Wasteful printing

The university charges students about $0.10 per page to copy or print on university computers. Students who are in upper division classes requiring a lot of journal reading, and writing lengthy papers, often find this to be costly. However, everyone recognizes that paper costs money, and that free printing leads hastily to abuse of the privilege.

On top of the direct cost to students of printing, there also is the environmental cost of paper usage. It appears that much of the paper used on campus is not recycled, meaning that each piece of paper used represents a much larger input of virgin timber and fuels, chemicals, etc. for processing than necessary. Paper recycling on this campus is unimpressive, suggesting that much of this first-use paper ends up in a landfill after one use.

So why then is it that so many of the printers in computer labs either are defaulted to single sided printing, or do not even have the option to print double sided? I suspect the reason is laziness. My suggestion: replace the printers that print only single sided, and default all computers to print double sided. Any professor who requires single sided papers should be asked to pay the difference.

Colin Tucker

Biology and wildlife

Ph.D. student

Flat-screens pointless

Recently, I've noticed that both the Bunnell and Node computer labs have been equipped with large, Samsung flat-screens monitors. These monitors display a myriad of benign information, and the one in Bunnell isn't even really visible from most areas in the lab.

Question: Why do we need them? Any of the information displayed could be displayed as a screen saver, and lab hours could be posted -- gasp -- on actual SIGNS. Talk about unnecessary spending -- how about replacing the keyboards from the time before Christ in Bunnell?

The consumer list price for these is about $850. No doubt UAF got them cheaper, but wasting any amount of money on something that gives nothing back whatsoever to thestudents is ludicrous.

Trista Saunders

Biology student

Young lies about Abe

Did you see our Alaskan Rep. Don Young stood up in the U.S. Congress and used a fake, made-up quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, created by right-wing Republicans to justify this illegal war in Iraq?

Young lied about Lincoln! He should resign, at least. He owes Alaskans and all Americans justification for his lies.

How stupid is he? How stupid do the Republicans think Alaskans are?

Young was featured as MSNBC's "Worst Person in the World" on Friday on "Countdown" for his lies. Quite an honor in stupidity. How sad for Alaskans.

Dave Voth

Juneau