My kids got the most from k'nex: http://www.knex.com/ and Wedgits: http://www.wedgits.com/

Both have excellent building guides, are very educational and fun to play with. Wedgits are great for the younger kids. K'nex roller coasters and ferris wheels would be well used and loved. K'nex teach about structural design, mechanical engineering and assembly. They start with simple, easy to assemble structures and get very complex, taking days to assemble at the high end. We also spent many, many hours building our own designs.

Yes, UAV's. I'd put a sensor on the bottom and use it to trigger a quick change in direction using snap rolls or other high G turns.

I've flown slope RC. Little planes can change direction incredibly fast.

At 50, now I need reading glasses to work on my laptop. For my desk I purchased this 30".

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824254026 - $310 delivered.

It's also very bright which helps with depth of focus. It's so nice I purchased two.

Sony is out of touch with the market. This thing wouldn't last a week in my kids hands. Toys should survive normal usage and the Go looks fragile . I think clamshell designs are more durable, and keep the screens from being broken or scratched when they're dropped out of the car onto concrete. Will it come in a pretty pink?. I think Sony is trying for the upscale, male geek, with lots of money. I'll pass.

In Nelson's Voice: Ha Ha. I was laid off from NCAR early this year after making noise about; 1 Sending DOD developed software to China, 2; Exposing unsecured DOD data and systems to the Internet and 3; Billing the US Army for developing systems for the French Navy. I wrote e-mails, I visited managers. I was a trouble maker, so, after 18 years of service, they said there was no longer any work for me at NCAR. I can still obtain access to live, sensitive data from Army bases and the Pentagon through NCAR web sites. Investigators, Auditors, please look me up. I'm using the same ID I've used for 35 years. I'd be happy to expose the wide open holes I know about as long as the law is on my side.

I worked as a engineer for NCAR, building and installing high-tech weather systems for the FAA (AWRP) for over a decade in the mid-90's-00's. I found the FAA leadership is filled with bunches of Republican partisan hacks who spent their time telling AL Gore Jokes in their technical meetings rather than getting things done. It literally takes them 10 or more years to get technology to their employees in the trenches. (officially). Because of upper mgt incompetence, the local level tech is a free-for-all, running in the closet. When I installed our sanctioned equipment in the Long Island FAA TRACON, I found a shift supervisor had brought his old PC in and got an AOL account so that the "super secure war room" could see what the weather was like outside as they managed 40% of the air traffic in the US. The FAA literally watches the weather channel with the sound off and competes with all the every day Joes for Nexrad images on accu weather. One of our (NCAR) systems under rigid performance evaluation at the FAA Technical Center (NJ) kept "hanging" several times per week, and we received poor evaluations and threats of funding cuts. I finally discovered that the reason for the failures was one of their staff had opened a shell terminal, ran Mosaic (remember that) and went porn surfing.(up our dedicated 64kbps line back to NCAR in Boulder and out through our .edu POP). The FAA has lots of ad-hoc systems installed everywhere. Can anyone say "Pass your USB key over here Bob - Ya gotta watch this". Maybe Obama's administration will clean the rot out of the FAA. I lost any hope many years ago.

Is what I installed in my Colorado home, in place of a real fireplace. We lose power for days at a time every decade or so, often during the worst and coldest weather. I chose a gas fireplace which requires no electricity to operate and is designed to dump most of its heat into the room.

The gas fireplace, gas range, and gas hot water heater keep us warm, comfortably fed and clean during extended power outages and are useful otherwise. The fireplace I installed has a convective loop heat exchanger/chamber surrounding the fire box and most of the heat flows into the room. When the power's on, it has an optional blower that improves its efficiency to over 80%. My wife really likes having a lit fireplace. Animals and humans alike gather around and bake them selves to their toasty delight, regardless of the presence of electricity.