and given the user interface description (ok, only half the story, but anyway), much easier to use.
So, you're saying a 3x4 phone keypad is much easier to use than Tapatap which displays a 3x3 grid? T9 which uses 3x3 of the keys for text input is fairly popular on US phones; I don't really see where the interface difference is.
Unless you're saying they'll use the mobile phone to call someone for the info they need. But they presumably already have a community land line for the Simputer modem, so they could just call using that instead of getting a mobile phone.
But who do you call that has the info they need at low or no cost?
When was the last time you called up 844-1111 (or whatever that number was) to get a bank-sponsored weather report for the day? You use the internet now, right? It's much cheaper to distribute information through the internet than through call centers.
What I found interesting is that in that paragraph he pooh-poohed the $250 community device with simple-to-understand user interface (his description) and text-to-speech capability to help the illiterate and suggests that high-end text messaging mobile phones may usurp its purpose.
Cellular phones aren't cheap. We Americans think they are sometimes, but try to buy one without signing up for a year of service. They are US$300-US$500 last I checked (Nextel Motorola i500's and i1000's at Office Depot w/out service). That figure doesn't necessarily fairly compare with the quoted $250 for the Simputer because my cell phone price is USD in a US retail store and they will likely be much cheaper in the "developing world", and I presume the quoted $250 for the Simputer would be the "developing world" price.
Plus a cellular phone requires an ongoing expense. Depending on how they set it all up, they may pay a relitavely high price for the phones and low price for service or vice versa for one to offset the other, but I doubt this solution will be much cheaper than the Simputer even if they share one mobile phone for text messaging.
You could also think about it this way. McDonalds is a part of the American Landscape.
So are violent crime, Marlboro billboards and phone sex ads. Should any of those be in Sims, too?
Listen to Shatner at Amazon
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 3, Informative
he guest-starred on an album released with Ben Folds called "Fear of Pop" a few years ago - it's really friggin' good
Cool, that link has Real Player streaming samples. Shatner's contribution is audible in track 5: "In Love - David Davidson".
AH! Here is Shatner's "Transformed Man" album with a sample of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" for those of you who haven't heard it. Unfortunately the sample is small and doesn't capture the whole performance, but you get the idea.
OMG Amazon says "Transformed Man" starts at US$75!!!
LOL, you have to listen to all the samples.
Re:How does it compare on windows?
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Also I have noticed that most linux games based on GL really crawl on my machine.
Assuming you mean when running under X and Linux, run glxinfo from a shell. Near the top will be "direct rendering: yes" (or no). If it's no then you're running software OpenGL instead of hardware accelerated OpenGL.
Yeah, I saw episode one on the first day; I bought the ticket 30 minutes ahead of time and had a half empty theater at 7pm. This was in Decatur, TX (about 40 minutes NW of Fort Worth). The trick is to head out of town (I lived in Fort Worth then) and catch a theater in a small town. Not usually as nicely furnished as the megatheaters in town, but the film is new and the crowd is small, and you can't beat that.
Plus, there's something about Texas small towns and beautiful young women. They really know how to grow 'em. I'm in Indiana now and the small town women are scary looking. Must be a corn vs. beef thing.
LOL, I just saw Showtime on DVD last week. Not the best movie, but it was hilarious to see William Shatner try to give Robert Dinero advice on how to act like a cop.
Can't wait to see the funny comments in this thread.
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 2
... the difference is that with cc transactions the company you are buying from gets a bill from the credit card processing company for using the service, a fee that the company would not have had with a paper transaction.
But the cc transactions don't require safes and armored cars or as much in-store security to protect the revenue. They don't require as much hands-on-money action as cash or checks do. Not all of the cost it billed by one bank, but the costs are real. The credit card companies take care of a lot of the security for you with their financial network and bill you for that. If you accepted only credit cards at a retail outlet your local security and transport security needs would diminish.
What it comes down to is you have to pay the workers to cover the cash register anyway, but you don't have to pay the charges to use a cc processing company.
But the workers spend as much as an hour of their shift checking out/checking in their cash drawers and accounting for their checks. The CC transactions are pretty much handled by the registers. Add in the aforementioned security measures and counterfeit and bad check problems and the cost of handling paper is not trivial. That reminds me, almost everyone who takes checks pays Verisign or a similar company to help them with avoiding check problems; more money for non-cc transactions.
My point is that I don't think it's fair to pass on the cc fee to the consumer directly because there is a cost of some sort with any type of transaction.
But all that said, I'm not a big fan of credit cards. They are designed to suck everyone's money and credit completely dry and do a good job of it. Quick tip: avoid any card whose bank is in Delaware. Most loose usury laws in the USA.
Re:Per Transaction Fees Suck...
on
Add-Ons Add Up
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My boss gets lots of complaints because we pass the 3% credit card charge on directly. Like somehow people who pay with cash or check should subsidize the credit industry.
But doesn't handling cash and checks cost money, too? Armored cars and local security to guard the cash, and someone gets paid to take the checks to the bank. I don't know if it compares to credit card fees, but don't discount the cost of cash and checks.
I recently downloaded FreeBSD 4.7, Red Hat 7.3 and KNOPPIX ISOs and am now downloading Slackware 8.1 packages. I tried searching for some of these on p2p (Limewire and Kazaa) but couldn't find them. (I used mirror sites instead.)
Limewire is Gnutella1, right? So it can see any Gnutella1 nodes or just other Limewire nodes? This is one thing I wasn't able to determine for sure about Gnutella.
I would really like to see most opensource available p2p, but my early tries are returning little.
(By the way, I installed Limewire and Kazaa on their own little PC with a bare install of Win95. I didn't install these on my main system for fear of adware/spyware.)
Not to mention that to some insects, the materials used to laminate circuit boards and some plastics that compose the electronics, are amazingly tasty...
I've seen ants in electronics before, but I didn't know they like the plastics in there. That might explain my wierdest and experience: they established a colony, complete with queen and larvae, in my 3-ring bound paper reference manuals (about computers and electronics). These manuals were in milk-like plastic crates in the back of my van, away from anywhere that might have traditional food such as crumbs (I never ate back there) or anything organic. They were, as best as I can tell, eating the white plastic 3-ring-bound card in front of the pages (you know, the thingy to keep the pages from getting caught funny when you close the binder). They only liked the white one, though, not the black ones or the vinyl in the binder cover.
Personally, I think a USB or legacy serial interface would be more useful and far more universal. Why don't we have these? Perhaps we can convert one of camera flash card readers (you know, the ones that plug into a parallel port) to take SDRAM DIMMS.
Many people don't realise how much of a difference going from 128M to 256M or 256M to 384 or so makes.
Or how going from 64mb to 192mb will turn a PII 266 into a surprisingly usable multitasking desktop, for example. RAM does wonders for slower processors running recent OSes and applications.
Reading the story you find out this is not a national ID system.
and... This system is not for you, the everyday individual.
Read it again. What you describe is:
(From the article:)
The Transportation Worker ID Card: Vision for the Future Elaine Charney, TWIC Program Manager, Transportation Security Administration
Read the next line down:
The Registered Traveler ID Initiative Mike Barrett, Registered Traveler Program Manager, Transportation Security Administration
Regestered Traveler ID Initiative? Registered Traveler Program? The problem is there is no additional information as to what this means, but it sure sounds like this would cover you and I flying (or even driving?) from Indy to DFW.
But there's no additional info so it's hard to comment intelligently about it. Perhaps they just rever to visitors/workers with visas. Perhaps only certain people will need it. Perhaps you can avoid it by wearing a tin hat. Perhaps we'll all have government barcodes and Lojacks implanted. Too little info and a scary sounding title make for some upset Slashdotters.
Very good point about peer-peer distribution. The availability increases with demand.
A big potential problem I can see is the cost for the peers. We're already seeing some ISP implement bandwidth caps. If we take this concept to the extreme example of everything becoming peer-peer then I would expect consumer bandwidth costs to skyrocket, at least for any constantly utilized p2p nodes.
Another problem may be reluctant node operators. I just recently read into FreeNet. I feel a bit unconfortable with the idea that my node may be used to assist with untraceable kiddie porn or cult/nutty militia propoganda or other material that I find objectionable or even illegal. (Read the FreeNet faq about this very concern and counter points.) I'll probably get over this and give it a try, but I expect many others won't get over it.
This would be an excellent model for much of the type of things we read on Slashdot, such as a geek with a cool project and a low-bandwidth server that gets pummelled for two days and then is far less busy afterward. A FreeNet-distributed site would respond to the demand but not cost the author additional money or grief. Or perhaps a programmer starts and open-source project that gets ignored until version 0.4 and then people notice it does something cool and works and then the demand skyrockets. Typically projects have to relocate to handle the traffic, but no relocation would be necessary in a FreeNet-like distribution system.
The real irony with this story is that mail is peer-peer, anyway. Yahoo is basically charging for high availability online storage, otherwise you could just have a service that knows when you're online and points to your local SMTP agent when you're online. The sender's SMTP agent already holds the email if the receiving server is unavailable and retries periodically. The only problem with this would be if both sender and recipient ran their own SMTP agents and were never online at the same time.
I read the links but found no concrete information on what this is about, but "Registered Traveler ID Initiative" sounds very disconcerting.
I just watched "The Hunt for Red October" again last week. There's a scene where the would-be Soviet defector sub Captain (Sean Connery) and First Officer (Sam Niel) are discussing what they'll do in America. The first officer would like to live in Montana but says something like "I might buy a recreational vehicle and travel from state to state...they let you do that? No papers?" Captain: "No papers."
Annoying Picky APT Correction
on
Due Diligence?
·
· Score: 1
My Debian box was updated no more than 24 hours after I read about the problem, requiring nothing more that an apt-get update on my part. [link to Debian APT HOWTO added by me]
Um, I hope you did an apt-get upgrade, too, otherwise you have only a nice list of updated software that hasn't been installed on your Debian box.
I wouldn't mind trying GNU/Hurd.. but there aren't any screen shots to tempt me
It looks a LOT like Debian GNU/Linux. Go figure.:-) Seriously, the CD-builds are converted Debian GNU/Linux CDs. Some of the Linux specific stuff is still in the H3 CDs and I think the H4 CDs, too.
the Hurd works (mostly), but end-user-wise it's no different from any GNU/Linux distribution desktop (except for lack of virtual terminals [use screen, blah blah] and limited partition size), so there's really no need for screenshots.
Plus I don't know if the Hurd has any advantages to an end user right now. It's fun to play with translators, though.
I don't know about the whole engaging characters & complex storylines in games thing. My favorite games have always been completely devoid of any storyline at all.
Every now and then a game with a storyline has held my interest. King's Quest 6 jumps to mind as do a couple of the other King's Quest games.
RTS games like Warcraft, Starcraft and Command and Conquer, and turn-based strategy games like Civilization * and S.M. Alpha Centauri have story lines, but I don't think the story line adds any interest for me; for those games the interest is in building towards a goal, whether it be annihilating the enemy, becomming the biggest nation/faction or even self destruction and resurrection. And of course the different strategies for doing the above.
Quake and Doom types generally have stories in the manuals, but I don't care as long as I get to blow sh*t up and either get to the next level or outscore some network opponents.
Dragon's Lair was cool when it came out. The gameplay was annoying at times, and after a while it got old for me because I didn't get very far and therefore saw the same scenes over and over again. It was more fun for me to watch a good player play it and see what happens. I'm not going to pay US$50 for it, but I'll try to catch a demo at the store, and maybe I'll buy it when it drops to US$20. (I'm very patient.) It looks like they're keeping the characters true-to-2d animation while immersed in a 3d world.
I would assume they'll either remove the wings all together, or use spoilers of some sort. To weathervane, they don't need wings: just the tail.
The site claims to offer rails for the wings if you want. It said it would hold like 70 people per wing at 175 lbs apiece. They seemed to base this on flight charicteristics.
I can't believe these people are for real. They don't seem to have an existing converted plane to photograph and made a horrible digital rendering.
Sure, 727-200s are tough and made to take stress, but the ones in service go through regular scheduled maintenance checks mandated by the FAA. Aircraft maintenance hangars have ways of checking for metal fatigue and replace parts as needed. Also they are designed to take stress through the wings and main landing gear; I don't know how the body would do stuck up on a column year after year. Then there's the danger of galvanic corosion where your presumably stell support structure connects to the aluminum airframe.
Slashdot Mirror
and given the user interface description (ok, only half the story, but anyway), much easier to use.
So, you're saying a 3x4 phone keypad is much easier to use than Tapatap which displays a 3x3 grid? T9 which uses 3x3 of the keys for text input is fairly popular on US phones; I don't really see where the interface difference is.
Unless you're saying they'll use the mobile phone to call someone for the info they need. But they presumably already have a community land line for the Simputer modem, so they could just call using that instead of getting a mobile phone.
But who do you call that has the info they need at low or no cost?
When was the last time you called up 844-1111 (or whatever that number was) to get a bank-sponsored weather report for the day? You use the internet now, right? It's much cheaper to distribute information through the internet than through call centers.
If you go by that screenshot, that thing must have 1280 resolution. You gotta love people who Photoshop screen mockups of web pages onto PDAs.
LOL, read the caption for the photo. It says that the pictured unit has a black and white display. I never knew black and white was so colorful.
What I found interesting is that in that paragraph he pooh-poohed the $250 community device with simple-to-understand user interface (his description) and text-to-speech capability to help the illiterate and suggests that high-end text messaging mobile phones may usurp its purpose.
Cellular phones aren't cheap. We Americans think they are sometimes, but try to buy one without signing up for a year of service. They are US$300-US$500 last I checked (Nextel Motorola i500's and i1000's at Office Depot w/out service). That figure doesn't necessarily fairly compare with the quoted $250 for the Simputer because my cell phone price is USD in a US retail store and they will likely be much cheaper in the "developing world", and I presume the quoted $250 for the Simputer would be the "developing world" price.
Plus a cellular phone requires an ongoing expense. Depending on how they set it all up, they may pay a relitavely high price for the phones and low price for service or vice versa for one to offset the other, but I doubt this solution will be much cheaper than the Simputer even if they share one mobile phone for text messaging.
You could also think about it this way. McDonalds is a part of the American Landscape.
So are violent crime, Marlboro billboards and phone sex ads. Should any of those be in Sims, too?
he guest-starred on an album released with Ben Folds called "Fear of Pop" a few years ago - it's really friggin' good
Cool, that link has Real Player streaming samples. Shatner's contribution is audible in track 5: "In Love - David Davidson".
AH! Here is Shatner's "Transformed Man" album with a sample of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" for those of you who haven't heard it. Unfortunately the sample is small and doesn't capture the whole performance, but you get the idea.
OMG Amazon says "Transformed Man" starts at US$75!!!
LOL, you have to listen to all the samples.
Also I have noticed that most linux games based on GL really crawl on my machine.
Assuming you mean when running under X and Linux, run glxinfo from a shell. Near the top will be "direct rendering: yes" (or no). If it's no then you're running software OpenGL instead of hardware accelerated OpenGL.
[story of late-ticket-good-seating for Episode 1]
Yeah, I saw episode one on the first day; I bought the ticket 30 minutes ahead of time and had a half empty theater at 7pm. This was in Decatur, TX (about 40 minutes NW of Fort Worth). The trick is to head out of town (I lived in Fort Worth then) and catch a theater in a small town. Not usually as nicely furnished as the megatheaters in town, but the film is new and the crowd is small, and you can't beat that.
Plus, there's something about Texas small towns and beautiful young women. They really know how to grow 'em. I'm in Indiana now and the small town women are scary looking. Must be a corn vs. beef thing.
Is that the sister of the MSN butterfly guy?
Are you planning on releasing any new songs soon?
(Anyone ever heard him sing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?)
LOL, I just saw Showtime on DVD last week. Not the best movie, but it was hilarious to see William Shatner try to give Robert Dinero advice on how to act like a cop.
Can't wait to see the funny comments in this thread.
... the difference is that with cc transactions the company you are buying from gets a bill from the credit card processing company for using the service, a fee that the company would not have had with a paper transaction.
But the cc transactions don't require safes and armored cars or as much in-store security to protect the revenue. They don't require as much hands-on-money action as cash or checks do. Not all of the cost it billed by one bank, but the costs are real. The credit card companies take care of a lot of the security for you with their financial network and bill you for that. If you accepted only credit cards at a retail outlet your local security and transport security needs would diminish.
What it comes down to is you have to pay the workers to cover the cash register anyway, but you don't have to pay the charges to use a cc processing company.
But the workers spend as much as an hour of their shift checking out/checking in their cash drawers and accounting for their checks. The CC transactions are pretty much handled by the registers. Add in the aforementioned security measures and counterfeit and bad check problems and the cost of handling paper is not trivial. That reminds me, almost everyone who takes checks pays Verisign or a similar company to help them with avoiding check problems; more money for non-cc transactions.
My point is that I don't think it's fair to pass on the cc fee to the consumer directly because there is a cost of some sort with any type of transaction.
But all that said, I'm not a big fan of credit cards. They are designed to suck everyone's money and credit completely dry and do a good job of it. Quick tip: avoid any card whose bank is in Delaware. Most loose usury laws in the USA.
My boss gets lots of complaints because we pass the 3% credit card charge on directly. Like somehow people who pay with cash or check should subsidize the credit industry.
But doesn't handling cash and checks cost money, too? Armored cars and local security to guard the cash, and someone gets paid to take the checks to the bank. I don't know if it compares to credit card fees, but don't discount the cost of cash and checks.
I recently downloaded FreeBSD 4.7, Red Hat 7.3 and KNOPPIX ISOs and am now downloading Slackware 8.1 packages. I tried searching for some of these on p2p (Limewire and Kazaa) but couldn't find them. (I used mirror sites instead.)
Limewire is Gnutella1, right? So it can see any Gnutella1 nodes or just other Limewire nodes? This is one thing I wasn't able to determine for sure about Gnutella.
I would really like to see most opensource available p2p, but my early tries are returning little.
(By the way, I installed Limewire and Kazaa on their own little PC with a bare install of Win95. I didn't install these on my main system for fear of adware/spyware.)
Not to mention that to some insects, the materials used to laminate circuit boards and some plastics that compose the electronics, are amazingly tasty...
I've seen ants in electronics before, but I didn't know they like the plastics in there. That might explain my wierdest and experience: they established a colony, complete with queen and larvae, in my 3-ring bound paper reference manuals (about computers and electronics). These manuals were in milk-like plastic crates in the back of my van, away from anywhere that might have traditional food such as crumbs (I never ate back there) or anything organic. They were, as best as I can tell, eating the white plastic 3-ring-bound card in front of the pages (you know, the thingy to keep the pages from getting caught funny when you close the binder). They only liked the white one, though, not the black ones or the vinyl in the binder cover.
Personally, I think a USB or legacy serial interface would be more useful and far more universal. Why don't we have these? Perhaps we can convert one of camera flash card readers (you know, the ones that plug into a parallel port) to take SDRAM DIMMS.
Many people don't realise how much of a difference going from 128M to 256M or 256M to 384 or so makes.
Or how going from 64mb to 192mb will turn a PII 266 into a surprisingly usable multitasking desktop, for example. RAM does wonders for slower processors running recent OSes and applications.
Reading the story you find out this is not a national ID system.
and...
This system is not for you, the everyday individual.
Read it again. What you describe is:
(From the article:)
The Transportation Worker ID Card: Vision for the Future
Elaine Charney, TWIC Program Manager, Transportation Security Administration
Read the next line down:
The Registered Traveler ID Initiative
Mike Barrett, Registered Traveler Program Manager, Transportation Security Administration
Regestered Traveler ID Initiative? Registered Traveler Program? The problem is there is no additional information as to what this means, but it sure sounds like this would cover you and I flying (or even driving?) from Indy to DFW.
But there's no additional info so it's hard to comment intelligently about it. Perhaps they just rever to visitors/workers with visas. Perhaps only certain people will need it. Perhaps you can avoid it by wearing a tin hat. Perhaps we'll all have government barcodes and Lojacks implanted. Too little info and a scary sounding title make for some upset Slashdotters.
Very good point about peer-peer distribution. The availability increases with demand.
A big potential problem I can see is the cost for the peers. We're already seeing some ISP implement bandwidth caps. If we take this concept to the extreme example of everything becoming peer-peer then I would expect consumer bandwidth costs to skyrocket, at least for any constantly utilized p2p nodes.
Another problem may be reluctant node operators. I just recently read into FreeNet. I feel a bit unconfortable with the idea that my node may be used to assist with untraceable kiddie porn or cult/nutty militia propoganda or other material that I find objectionable or even illegal. (Read the FreeNet faq about this very concern and counter points.) I'll probably get over this and give it a try, but I expect many others won't get over it.
This would be an excellent model for much of the type of things we read on Slashdot, such as a geek with a cool project and a low-bandwidth server that gets pummelled for two days and then is far less busy afterward. A FreeNet-distributed site would respond to the demand but not cost the author additional money or grief. Or perhaps a programmer starts and open-source project that gets ignored until version 0.4 and then people notice it does something cool and works and then the demand skyrockets. Typically projects have to relocate to handle the traffic, but no relocation would be necessary in a FreeNet-like distribution system.
The real irony with this story is that mail is peer-peer, anyway. Yahoo is basically charging for high availability online storage, otherwise you could just have a service that knows when you're online and points to your local SMTP agent when you're online. The sender's SMTP agent already holds the email if the receiving server is unavailable and retries periodically. The only problem with this would be if both sender and recipient ran their own SMTP agents and were never online at the same time.
I read the links but found no concrete information on what this is about, but "Registered Traveler ID Initiative" sounds very disconcerting.
I just watched "The Hunt for Red October" again last week. There's a scene where the would-be Soviet defector sub Captain (Sean Connery) and First Officer (Sam Niel) are discussing what they'll do in America. The first officer would like to live in Montana but says something like "I might buy a recreational vehicle and travel from state to state...they let you do that? No papers?" Captain: "No papers."
My Debian box was updated no more than 24 hours after I read about the problem, requiring nothing more that an apt-get update on my part. [link to Debian APT HOWTO added by me]
Um, I hope you did an apt-get upgrade , too, otherwise you have only a nice list of updated software that hasn't been installed on your Debian box.
That's why in Europe there are not 900MHz phones.
In Europe the eqiuvalent is 868-870MHz..
Well, those Europeans can KEEP their stupid metric system. SAE was good enough for my grandpappy, and it's good enough for me!
I wouldn't mind trying GNU/Hurd.. but there aren't any screen shots to tempt me
:-) Seriously, the CD-builds are converted Debian GNU/Linux CDs. Some of the Linux specific stuff is still in the H3 CDs and I think the H4 CDs, too.
It looks a LOT like Debian GNU/Linux. Go figure.
the Hurd works (mostly), but end-user-wise it's no different from any GNU/Linux distribution desktop (except for lack of virtual terminals [use screen, blah blah] and limited partition size), so there's really no need for screenshots.
Plus I don't know if the Hurd has any advantages to an end user right now. It's fun to play with translators, though.
I'm really surprised to hear that so many /.ers found DL interesting.
:-)
But the girl was HOT. (To a 12-year old boy.) She's the only cartoon character I ever had sexual fantasies about.
I don't know about the whole engaging characters & complex storylines in games thing. My favorite games have always been completely devoid of any storyline at all.
Every now and then a game with a storyline has held my interest. King's Quest 6 jumps to mind as do a couple of the other King's Quest games.
RTS games like Warcraft, Starcraft and Command and Conquer, and turn-based strategy games like Civilization * and S.M. Alpha Centauri have story lines, but I don't think the story line adds any interest for me; for those games the interest is in building towards a goal, whether it be annihilating the enemy, becomming the biggest nation/faction or even self destruction and resurrection. And of course the different strategies for doing the above.
Quake and Doom types generally have stories in the manuals, but I don't care as long as I get to blow sh*t up and either get to the next level or outscore some network opponents.
Dragon's Lair was cool when it came out. The gameplay was annoying at times, and after a while it got old for me because I didn't get very far and therefore saw the same scenes over and over again. It was more fun for me to watch a good player play it and see what happens. I'm not going to pay US$50 for it, but I'll try to catch a demo at the store, and maybe I'll buy it when it drops to US$20. (I'm very patient.) It looks like they're keeping the characters true-to-2d animation while immersed in a 3d world.
I would assume they'll either remove the wings all together, or use spoilers of some sort. To weathervane, they don't need wings: just the tail.
The site claims to offer rails for the wings if you want. It said it would hold like 70 people per wing at 175 lbs apiece. They seemed to base this on flight charicteristics.
I can't believe these people are for real. They don't seem to have an existing converted plane to photograph and made a horrible digital rendering.
Sure, 727-200s are tough and made to take stress, but the ones in service go through regular scheduled maintenance checks mandated by the FAA. Aircraft maintenance hangars have ways of checking for metal fatigue and replace parts as needed. Also they are designed to take stress through the wings and main landing gear; I don't know how the body would do stuck up on a column year after year. Then there's the danger of galvanic corosion where your presumably stell support structure connects to the aluminum airframe.