Sometimes it's better to have a SMALL ONE!
China to build ginormous buses that cars can drive under
By Richard Lai
Seriously, this is the future that China's envisioning: huge friggin' buses engulfing smaller cars on the road. Despite the silly picture and the eccentric "3D Express Coach" branding, this cunning project by Shenzhen Huashi Future Car-Parking Equipment actually makes sense. The idea is to make use of the space between regular-size cars and bridges, thus saving construction costs as well as minimizing congestion impact by allowing cars to drive underneath these jumbo buses. Fancy hitching a ride? You better start planning your move to Beijing's Mentougou district, which is where Huashi will commence building its first 186 km of track at year's end.
Madison Avenue - New York City Future
This is NYC on Madison Ave
I wonder what would happen if Christians blocked the streets of New York every Sunday for an hour or two?????
A Christian Nation cannot put up a Christmas scene of the baby Jesus in
a public place, but the Muslims can stop normal traffic every Friday afternoon
by worshiping in the streets... Something is happening in America that is
reminiscent of what is happening in Europe. This is Political Correctness gone crazy...
This is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon in several locations
throughout NYC where there are mosques with a large number of Muslims
that cannot fit into the mosque - They fill the surrounding streets, facing east
for a couple of hours between about 2 & 4 p.m. - Besides this one at 42nd St
& Madison Ave, there is another, even larger group, at 94th St & 3rd Ave, etc.,
etc. - Also, I presume, you are aware of the dispute over building another "high
rise" Mosque a few blocks from "ground zero" - With regard to that one, the
"Imam" refuses to disclose where the $110 million dollars to build it is coming
from and there is a lawsuit filed to force disclosure of that information - Just some
facts FYI November can't come soon enough
This is in New York City on Madison Avenue, not in France or the Middle East or Yemen or Kenya.
Is there a message here???? Yes, there is, and they are claiming America for allah. if we don't wake up soon, we are going to "politically correct" ourselves right out of our own country!
The last flight of the Charlie Brown. A Remarkable story.
Look carefully at the B-17 and note how shot up it is - one engine dead, tail, horizontal stabilizer and nose shot up.. It was ready to fall out of the sky. (This is a painting done by an artist from the description of both pilots many years later.) Then realize that there is a German ME-109 fighter flying next to it. Now read the story below. I think you'll be surprised.....
Charlie Brown was a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot with the 379th Bomber Group at Kimbolton , England . His B-17 was called 'Ye Old Pub' and was in a terrible state, having been hit by flak and fighters. The compass was damaged and they were flying deeper over enemy territory instead of heading home to Kimbolton.
After flying the B-17 over an enemy airfield, a German pilot named Franz Steigler was ordered to take off and shoot down the B-17. When he got near the B-17, he could not believe his eyes. In his words, he 'had never seen a plane in such a bad state'. The tail and rear section was severely damaged, and the tail gunner wounded. The top gunner was all over the top of the fuselage. The nose was smashed and there were holes everywhere.
Despite having ammunition, Franz flew to the side of the B-17 and looked at Charlie Brown, the pilot. Brown was scared and struggling to control his damaged and blood-stained plane.
Aware that they had no idea where they were going, Franz waved at Charlie to turn 180 degrees. Franz escorted and guided the stricken plane to, and slightly over, the North Sea towards England . He then saluted Charlie Brown and turned away, back to Europe . When Franz landed he told the CO that the plane had been shot down over the sea, and never told the truth to anybody. Charlie Brown and the remains of his crew told all at their briefing, but were ordered never to talk about it.
More than 40 years later, Charlie Brown wanted to find the Luftwaffe pilot who saved the crew. After years of research, Franz was found. He had never talked about the incident, not even at post-war reunions.
They met in the USA at a 379th Bomber Group reunion, together with 25 people who are alive now - all because Franz never fired his guns that day.
When asked why he didn't shoot them down, Stigler later said, I didn't have the heart to finish those brave men. I flew beside them for a long time. They were trying desperately to get home and I was going to let them do that. I could not have shot at them. It would have been the same as shooting at a man in a parachute.
The Best Blu-Ray Player - Reviewed
I've argued that a Blu-ray player could soon be your only set-top box. These $200-$250 models, the four fullest-featured you're likely to buy, all strive to be Swiss Army-like in their utility, but only one comes closest to the promise.
We call them "Blu-ray players," but if you use these right, you'll spend less than 10% of your time actually watching Blu-ray discs. Besides BDs and DVDs, you will use them to stream Pandora music channels, pull up the latest weird YouTube video to show off, rent high-def versions of new releases, and stream a marathon or two worth of cheesy sitcoms. And if you pick the right one, you'll be able to browse files stored on your computer or a network drive, too. All these are missing to be a complete all-in-one set-top box is Hulu—but that's because Hulu is rethinking its "give shows away free" strategy.
Let me make this clear: There are cheaper Blu-ray players out there, but all of the following come with YouTube, Netflix, multiple pay-per-view movie services and Wi-Fi. Once I saw Avatar in Vudu's HDX super-high-def format over Wi-Fi, I realized that wireless connectivity is finally good enough to be worth paying for.
The Contenders
LG BD570 - Following on the heels of our favorite pick from last year, the BD570 had a lot to prove, and it did a nice job. The key addition is file compatiblity— you can use this thing pretty much like an HD media player, a full-fledged Apple TV killer. It's not perfect in that department: You have to use PC-formatted (NTFS) drives, and it won't read disc image files (ISOs), but it read most videos I threw its way, both locally and on the network, so it's good for all but the most particular of file dweebs.
Other than that, LG's clean interface and useful lineup of services makes it a great choice again this year.
Panasonic DMP-BD85 - Panasonic isn't known for being on the cutting edge (unless by "cutting" you mean "huge" and by "edge" you mean "TVs"), but even so, the BD85 was a disappointment. It's the only one without integrated Wi-Fi (it comes with a dongle), and without a DLNA network browsing capability. As much as this might be spun as a "simpler" product for people who are easily confused by options, the godawful user-interface dashes that argument to bits.
Panasonic and Sony have "Quick Start" options, that reduce startup time from 20 or so seconds to under 5 seconds. I don't get it, because it doesn't make any other part of the process faster: The Panasonic is still the slowest at loading discs and jumping around the user interface in general; Quick Start just highlights the problem.
Samsung BD-C6500 - With arguably the best interface, the Samsung gives you loads of options, neatly integrated into a simple home screen. I had some trouble getting it to play files from a hard drive and from a NAS, and its USB jack isn't powerful enough to spin a portable hard drive. But on the flipside, it's faster than any system but the Sony, and is the only one of these four with analog 7.1 audio jacks. It also sells for the best price on Amazon (at least at the moment).
Sony BDP-S570 - The Sony clocked in as the fastest player of all, beating the Samsung by a few seconds. It is also the device with the most stuff in it—but that's not necessarily a good thing. It has more video-on-demand choices than everyone else, so many that it has a search engine for all of its available video. But it's mostly web snippets from Livestrong and CondeNet and other sources, not what you'd call premium, or even good, content. I do applaud its choice of audio services—in addition to Pandora and Slacker radio apps, it's got NPR.
Sony would have done better, except that it only takes FAT-formatted hard drives, and even then, can't read most of the test files I fed to it. That and when you set it up, you have to create an account on this really awful website in order to activate things like Slacker and Amazon VOD. And even when you've done it, a pointless icon that reads "activate enhanced features" persists in hanging around as a menu option.
The biggest advantage this Blu-ray player has over all the others is that in the summer, it will get a firmware update making it capable of playing 3D movies. I don't think that's enough motivation at this point, but if you're on the 3D forefront, you should weigh that in.
And finally, Sony gets props for its Blu-ray remote control app for the iPhone. I won't lie, it's awesome. But as a controller, it adds very little to the experience, and worse, I find myself mad that Sony engineers were dicking around with this when they should have been sorting out the other stuff. It begs the question, "If you can do that, why can't you handle basic disk and file formats, or give me a way to remove some of the useless channels that clutter the home screen?"
The Big Winner
My first prize goes to the LG BD570, because it works as advertised, where many of the others do not. It's not as fast as the Sony or the Samsung, but it's faster than the Panasonic, and is as easy to set up as any of them. Because Vudu is my favorite pay-per-view movie site—all you have to do is check out an HDX high-def movie and it'll be yours too—LG and Samsung get bonus points for supplying that, along with alternatives.
Special Circumstances
• If you have a great surround receiver that you either can't or don't want to swap out for latest digital model, you should go with the Samsung. The BD-C6500 has analog 7.1 output, a smart way to get much of the benefit of Blu-ray audio with the least amount of investment.
• As I said, if you are going 3D in the near future, you should opt for the Sony BDP-S570. Sony offers the best value for a 3D Blu-ray player. Just let us know when you find any 3D Blu-rays.
• Alas, under no circumstances should you buy the Panasonic. Its lack of power and its decade-old user interface means that even if they try to improve the thing via firmware updates, it'll remain behind the competition. Usually I love Panasonic products, so this judgment was particularly painful.
• Of course, for a $100 upsell ($300), you can score a PlayStation 3—which is a very media-capable machine with gaming piled on top—and it, too, will get a 3D Blu-ray update this summer. Just be aware that even the new "Slim" uses 3X to 4X the energy of any of these, and it actually can't do as much as LG in terms of HD media playback. Not yet, anyhow.
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