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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."
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
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.
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.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Do the equivalent in just about any country, and you'll end up with the same thing.
Sad? Yes. American only? No.
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.
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.
Excuse me, but how does a decision to change suppliers of future purchases make currently owned equipment "of no use?" Do the iBooks figure out that their new brothers are not Apple and suddenly stop working? Does the software on them suddenly stop functioning?
Failing to plan for a herd of vultures rioting to get almost free computers is not the crime here. The crime is the attitude that perfectly functional computing hardware is suddenly "of no use", especially coming from a taxpayer funded institution. And certainly when that institution typically cries because they don't have enough money.
There is no reason not to use the iBooks until they croak, and then replace them with new Dells. It would teach kids that there really is more to life than Microsoft and Intel, and allow them a choice of which OS they preferred. Schoolkids are not processing gigabyte datasets that requires terrabyte disks and gigahertz CPUs. They're browsing the web and typing book reports. I'm sure an iBook can handle that.
If I were a resident of that county, the next time the schools put a millage up for a vote I'd remind my neighbors of the profligate waste demonstrated by this nonsense and campaign for a no vote. And a replacement of the moronic school board.
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.
On identical hardware OS 10.3 ran *faster* than 10.2, and 10.4 would have been faster still if not for Spotlight.
That goes a long way toward explaining why Macs hold their value better than average Windows boxes.
(And, yes, I know that the old Windows boxes are still good for all kinds of applications using other OSes -- but that market is awfully small even compared with the market for used Macs.)
Completely missing from the story is one important detail:
Who was the DUMBASS from this school's administration that decided to sell 1000 laptops for less than 1/15th of what they could have fetched on eBay?
Hell, even a rip-off joint like Computer Rennaisance would have given them about $200 a pop for those things.
Whoever made this call should be fired.
Not just for causing a riot which anybody should have seen coming...
Not just for dumping those spiffy iBooks and making the teachers there settle for crappy Dells (probably Latitude 600 seris, if they are very lucky...)
All that, yes, but also for throwing away more than $700,000 dollars worth of school assets.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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
Well, since it was taxpayer money that paid for them, they probably were just disposing of them rather than trying to get top dollar. Sort of a community service if you will...
Personally, if I had known that sort of riot would happen, I woulda just camped-out with refreshments and a video camera and enjoyed the spectacle (don't need an ibook).
And they could've easily avoided creating a problem in the first place by just giving people numbered tickets in the order they arrived - then calling them out in order when they were ready to sell. If someone doesn't respond within a few minutes of the number being called, they lose their spot and someone else farther down the list gets called. Simple and smart.
Doesn't take a rocket-scientist to figure out how to do this without causing a riot...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle