Ummm.. isn't that really the only reason you every purchase flood insurance? I don't purchase flood insurance for my house sitting atop this hill here.
In insurance there is a term called "negative selectability", and it refers to insurance that is largely taken by those at a high probability of collecting on it, but without the subsidization of all of the people who are at a low risk. No insurance company wants that, so for products where there is a high occurrence of negative selectability, they just don't offer that. Flood insurance is one of the best examples of this, where the only people who take the insurance are the people who are likely to make a claim.
... not dead, no. Pay-per-click pretty much makes up all of Google's revenue stream today.
Not only Google's revenue stream, but the vast bulk of quazi-commercial websites out there (e.g. a large number of the sites linked to by Slashdot).
Google brought advertising to the low-end with Adsense, which is a performance based ad system (e.g. pay per click rather than impression). Prior to Adsense, most low-end sites were trying to recoup hosting fees with affiliate links with sites like Amazon (which led to some whoring conflicts of interest).
What future is that? Are you saying we'll have to check in with the government every so often or be terminated?
OMG! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! PANIC! NOTHING MATTERS ANYMORE!
The myopia on here is astounding. Here's the thing, benjamindees - The Gulf coast will recover. Those people will probably want jobs, and will probably want normal essential infrastructures to get back and going in modern society. A tragedy happened, but ultimately things will get back to normal (a lot quicker than armchair quarterbacks like yourself think), and these things will be crucially important. Or do you think that it's all stone-age from here on in?
Are you really that much of an idiot, and did you really miss the point that astoundingly?
99% of America, and about 99.999% of the world, is doing absolutely nothing more than a bit of moralizing about what everyone else should be doing, maybe providing a bit of armchair analysis of what people should or shouldn't do. Here some people decided to use a bit of brainpower for good, perhaps using technology to help assist the recovery (and for those who think technology has no place - thankfully you aren't in any position of power and instead are just useless automatons typing on a keyboard somewhere), or to help prevent this sort of descent to chaos in the future. I highly suspect that everyone of the idiots postulating what is right or wrong to talk about themselves have done dick all - zilch, nothing, nada - to help the people of New Orleans, but instead they toss off some moralizing (just before they toss off to porn) about what everyone else should be doing.
People killed, property destroyed, mass reverted at "Lord of the Flyes" level. And people talking about WiMax and Ham radio.
Jesus, here's this bullshit again. MY GOD MAN, PEOPLE ARE DROWNING AND HERE YOU ARE POSTING ON INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD! GOOD GOD MAN, GET SOME PERSPECTIVE!
Here's the thing, though I realize this message will be missed by all of the pseudo morally righteous as they continue their campaign to post "Good god, won't anyone think of the..." messages to every message board: We, as a generalization of the Slashdot community, are in the technology arena.
We do not produce food, filter water, or build dikes. We do technology. You get that? Does every "Why won't someone thing of the..." moron understand this very simple point? This is our domain. Maybe it isn't the most important necessity of life, but it's what we know (and other people are taking care of the other areas, and there is NOTHING WE CAN DO to help get food or water there quicker, or to restore law and order).
As such, in the grand composite intermix that is modern society, the people who do technology ponder how they can leverage their knowledge and skills to get society up and running. Because, as I'm sure you're aware, the goal isn't just to setup a third-world state in New Orleans, but to get society running again there so people can live and work and play, and not just sit on their stacks of water and food because that's all that LkDotCom thought mattered.
Do you have Asperger's Syndrome? I'm 100% serious.
People had online diaries long before the term blog was coined (indeed, it's what most Geocities sites were). The term blog was coined in relation to a general format of online diary, and a generalized method of posting entries (which was the very generic textarea style entry). It is the ease of entry of all blogs that has led to the mainstream acceptance, not the fact that it's an online diary.
I think most people recognized the blogging craze as just that: a fad that will ebb along with every other fad...
I think you misinterpreted the article (just as I think the article misrepresents the topic). I don't think the case is really that geek blogs are on the decline, and there are as many that remain very important in the geek community. However, as blogging has gone mainstream, the geek blogger has been dwarfed by the mainstream blogger, thus losing relational rankings in things like the top 100. This doesn't mean that it declined except in a top 100 ranking, and these bloggers could have 3x the readership they had a year before and still faced the same decline.
Nonetheless I do think you're right - blogging is just the second wave of Geocities accounts, and just like the first wave it'll fade. I doubt it would have garnered nearly the popularity it has if not for Adsense making advertising income available to the pedestrian level.
This is the only thing close to a neutral study...
ARE YOU KIDDING? That piece of Slashdot karma-whoring claptrap was universally panned as being rife with terribly amateur errors and omissions, and the only people who took it seriously were the people who felt it vindicated their position. Petreley is an absolute laughing stock moron whose only readership is a couple of die-hard Linux zealots.
I wilke to play the baseless speculation game. What can I THINK some company is doing based on my limited knowledge?
There are countless writers out there whose job is to do exactly that - to speculate and postulate how organizations, the markets, and the world are going to change. Perhaps you're the sort that simply waits for the world to change around you, always on the trailing edge, but a lot of people like to be in a position where they're not just along for the ride.
What I'd really like to know is why you felt it so important to purportedly read the article, and then to comment on it? If speculation isn't your cup of tea, then move on. Instead I think you're driven by some sort of desperate Google-love, fanatical in your quest to piss on those who dare to question the almighty Google. That particular disease is pretty rampant around these parts.
That's how the game is played, the harder you work and less you complain the more likely you will have a job. This whining about outsourcing is just a bunch of over-priviledged people who are used to having it easy.
You sound like an Uncle Tom - "Yes massa, I'll work hard without complaint, because that's my lot in life". What a load of bullshit, and it's an attitude that will guarantee you a lower class hard working existence until you die.
In the enlightened world, people are less servile and aren't confused into thinking that brainless hard work makes them worthwhile, and prefer to work smart while looking out for #1 (themselves). It's for this reason that self-employment and extreme capitalism is so common in North America and Europe. It's why most of the hard working, non-complainers are working for large Western corporations, that are full of endless ranks of idle middle-managers. Feel proud.
On the other hand, the industrious hard working folk of Somewhere in SomeThirdWorldNation can feel foolishly confident and proud that their meager paradoxically existence guaranteeing them a job, until BigCo decides that the pickings are even better in North Korea, and moves on. Already many large corporations are grumbling about India's tech sector being "too priviledged", to use your servile talking points.
In the end, though, I completely agree with you - Any sort of protectionist or entitled grumblings are misled, and ultimately those who are downtrodden about outsourcing just need to look at the massive and continuing tech industry right here in North America. A tech industry that is actually growing, despite the fact that workers are demanding more and more (some niches are back up to over-100K average salaries. Again, feel great about the fact that you've been suckered into working for 6 rupees a day).
"Security in Java is multi layered and complex, you cannot possibly cover all its faces."
Yeah, scientists and archeologists are still uncovering the layers of Java security. One day, hopefully manking can have a cursory knowledge of the amazing depth of Java.
".Net managed code is very rare and all.NET applications I know of (that are real applications) use native code thus removing any sense of security.".NET's primary marketplace has been in supplanting Visual Basic for corporate internal applications. I have worked on several large scale.NET applications, and it is extremely uncommon for the teams to ever use anything other than Managed code. The primary reason is simply that these are people that aren't going to be dropping to Visual C++ and spitting out COM objects.
"Java has had years of full source code visibility (not open source) and had several holes plugged by the community,.NET has no such thing."
See, the whole open-source=secure argument has sorta been disputed by history. This is doubly true when you're talking about something that pretty much no one is passionate about (Java). Of course all of this is ignoring the fact that Sun released the source only to stave off impending doom.
"Saying that.NET is more secure is just about the stupidest thing someone can say..."
Well, I guess now that you've said that, it must be true! Colour me converted!
See the funny thing is that.NET security does have weaknesses. I have never, for instance, seen a shop (Even large corporations) using code access security. Few in the.NET arena understand the Global Assembly or configured assemblies. Instead security, like many MS projects before it, is completely and uttery ignored.
Am I the only one that thinks that article doesn't make too much sense?
The article makes total sense - you're just looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Instead you need to look at it from a Google-Adsense-Whore's perspective. A perspective where one needs to write vague, technically undemanding article that pander to a large, easily herded sheep like online community. You plan on spreading the vacuous words over tiny little pages, each with the requisite AdSense ads.
3. Profit!
From that perspective they did wonderfully, and completely followed the template of about half of the submissions posted on Slashdot. Anyways, I have to go: I'm just finishing "2006: The Year of Linux?". At only 2000 words I still managed to spread it over 60 pages, which I think is quite an accomplishment.
HDMI supports DRM too, and is pretty much going to be the standard in the future.
DVI supports DRM too - it's HDCP, and it's the same protocol on either a DVI or a HDMI wire.
Was this story actually printed 2 years ago and they were talking about HDMI versus DVI, because I see nothing that differentiates it from HDMI (which is audio and video on a single cable, HDCP, and so on).
2. Your visitors don't realize they're clicking on an ad
mininova.org achives #2 absolutely brilliantly - a friend of a friend has accidentally clicked on the dynamically expanding ads on that site probably several dozen times (as the ad expands right into the space of the link you're about to click).
Sorry to be cynical here but they are running AdSense and need to raise more revenue....
Especially given that their way of boosting Adsense revenue was to place more Adsense banners on each page (ridiculously placing three vertical banner Adsense ads side by side. This technique would be logical if they were paid by impression, but for a pay for click it's self defeating).
The reality, however, is that the sort of generalist technology stories they write, appealing to the interested lay person, will yield next to no Adsense clicks - I mean they have a story on ice transforming chipmaking, with adsense ads selling things like silicon wafers, and ultra thin diamond blades. There is no way the general readers are going to care about the items those ads are selling, and it's in that sort of context that Adsense is just terribly ineffective (as it is on many pages). They'd be better serve by market targeted ads (e.g. the average visitor is a software developer, so cups and funny hats) rather than keyword driven ads.
Of course the biggest problem seems to be, like others have mentioned, that their primary "publishing" is simply repackaging stuff they find elsewhere -- there are already far too many of those sites on the net. Having 200,000 visitors means nothing if they all fly-back quickly.
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston.
While I'll happily concede if you can name a credible source, I did search and found that this is an urban myth that the slackjawed right-wingers use to imagine that the rest of the world is to blame, rather than themselves. There is, according to what I can find (in actual credible news) zero proof that any of the 9/11 terrorists ever touched foot in Canada. Instead they were busy spending their time taking advantage of all the US had to offer.
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston
You have a source for this? I realize that it became a meme that terrorists came from Canada, and it is true that Rassam came from Canada on an attempt to bomb LAX, however it was my impression, and this was reiterated many times, that not one of the 9-11 terrorists came through Canada. Not that it matters anyways, as ferry or not they're still going through US Customs, and thus it's still up to the US to maintain its security (just as it does, or rather didn't do, when all of the others flew right in and should have raised every red flag).
Because it's the bosses job to make you do your job, and often people don't like to be made to do their jobs. There's your answer.
If you're a boss anywhere other than a greasy spoon or a low-level assembly line, then you're a terrible, terrible boss. Your understanding of what a boss is could not be further from the truth.
A bosses job is to empower and motivate (or at least avoid demotivating) their charges. To do so such that their charges achieve, or are on the track of, their own goals.
The reality, which you apparently miss, is that most people WANT to be promoted, and to release great products, and to be recognizes for their efforts. When it degrades to a boss making them do their job, the relationship is dysfunctional.
The US exported about $800 billion worth of goods last year. In the same period China exported about $500 billion worth of goods, while Japan exported about $550 billion. Of course the US slaves out the dirty work to people around the globe (where they hilariously gloat, as if they're in a superior position), herself largely dedicated to large capital goods.
Um, so you think 5 bills is somehow 1000 laptops? It's an analogy, obviously, demonstrating that it's a completely unfair and unequal distribution among a very small subsection of the taxpayer base. It's a completely bullshit way of trying to supply charity.
Errr, so if the schoolboard over-taxes, but every year gives out 5 shiny $1,000 bills to the first five people to battle through a gauntlet, they're fulfilling their mandate?
You have a pretty screwed up concept of governmental economics.
Just wanted to say thanks for a laugh. As you mentioned in retrospect it looks like a bad place for a kid, but before the "event" there doesn't seem to be any reason why a parent couldn't bring a child.
But at least they would have maximized the cash flow, which is the most important thing, right?
Uh...yes? Maximizing revenue to allow the schoolboard to fulfill its mandate, rather than acting as some sort of terribly inefficient, and undoubtedly seriously abused, charity computer distribution network. I'll bet that over half of those laptops end up on ebay in a day or two anyways, with no benefit to the schoolboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm.. isn't that really the only reason you every purchase flood insurance? I don't purchase flood insurance for my house sitting atop this hill here.
In insurance there is a term called "negative selectability", and it refers to insurance that is largely taken by those at a high probability of collecting on it, but without the subsidization of all of the people who are at a low risk. No insurance company wants that, so for products where there is a high occurrence of negative selectability, they just don't offer that. Flood insurance is one of the best examples of this, where the only people who take the insurance are the people who are likely to make a claim.
Not only Google's revenue stream, but the vast bulk of quazi-commercial websites out there (e.g. a large number of the sites linked to by Slashdot).
Google brought advertising to the low-end with Adsense, which is a performance based ad system (e.g. pay per click rather than impression). Prior to Adsense, most low-end sites were trying to recoup hosting fees with affiliate links with sites like Amazon (which led to some whoring conflicts of interest).
What future is that? Are you saying we'll have to check in with the government every so often or be terminated?
OMG! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! PANIC! NOTHING MATTERS ANYMORE!
The myopia on here is astounding. Here's the thing, benjamindees - The Gulf coast will recover. Those people will probably want jobs, and will probably want normal essential infrastructures to get back and going in modern society. A tragedy happened, but ultimately things will get back to normal (a lot quicker than armchair quarterbacks like yourself think), and these things will be crucially important. Or do you think that it's all stone-age from here on in?
Are you really that much of an idiot, and did you really miss the point that astoundingly?
99% of America, and about 99.999% of the world, is doing absolutely nothing more than a bit of moralizing about what everyone else should be doing, maybe providing a bit of armchair analysis of what people should or shouldn't do. Here some people decided to use a bit of brainpower for good, perhaps using technology to help assist the recovery (and for those who think technology has no place - thankfully you aren't in any position of power and instead are just useless automatons typing on a keyboard somewhere), or to help prevent this sort of descent to chaos in the future. I highly suspect that everyone of the idiots postulating what is right or wrong to talk about themselves have done dick all - zilch, nothing, nada - to help the people of New Orleans, but instead they toss off some moralizing (just before they toss off to porn) about what everyone else should be doing.
People killed, property destroyed, mass reverted at "Lord of the Flyes" level. And people talking about WiMax and Ham radio.
Jesus, here's this bullshit again. MY GOD MAN, PEOPLE ARE DROWNING AND HERE YOU ARE POSTING ON INTERNET MESSAGE BOARD! GOOD GOD MAN, GET SOME PERSPECTIVE!
Here's the thing, though I realize this message will be missed by all of the pseudo morally righteous as they continue their campaign to post "Good god, won't anyone think of the..." messages to every message board: We, as a generalization of the Slashdot community, are in the technology arena.
We do not produce food, filter water, or build dikes. We do technology. You get that? Does every "Why won't someone thing of the..." moron understand this very simple point? This is our domain. Maybe it isn't the most important necessity of life, but it's what we know (and other people are taking care of the other areas, and there is NOTHING WE CAN DO to help get food or water there quicker, or to restore law and order).
As such, in the grand composite intermix that is modern society, the people who do technology ponder how they can leverage their knowledge and skills to get society up and running. Because, as I'm sure you're aware, the goal isn't just to setup a third-world state in New Orleans, but to get society running again there so people can live and work and play, and not just sit on their stacks of water and food because that's all that LkDotCom thought mattered.
Do you have Asperger's Syndrome? I'm 100% serious.
People had online diaries long before the term blog was coined (indeed, it's what most Geocities sites were). The term blog was coined in relation to a general format of online diary, and a generalized method of posting entries (which was the very generic textarea style entry). It is the ease of entry of all blogs that has led to the mainstream acceptance, not the fact that it's an online diary.
I think most people recognized the blogging craze as just that: a fad that will ebb along with every other fad...
I think you misinterpreted the article (just as I think the article misrepresents the topic). I don't think the case is really that geek blogs are on the decline, and there are as many that remain very important in the geek community. However, as blogging has gone mainstream, the geek blogger has been dwarfed by the mainstream blogger, thus losing relational rankings in things like the top 100. This doesn't mean that it declined except in a top 100 ranking, and these bloggers could have 3x the readership they had a year before and still faced the same decline.
Nonetheless I do think you're right - blogging is just the second wave of Geocities accounts, and just like the first wave it'll fade. I doubt it would have garnered nearly the popularity it has if not for Adsense making advertising income available to the pedestrian level.
This is the only thing close to a neutral study...
ARE YOU KIDDING? That piece of Slashdot karma-whoring claptrap was universally panned as being rife with terribly amateur errors and omissions, and the only people who took it seriously were the people who felt it vindicated their position. Petreley is an absolute laughing stock moron whose only readership is a couple of die-hard Linux zealots.
I wilke to play the baseless speculation game. What can I THINK some company is doing based on my limited knowledge?
There are countless writers out there whose job is to do exactly that - to speculate and postulate how organizations, the markets, and the world are going to change. Perhaps you're the sort that simply waits for the world to change around you, always on the trailing edge, but a lot of people like to be in a position where they're not just along for the ride.
What I'd really like to know is why you felt it so important to purportedly read the article, and then to comment on it? If speculation isn't your cup of tea, then move on. Instead I think you're driven by some sort of desperate Google-love, fanatical in your quest to piss on those who dare to question the almighty Google. That particular disease is pretty rampant around these parts.
That's how the game is played, the harder you work and less you complain the more likely you will have a job. This whining about outsourcing is just a bunch of over-priviledged people who are used to having it easy.
You sound like an Uncle Tom - "Yes massa, I'll work hard without complaint, because that's my lot in life". What a load of bullshit, and it's an attitude that will guarantee you a lower class hard working existence until you die.
In the enlightened world, people are less servile and aren't confused into thinking that brainless hard work makes them worthwhile, and prefer to work smart while looking out for #1 (themselves). It's for this reason that self-employment and extreme capitalism is so common in North America and Europe. It's why most of the hard working, non-complainers are working for large Western corporations, that are full of endless ranks of idle middle-managers. Feel proud.
On the other hand, the industrious hard working folk of Somewhere in SomeThirdWorldNation can feel foolishly confident and proud that their meager paradoxically existence guaranteeing them a job, until BigCo decides that the pickings are even better in North Korea, and moves on. Already many large corporations are grumbling about India's tech sector being "too priviledged", to use your servile talking points.
In the end, though, I completely agree with you - Any sort of protectionist or entitled grumblings are misled, and ultimately those who are downtrodden about outsourcing just need to look at the massive and continuing tech industry right here in North America. A tech industry that is actually growing, despite the fact that workers are demanding more and more (some niches are back up to over-100K average salaries. Again, feel great about the fact that you've been suckered into working for 6 rupees a day).
"Security in Java is multi layered and complex, you cannot possibly cover all its faces."
.NET applications I know of (that are real applications) use native code thus removing any sense of security." .NET's primary marketplace has been in supplanting Visual Basic for corporate internal applications. I have worked on several large scale .NET applications, and it is extremely uncommon for the teams to ever use anything other than Managed code. The primary reason is simply that these are people that aren't going to be dropping to Visual C++ and spitting out COM objects.
.NET has no such thing."
.NET is more secure is just about the stupidest thing someone can say..."
.NET security does have weaknesses. I have never, for instance, seen a shop (Even large corporations) using code access security. Few in the .NET arena understand the Global Assembly or configured assemblies. Instead security, like many MS projects before it, is completely and uttery ignored.
Yeah, scientists and archeologists are still uncovering the layers of Java security. One day, hopefully manking can have a cursory knowledge of the amazing depth of Java.
".Net managed code is very rare and all
"Java has had years of full source code visibility (not open source) and had several holes plugged by the community,
See, the whole open-source=secure argument has sorta been disputed by history. This is doubly true when you're talking about something that pretty much no one is passionate about (Java). Of course all of this is ignoring the fact that Sun released the source only to stave off impending doom.
"Saying that
Well, I guess now that you've said that, it must be true! Colour me converted!
See the funny thing is that
Am I the only one that thinks that article doesn't make too much sense?
The article makes total sense - you're just looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Instead you need to look at it from a Google-Adsense-Whore's perspective. A perspective where one needs to write vague, technically undemanding article that pander to a large, easily herded sheep like online community. You plan on spreading the vacuous words over tiny little pages, each with the requisite AdSense ads.
3. Profit!
From that perspective they did wonderfully, and completely followed the template of about half of the submissions posted on Slashdot. Anyways, I have to go: I'm just finishing "2006: The Year of Linux?". At only 2000 words I still managed to spread it over 60 pages, which I think is quite an accomplishment.
First post?
Why do none of the recent stories have posts?
HDMI supports DRM too, and is pretty much going to be the standard in the future.
DVI supports DRM too - it's HDCP, and it's the same protocol on either a DVI or a HDMI wire.
Was this story actually printed 2 years ago and they were talking about HDMI versus DVI, because I see nothing that differentiates it from HDMI (which is audio and video on a single cable, HDCP, and so on).
you are posting on slashdot, criticising news-repackagers?
Slashdot is, at least to most of the people I know, 90% the forum and, err, "community". The stories are simply the impetus for discussion.
2. Your visitors don't realize they're clicking on an ad
mininova.org achives #2 absolutely brilliantly - a friend of a friend has accidentally clicked on the dynamically expanding ads on that site probably several dozen times (as the ad expands right into the space of the link you're about to click).
Sorry to be cynical here but they are running AdSense and need to raise more revenue....
Especially given that their way of boosting Adsense revenue was to place more Adsense banners on each page (ridiculously placing three vertical banner Adsense ads side by side. This technique would be logical if they were paid by impression, but for a pay for click it's self defeating).
The reality, however, is that the sort of generalist technology stories they write, appealing to the interested lay person, will yield next to no Adsense clicks - I mean they have a story on ice transforming chipmaking, with adsense ads selling things like silicon wafers, and ultra thin diamond blades. There is no way the general readers are going to care about the items those ads are selling, and it's in that sort of context that Adsense is just terribly ineffective (as it is on many pages). They'd be better serve by market targeted ads (e.g. the average visitor is a software developer, so cups and funny hats) rather than keyword driven ads.
Of course the biggest problem seems to be, like others have mentioned, that their primary "publishing" is simply repackaging stuff they find elsewhere -- there are already far too many of those sites on the net. Having 200,000 visitors means nothing if they all fly-back quickly.
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston.
While I'll happily concede if you can name a credible source, I did search and found that this is an urban myth that the slackjawed right-wingers use to imagine that the rest of the world is to blame, rather than themselves. There is, according to what I can find (in actual credible news) zero proof that any of the 9/11 terrorists ever touched foot in Canada. Instead they were busy spending their time taking advantage of all the US had to offer.
6 of the 9-11 terrorists came through canada, on the catferry from NS to bar harbor to get to boston
You have a source for this? I realize that it became a meme that terrorists came from Canada, and it is true that Rassam came from Canada on an attempt to bomb LAX, however it was my impression, and this was reiterated many times, that not one of the 9-11 terrorists came through Canada. Not that it matters anyways, as ferry or not they're still going through US Customs, and thus it's still up to the US to maintain its security (just as it does, or rather didn't do, when all of the others flew right in and should have raised every red flag).
Because it's the bosses job to make you do your job, and often people don't like to be made to do their jobs. There's your answer.
If you're a boss anywhere other than a greasy spoon or a low-level assembly line, then you're a terrible, terrible boss. Your understanding of what a boss is could not be further from the truth.
A bosses job is to empower and motivate (or at least avoid demotivating) their charges. To do so such that their charges achieve, or are on the track of, their own goals.
The reality, which you apparently miss, is that most people WANT to be promoted, and to release great products, and to be recognizes for their efforts. When it degrades to a boss making them do their job, the relationship is dysfunctional.
The US exported about $800 billion worth of goods last year. In the same period China exported about $500 billion worth of goods, while Japan exported about $550 billion. Of course the US slaves out the dirty work to people around the globe (where they hilariously gloat, as if they're in a superior position), herself largely dedicated to large capital goods.
Um, so you think 5 bills is somehow 1000 laptops? It's an analogy, obviously, demonstrating that it's a completely unfair and unequal distribution among a very small subsection of the taxpayer base. It's a completely bullshit way of trying to supply charity.
So they were fulfilling their mandate.
Errr, so if the schoolboard over-taxes, but every year gives out 5 shiny $1,000 bills to the first five people to battle through a gauntlet, they're fulfilling their mandate?
You have a pretty screwed up concept of governmental economics.
Just wanted to say thanks for a laugh. As you mentioned in retrospect it looks like a bad place for a kid, but before the "event" there doesn't seem to be any reason why a parent couldn't bring a child.
But at least they would have maximized the cash flow, which is the most important thing, right?
Uh...yes? Maximizing revenue to allow the schoolboard to fulfill its mandate, rather than acting as some sort of terribly inefficient, and undoubtedly seriously abused, charity computer distribution network. I'll bet that over half of those laptops end up on ebay in a day or two anyways, with no benefit to the schoolboard.