I’m not complaining about CNN’s content and professionalism, I’m complaining about the inability to avoid it at an airport. Hearing the news is fine, hearing it endlessly for hours is refined torture. Like the bus TV, it’s something you can’t turn off or escape.
They’re both incredibly obnoxious.

I regard Transit TV the same way I regard Airport TV. Airport TV is always tuned to CNN and if your flight is delayed (as it almost always is) you’re subjected to hours of the news—repeated endlessly, loudly, maddeningly.

Both are an obnoxious intrusion on my ability to sit and read (or think) quietly.

Obviously there’s a significant cost to having 1/3 of your architecture Windows, 1/3 Linux, and 1/3 Mac; most schools are going to have to pick one and stick with it… most likely which ever one is on the PCs that get donated to them. And we can’t have a soda machine from every brand in every school. I guess my point was just that there are definitely teams in many marketing departments who focus solely on how to get their brands into schools, and I think it’s important to be aware of that. Whether the taxpayer-funded org is picking the most sensible vendor for their needs or erecting barriers to competition is perhaps a matter of perspective.

MA’s move to ODF is an interesting instance of a state trying to avoid doing just this (amongst other reasons). I can tell you that — while it has gotten better in recent years with the rise of PDF — there’s no way my company’s public sector practice could ditch Office, because almost all state governments have Office (and Office only) in their standard desktop image.

How I managed to go from a Coke machine to MS Office… your guess is as good as mine.

But DO PLEASE ride the bus; we need your fare.

To write there contact me.

thanks
Bill

Dan, have to disagree with you and at the end of the day, you’re talking about maybe tens of thousands of dollars here anyways. On it’s own, that’s a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of the kind of budget MPS has, it’s nothing. I personally would rather pay an extra $0.02 per year on my property taxes to send my kids to a place that didn’t resemble Times Square.

What’s interesting is I’ve heard a lot of conservative parents express a similar feeling about sending their kids to a school system where that doesn’t re-enforce their values or beliefs. Along the same lines, how can I even consider sending my kids to an environment for 8 hours a day that directly contradicts with what I’m trying to teach at home, you know?

You’d think if there was one thing that public schooling would make sure they took care of, it would be teaching people to handle money. It’s been a while since I’ve used trigonometric substitution while integrating, but I can remember pretty well the last time I had to handle money, given that it was a couple hours ago.

What do you think about schools allowing soda and snack machines from certain vendors? Advertising in schools gives me the heebies too, but I also see that it’s already there. I walked by a huge Coke machine every day on my way to gym class in elementary school. We should probably pick one way or the other and go with it, rather than favoring a tiny few of vendors who want the ability to target such key demographics.

Thanks for giving me another reason not to ride the bus.

I used to live in NYC and the subways and buses always carried ads. But they were silent posters—nothing that demanded attention or interfered with reading or thinking.

MPS needs to do an assessment of the revenue they (reasonably) expect to garner, and look at that sum and ask themselves just What it would buy that a penny on your property taxes would not buy. Yes, a penny. TTV revenue would be covered with a fraction of a penny per fare. Meanwhile it irritates the riders of choice that Transit needs to serve.

Bill Sell