BB used to charge the full rental price even if the rental was a few hours late. This pissed a lot of people off of they had to pay another $4.38 for being 3 hours late.
My franchise (Southern Stores, INC) came out with a per/day late fee. For a 5 day rental - they are all 5 days now at my store - then it is $.90/day late fee charged to the account. This is the entire late fee divided up into 5 days. People complain a LOT less about a $.90 late fee than a $4.50 late fee. We also changed our due date to midnight instead of noon on the second day.
We started this program and tested it beginning in January 2004 with a few stores and eventually all of our stores adopted it (the franchise covers Tennessee). Our customers were much more happy than previously.
Then BB Corporate, all of the national stores, came out with this "no-late fees program" and began to advertise it via national advertising outlets. Well, people in Tennessee watch network and satellite programming and thus saw these advertisements. You want to see confusion in the market place?
Our franchise decided to NOT participate in the corporate program because we think our customers like the current program not to mention it is much simpler. Almost every day people will walk into my store and when I tell them they have late fees they immediately start to mention that BB has no more late fees. Then I have to be the bad guy and sit there and explain to them that we are a franchise store and don't participate in that corporate program; yeah - it really tends to upset some of the customers. If they still complain then I hand them a memo from our franchise office which explains all of this in writing and even offer to give them the number. I remember a few months ago I saw a posting on the Net that mentioned an exec from the franchise slamming the corporate policy in the memo we hand out and that his remarks could potentially be used in court against the national corporation. I cannot find that article now however. I've been told that only 5% of all BB stores are not participating.
Also something worth noting is that we seem to be getting less and less copies of titles in on their respective release dates. For example if we would normally get 50 copies of this week's new relases last year, we might only be getting 30 or so. From what I can tell it is deliberate and accomplishes several things: 1) Less inventory to purchase 2) More likely to be 100% out of stock for a longer period of time 3) Keeps the customer coming back to the store more often because their chances of getting a new title the first week are slimmer and slimmer 4) Creates more space in the store for sell-thru items 5) We are told to suggest to customers that they purchase the movie from our shelves instead of rent it.
Compare our prices to Wal-Marts!!! WOW we are sometimes as much as $10 higher than Wal-Mart! I think that their model is to have less and less to rent and then try and get the customer to keep coming back so that they spend more often, or that they actually purchase it where there is a greater profit margin (or at least it gets the customer in the mindset of purchaseing, not just renting, from Blockbuster)
Here is an article from our local paper in Nashville which mentiones these issues: http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/ 05/01/638 70251.shtml
I apologize for the poor grammer, spelling, and incoherence but I've spent the better part of 40 something in the studio working on a project for school.
The opinions and thoughts of this posting are in no way official commentary of Blockbuster or Southern Stores, INC no do they reflect or represent either entities. Any official comments or news releases will come from proper and official channels. (besides, I graduate from college in a month and will be quitting then)
=== first, it is there to help with your education===
Did you ever consider his major might require large amounts of bandwidth? I am a recording industry major (audio engineering) at a medium sized public university and I often move around GB+ files around from studio to studio at my school. I am sure the video guys at our TV production program do too.
Or if I was a CS major I am positive I could justify using P2P for updates, distros, etc etc.
This is DIRECTLY related to "educational purposes".
That's good... from the sounds of it (no-pun intended) it looks like you would be listening to noise being processed looking for patterns of intelligent life. I guess they would call it being able to search for life while on your commute!
I tend to think that might get a little dull after the first 30 seconds or so.
Actually in this country copyright infringment is usually a CIVIL matter; not a CRIMINAL matter. IT is handled by different courts, governed under different laws, and brought by different parties.
And semantics DO matter within the law - no US law calls it "theft".
Please get your facts right before you post.
(IANAL but I have taken 2 legal classes on the subject and my major in college is the study of the recording industry)
Well.. the answer is not clear, cut, and dry nor is it simple... But for critical analysis here is a good place to start:
What is the current law regarding mercy-killing (euthaniasia)? Where do we draw the line with that? If someone has no brain wave activity, but are being kept alive by machines, are they considered alive? Can we kill them at that point? At what point do we as a society allow the plug to be pulled? If the law states that we cannot kill people if they still have a heartbeat, then that should include unborn children that have heart beats too; or brain waves, or whatever the measurement is.
My statement isn't a pro anything other than I think we should have some logic and consistancy within the law. Maybe that's a lot to ask:-(
I was educated in a public school (unfortunately) and was out right told by my gov teacher that several of the Founding Fathers were deists. There were no hidden secrets there really...I grad HS in 2000 FYI...
Also I think that the 'seperation of church and state' (which is not in the US Constitution by the way) protects the church just as much as it protects the state. I consider myself protestant and really wouldn't want my faith to be mixed with the government and vice versa... it causes a WHOLE bunch of problems and usually does more harm than good... look at the Holy Roman Empire as just one example, not to mention places like Iran, or any other atrocities carried out by governments in the name of religion.
Besides, if the government can justify enforcing my views and faith, what keeps them from enforcing someone else's later on down the line?
Dr. Michael Harringon is one of the foremost experts on this subject. http://www.belmontcopyright.com/harrington.php
He is head of the Belmont University Copyright Society located in Nashville, TN. http://www.belmontcopyright.com/harrington.php
He spoke at my school http://mtsu.edu/~record/ a few weeks ago about sampling. Many examples were played and the class discussed the specific details and outcomes of these cases. Michael has been an expert witness on MANY cases and enjoys hearing from people. Feel free to check out his website (his credentials are unbelieveable!) and drop him a line!
I see you are from Florida... I went all of my school years there including 2 years of community college in Orlando and now I am about to grad with my BS from the Nashville area.
Anyway, I lived in Seminole County who had the second largest budget (per capita I think) except for Palm Beach County. I remember thinking how bad my education sucked and how little I learned. Then I went to Valencia CC (one of the best CCs in the US) in Orlando and in my first few classes I quickly realized I was one of the most educated people around. To this day I still sit back and think about how crummy my education was and yet I got one of the highest quality educations in the state.... utterly amazing.
And about the FCAT - yeah I grad HS in 2000 and we had the HSCTs (High School Compentency Test). They were a pain in the ass and a waste of time to me. The teachers were forced to take like 20 minutes every day to give a practice test and then "teach the test" to the class.
A lot of people had problems with the teachers "teaching the test" in order for the students to be able to pass it. However, the trick to that is that if important material (math, basic sci, basic reasoning, logic, etc) was put on the test, at least some of it would get taught to the students.
I work at a Blockbuster in the Nashville area and we are not a corp store - we are owned by a franchisee holding company based out of Memphis; Southern Stores, INC.
The "No Late Fees Program" which has been heavily advertised across the us is not true for about 5% of the BBs in the US. The majority of the stores in the Tennessee area do not participate in this program.
If you want to see confused and pissed off customers, try hanging out at my store on a Fri/Sat night. People will return rental items days and weeks late expecting to NOT pay a late fee. Then when we tell them there is a late fee the get very upset because they saw an ad on TV that said there were no more late fees. I don't say that I blame them either but I am sure all of the commercials say something like "at participating locations only"
This is a PRIME example of large corps causing confusion on the market place and pissing off their customers.
First thing I guess was in the 7th grade (1994 or so)I would take the encylopedia CD computer in the library/media center offline and play QBASIC's Nibbles and Gorilla. They didn't like that. I would also go into the computer lab every morning before school and figured out how to use the Mac LAN to connect to one of the modems and dial my favorite BBSs. I would play the games, chat with people, and send mail over FidoNet. This got me kicked off of all computers for the rest of my middle school/junior high career.
In high school I was in the A/V club (my career is now audio engineering) and I got permantly kicked out of the theater sound booth for re-adjusting the room EQ.
In my 'intro to computer' class our teacher was cool and I would fix his laptop for him often (Windoze 95). One day we had a sub and the guy was a real jackass. So my friend and I wrote a program in QB that would loop the PC speakers climbing in frequency and make the screen go blank. We then put it on disk and copied it to ever other computer that wasnt being used and setup a delayed countdown on it for like 10 minutes. This guy didnt know jack about computers so we turned the monitors off. My friend and I set this in motion and then went to the bathroom. The next day our regular teacher was like "what did yall do to that poor guy?". It was hilarious - he deserved it.
I was in NJROTC too and we had our student in charge who was a nice guy but really waaaay too uptight about things. So one day we decided to play a joke on him. We wrote another QB program to simulate a hard drive formatting upon boot-up. I could hear him scream at the top of his lungs from 3 rooms over; it was great.
Then the idiots at the school system decided to move off of their WANG mainframe grading system to a GUI Windoze over the LAN type of application. It handled all student records and such. What a JOKE! Let's just say I extracted my fair share of information from there; having every single networked PC in the county open to the "Windoze Neighborhood" wasn't a smart move either heh heh heh.
Then of course there was the normal stuff of having all of the computers supposedly 'locked down ' so that the students couldnt change the background and screensaver and such. Another joke which was fixed by either a boot disk or a boot to safemode.
And of course putting PC Anywhere on the staff's computers without them knowing it was loads of fun.
And my favorite was back in 1997 when I was a freshman. I was in this typing class with a bunch of senior girls who had bigger tits than brains. Well I quickly figured out how to send network messages to individual computers. Ohhh the fun I had with that... things like "I am the computer and Im watching you pick your nose" or "nice red dress" or "your name is..."
By the way I grew up in Seminole County Florida, the second wealthiest county in the state; Palm Beach is the first. There were soo many times where these guys were just pissing money away because they had it to spend. Ahhhh the memories.
Yes you are correct! And I think the parent was being a smartass by pitting those who are ignorant of the denotative concept of a "myth" vs those who are only familier with the connotative term. On the flip side I think people should be more educated about things before they get pissed off over something which turns out to be as trivial as semantics.
I am a Christian but yes I agree and understand that all of the Hebrew Bible is mythological, same as Gilgamesh, Oddesy/Illiad, etc etc... Does that mean it's all true and factual? Dunno... "Fact" and "truth" before the 1400's were not thought of as a logical, rational, objective idea that they are in the 21st century. Back then there was moral truth, spiritual truth, factual truth, etc however I am not a humanities major.
I took a humanities course once in Hebrew/LateRoman/Medieval humanities and I learned more about my own faith and beliefs in that secular college course than I did in years and years of Sunday school.
Did anyone else happen to notice that he was in Port Blair, and he was from UCF's film program which had a hand in the "Blair Witch" ??? Coincidence?;-)
I apologize if I misinterpeted your post - we probably mostly agree then. I guess the vibe coming from it was what made me feel the need to respond to it in the way that I did. I simply wanted to make a few points to ensure my ideas were crystal clear behind my reasoning of submission of this story.
I was accused of karma-whoring in another topic tonight too;-) Oh well.
But seriously - enjoy your break and I hope things work out well with your deppression. I've had some of that myself here lately and it isn't fun. Be sure to seek help if you need it - there is never any reason not to get help. Lots of luck.
Not expecting any mod points or anything. Simply wanting to do an FYI sort of thing. Besides, my ham radio submission got accepted tonight. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01 /02/234325 6&tid=215
WOOO HOOOO. I got my first acceptence at/. !!! I like this better than the first time I had sex....uhhh...errr..wait... that hasn't happened yet.:-P
1) There is no better time to point out the effects of a technology than when it is being used during a crisis! In 5 years (assuming there isn't another crisis of this magnitude) people will largely forget about ham radio and its function especially as an emergency communications network. Now is a GREAT time to launch a PR campaign of awareness and information about the art and hobby of ham radio. (if you notice though I didn't mention BPL in my article because I didn't want it to be the main focus of things). I guarentee you that thousands, if not millions, are exceptionally appreciative of ham radio at the moment.
2) A lot of/.'ers have already posted their sympathy and condolences about this tragic situation. Don't believe me? Read this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/28 /012024 0&tid=99 and this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31 /001620 6&tid=99
3) This is/. We are about technology and technical things. Discussing communication technology, people who use it, methodology, functionality, and even the human side of it is perfectly within the realm of informative speech.
4) I bet that the doctors and EMTs over in that area are discussing their professional and technical perspectives of the disaster among their collegues. Why? Because they want to learn and exchange information. So are the structual engineers, and the civil engineers, and city planners etc...
No one is saying that this is not a very tragic situation. But with the free exchange of information and objective discussion perhaps better methods of communication or preperation could be devised to help save more lives or maybe to ease the burden next time.
Actually - my original submission had linked to that article. The person who edits the submissions apparently decided to link to the ARRL article instead.
Slashdot Mirror
BB used to charge the full rental price even if the rental was a few hours late. This pissed a lot of people off of they had to pay another $4.38 for being 3 hours late.
/ 05/01/638 70251.shtml
My franchise (Southern Stores, INC) came out with a per/day late fee. For a 5 day rental - they are all 5 days now at my store - then it is $.90/day late fee charged to the account. This is the entire late fee divided up into 5 days. People complain a LOT less about a $.90 late fee than a $4.50 late fee. We also changed our due date to midnight instead of noon on the second day.
We started this program and tested it beginning in January 2004 with a few stores and eventually all of our stores adopted it (the franchise covers Tennessee). Our customers were much more happy than previously.
Then BB Corporate, all of the national stores, came out with this "no-late fees program" and began to advertise it via national advertising outlets. Well, people in Tennessee watch network and satellite programming and thus saw these advertisements. You want to see confusion in the market place?
Our franchise decided to NOT participate in the corporate program because we think our customers like the current program not to mention it is much simpler. Almost every day people will walk into my store and when I tell them they have late fees they immediately start to mention that BB has no more late fees. Then I have to be the bad guy and sit there and explain to them that we are a franchise store and don't participate in that corporate program; yeah - it really tends to upset some of the customers. If they still complain then I hand them a memo from our franchise office which explains all of this in writing and even offer to give them the number. I remember a few months ago I saw a posting on the Net that mentioned an exec from the franchise slamming the corporate policy in the memo we hand out and that his remarks could potentially be used in court against the national corporation. I cannot find that article now however. I've been told that only 5% of all BB stores are not participating.
Also something worth noting is that we seem to be getting less and less copies of titles in on their respective release dates. For example if we would normally get 50 copies of this week's new relases last year, we might only be getting 30 or so. From what I can tell it is deliberate and accomplishes several things:
1) Less inventory to purchase
2) More likely to be 100% out of stock for a longer period of time
3) Keeps the customer coming back to the store more often because their chances of getting a new title the first week are slimmer and slimmer
4) Creates more space in the store for sell-thru items
5) We are told to suggest to customers that they purchase the movie from our shelves instead of rent it.
Compare our prices to Wal-Marts!!! WOW we are sometimes as much as $10 higher than Wal-Mart! I think that their model is to have less and less to rent and then try and get the customer to keep coming back so that they spend more often, or that they actually purchase it where there is a greater profit margin (or at least it gets the customer in the mindset of purchaseing, not just renting, from Blockbuster)
Here is an article from our local paper in Nashville which mentiones these issues:
http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives
I apologize for the poor grammer, spelling, and incoherence but I've spent the better part of 40 something in the studio working on a project for school.
The opinions and thoughts of this posting are in no way official commentary of Blockbuster or Southern Stores, INC no do they reflect or represent either entities. Any official comments or news releases will come from proper and official channels. (besides, I graduate from college in a month and will be quitting then)
=== first, it is there to help with your education===
Did you ever consider his major might require large amounts of bandwidth? I am a recording industry major (audio engineering) at a medium sized public university and I often move around GB+ files around from studio to studio at my school. I am sure the video guys at our TV production program do too.
Or if I was a CS major I am positive I could justify using P2P for updates, distros, etc etc.
This is DIRECTLY related to "educational purposes".
Too Many Secrets!
"If we allow one brain-dead Floridian to die, what's to stop us from extending that policy to include the rest of the state?"
That's good... from the sounds of it (no-pun intended) it looks like you would be listening to noise being processed looking for patterns of intelligent life. I guess they would call it being able to search for life while on your commute!
I tend to think that might get a little dull after the first 30 seconds or so.
Actually in this country copyright infringment is usually a CIVIL matter; not a CRIMINAL matter. IT is handled by different courts, governed under different laws, and brought by different parties.
And semantics DO matter within the law - no US law calls it "theft".
Please get your facts right before you post.
(IANAL but I have taken 2 legal classes on the subject and my major in college is the study of the recording industry)
"Most women I know have less tools under their belt"
;-)
uhh.... isn't that what makes them a (wo)man instead of a man?
I thought the robot had 3 arms... If that was the case I was going to say "..wait a minute; that's not a 3rd arm!!!!" ;-)
Well.. the answer is not clear, cut, and dry nor is it simple... But for critical analysis here is a good place to start:
:-(
What is the current law regarding mercy-killing (euthaniasia)? Where do we draw the line with that? If someone has no brain wave activity, but are being kept alive by machines, are they considered alive? Can we kill them at that point? At what point do we as a society allow the plug to be pulled? If the law states that we cannot kill people if they still have a heartbeat, then that should include unborn children that have heart beats too; or brain waves, or whatever the measurement is.
My statement isn't a pro anything other than I think we should have some logic and consistancy within the law. Maybe that's a lot to ask
I was educated in a public school (unfortunately) and was out right told by my gov teacher that several of the Founding Fathers were deists. There were no hidden secrets there really...I grad HS in 2000 FYI...
Also I think that the 'seperation of church and state' (which is not in the US Constitution by the way) protects the church just as much as it protects the state. I consider myself protestant and really wouldn't want my faith to be mixed with the government and vice versa... it causes a WHOLE bunch of problems and usually does more harm than good... look at the Holy Roman Empire as just one example, not to mention places like Iran, or any other atrocities carried out by governments in the name of religion.
Besides, if the government can justify enforcing my views and faith, what keeps them from enforcing someone else's later on down the line?
I am a libertarian too http://www.lp.org
I'm sorry - could you be specific as to what is being stolen? As far as I can see copyrights are being infringed which != theft!
Yeah - check out http://www.808records.com/
Dr. Michael Harringon is one of the foremost experts on this subject. http://www.belmontcopyright.com/harrington.php
He is head of the Belmont University Copyright Society located in Nashville, TN. http://www.belmontcopyright.com/harrington.php
He spoke at my school http://mtsu.edu/~record/ a few weeks ago about sampling. Many examples were played and the class discussed the specific details and outcomes of these cases. Michael has been an expert witness on MANY cases and enjoys hearing from people. Feel free to check out his website (his credentials are unbelieveable!) and drop him a line!
I see you are from Florida... I went all of my school years there including 2 years of community college in Orlando and now I am about to grad with my BS from the Nashville area.
.02
Anyway, I lived in Seminole County who had the second largest budget (per capita I think) except for Palm Beach County. I remember thinking how bad my education sucked and how little I learned. Then I went to Valencia CC (one of the best CCs in the US) in Orlando and in my first few classes I quickly realized I was one of the most educated people around. To this day I still sit back and think about how crummy my education was and yet I got one of the highest quality educations in the state.... utterly amazing.
And about the FCAT - yeah I grad HS in 2000 and we had the HSCTs (High School Compentency Test). They were a pain in the ass and a waste of time to me. The teachers were forced to take like 20 minutes every day to give a practice test and then "teach the test" to the class.
A lot of people had problems with the teachers "teaching the test" in order for the students to be able to pass it. However, the trick to that is that if important material (math, basic sci, basic reasoning, logic, etc) was put on the test, at least some of it would get taught to the students.
Just my
I work at a Blockbuster in the Nashville area and we are not a corp store - we are owned by a franchisee holding company based out of Memphis; Southern Stores, INC.
The "No Late Fees Program" which has been heavily advertised across the us is not true for about 5% of the BBs in the US. The majority of the stores in the Tennessee area do not participate in this program.
If you want to see confused and pissed off customers, try hanging out at my store on a Fri/Sat night. People will return rental items days and weeks late expecting to NOT pay a late fee. Then when we tell them there is a late fee the get very upset because they saw an ad on TV that said there were no more late fees. I don't say that I blame them either but I am sure all of the commercials say something like "at participating locations only"
This is a PRIME example of large corps causing confusion on the market place and pissing off their customers.
Hmmm... Where do I start? (there are soo many).
..."
First thing I guess was in the 7th grade (1994 or so)I would take the encylopedia CD computer in the library/media center offline and play QBASIC's Nibbles and Gorilla. They didn't like that. I would also go into the computer lab every morning before school and figured out how to use the Mac LAN to connect to one of the modems and dial my favorite BBSs. I would play the games, chat with people, and send mail over FidoNet. This got me kicked off of all computers for the rest of my middle school/junior high career.
In high school I was in the A/V club (my career is now audio engineering) and I got permantly kicked out of the theater sound booth for re-adjusting the room EQ.
In my 'intro to computer' class our teacher was cool and I would fix his laptop for him often (Windoze 95). One day we had a sub and the guy was a real jackass. So my friend and I wrote a program in QB that would loop the PC speakers climbing in frequency and make the screen go blank. We then put it on disk and copied it to ever other computer that wasnt being used and setup a delayed countdown on it for like 10 minutes. This guy didnt know jack about computers so we turned the monitors off. My friend and I set this in motion and then went to the bathroom. The next day our regular teacher was like "what did yall do to that poor guy?". It was hilarious - he deserved it.
I was in NJROTC too and we had our student in charge who was a nice guy but really waaaay too uptight about things. So one day we decided to play a joke on him. We wrote another QB program to simulate a hard drive formatting upon boot-up. I could hear him scream at the top of his lungs from 3 rooms over; it was great.
Then the idiots at the school system decided to move off of their WANG mainframe grading system to a GUI Windoze over the LAN type of application. It handled all student records and such. What a JOKE! Let's just say I extracted my fair share of information from there; having every single networked PC in the county open to the "Windoze Neighborhood" wasn't a smart move either heh heh heh.
Then of course there was the normal stuff of having all of the computers supposedly 'locked down ' so that the students couldnt change the background and screensaver and such. Another joke which was fixed by either a boot disk or a boot to safemode.
And of course putting PC Anywhere on the staff's computers without them knowing it was loads of fun.
And my favorite was back in 1997 when I was a freshman. I was in this typing class with a bunch of senior girls who had bigger tits than brains. Well I quickly figured out how to send network messages to individual computers. Ohhh the fun I had with that... things like "I am the computer and Im watching you pick your nose" or "nice red dress" or "your name is
By the way I grew up in Seminole County Florida, the second wealthiest county in the state; Palm Beach is the first. There were soo many times where these guys were just pissing money away because they had it to spend. Ahhhh the memories.
Yes you are correct! And I think the parent was being a smartass by pitting those who are ignorant of the denotative concept of a "myth" vs those who are only familier with the connotative term. On the flip side I think people should be more educated about things before they get pissed off over something which turns out to be as trivial as semantics.
I am a Christian but yes I agree and understand that all of the Hebrew Bible is mythological, same as Gilgamesh, Oddesy/Illiad, etc etc... Does that mean it's all true and factual? Dunno... "Fact" and "truth" before the 1400's were not thought of as a logical, rational, objective idea that they are in the 21st century. Back then there was moral truth, spiritual truth, factual truth, etc however I am not a humanities major.
I took a humanities course once in Hebrew/LateRoman/Medieval humanities and I learned more about my own faith and beliefs in that secular college course than I did in years and years of Sunday school.
Did anyone else happen to notice that he was in Port Blair, and he was from UCF's film program which had a hand in the "Blair Witch" ??? Coincidence? ;-)
Sher is going to turn 60 and have Dick Clark's kid!
More power allows you to last longer and finish your emission!
I apologize if I misinterpeted your post - we probably mostly agree then. I guess the vibe coming from it was what made me feel the need to respond to it in the way that I did. I simply wanted to make a few points to ensure my ideas were crystal clear behind my reasoning of submission of this story.
;-) Oh well.
I was accused of karma-whoring in another topic tonight too
But seriously - enjoy your break and I hope things work out well with your deppression. I've had some of that myself here lately and it isn't fun. Be sure to seek help if you need it - there is never any reason not to get help. Lots of luck.
Not expecting any mod points or anything. Simply wanting to do an FYI sort of thing. Besides, my ham radio submission got accepted tonight.1 /02/234325 6&tid=215
/. !!! I like this better than the first time I had sex....uhhh...errr..wait... that hasn't happened yet. :-P
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0
WOOO HOOOO. I got my first acceptence at
I would like to mention several things:
/.'ers have already posted their sympathy and condolences about this tragic situation. Don't believe me?8 /012024 0&tid=991 /001620 6&tid=99
/. We are about technology and technical things. Discussing communication technology, people who use it, methodology, functionality, and even the human side of it is perfectly within the realm of informative speech.
1) There is no better time to point out the effects of a technology than when it is being used during a crisis! In 5 years (assuming there isn't another crisis of this magnitude) people will largely forget about ham radio and its function especially as an emergency communications network. Now is a GREAT time to launch a PR campaign of awareness and information about the art and hobby of ham radio. (if you notice though I didn't mention BPL in my article because I didn't want it to be the main focus of things). I guarentee you that thousands, if not millions, are exceptionally appreciative of ham radio at the moment.
2) A lot of
Read this:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/2
and this:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/3
3) This is
4) I bet that the doctors and EMTs over in that area are discussing their professional and technical perspectives of the disaster among their collegues. Why? Because they want to learn and exchange information. So are the structual engineers, and the civil engineers, and city planners etc...
No one is saying that this is not a very tragic situation. But with the free exchange of information and objective discussion perhaps better methods of communication or preperation could be devised to help save more lives or maybe to ease the burden next time.
Actually - my original submission had linked to that article. The person who edits the submissions apparently decided to link to the ARRL article instead.
The link to the movie Jackal is:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0119395/