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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."
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.
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 .
Exactly. Government officials ignorant of basic economics, what are the odds?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
local richmond newspaper link
another local link with slideshow pictures
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
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.
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
NSFWYou would get everyone living happily ever after with their iBooks. But there were actaully about 3000 people, which changes everything.
first official slashdot post from a $50 iBook.
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.
I think she was trying to re-charge the battery in her cellphone...
get your dirty sig off me, you filthy APE!
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.
I am waiting for someone to tell me that these iBooks are overpriced and they can get a Dell laptop for $40.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
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.
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.
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.
Ahh reminders of exactly how big of assholes the people we share this planet with are :-)
My first exposureto the reality that is my fellow human beings was when I was 18 at the DAyton Hamfest.
A moron in an airplane threw a ream of papers out of the plane on a RAINY day each paper had a 1 dollar bill stapled to it. the ream of papers did not seperate, it fell as one brick 200 feet until it hit me in the head.
What did my fellow humans and americans do? See if I was ok as I was lying there bleeding? Nope they trampled me trying to get to the one dollar bills.
From that day on I learned that deep down, our fellow humans really are dirtballs and do not give a rats ass about anything but themselves.
If anyone is suprised at all by thisthen they are either fools that have been insulated from reality or had an IQ below 60. (selling the ibooks for $50.00 tells me the latter was true)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.