It is the Marriott Grand Marquis at Times Square. Saw a show on it (Nova I think) and was happy when I checked in and found the system I'd seen on TV. The elevator bank is a cylinder, people enter the inside, and there are elevators along the outside of the cylinder. Obviously there is a passageway to get to the inside of the cylinder, as if you are walking through the cylinder wall. There is a touch pad there where you enter your floor. It immediately tells you the letter of the elevator you're supposed to stand in front of. You walk around the circle until you reach that elevator, and in less than 5 seconds the doors open. About half a dozen people get on. The elevator has no buttons on the inside other than the help button... the elevator already knows where it's going. You stop at about 3 or 4 floors and you get off on your floor. I don't know what it does then - I'm guessing that in busy "up" times, it shoots to the ground floor and handles the next group. Going down works exactly the same way. There is often a longer wait for the elevator, but it only stops 3 or 4 times at most before whisking you to the lobby. All in all, a revolutionary system... that little bit of extra info makes all the difference.

I was a Girder and Panel freak... There were two eras for the sets... The first era saw the plastic panels made out of a fairly sturdy plastic... don't know the formula, but it was a more cardboard like plastic. These sets also had red girders, and most notably, small plastic "toppers" for lack of a better word... they were like a really really short girder, but had the nubs that held the panels on, and could also serve to hold down the roof pieces.

The later sets that came out were basically the same, except the panels were made of a thicker, more flexible plastic, the girders were black instead of red, and there were no "toppers" as I'm calling them.

I'm assuming the recall was over those little toppers, which a kid could conceivably choke on. They were not made out of rubber. I don't recall any "rivets" at all, other than the nubs that you attached side panels to.

I used Girder and Panel with my model train sets and my race car sets. It allowed you to quickly and easily have multiple levels of train loops, and simulate a city with an elevated rail transit system. I also incorporated the old Aurora slot car sets for city traffic. Much of what I used was hand-me-down from my brother and sister who were 10 years older than me. But put it all on a 4'x8' plywood sheet and you had days and days of rainy weather activities. Those were halcyon days...

The problem with all electric cars is the charging... until an electric vehicle can be charged in the same time that a gasoline based car can be fueled, they will all be unacceptable to vast majority of drivers.

What IS viable in the next few years is the plug in hybrid, like the Volt or the plug in Prius. The major problem here is getting unit costs down to where the cars become acceptable from a pricing POV. The Volt certainly has work to do here, and I'm guessing the Prius plug in faces the same problem. Incremental improvements in costs of the batteries will slowly bring these cars into the mainstream in the next few years. Cars like the Volt are, by all accounts, just like driving existing gasoline cars, and have the advantage of allowing most daily commutes to be done electrically.

Here's the problem with your logic on capital punishment. I live in Connecticut, which has recently repealed the death penalty. Here is the reality: Before it was repealed, when a heinous crime was committed, the defendant was charged with the capital crime. They would be told by the prosecutor the state would seek the death penalty. In some cases, this was enough to get the defendant to plead to a lower crime, with life in prison without possibility of parole as the agreed punishment. This made sure that the perp never again would terrorize the public. And it was cheaper. In other cases, the state would pursue the death penalty because the crime was so particularly heinous. Google "Cheshire CT Murder" and you'll see the case where two career criminals, with an average of 20 felony convictions each, decided to rape and murder a mother and two teenage daughters because they "liked their car" and followed them home. This crime was so infamous, that even though the state had elected a democrat governor with a democrat legislature, they could not pass the repeal as the political backlash would have been too great. They waited until the next year when the defendants had been sentenced to death before repealing the death penalty for NEW capital crimes.

After it has been repealed, here is what has happened. With the death penalty off the table, the state could only seek life in prison without possibility of parole as it's biggest gun. So defendants now plead out to the lesser crimes with 25 year sentences instead, and are now eligible for parole. As such, there is no really good way of getting someone put away for life without bearing the previous cost of the death penalty cases, with their costly trials and endless appeals. So in reality, the state has saved no money, but now puts murders back on the street at some point. And the biggest irony is that existing death row inmates are now petitioning for their sentences to be reduced to life without parole under the equal treatment clauses under the constitution. This is still outstanding, but it is likely they will prevail. And the two murderers in Cheshire? Well, they are not yet a party to that case, as they are having their cases appealed first. Once that is done, and their appeals are denied, they'll attach themselves to this litigation, and I predict that their sentences will be reduced as well.

The fact of the matter is that none of this will save any money. The fact of the matter is that the old system worked well, since Connecticut never actually executed its death row inmates, except in one case where the murderer essentially committed state suicide by demanding his execution, and even then he had to represent himself, as no lawyer wanted to make that case for him. Other than him, Connecticut hadn't actually killed anyone for decades. But heinous criminals were kept behind bars for life, without the possibility of parole boards, early release programs, etc. releasing these monsters back into society.

But we're all better off now, right? Yeah, I agree. Now lets go gun shopping!

I'm SOOOO tired of this "customer" vs. "product" false dichotomy. I'm one of Google's customers. They service me and I pay them by using their service and allow them to target me with unobtrusive ads. Apple, OTOH, pays lip service to it's "customers" by hyping the fact that they now offer a phone that can get 4g service, which I've had for almost 2 years now. They still make money off of advertising, making me a "product" in your eyes, but better still, they charge you to buy their hardware, and their software, at exorbitant prices across the board compared to the other alternatives. They innovate by rounding the corners off their devices.

But back to the main point, when did I become the product just because a service is provided to me free of charge via an advertising model? Does this mean that I'm also a Slashdot product? Am I also a Wolfram Alpha product? Am I a product of the landowner who puts up a billboard next to the freeway I drive down?

Jeez louise, get a grip man. You already sold your soul to Google... does it really matter if they know where you go? They'll probably do something really evil, like put up an ad for a BBQ place that you didn't know was there, but that you'd really like to check out.

Caffeine! It's what fish crave!

I have purchased 2 cars through Hertz's Rent 2 Buy program. The first purchase was a very specific minivan that had a tow package installed (suspension but not a hitch). I bought it with about 40k miles on it. It was at least $2000 below KBB, and I've had it for 2 years now. It has given me NO trouble whatsoever. I just purchased a small SUV from their program and it was basically cherry. Again, $2000 below KBB and it too has been wonderful so far.

I've had a lot of people raise their eyebrow at this. They typically recount a story where they treated their rental like crap. But they've rented many cars. Most are rented at the airport by business people who drive to a hotel and an office, and back to the airport to go home. Most rentals are like that minus the horror stories you hear.

The nice thing about the Hertz program is that you rent the vehicle after finding it online near you. You can rent it for 3 days at $50/day. You get to drive it and see if the tire pressure sucks, or the car shimmies, or the tranny doesn't shift right. You bring it to a garage and have them inspect the car for damage and general road worthiness. If you decide to buy, you go to their website, click "Buy" and keep the car. They send you an fedex with all the paperwork, and even do financing through Chase or BoA. After you send them the downpayment, they send you the completed registration and plates for your state. You can even transfer your old plates if you sell your old car separately. I dumped a 100k+ mileage Honda Accord hybrid on CarMax. They paid me 4k for it, and the AC didn't work and there was significant body damage. We now have a 2011 late model SUV with 37k miles, the AC works, and the car has been like a dream in comparison. Gets the same mileage, and is from a reputable Japanese manufacturer.

For all those who are going to reply that the car will be trouble down the road, I'd ask you to tell me how you treated your last lease vehicle. That is what you're going to get on a used car lot. One driver who didn't change the oil, and didn't give a crap about the car because it was just a lease and they will trade up in 3 years anyway. Is there really any appreciable difference? Yes. The rental company had an incentive to make sure the car was in its rental fleet, and so they did the maintenance regularly. It all depends on your POV... if you want to roll the dice that you got a good lease car over a bad one, okay. Or, you can buy the rental for thousands less, with the chance that a small number of drivers abused the car, while most treated it with care lest they end up having to pay the rental company for damage. I'll take the latter.

Driving is best done by being an asshole... For instance, in your example, you merge early and don't use the whole merge lane. What happens? Someone behind you runs up to the end of the lane and merges in front of you. I don't care whether or not he merges in front of you, but I DO care that you wasted the entire merge lane by merging early. You probably had to do it at a steeper angle, and you probably disrupted the highway traffic more that if you had just picked two cars to merge between, and paced with the gap between them until you were at the reasonable end of the merge lane and then merged into traffic. By doing this, you allowed everyone behind you to utilize the whole merge lane, allowing more cars on to the ramp, and smoothed the entire merge for everyone.

Same thing applies to the 4 way stop. Somebody gets there first, but they are "not an asshole" and so waive you through even though it's not your turn. You waive back and say "hey, not an asshole, it's your turn, you should go." Instead of going, "not an asshole" waives at you again and you've both sat there longer than you should have - much longer.

Long story short, exercise safe and expeditious traffic habits, use all of the merge lanes so that true asshats don't get to cut the line, go when it's your turn, and everything works out better.

Updates are worse than just the hassle of them. Many of the updates take away, or fundamentally change, the way the underlying software works. IIRC, iTunes had a great example of this early in their release schedule... At some point, Apple wanted to stop people from doing something with their files...like being able to turn them into MP3's or something like that. They released an "Update" that stopped that ability. (I may be remembering some other similar functionality)... Anyway, I remember consciously NOT upgrading, even though it nagged every time it started up, so that I wouldn't have this functionality removed. At some point, one of my kids clicked "Yes" and the functionality I was trying to preserve disappeared. I abandoned iTunes at that point because Amazon had finally come up with a viable music store that sold MP3's directly. About a year later, after Amazon started eating their lunch, Apple allowed "unprotected" files, but they were still AAC files, not MP3... Like I said, I never went back.

The point is that as long as companies use updates to make things that used to be free cost something now, or otherwise preclude you from doing certain things, the "safe" thing to do from a users point of view is adopt the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, thus opening their systems to unpatched and potentially dangerously out of date software. My main point is that this isn't all the user's fault.

Wish I had mod points for you. Bravo

Think about what that means for the people who used to live there. Imagine not knowing when or even if you will be able to go back to your home, and knowing that even if you do half the other people won't be there anyway and your old job is gone. Most of those people are still living in rented accommodation just outside the zone, unemployed and dependent on benefits.

Sounds like the lower ninth ward in New Orleans. Forget about nukes... it's this Dihydrogen Monoxide that keeps screwing things up. I vote we ban it.

Oh noes! How will wind farms fair during an earthquake/tsunami? 80 foot whirling propellers of death. Why doesn't anyone think of the birds?

I agree with the parent... but for completely different reasons. He went into some detail, but I'll be succinct.

You keep saying you need to be a physicist to answer your interstellar engine question, when clearly you need to ask an ENGINEER.

Remember, Scientists dream of doing things. Engineers do them.

So bypass your doctor. Inhousepharmacy.biz will likely sell you your drug, probably an even cheaper version made in India, and shipped to your door. You have to sign for it, but that's it. Every once in a while, the package will get seized (although this has never happened to me) and when it does, the company ships you another batch free of charge.

Let's face it, fragmentation dooms whatever it touches. And Apple's model is always successful. I mean look at the following things that are fragmented devices:

Television Sets
Cars
Cameras
Game Consoles
Power Tools
Outdoor Power Equipment (like snowblowers and lawn mowers)
Motorcycles
Bicycles
HVAC equipment

Now compare those doomed industries to the closed model that Apple represents. You know, the one where the only one left is the provider:

Motor Vehicle Department
Electric Company
Cable Company
Telephone Company
Gas Company

Isn't it clear that the companies that offer the non-fragmented service are the most successful and provide the most benefit for the customer?