black people behave like humans?"
That tells me that you really don't hate to say it.
"This is considered plagiarism."
"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer -- and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County.
Interesting. Not only are they switching away, but are slamming Apple on the way out. Or the guy's an idiot. Take your pick.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
That was really stupid to price them that low ... $50 is ridiculous. An onlie auction or live auction would have determined the right price for these laptops. The school that sold these was GIVING AWAY tax dollars that were used to buy these units in the first place.
No, wear one of these.
Or just show up wearing nothing but a mailing tube and grease - people will leave you alone then.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...off of the T-Shirt sales than Henrico County makes from selling the iBooks!
Ah, the joy of capitalism.
Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
I'm sorry, but nobody in the photos of the event could ever pass for a genuine Apple user, like these beautiful and stylish souls. It's no surprise they've decided to switch their school system to Dell.
I want to meet this guy.
Was the sale advertised as a "laptop sale" or an "Apple ibook sale"? I wonder how many people got home turned it on and saw a completely unfamiliar OS? $50 is still a good deal for even a 4yr old laptop if you need one that just turns on, has an Internet connection, browser, email, a word processor and maybe a few games. A few months ago I gave my mother my 5yr old gateway laptop and she's had no problems with it, but not before spending $65 on a few upgrades and repairs to make it little more usable.
the required Star Wars ref- maybe they should have hired some Star Wars fans to teach a "waiting in line class" first.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
You just don't get this kind of exitement with Microsoft products ;)
Most people were disapointed when they got in and discovered that the ibooks were not in fact, cabage patch kids.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The computers were 4 years old, and most of them probably needed new batteries. That bumps the price up to $150 right there.
Of course, the true problem is that the iBooks were sold at a price well below their true value.
My theory is the following: To get the money to purchase new laptops from Dell and Microsoft, somebody had to represent that the existing, perfectly-good iBooks were obsolete and near-worthless. If they had been offered at auction, they would have sold at a much higher price, exposing the fraud. So instead, they were offered to the public at fire-sale prices. The riot was the predictable outcome.
In fact, it is hard to imagine what student use would have required anything more powerful than a 500 MHz iBook. The only one that leaps to mind is video editing, and somehow I doubt that a large number of students needed to do that on their laptops.
...The Beings for Ethical Treatment of Sentient life (BETS) lost the dispute over destroying the planet Earth in order to create a new Hyperspace Highway. Vogons, who have had equiptment in place for nearly a month now, observed mad behavior that "no sentient being would perform" when earthlings trampled one another for computers that, by even their primitive standards, were well outdated. The destruction of earth that was previously halted by BETS is now scheduled for next Tuesday.
I would have given them away to boost audience figures and participation.
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
For humanities sake, PLEASE stop the iJokes!
That one chick pissed herself!!! People like that should still be living in caves flinging feces at each other.
I think that was the general idea but she had too many lattes and not enough pancakes.
Idiots like these are supposed to die and not breed. Why did they all live?!
What do we pay you for anyway?
I wonder How this affected apple computer's Stock today.
Pics: http://media.gatewayva.com/photos/rtd/special/iboo k/index.htm P age/VideoPopup&c=Page&cid=1059969235826&image=medi a.mgnetwork.com!wwbt!images!hdr_video.jpg&oasDN=ww bt.com&siteid=WWBT&videoid=1031784465717
Realplayer Video: http://nbc12.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WWBT/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
12345
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If only I could remember what one...
They should of put them up on ebay. According to the demand they could have sold them for $100 and $25 shipping and wouldn't have to wory about an iRiot.
Henrico County priced these things like they were used Dells. They probably thought no one would be interested. After all, who wants a used Dell.
Henrico County could have easily charged $100-150 and they would have still sold like hotcakes. I would have bought one. PC users always complain about Apple charging more, but the premium of owning an Apple vanishes in the return you get from resale.
I know, resale. Such a novel concept to PC users.
I almost pissed myself when I read that. wish I had mod points.
Info http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/ 6592/
P age/VideoPopup&c=Page&cid=1059969235826&image=medi a.mgnetwork.com!wwbt!images!hdr_video.jpg&oasDN=ww bt.com&siteid=WWBT&videoid=1031784465717
a .gatewayva.com/photos/rtd/special/ibook/index.htm
Video http://nbc12.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WWBT/
Slideshow http://macdailynews.com/index.php?URL=http://medi
-- Boycott Shell
This is hardly the first organization that has to sell surplus items.
Don't they have a fiduciary duty to get the best price?
Meanwhile, in Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger etc. many people who are starving are patiently waiting for food supplies to be handed out.
1. When the UN provides food aid, they are usually smart enough to bring along well-armed peacekeeping soldiers to prevent riots.
2. In those cases where the UN did not bring said peacekeepers, food riots have often occurred.
3. In those cases where the food riots did not occur, it is usually because the people were so chronically malnourished that they were too weak to riot.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
They should have held a lottery.
Everybody gets a numbered ticket. The ticket numbers are jumbled in a hat. Pick ticket numbers.
Each winning ticket has the opportunity to pay $50 for a laptop.
Keep drawing numbers from the hat until all laptops are sold.
By the way, I saw your sister there. You might want to get her cleaned up. She peed herself.
unless they were trying to escape.
>Jesse Sandler said he was one of the people pushing forward, using a folding chair he had brought with him to beat back people who tried to cut in front of him.
"I took my chair here and I threw it over my shoulder and I went, 'Bam,"' the 20-year-old said nonchalantly, his eyes glued to the screen of his new iBook, as he tapped away on the keyboard at a testing station.
"They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said.
Hmmm.
Henrico County Sheriff's Office
Michael L. Wade, Sheriff
sheriff@co.henrico.va.us
Sheriff Mike?
I got one for ya!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
And somewhere in Hollyweird^H^H^H^Hood, there is one scum-sucking producer looking at this and saying to another "Well, I think we have found our next reality TV show!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
NOT to try and sell/offload out-dated equipment yourself. Use a middleman; give it away if you have to. Hell, pay the recycling fee and drag them to the dump. But I will never, EVER try and sell my company's retired "assets" to our own employees or anybody else.
I live in Henrico and was considering going, or at least I was when I first heard about it through a guy who works for the schools. After the sale was mentioned in the local paper, though, I gave up on the idea figuring a lot of people would show up. I never expected it to turn into this, though.
...publicity like that.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
A terrifying prospect as a residence?
Packed with taxes and guaranteed to stultify?
An unfortunate bump on the road from DC to New York?
Convinced (like so many other states) that gambling is going to save their children from shitty education?
The rest are left as an exercise for the reader.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
"They were getting in front of me and I was there a lot earlier than them, so I thought that it was just," he said."
Woe to anyone trying to get first post before him.
Seriously, check out the group mentality of baggage pickup.
Everyone stands a little ways off, but the MOMENT the belt turns on it turns into a shoving match where EVERYONE MUST BE NEXT TO THE BELT!
Instead of standing 3 steps back, waiting till luggage that looks like yours comes by, walking up, checking it, leaving or pulling it...
Now they get into shoving matches to yank the luggage free and knock their 'neighbors' (whom get pissed off) while trying to remove said dead weight.
So yes, people act responsibly? Never. It's not possible. Any single person will act responsible, but the moment you remove the threat of punishment a free-for-all mentality of "I can get away with this, and tough shit" is born.
Give out lottery tickets, and let the winners purchase a laptop. Simple, right?
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
It was like any given white sale at Penny's.
What?
This is precisely what happens in a typical country, for e.g, at the time of release of new movies, you should see the crowd trying to get into the theater.
The article should read:
"What do you get when you combine 1000 iUsed iBooks being sold for $50 and 1000 iPeople desperately wanting to buy them? You get an iStampede of course! Add into the iMix one iGuy who watches too much iWrestling and one iGal who re-lived her first Backstreet Boys iConcert by wetting herself and you'll being looking for iVideo of the whole thing. CNN has some extra iDetails as well." From the article: "iOfficials opened the iGates at 7 a.m., but some already had been waiting for hours in iLine. When the iGates opened, it became a terrifying mob iScene. iPeople threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little iGirl's iStroller was crushed in the iStampede. iWitnesses said an elderly iMan was thrown to the iPavement, and someone in an iCar tried to drive his way through the iCrowd."
Wow, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of racists that cruise this site. I also like how they are not strong enough to stand up for what they say, if thats what you really think, don't be a vag and post anonymously. Show your true colors... or lack there of.
You are all a bunch of idots.
Could they make any more bad iJokes in there?
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I've never been so excited that I've urinated from a material object, but I did drop a deuce when I was 5 and got a Voltron.
Welfare checks have already been distributed, WTF? Look at the picture on CNN. Look for only $41.00 you get to live. EBAY
and a 4 year old broken ibook with a bad battery, bad screen, and no ac adapter goes for up to $55 on ebay. They got one hell of a deal.
It's because of their rotten hip hop culture that glorifies violence, loitering, drug use, trespassing vandalism, and theft. It's a throw back from the shit that goes on in their home countries. Africa is one of the most fucked up and most impoverished continents of the world.
I haven't seen this much action since the Cabbage Patch Doll craze in the early '80s when my mother duked it out with 40 other women at a Toy R Us store trying get one of these dolls for my neice before Christmas.
They probably spent more money in holding the sale than they got in revenue.
Next time, auction them off to the public, or restrict the auction to taxpayers/residents or better yet, low-income families.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Seattle, 16 August 2005
A rush to avoid Windows Vista turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over by people fleeing a public demonstration of Microsoft's "next generation" operating system. One woman went so far to wet herself rather than be forced to accept a DVD containing the beta release.
So THIS is what the Slashdot effect would look like in person eh? heh... wish I could have seen that!
Any video of the event at all that anyone has found?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
"there are some areas of public life where market or commercial approaches haven't completely encroached"
;-P
unless you are a farmer growing your own food, market and commercial approaches have completely encroached, to use your phrase
read: even BEFORE the invention of money this behavior existed
all that is required are two magic ingredients: little supply and lots of demand
presto: this "disgusting American behavior"
hell, i amend my initial comment: it's not even a human attribute, it's an attribute of all animals hard at work getting scarce resources
ever see a feeding frenzy around a dead carcass on the dicsovery channel?
how about animal behavior around a watering hole during a drought?
how out of touch with reality can you possibly be?
based on your words, am i to suppose that when ants go crazy over a dead bug carcass, they've been corrupted by american consumerism?
please try to understand the reality you live in a little better!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Appears very much like "LA riots" from last decade....
I suggest you read Slashdot
Oh thank god, I'm not the only one who thinks these people are morons. If they weren't all huddled around the damn belt, maybe I could actually see my luggage. *sigh*
Another good one that I encounter all the time: there's a crowd of people entering a building. It's a doorway with two doors. ONLY ONE DOOR IS BEING USED. Holy fuck. I am always, always the only one who thinks of opening the other door. Once the door has been opened, the sheep will usually follow and keep it open.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
This gives you an idea of just how fine a line there is between civilization and complete anarchy. Imagine a fuel crisis much worse than the Carter era, where only a select few can have access to gas each week. Or food shortages. Or a mass bio-hazard.
Better yet, the bird flu. A mass epidemic. Imagine the scene at hospitals. This is why crisis management and homeland security dollars are important - too bad they are being treated by politicians as just another thing to pork barrel. We spend money buying firefighters in Wyoming HazMat suits and trucks - but a nuke in NYC would be catch us completely un prepared.
I always enjoy these little reminders of how close the American public is to hysteria.
Cash the schools don't have because they gave the laptops away for $50. They could have at least given them to the good students as a perc for grades. As it is now it's just a benefit for those without jobs (so they could spend the day).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
people would have been dancing over each other and freezing in those ridiculous poses, with an even higher body count.
.
mind you, i have a flash memory 512MB MP3 player, which is way smaller, so you'd never catch me in that line, i'm too busy downloading free local music from bands i like.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Then the price would be set by demand and the tax payers would have got fair value. Sheesh, you'd think that after 250 years of capitalism in the Land of the Free that people would have "got it" by now?
K.
the chinese care about country and state
the brazilians care about family and friends
the americans care about money
is that what you are honestly telling me?
doesn't that sound a tad racist to you?
but i don't even have to pursue that line of thought to prove you wrong: currently, china is engaging in ultracapitalistic behavior that is exposing gaps between the rich and poor there that would make the richest robber baron of the guilded ages in victorian times in the usa blush, and brazil is currently shedding every socialist pretense it ever had and rushing headlong into capitalism
is it your position that china and brazil are doing this because america has corrupted them?
if you do say this, you realize in what utter contempt you are holding chinese and brazilian initiative, don't you?
but,e ven putting that aside, let me ask you a question: have you ever seen the behavior of animals around the watering hole during a drought on the discovery channel?
let me guide you: scarce resource+high demand=ugly behavior
so i amend my initial comment: it's not a human attribute, it's an attribute of all animal behavior in fact
to say that this behavior is somehow american is simply laughably out of touch with the reality of the world you live in
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Are you kidding me? I can't find a link to the article, but a year or so ago in Africa somewhere, a woman accidentally dropped her cell phone into a public outhouse. She offered a reward for its retrieval (which came out to something like US$14), and three people died down there from inhaling noxious fumes trying to get it out. Petty greed is part of the human character, dogg.
--- What
There's always a small group of folks who stand back and let the herd struggle with one another over baggage. We lean against the wall, amuse ourselves over the antics of our fellow human beings, and then go pick up our bags after the crowd thins out. Which takes what? All of five or ten minutes? In exchange for the free amusement?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
We do similar things with our surplus property. Not the riot part, but selling it for really cheap. The thing is that it can actually end up costing you more to keep things around and to try and get rid of it slowly for as much as you can get. We aren't in the retail business.
Well, if you want to get the stuff out quick, dropping the price is a sure way to do it. The price wasn't really that outta line, espically since some systems were likely damaged, maybe even inoperable. The problem was that people percieved it as being an amazing deal. I mean it was a deceant one, cheaper than what you'd pay on eBay, but not all that stellar. The systems are not that modern and don't go for all that much.
The event should have been handled better, but I don't fault the district for going with low prices. Presumably what they wanted was to get rid of all of them as quick as possible.
Let the kids have them for $50 if you must. But give them the chance to buy in order of decreasing GPA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sheesh, what were they thinking?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Unless you're trying to imply that human beings are incapable of acting like the most intelligent creature on the planet as some say we are.
You have it the wrong way around.
Human beings are capable of acting like the most intelligent creature on the planet.
The intelligent thing to do was to stay the hell away from this mess. So who does that leave?
It would be a threat to National Security.
My Good Lord, I almost relived "War of the Worlds" where people start killing each other for a spot on a Van.
I got there around 5:45 and the crowd was already over a 1000, snaking along the road for half a mile. It got worse as it got near to 7:00 when the gates were supposed to open. There were hardly 4 law enforcement officers near the gate and even they were hardly prepared for the onslaught at 7:00. More over, even after having over a month to prepare, there was hardly any planning. They could have let people in to the Raceway which had a huge parking lot and used barricades to create a maze like queue. I am positive people would have respected that, but they made people wait in unmanaged queues outside the gate. They could have opened just one gate, and let people trickle in. Instead they opened two gates, one wide enough for cars waiting outside to enter (which they did plus hundreds waiting to pounce) plus they flung open the gates where people were waiting and you bear witness to what ensued by looking at the slideshows on Times dispatch. People ran like as if a pack of hellhounds were at their heels and in less than 30 seconds a "queue" (if you can call it that) formed outside the entrance to the facility which was more like 10 queues side by side.
People were fainting all around us, fire department did what they could. Swat team in riot gear assembled towards the back of the facility, willing to step in to do what they can if things get more worse. There were still less than 10 law enforcement officers in regular attire trying to manage the crowd. People were unruly, cussing and dropping like flies around us as the heat picked up.
Towards 9:30, authorities realized they need a plan and put together some barricades and started channeling people inside the facility. It was another 3 hours before I got in and got my hands on one. I am sure Steve jobs will be licking his lips in anticipation of 1000 odd users foraging through his stores..
Anyway, this was an event that went to hell in a handbasket in 10 seconds straight. Due to bad planning or lack of it, something that could have been organized to the point where the whole thing should have lasted a couple of hours, it turned out in to a free for all, where people, regardless of their social status put a lid on their conscience and returned to more basic instincts.
Rapid Nirvana
in Toronto/Montreal/Winnipeg/Vancouver, they all just stand around keeping away from other people. When the belts move, everyone stays still. Sometimes, people say "excuse me" and someone will move over and let them. There are no armed guards, and no one tries to steal your bag. When we drive, we signal first, then you are let in to the lane, and then you wave. I tried driving in Detroit. You had to be sneaky to change lanes. Signalling was only to indicate to the others to block you from changing lanes. LOL
"My other laptop just went BEEP BEEP BEEP and then it ate all my homework, so I was, like, lining up for a new iBook and then it just went BAM and I was like, ow. Uh ... where am I?"
Try to cut. Get your head bashed in. Fair enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I blame the media blamers.
(Dale Gribble)
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Why do they all look Pakistani in the picture?
Is this really Virginia? It looks like a terrorist convention!
So speaking one's mind about *obvious* cultural trends makes one a racist? And you wonder why somebody wouldn't want to post under their account...
This sort of thing happens entirely too often within black communities and only perpetuates the (deserved) stereotypes. I guess saying this makes me a racist. Oh well, welcome to PC central.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Odessa Steps scene from the Battleship Potemkin?
"Add into the mix one guy who watches too much wrestling and one gal who re-lived her first Backstreet Boys concert by wetting herself and you'll being looking for video of the whole thing"
Found it!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Funny. Posted story said 1,000 people (which didn't make sense because there were 1,000 laptops, and there wouldn't be a riot), then someone else posted that there were 3,000 people. Now you say 12,000 people. I wonder how long before we hear about the "million moron imarch". And they were new Mac G7s with 30" displays, and they were $1. And Bill Gates was autographing them "Sorry my products aren't this good -Bill"
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
that equates to $250,000 squandered today by the school district. This is without figuring the cost of the sale itself (and any lawsuits).
Why is it that the institutions of education attract such dumb people for there boards???
You get a 1:1 relationship and everybody leaves happy.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It was routine to have a 5 Apple count before rushing the QB in touch football after the snap. Maybe these people should have taken a page from that book when those gates opened.
Just happens that the count is also fitting here.
Something similar happened earlier this year, a riot occurred when a new Ikea store was opened on 10th February. The store, in Edmonton, London, which offered store opening bargins, had to be closed under Police advice after 6000 people turned up to buy such bargins as a leather sofa for £45 ($81), when the store only expected 2000 people at the opening.
Amusing though: iKea? they do sell office furniture!
These are the people that need the education and elevated level of sophistication a purchase of an Apple product provides. The lucky thousand were elevated beyond thier realm of morlocks and now dine with the other gods among men running OS X.
They either should have charged more, or had some sort of raffle.
English is easier said than done.
I tried driving in Detroit. You had to be sneaky to change lanes. Signalling was only to indicate to the others to block you from changing lanes.
You spelled "Minneapolis" wrong.
"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer -- and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County.
If I had a choice between a 4 year old iBook and a four year HP Bompaq, I would definitely take the ibook. A 500MHz iBook runs OSX10.3 oe 10.4 very nicely, and a hell of a lot better than a 4 year old laptop runs XP, and with an iBook, you have at least a good idea of the quality.
Apart from which you could have sold them for $100 and the people would still have come.
I know what you're saying about the door thing but I also find that about 50% of the time the unused door is locked.
One of these days I am going to call the Fire Marshal and try to get them fined.
"Ain't no one above an ass kicking...You can find a reason to push an old man down a flight of stairs. You just don't do it."
"from the bricks to the booth...I predict the future like Cleo the psychic..."
The more people that are in the group, the lower the collective intelligence of a group. After a major sporting event, people riot and break shit. How many times do you see just a group of 4 guys doing this? Hardly ever. The larger the group, the more stupid shit goes on.
People threw themselves forward, screaming and pushing each other. A little girl's stroller was crushed in the stampede. Witnesses said an elderly man was thrown to the pavement, and someone in a car tried to drive his way through the crowd.
We used to make fun of the Soviets for standing in line for toilet paper. At least they were calm about it.
Do you think this would happen at the apple retail stores if the prices would be lowered? Should apple marketing re-think and re-model the optimum revenue generated (as a function of volume and pricing) system?
They weren't popular because they were iBooks, they were popular because they were $50 laptops. Any stack of laptops going for $50 each would have resulted in the same foolishness.
And I'll bet at least half the 'lucky' ones are pissed when they get it home and find that standard Windows stuff doesn't work.
I'd already read about this before it happened, and the county was worried about out-of-state people grabbing them at the expense of locals. Anyway, the school system officials had stated that these laptops were the ones they couldn't use anymore and not in the best condition.
I love CNN's reporting: "More than 1,000 people turned out at the Richmond International Raceway in hopes of getting their hands on one of the 4-year-old Apple iBooks, which retail for between $999 and $1,299." Uh, no, 4-year old heavily used iBooks do not cost that. I know what the reporter was intending, but that's just sloppy.
This is true. The exact formula is:
Total_IQ = (IQ of group-member with lowest IQ)/(# of people in the group)
Or so it seems...
-C
-- If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?
This behavior is motivated not just by people being eager to get there luggage as quickly as possible, but more importantly, a desire to monitor other passengers to make sure they don't grab their luggage in error--or on purpose.
Of course if everybody stood back to allow a clear view, this would be a lot simpler to do with a wider visual angle. Of course, if just one person steps forward, everybody (who plays this game) has to step forward as well. It's a prisoner's dilemma type scenario.
Haven't they ever heard of Dutch Auctions?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
If you want to get technical, Virginia doesn't call itself a state -- it's a commonwealth. The US has three other commonwealths - Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Mmm hmm... I'm with you there. And to those who think this behavior is rampant around the world, obviously haven't been to a civilized country like Japan yet. (Yes, they apparently _have_ learned some hard lessons from WWII).
Then he screwed himself.
The people cutting were stealing from those behind them. They got what they deserved.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yup. Nations with 1/3 of the population dying of AIDS, rampant crime, warlords murdering thousands upon thousands. Hell, the Somalis fought Americans for trying to clean up thier shithole by getting rid of tyrrants that were starving people. South Africa has gone to hell in a handbasket since Mandela was freed. Those colonies should have remained under the control of britain and france. Blacks just can't run nations.
This proves my hypothesis:
Mac users are completely and totally insane.
Joking aside though, if a sale like this were happening in my area, I would have been there too.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
severe demand+short supply=ugly behavior
true across all humanity and even the animal kingdom
to illustrate the absurdity of your position, are you telling me the same scene wouldn't happen in brazil or india or china?
and if it did, would you insist it was because the people there got corrupted by american capitalism?
gee, that's funny, why haven't they been corrupted by medieval venetian capitalism? or ancient sumerian bazaar mobbing?
methinks you simply don't understand that this behavior is extremely close to intrinsic human behavior, even animal behavior
no modern buzzwords apply: you're simply out of touch with the reality of human behavior
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This happens all the time. And it's not that the other door is locked. And I never understood it. Even among people you would think would be smart enough not to do this--at my graduation ceremony, everyone was crowded behind one door. Three other doors, no one even attempted to open the other doors.
Much more poetic.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You spelled "Minneapolis" wrong.
You spelled "Dallas" wrong.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
...is for someone to walk down the line BEFORE the gates open, handing out numbers (like at a deli counter), and sending everyone else home. This pre-empts the excitement of "gate opening", and everyone left isn't worried because they know they are in already.
This system has been in common usage wherever there are more people than can be helped at once.
I've seen plenty of people take a case, start to leave, then realise it's not theirs. My luggage stands out, so I don't have to worry, but if I had a generic black case I'd be up close looking for it.
It seems he could go to jail for ten years if convicted, or a cop could just walk up and throw him in the slammer for 18 months without a trial, if he did this in Canada.
There was enough niggers there to make a tarzan movie. -Fred Sanford
If you are going into debt keeping a roof over your head it is too nice a roof. (exception: you are a student) Poverty level here is living like a king in subsaharan africa.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Now, don't try yelling "shifting the blame" or "revisionist history", because all I am doing is providing the proper cause of their problems instead of generalizing after the fact.
Now that I am done with my corrections, I am going to go wander and register .xxx domain names! Ha!
Bet that look of amusement drops from your face pretty damn fast when you realize someone else has walked off with your bags...
--
"But all your Emitter and Collector are belong to ME!"
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Then, when you go to open one of the other doors, some twit who is so scared of actually TOUCHING a door is walking into the path of the other door so s/he doesn't have to push the door s/he is using all the way open.
I don't care anymore. If you're going to walk or stand in the swing-path of a door, you're going to get hit by it. Pay attention to your surroundings.
As this article in the local paper points out -
g ename=RTD/MGArticle/RTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&c id=1031784321130
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pa
The systems were all four years old and had been used by high school students - no not just the computer class/AP calculus geeks, but everyone - the freaks, the jocks, etc. Graduating seniors had the option to take their iBooks with them. The fact that these models were no longer wanted by their prior owners should suggest that they were in far from new condition.
People on welfare pay taxes. It's called sales tax, and everyone pays. People on welfare also work, but because their work is less valueable to you, it does not make them enough money to pay taxes.
Now, you can call them lazy, but compared to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you are lazy and your job is worthless.
I think giving out laptops is good, I think they picked a stupid way to give them out. People should take a free computer education course and recieve the laptop at the end. It's pointless to just give away laptops when you don't teach people how to use it to find a way out of poverty.
the people mobbed to get the laptops just because they like to collect stuff?
are you kidding me?
go down there and ask every single person why they wanted the laptop: do their homework, write a screenplay, pay their bills online, play computer games, surf the web, read their email, etc.
what are those desires?
are those capitalist desires?
are those american desires?
i'd like to see you characterize those desires and motivations as such, and not therefore label yourself as what you seem to dislike
so they are running down there to grab a laptop so they can go home and add to their pile of useless stuff
is that your position?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Oh, come on. Lighten up a bit. I was poking at how fast our civilised nation drops any pretense of civility and good behavior at the mere mention of a killer sale.
Besides, it's not a "he" we're talking about, but a "they"; a few hundred "thems". And I'm willing to bit a fairly large chunk of my money that a very high percentage of those people call themselves "Christians" (after all, approximately 77% of Americans {myself included} do). That is, they probably do when they're not engaged in riotous, and, apparently for that last fellow in the CNN article, "righteous", violence in the name of capitalistic opportunity.
Ah Mammon, we know ye too well . . .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Definitely one of my pet peeves too. Last time I was at the airport, I was the first person to the conveyor. I parked myself a few feet downstream of the chute, then stood 6 or 8 ft back. Before the crowd even got thick, someone parked their ass right in front of me. Probably the same person that drives/follows people walking to their car in a parking lot, then hold everyone up while they wait for the person to get into their car and leave instead of just grabbing the empty spot 5 cars down.
Why people think things like this are the only deals in town will never cease to amaze me. If some people would only look around in their own cities/states they could find some great deals. I found a local leasing company and got a PIII 1GHz Dell Latitude C610 for $300 (included port replicator!). He had PIII 500MHz Latitude LS's (small form factor) for as little as $100. These had all the CDs and original cases and legitimate licenses. Plus nobody was running me over!
You spelled "Dallas" wrong.
You spelled "Penis" wrong.
Is to give it to people in an organized way. This means offer classes, teach the people who show up, and at the end of the course, give away the free laptops.
The stupid way is to just give it away to random people. Laptops in the right hands are more valueable than school. A lot of the best programmers are drop outs. Using the internet anyone can educate themselves to become anything they want, this includes getting a degree, this includes becoming a computer scientist.
The idea is good, they just handled it in a stupid way. Yes its good to give people access to technology, but its also just as important to give it to the people who actually want to to learn and use the technology.
Good idea, bad way of handling it. It's definately not a waste of tax payer dollars, when more people are educated and employed, less people are on welfare, DUH! More tax dollars are generated, DUH!
Long term its a good strategy, and if we put internet cafes in every ghetto and in every trailer park, we could have trained millions of programmers to help write Linux or start new software companies of their own.
I think the USA likes to have poverty, welfare, etc. We like having ghettos and trailer parks becaue its a way for the average joe to have a sense of self esteem. If someone is always below you, you feel better about yourself.
This is why we have a third world, a ghetto, and welare, trailer parks, and outsourcing.
So instead of giving away laptops, build some internet cafes, actually train people, and give the laptops to people who actually go through the training program.
n/t
There's a reason that the word Coward follows the word Anonymous.
You obviously feel your statements are true enough so why not stand behind them?
"This is considered plagiarism."
like throwing 150,000 dollars cash into the middle of a busy street!!... ($200-$50)*$1000=$150,000 :)
Actually it's 150,000$ (power by 2) if we follow your calculations
> Ah Mammon, we know ye too well . . .
What does Al Jolsen have to do with this?
"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer -- and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County.
This man is talking about 4 year old and still very sought after iBooks sold for about 10-15% of their current market value.... how clueless can you get.
Been trying to get my hands on some second hand G3 iBooks as they make ideal portable linux machines for a project, and not only do they go for prices of around 500 euro/$$$, they are pretty hard to get in the first place because people won't part with them. Less-than-desirable my ass.
...How long before someone sues Apple for making them want a laptop so much?
to me.
There were way more than one thousand people, and if you don't believe I was there, how exactly did I take those pictures? Either way, I had seen a report saying estimates of 12,000 but I can no longer find it, now I'm seeing numbers more in the 5,500 range. I think after the first thousand people running behind you, it kind of stops mattering how many people there are. Heard a report about one person hitting others with folding chairs to stop them from passing him.
I wanted to amplify this. I just flew from Vancouver to Toronto this past Friday, and while it took a while to get my luggage due to the plane landing at the IFT (Infield Terminal), it did give me a chance to stand around and watch the human animal.
I have to say, watching these people at Canada's biggest and busiest airport, I felt pretty good about ourselves as a people. There was no pushing or shoving. Everyone did indeed stand two or three paces back waiting for their bags to show up. The only "event" was mostly a non-event: a petite woman who flew in from China with a suitcase that probably weighed as much as she did asked me if I could help her get her bag off the carousel (for which I had to say "excuse me" to a few people so I could manhandle it off).
If I can generalize for a moment, in all of my travels the vast majority of people I see behaving badly in airports are Americans. Earlier this decade I was travelling back to Toronto from Schiphol Airport (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I had been warned by airport staff well in advance of my flight that it is a good idea to get into the line to get your passport stamped at least a hour before boarding time, so I did (actually, it was probably closer to two hours in advance -- I got there early, and was trying to enjoy a leisurely day).
By the time I made it to the half-way point in line after about 30 minutes, a man and woman sudddenly forced themselves into line in front of me, mumbling something about their flight leaving in 20 minutes (note: they didn't ask -- they just shoved me out of the way while they jammed their luggage in front of me). I was cheesed, but to be honest I had lots of time, felt for their situation somewhat, and decided to say nothing. After all, I have that world-renouned "Canadian politeness" to live up to.
And to be honest, at that point I didn't know that these people were Americans. Just minor league jerks. But then they spent the next half hour bitching about how they wouldn't have had to stand in line back in the US, and how terrible air travel is in the rest of the world.
(Okay -- hint for those Americans reading this who have never been outside their own country: IMO, Schiphol Airport gets an A. It was very efficient, and the staff was super nice. Additionally, just try being a foreigner travelling at a US airport, and the situation is often much, much worse than what little wait these people had to put up with).
By the time I had made it to the front of the line, I had let nearly a dozen more Americans into line in front of me, all of whom had arrived "just minutes" before their flight was to leave (or, in the case of one couple, as their flight was leaving). They all seemed to congragate around this woman who was (at this point) very loudly bitching about having to stand in a line at the airport. They berated the airport, the airport staff, and the whole country of The Netherlands in general. I was embarassed to admit I was from the same continent as these people.
Now admittedly there were probably 20 or more other Americans in the line who got to the airport in plenty of time who were likewise embarassed by the actions of these people. But it seeems that every time I travel anywhere and run into someone behaving badly in the airport and ask them where they're from, it turns out they're from the US. You never see those people helping old ladies get their baggage off, or letting louts who arrived at the airport 10 minutes before their flight was to leave get into line in front of them because they arrived in sufficient time.
So maybe it shouldn't be any wonder that the grandparent routinely sees people bahaving b
Thinking people don't like religion.
Hope that helps.
Blar.
...I hate being associated with the human race.
Go check on eBay...the current price of a similarly configured iBook is about $350 for a working on and about $150 for a broken one (for parts). Henrico county just threw out massive amounts of money by doing this. They should have had a public auction for the residents. This would have helped to offset the cost of their next set of computers.
And, I would like have seen how much the total cost of the Apple computers was after a market value sale and compare that to a similar deal with the Dells in four years. Somehow, I can't see people wetting themselves over a 4 year old Dell laptop for $50.
What is it about Apple?
Does anyone out there think that 12,000 people would have shown up for four year old Dell or Gateway laptops?
There's a marketing / branding lesson in here some where.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
>What do you get when you combine 1000 used iBooks
>being sold for $50 and 1000 people desperately
>wanting to buy them?
A flat demand curve?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I agree.
... are such strange creatures.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
Interesting. It sounds like something you'd expect to see, but I've flown dozens of times and never seen anything like that; not even after significantly delayed flights. Maybe I'm just lucky with the airports and airlines I've chosen.
They wanted to sell these laptops at a price that everyone could afford and destroy any barriers that exist so everyone could get a computer.
(It's not mine, I just found it on MetaFilter.)
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44333#1013861
They should've just packed the iBooks in an unmarked truck and taken them somewhere else for sale at a later time so they can read up on crowd control.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That was until I visited the store...
My wife had gone to the store in San Diego, and she said she had a good shopping experience. It was a little crowded, but other than that, an OK time, and she liked some of the things there, too. She wanted to see if we could get some small pieces of furniture there. It was announced that they would open an IKEA up in Tempe/Mesa, Arizona, around the year-end holidays. We weren't stupid, we weren't going to go to the grand opening of something like that. We decided to wait until after things settled down. We thought that going several months after they opened would be the right time.
We were wrong.
We ended up having to park in the parking lot of a "nearby" (about .25-.5 miles away) health club and walking. Not a big deal, but we were amazed at the number of people at the place. For some reason, we figured "well, we drove all the way out here and waited in line to find a parking spot (which we didn't)", so we decided to go in. We must have been out of our minds.
On the way in, we noticed some yuppie smiling and carrying a bundle of sticks - evidently you could buy sticks and twigs at IKEA, crap you could pick up off the forest floor for free if you wanted to drive a couple of hours north of Phoenix. Strange...
We get inside, and do some looking around. First off, those damn arrows and system they have for getting around seems like a good idea - until you realize that you must have a design already in your head, and you must not mix-and-match while in the store, because if you do, you must GO AGAINST THE FLOW OF TRAFFIC. Boy, was there traffic. It was like a tour of the store with throngs of people, rather than an actual shopping experience. Still, we were set on buying some stuff, after seeing what they had. So, we set out to find a shopping cart (we didn't see any on the way in)...
We couldn't find one - not even at the stalls where you supposedly could get one - the stalls were empty. We eventually found one lonely one with a few items in it just sitting around. We looked around, tried to see if an owner was nearby. Nobody seemed to be interested in the cart at all. We waited a little, then said "screw it", pulled the items out, then pushed it away. Nobody screamed "Hey! My cart!" so we thought it was truely an abandoned cart. We were to later figure out why...
We found some things we wanted, probably had about $200.00 worth of stuff in the cart (which was hell to aquire, because of all the people, and the damn cattle like guidelines and arrows on the floor, and the fact that everything seemed the same - getting lost in that store is VERY easy, it feels like a Las Vegas casino in a weird way), and we wanted to look at some of the furniture, which was upstairs. So - we tried to find a way upstairs.
And tried...and tried...and tried some more...
Consulting the maps didn't help, asking store personnel didn't help, wandering around didn't help, either - about the only way we could figure on getting to the upper floor was to somehow get back to the front of the store and take the escalator up with the rest of the drones (and I swear, that is what all of the people in this store looked like - a bunch of bored and scared drones looking to buy sticks). Despite all of our efforts, there didn't seem to be any way for us to take our cart and go upstairs with it (despite the fact that somewhere in the building there had to be an elevator - they were even advertised for those with carts and baby strollers on the maps - though we never could find them).
We got sick of the whole charade. We were prepared
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
So you take a situation that has nothing to do with Christianity, and assume people involved are active Christians because you feel like assuming that despite the total lack of evidence? And when somebody points out that you're full of shit you tell him to "lighten up" and claim you were talking about civility instead of religion? You're one of the most nonsensical trolls I've ever seen. Even the "sex with a mare" guys have stronger connections to reality and better logic than you.
As far as how this behaviour is simply American, I said it was capitalist behaviour - getting something for less, or in other words profitting. It's a cheap shot; a bargain, something for nothing - that's exactly what drives capitalism; getting more for less.
;-P
wait, let me get this straight: if i went to the most non-capitalist country, in it's most noncapitalist region, and picked the most noncapitalist person there, and i offered him a roll of toilet paper for $10 or the same roll of toilet paper for $1, when that guy (obviously) chooses the one for $1, that's your evil capitalist behavior?
is that what you are honestly trying to tell me?
this is kind of funny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The profits, if any after this brilliant sale can be used toward legal bills to defend the county from the personal injury and negligence suits. This whole fiasco is public service mediocrity at it's best. They should have turned the things over to a private auction firm, but some brilliant manager wanted to show he could save some money.
f$@*in9 b1@ck ppl!
Please don't self-flagellate at MY expense.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Just goes to show what, ultra desirable branding will do to people. The marketeers at apple would be proud.
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
so after looking at the extra slide shows (now thos pics are priceless) i realized something...estimates placed the crowd at 5500-12,000 people...i know there are some dumbass rednecks out there in this grand country of ours, who probably dont count so well...but who arrives at the back end of a line of even a couple thousand people and then say s to themselves "ya know, i think ill stick around. i just might be able to get one of those 1000 laptops" i think this nation is badly in need of stupid police (Fark.com proves this fact every day). If we had an official "stupid" police officer there this all could have been solved. he could have stood on top of a car about a football field length from the front of the line with a mega-phone and said "listen up all you ignorant f*cks. if you are standing in front of me, go the f*ck home. when you get there start saving some money. once you have enough, go enroll at a local community college. take a math class and a possibly a perspectives class. then if you have any money left over, go get your f*cking eyes checked, just in case...if you try to proceed in this gate you may be arrested or fined by my fellow officers. If i catch you, im gonna mace you in the face and beat you like Rodney...that is all"
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
Well, my original post was only half-serious
This is slashdot, we take everything completely seriously! You son of a bitch!
I was just pointing out to my friend who picked me up at the airport a week ago how insane people are to behave in just this way. It's as if the mentality is "oh,no...you ain't getting to the luggage before I do, even if your piece comes off first!" I've had to nearly forcibly break between people who wouldn't budge just to get to my bag, all the while they are still waiting for there's to appear.
I'm the same way with getting off the plane. I've noticed all those people who get up right away, save themselves a minute tops. And then have to wait when they get to the baggage belt anyway.
I wait on the plane till I can just get up and go, and then when I turn up to the baggage belt my luggage usually still hasn't shown up. A minute or two amusing myself over the antics of my fellow human beings, then pick my bags up. Or I just pack carry on if I can get away with it and beat them all out the door anyway.
Its like this whole false economy thing. People only think they need to rush because everyone else seems to be rushing.
It's the same thing, someone takes something from you.
You can be a bitch and go crying to teacher (and get nothing for your effort), or you can hit them in the head with a folding chair.
I would hit them in the head twice with the edge of the chair (not the flat). Those cutting think their might gives them the right to cut. Being more ruthless is then the other bastard is the key.
Dicks, pussys and assholes explains it all. Be a dick. Kick the shit out of the asshole cutting in line.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
i Am Amazed.
As a resident of Henrico, I caught a glimpse of the hype and madness surrounding these computers.
First of all, the problems with these iBooks were obvious when I was a student when these laptops were first introduced for educational use. The administration not only lacked preparation, but they lacked complete security, and they lacked the amount of software and web resources to justify such a grand-scale movement towards technology in class.
When I first received my iBook, I did not hesitate to enlighten many of my peers on the magic of emulators while I used it to coach myself on the ways of the Mac. I watched as the absolute madness ensued. Of course, almost every person didn't understand the concept behind the emulator, but all they knew was that they could play Super Mario World. And when isn't such a classic more interesting than bland health classes. This was all made possible due to the rushed nature of the entire iBook intiative. They gave kids computers with full access on them. Many of these kids knew more than their teachers who had been "trained" to use them for school use.
It was horrible. They had absolutely no software to really launch it. Their web resources were pretty much a handful of web sites and Google. Most classes were still ruled by the text book, which is fine by me, but the iBooks were becoming more of a distraction to students than helping those students learn. I believed in technology helping, but the implementation was absolutely horrible. Personally, I had no real use for the thing as high school was a joke, so it wasn't like I needed much assistance to learn. The only thing I did was find ways around the security they eventually built, and the rest of the time it was just my big-ass iPod. Luckily, they eventually learned that they are hurting a lot more than they are helping, and they had to make a decision to stop their use.
The iBooks were being sold because many taxpayers of Henrico believed that it was an incredible waste of resources and money to simply discard of them in some manner that doesn't service the citizens. Instead, they wanted a piece of the pie. But I must admit, I find it very funny that such madness occurs from many people who would not know how to operate it in the first place.
...that Apple hardware isn't always overpriced.
If the Europeans can riot over soccer games, we can riot over...hey, wait!
I love the pictures, where they've run 5000 people through the "pedestrian gate", and not the "vehicle gate".
This also reminds me of the time I visited a hotel store on beanie-baby shipment day...talk about a room full of bighairs waiting to kill anything that jumped early! I got to taunt them (and live) by buying a single, older beanie from the (bottom of the) existing pile.
Me: "Excuse me {to the person hogging the line}, I'm ready to pay for this."
BH: "Wheredidyougetthatfrom!?"
Me: "From the pile over there."
BH: "Nohellyoudidn't!"
By time bighair found another instance of the same beanie in the pile, I had paid and escaped.
Virginia is not a state. It's a Commonwealth.
And you've learned by now that it makes no difference. It's just a nifty term some state's founders like and stuck into their constitutions.
People like to pretend there's a difference, but the commonwealths are the same as the states.
However, one state is actually truly different from the others, and that's Louisiana. It's legal system is civil/napoleonic law, built on the legal system that was in place prior to it becoming a state, which the French brought to it. The other 49 states are based on common law, which is the system the British gave us.
It would require quite a lot to go through the differences, but there are some huge differences, and yet, it's still just the State of Louisiana.
That's funny. I own a company that does well over 7 figures in annual sales. While I'm certainly not rolling in cash, I'm also not broke. But hey, good try!
I don't respond to AC's.
...or had an auction... Just like a school system to not understand the economics of supply and demand... no wonder they don't have any money...
But I bet as of this evening you can pick up a cheap iBook at any of the surrounding pawn shops.
It's a racetrack, for Christ's sake-- you're telling me they didn't have turnstiles with counters on them at the entrances there, like every other friggin' stadium and other large public venue in the country does?
What a total fiasco. I can't wait until the first civil suit gets filed by one of the people who got injured. You know it's coming, and a nice settlement will result.
Even if they wouldn't put the things on eBay like anyone with a shred of sense would have, there were still a million better ways to do this than a friggin' battle royale-- for example, why didn't they give out numbered tickets to everyone who showed up before a certain time, and then draw "winners" at random from that group?
If there will be more of these iBook fire sales, I hope they put some more thought into the execution than they did for this one.
~Philly
Generally, assets are depreciated over a set schedule. UNLIKE Tax accounting, where the IRS sets the depreciation schedule, for financial reporting and to some extent governments, can set the rules.
For example, they may have decided that we buy these machines for $1250, will get four years out of them, then have a salvage value of $50. Therefore, we take $300/year in machine costs (the depreciation) and sell them at the end.
Now, if a corp. sold them at the end for $200, then they would book $150/each. as a profit on disposed asset. But the school system has no concept, so likely sold them for the salvage value from 4 years ago... and that salvage value was probably based on previous laptop salvage pricing, ignoring that the Mac market tends to have higher salvage values.
So it likely wasn't fraud, but rather a government official confusing accounting with reality.
A strange claim, considering the fact that Albert Einstein was able to wrap his brain around both science and religion and accept both in his life.
When you're as enlightened as he, get back to us.
Thinking people don't presume to speak for all thinking people.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Recently (in London) they painted a line 2 feet away from the belt. Amazingly, the area between the line and the belt remained unoccupied!! The distance should have been 3-4 feet though.
By the way, there are similar ones to this 'conveyor belt syndrome': on public transport it is obvious to any intelligent being that those entering the car should let those leaving the car go first. Does not happen. A simple solution is to have the front doors operate as entrances and the back doors operate as exits only. This simple solution have not caught on as much as it should have.
2. The bargan purchasers paid (using their money), the computers are their property, the schools need that much less tax money next year.
3. The Ebay purchasers pay for the computers. The bargan purchasers are enriched at the expense of the schools and other tax payers.
Which part of ownership don't you understand?
I want a F16 for $50, don't try to get away with giving me the old sidewinders eather. I want it fully armed and with a full tank of gas. Yes I'll settle for a tac nuke just this once.
If they were going to sell at below market they should have sold them to the students with the highest GPAs (that wanted them). That way the machines are still contributing to the education of the most deserving students.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Apple zealotry and having children. Both are guaranteed to drop your IQ by 15 points each. I am fiddling with a 1999 iMac right now, and like, these things are so obsolete. G3 processors can barely get any processing done. Forget trying to view a divx file. 50 fps??? Ugh! (Though I probably need to get the DRI properly configured. Then I can get a whopping 300fps...)
I don't know where people are getting their baggage, but I fly over 30 weeks out of the year all up and down the east coast of the US (and to parts of Canada), and I have never seen the type of behavior people are describing here.
Where I see the most reprehensible behavior is waiting in line to get on the plane. People crowd the desk and make it difficult for those needing assistance to get on.
The other majorly annoying behavior I've seen is Canadians being loud and seemingly bragging about the fact that they are not American, and going out of their way to denigrate all things American. Hey douchebags, while Americans may not have the best image in the rest of the world, many of my Eastern European friends have told me the way to spot a Canadian in Europe is to look for the people who look American but have no sense of humor.
And often someone stands waiting in front of the door you attempt to open (because it is not a swing door). It happened that I started opening it slowly, so that I do not cause injury to the moron and once he figured that the door can be opened, he tried to get through first. This was in vain of course, since I was already in the doorway which opened towards him. This is an especially problematic situation from a social point of view, if the person is a woman and gets upset and loud when not let through first.
Wow. That was some war and peace rant.
Canada does have that effect on everyone who visits the country. Here in Toronto, there are many places where strangers say 'hi' to each other as they walk by, like people do in small villages. Toronto is the biggest city.
However, there are places where it feels worse than the US. Most immigrants like me who visit Montreal or Quebec make the huge mistake of speaking English to the locals there. You see them watching english channels and reading english newspapers, but try speaking the language. Suddenly you're about to get lynched.
I have also been not impressed with the way native people are treated in some places. However they are treated extremely well compared to the neighbors in the south. But I shouldnt rant away in public. It is unbecoming of a Canuck.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
That's because all you foreigners smell.
Those are the people that have'nt listed them on E-bay yet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The school district should have at least stripped those out, sold the 'Books for $50, and then the cards for another 50 bones apiece.
But making a savvy financial descision was clearly not an option on the table here, anyway.
You know what?
Well, there are many different ways you can look at this.
If it's a public school, you've already got plenty of people forced to pay into the system who don't even have kids. So getting a cheap laptop back out of the deal is about the *only* direct benefit they'll ever see for the money they've funneled into the school through their taxes. (Granted, they might get the same thing if the school went with your idea of "selling the laptops for fair market value and issuing the taxpayers rebate checks" - but how likely is that to really happen?)
I think the bigger issue might have been, how do you liquidate 1,000 laptops simultaneously and ensure you're paid up-front for the whole lot? I guarantee if you eBay'd all of them, you'd have lots of hassles with non-paying bidders, people demanding refunds because it "broke in shipping", possibly a couple cases of fraudulent cashier's checks or fake money orders, and so on. No way that's worth the bother. And if the school did go with a liquidator, most of them don't cut you a check until *after* they manage to resell all of the products, and then you get what they made, minus their "cut". So that could mean, no idea at all when they'd see money out of the sale. If the funding was needed for new items to be used for this school year, getting all of it immediately could have been worth a lot more than waiting around for months to try to make more in the long-run.
"It's rather strange that we would have such a tremendous response for the purchase of a laptop computer - and laptop computers that probably have less-than- desirable attributes," said Paul Proto, director of general services for Henrico County. "But I think that people tend to get caught up in the excitement of the event - it almost has an entertainment value."
What's amazing about the fact that people stampede for a $50 laptop that sells on eBay for over $300. I get the feeling Mr. Proto thinks these are toys of some kind. If they could run Windows XP maybe he'd think $50 was a pretty good deal.
Lets see how much their new Dell laptops sell for next year!
"So yes, people act responsibly? Never. It's not possible. Any single person will act responsible, but the moment you remove the threat of punishment a free-for-all mentality of "I can get away with this, and tough shit" is born."
Those are called copyright violaters.
--
The "are you a script" word for today is arrest.
The ticketmaster office in my town uses the lottery system to prevent this form happening. Everyone in line gets a ticket and they draw tickets until everyone has a chance to buy or the show sells out.
The only downfalls are that people that stand in line for hours hate the lottery and you might get your ass beat for your ticket if you win.
Still better than a crazy free for all.
Quebec does not count.
Go with the shotcrete, man, unless the zoning allows rammed-earth, adobe, or maybe straw-bale-core construction. If you do the concrete thing don't skimp on dyes and and broken tile and/or glass to make it look nice. It gets hot out there, and it's hard to cool a regular stick or steel house off-grid. Another tactic is to make the house with a chimney for the summer and long underground air intakes to cool the air. There's thousands of good, cheap techniques out there for building liveable "green" dwellings once you start to look. There's also a fair number of them that looked cool in the old Whole Earth catalogs that later turned out to be a PITA.
Anyway, on the main topic of your post, everybody trying to live cheaply ought to have a copy of
The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn. 976 pages (lots of short articles), $13.59 new. Still #3,581 in Amazon sales after nearly 6 years on the market. You have to pick and choose how far to go with her suggestions - put a value on your free time, prioritize which stuff will do you the most good, and so forth, but most people could be living quite well on less than $5,000 per person/yr. + $5,000 for the household, even without dumpster-diving, gomi-grabbing or moving way out of the city.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
It just goes to show people in and around Richmond, and especially Henrico County, are really, really wierd people. Trust me when I say that of the rest of the state is not like that, until of course you get to the DC beltway.
PS From what I saw on my one trip to the Eiffel Tower, I bet Italians could give Americans a run for their money. And BTW, this is all just superficial bitching. Some of the nicest people I know are American. At my work, many Yankees drive across the border every day to work with us. They are beautiful people. Its easy to get your opinions from the media, or a governments policies, but its off the mark. You want to know a nice town... Fargo. Boy do they bend over backwards to give good service.
It's the same way with getting on the plane - as soon as they announce that they are starting to board, everybody herds up close to the gate even though their rows haven't been called yet. In that mad rush to hand off your boarding pass and head down the jetway, you get to... stand in a line to get in your seat! Woohoo!
I like to sit in the gate area, reading or people watching or whatever, until it's clear that I can just mosey on in and sit down without all that standing in line. Why are people in such a rush to sit in an airplane?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Probably if they have a lot of carry-on to stow, or want to secure newspapers, magazines or pillows/blankets before they're all taken. Also, if you have an inside seat, it's easier if you get there before the person sitting in the aisle. If you have little carry-on, and/or you have an aisle seat, then it would be dumb to try to get in early.
Back to the topic of human stupidity, driving is by far the worst view of it. I don't mind fast drivers when traffic is light, having to navigate their way through left lane campers, but those who try to bust crazy moves in thick traffic for some insignificant placement advance are the worst. It's the kind of behavior that leads to accidents, just like this iMob incident; though that was exaggerated due to the unreasonably low offering price of the iBooks, creating significant profit opportunity for those who could buy them (and there's no better motivator than free money).
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
I call this "broken door syndrome" -- I use those "proken" doors a lot.
I'm also the guy you'll see actually walking up or down escalators, instead of just standing on the damn things.
This is a real shame, and a waste. What was the school district thinking?
1000 laptops worth $500-ish and sold for $50 = $450,000 that the school district just threw away. Over here in California, our school districts could sure use that money!
I wonder what the public cost was, for the extra law enforcement required at this riot? When the injured people sue?
I hope all those reading about this in the Henrico County papers get a lesson in economics, supply, and demand -- at least people there will then learn something from their school district!
My guess is that someone had no clue what the laptops were really worth (heads should roll, in this case), or there was some strange bureaucratic rule capping the price they could charge, or most likely, there was "interesting" accounting going on with regards to depreciation and tax writeoffs (they shouldn't have to do this, since they're a nonprofit school district!).
If they were determined to sell at a price that is ridiculously below market like this, then at a minimum, they should have done nothing on that day except hand out tickets, with the drawing to take place once the crowd disperses (perhaps the next day).
In this day and age, there's no way people should sell desirable items below market price unless the customer base is strictly limited somehow (lottery drawing, prequalification, etc.), due to the ease of "scalpers" flipping them on Ebay!
This is very shameful and a real waste....
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
"What do you get when you combine 1000 used iBooks being sold for $50 and 1000 people desperately wanting to buy them?"
Hold on, let me get my calculator...
(1000 laptops)/(1000 persons) = 1 laptop/person. Sheesh, what was all the fuss about, then?
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
http://news.designtechnica.com/article8119.html
---- I have nothing more to add.
I'm in this group. I like to leisurely walk around grocery stores when a blizzard is coming. People are nuts.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
This sort of thing could have been very easy to prevent. First come, first serve didn't work because those people are insane, so the only viable option is to put everyone on equal footing; simply give everyone a number and randomly select numbers to sell to. There are actually many different ways to accomplish the same thing, so that is just one example. In this way, there will be no struggle to get ahead because such a struggle would be rendered pointless.
http://www.learnersonline.com/weekly/archive2k/wee k16/2K0501_2.gif
Just to balance the stupidity, that's all.
feh.
I'm a bit disgusted by this. it's like were reduced to livestock, but instead of food we get cheap computers. instead of looking out for each other, we are just stepping on each others toes.
there are two problems with having an exit at the back of a bus.
the first is that it wastes space that could be used for seating.
the second is if you don't man it (which means a second man on the bus) then people will jump on at the back to avoid paying the fare.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I was born in the Toronto area, and have lived here in the GTA for the vast majority of my life. So I know what you speak of very well. I'm rather sorry I missed Taste of the Danforth two weekends ago -- I used to live in the Victoria Park and Danforth area, and if any event shows off Toronto at its best, it's Taste of the Danforth. Fortunately, I'm back in town to enjoy the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition), which is my other favorite summer happening in our fair city.
Let's face it -- there are complete ass-hats here in Canada as well. I just happen to think we have a lower overall ratio of ass-hats :).
Yaz.
So I'm trying to picture it: Student feverishly working at iBook trying to finish term paper before the thing gets ripped out of their hands. "No wait, I just have to run a spell check and send it to the printer!" "No, gimme it now, you little parasite. We're trying to run a school here, and you're getting in our way." Tug of war ensues...
Ahh, but not everybody riots at sporting events, just in particularly dumb cities with particularly dumb police who don't know how to do crowd control.
When my hockey team won the Stanley Cup, despite 20,000+ people inside the building and about as many standing outside packed like sardines watching, we succeeded in not rioting. Jumped up and down and screamed and hugged and threw beer, yes, ran around and smashed things, no. Why? Because nobody was stupid enough to start a chain reaction.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
Remindes me of traveling as a service engineer I had a toolkit that weighed at least 60 pound.
That thing used to slide down the belt and hit the rail so hard and loud it would make 10 people instantly jump back. never failed to give me a laugh.
the laptops were cheap and the schools put so many blocks on them that the computers were never useful. If you broke he screen, it only cost 50 dollars to replace. the school board wasted 60 million on the program. taxpayers money!
You mean like how another goverment agency handles it (GSAauctions.gov)? A simple call to the GSA for help would have saved everyone a lot of heartache and hurt. I know it's a local agency asking a federal agency for help (i.e. crosstalk is not common), but when a riot is a possibility, it's worth the extra effort.
Linux at home
You're not, erm, a Christian, are you?
All I can say is that its Richmond VA guys. The armpit of VA. I would expect no less.
The county code prior to the initial sale announcement only allowed for surplus county property to be sold at public auction, sealed bid, or sale to the general public at fixed price, first come first serve. Even the "fixed price to county residents first" required changing the law. Selling on Ebay would require bigger changes to the law, less likely to survive a court challenge.
Public auction of 1000 laptops is impractical for individual sales -- they'd have to do it in lots of however many, which would tend to put more into the hands of dealers, and fewer into the hands of county residents. They'll have less madhouse next time round either going with a sealed bid auction (ideally, using a Vickrey auction for setting the price), or having the bloody fools who set the price doing some research using Ebay's "completed sales" search capability on comparable models to get a better clue as to fair-market value.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
It's not clear whether EBay would qualify as public auction, although it might. There's also the hassle of either shipping 1000 laptops, or running a sale on Ebay with a "must pick up" requirement-- and the hassle of co-ordinating the pick-up. Also add in that Ebay would be getting a piece of the action.
Of course, not using E-bay's "completed sales" search capabilities to get a better idea of fair market value before setting the fixed price indicates abysmal ignorance.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
<BZZT>Wrong. According to the Henrico Site, these were G3/500 models. From reliable sources, this means PC100 RAM, 8MB VRAM with 1024x768 resolution, and benchmarks somewhere between a 600-900Mhz x86-type CPU. The Henrico models had 802.11b Wireless, but no optical burner.
It's still not worth a riot over, but it's not total crap. Suitable for someone who just wants a low-end laptop for web browsing, email, word processing, or a secure *nix platform to play with. Not suitable for gaming or video editing, but I could live with that. So could my twelve year old niece.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Thinking people don't presume to speak for all thinking people.
They do when they're sharing a brain with others. They kind of assume everyone else is sharing the same brain.
After all the fighting, did anyone end up getting any of those iBooks?
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
My god carries an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle. Your god is missing an eye. Any questions?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
You left out the stabbing and the dislocated jaw... http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/165115 41?source=PA/
They could have sold them at a new ikea store.
I don't care much for the windows vs. mac argument but you don't see many people getting into a riot over windows boxen. Maybe they're just more reserved?
My favorite drivers are the young guys with their tricked-out Civics who feel compelled to gun the engine, make lots of noise, then slam on the brakes a few seconds later as they move from one red light to the next. I could only wish to be so cool...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
In a related story, thousands of Dell laptop users were caught in a stampede to dump their Dells into the local Dumpsters.
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"It was out of control, the blue screens, the worms and virus programs - to the dumpster they go before the next massive planet wide outbreak of malware and spyware shut down our school."
More enlightened users logged onto the Apple School Discount Store, and bought new iBooks at a discount for low monthy payments.
"Using the online School Apple Store sure beats pissing on yourself while getting batted in the head with a chair while running from some dude plowing through the crowd in a car."
- Buying a Mac Mini is a much better deal than live action 'Mortal Kombat!' for iBooks.
Currently $579.00 or $679.00 for the Mac Mini with the DVD burner drive... $479.00 for the cheapest Mac Mini with the 40GB HD.
Flak Jacket not needed:
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/
Survivors can order a T-Shirt Now:
http://cgi.ebay.com/HENRICO-COUNTY-50-iBook-t-shi
Here's the text
and here are some videos:
Video Report (7:25AM)
Video Report (Noon News)
Video Report (4pm News) (2:45)
Video Report (5pm News)
Slide Show (NBC12)
Slide Show (Times-Dispatch)
The iBooks are technically the property of 'the people' because taxes paid for the hardware.
The $50 is like a service fee for picking up the iBook your taxes already paid for...
A 'Take A Number' bakery ticket stand would have solved this whole problem.
One at a time, take a number, wait your turn.
No Number - No iBook.
Not all of us can vanquish the plauge of religion from our psyches. Sadly, it seems, Mr. Einstein was one of them.
Besides, for every Einstein there is a plethora of douchebags worshiping a salt stain on an underpass or a cinnamon roll.
Blar.
Not Exactly good P.R. about the people who live in that area,
but it goes to show that people do love iBooks,
even old iBooks, and at a $50 price point, they would stand in line for hours to get one.
At $250 an iBook, the situation would have been much more calm.
On eBay the iBooks could have got $250 a pop,
so, who came up with the idea to WASTE $200,000 of tax payers money?
That $200,000 would have been helpful for the school football team, or paying for the new dells.
School systems need to hire more MBA type business people and CPA type accounting people
who will stop wasteful behavior and run a more effective budget.
In any corporation in the USA, the managers of this event would be out on the street before the newcast ended.
"There's only one computer worth wetting yourself for."
Or "Would you be willing to beat someone for a used Thinkpad? We didn't think so."
I believe you've misunderstood Einstein a wee bit. At best, Einstein was a non-theist, his deterministic streak was too strong. Here's just a sampling of his quotes about religion:
Just for purpose of discussion, here's a list of other folks many consider enlightened, who also had no use for religion:
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Well, my initial reason for posting that comment wasn't necessarily beause it describes me, personally. (As a matter of fact, I do have a kid.) But it's *one* way of looking at the situation, and it's a view you run across quite often, actually.
As a self-proclaimed Libertarian though, I'm a little surprised you're so frustrated with people complaining about "paying twice" to send their kids to private schools? Most Libertarians I know pretty much sympathize with that complaint, offering it as a prime reason to privatize the whole school system.
I, too, consider myself Libertarian - but I have a real problem with the inefficiency of the public school system as a whole. I went to both private and public schools when I was growing up, and I'll be the first to admit that my private school education was overpriced and *not* a good experience for me at all. But by the same token, I feel particularly lucky that I went to a public school that was still of pretty good quality. That was back in the late 80's, but even then, many of my friends attended public high-schools where gang violence and fights/stabbings were the order of the day. Only a couple years after I graduated from my high-school, I heard stories of a student being shot in a drive-by while waiting on the front steps there, and of metal detectors being put in, etc. etc. So I think I may have been one of the last to get a really "good experience" out of the place.
I don't claim to have all of the answers, but I do know that the current system isn't working. And no, I don't feel that my taxes paid into the current school system are a "privilege of living in a well educated society". Perhaps it would be if it really worked. But I look around, and I don't see this "well educated society" at all. Rather, I see little pools of intelligent/successful people - who most often got there because loads of additional money was pumped into their higher education by their own choice. The level of intelligence the public schools are churning out these days is nothing to be proud of as a nation.
Same experience here. SEA, SLC, and MCO are all pretty polite and laid-back. Maybe the rest of the country sucks? More likely there are a few bad places that really stand out in people's memories.
I had some idiot pass me doing about 20mph over the speed limit (55mph). He tried changing lanes as much as possible to gain an advantage, in fairly heavy traffic, for this area. I stopped paying attention to him. About 8 miles later I reached my exit and chose the left lane of two, who was in the right lane but the speed demon. I had continued travelling at the speed limit or less due to traffic, and eventually gotten ahead of him. I had such a good laugh as I passed him, though I was concerned that the idiot would cause a wreck as he caught up to me again, as traffic had lightened up.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
that's so damn funny my eyes are tearing and my gut hurts! brilliant!
Rabid Mac users scare me. They aren't anywhere near as bad as a windows only world (oh the horror...) but they do frighten me. I think we should rally them up, and get them to take over the Earth, so us Unix-based users can be the dominant breed. We will have to give Wozniak and Jobs good positions, but at least they make nice GUI's. We can also get rid of capitalism by telling them everyone gets free Mac Minis :)