VicMan

I do wish Continental did what Hawaiian Airlines did and offered free meals in addition to extra buy on board options.

Maybe what Continental should do is try to sell distinctly Houston products (food products from Houston area chains and/or specialties from the Houston area, such as fajitas, Vietnamese sandwiches, etc) on flights to and from Houston. I also thought of the idea of including chips and salsa with meal packs as kind of a Tex-Mex touch...

I happen to like my coffee hot and it still came down to the fact that the woman was clumsy.

The whole point of the lawsuit was that the company was preparing the coffee at a very unsafe temperature and was paying off other victims. Yes, people sometimes are clumsy and do spill coffee on themselves, and that alone doesn't merit a lawsuit. But spilled coffee is not supposed to give third degree burns that require skin grafts. http://www.businessweek.com/archives/1994/b338860.arc.htm

Reminds me of the McDonalds case where the woman was awarded something like 10 million because she was not warned the coffee was hot then spilled it in her lap while probably applying makeup in the mirror.

SchwinnChopper, the McDonald's coffee spill lawsuit was a justifiable, legitimate lawsuit. The problem was that the coffee was prepared at too high a heat, and the particular spill gave the woman severe burns.

This Snopes page notes: http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp

For example, the "woman scalded by hot coffee" suit, which at first blush looked like the height of frivolity proved to be a perfectly legitimate action taken against a corporation that knew, thanks to a string of similar scaldings it had quietly been paying off, that its coffee was not just hot, but <I>dangerously</I> hot.

A webpage by the Consumer Attorneys of California has information on this particular case: http://www.caoc.com/CA/index.cfm?event=showpage&pg=facts

After the 1980s economy collapse building designers have been much more conservative about projects in Houston.

I'm afraid due to the near-homogeneous population in pearland,

I don't think that will be true for very long. Pearland is growing quickly and different ethnic groups are moving in.

What ever happened to the Brown and Root building out off of West Belt? The one with the weird silo looking things. I thought this location was supposed to be the eventual location of all the post Halliburton/Brown & Root merger remnants.

AFAIK Halliburton owns that one.

Municipal annexation doesn't lead to increases in crime. Urban development patterns, which are seeping into the unincorporated areas, do influence crime levels.

Why would you hope so? For those of us who live in the area, it would be an absolute disaster. We already have a crime problem that's just barely manageable. If the area is annexed we'd have no police coverage whatsoever. As things stand now, it's all Precinct 4 can do to keep things in check. The area east of I-45 would become a free fire kill zone.

Didn't this development save the Clinton Drive facility? Or is KBR trying to get rid of it anyway?

See Page 2 of this Energy Corridor report. See page 3 of this TMC report.

The data is all sourced from the Census Bureau's LEHD program. Google it. It's not user-friendly, but you can run your own reports on the Greenspoint District if you wish.

That was interesting stuff. Thank you!

I'm not surprised that people live near where they work. I can see people in Spring, The Woodlands, Kingwood, and northwest Harris working at the new Exxon campus.

Employees tend to distribute themselves in the suburbs nearest their place of employment. For instance, most Energy Corridor employees live out west. Most TMC employees live south and southwest. Data actually exists to prove this, and I've seen it with my own eyes.

Are the sources available to the public? I would be interested in seeing the data and to see which suburbs are the employment bases of which districts.

There are a bunch in the loop but the Hardy toll road will solve the I-45 problem

In addition the employees who are in the loop can work in the Downtown offices, which will remain open, according to the HBJ article.

One interesting fact about the Persian Gulf War is that we basically invited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. There was an American diplomat named April something who told Hussein's people that America had no interest in Iraq's dispute with Kuwait prior to the invasion. To Hussein it must have seemed like a green light.

In a book I read, Saddam knew that the U.S. wasn't going to be happy about Iraq invading, and that Saddam knew that what Glaspie was saying was just standard diplomat stuff. He didn't get any wrong signals from the Glaspie meeting. AFAIK the book was House of Bush, House of Saud, but I forget the page number.

And Vicman yes, believe it or not there are plenty of people who ride and don't pay. You couldn't do that on a REAL rail system (unless you jump the turnstiles or run through the gates after someone else).

Citykid, yes, I could tell that there are people who don't pay. There are people who didn't pay - and those people are caught without tickets and punished.

The Houston METRORail is very much a real rail system.

The way METRO has its light rail set up now, you can pretty much ride for free. Who hasn't ridden it for free?

I have personally seen METRO police escorting people off the light rail who tried to "pretty much ride for free." I pay for my tickets, so I don't get escorted off.

However the headquarters of UPS and Home Depot are not in the Atlanta City limits. UPS is in Sandy Springs, and Home Depot is in Cobb County.

Days of severe heat and humidity tend to be only a phenomenon of July and August. Every other time, the weather is decent. Many people prefer having hot summers to really cold winters, which is part of the reason why we settled in Texas.

I think the reason why there is a disparity in the height measurements is because there are many ways to measure a building's height.

* Do you include only what is above ground, or do you include what is below ground too?

* Do you include the antenna in the measurements, or do you not include it?

* Do you measure up to the last floor with office, retail, and/or residential space, or do you go beyond that?

In regards to cell phones, in many poor countries cell phone development leapfrogged land line development. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2009-03-02-global-cellphone_N.htm

The poor in the United States and in other countries benefit from cell phones.

Even though there has been political divisiveness, it's not the degree that it was in Weimar Germany. Political parties are not hiring private militias. Discussing the "social, have-have not, rich-poor difference" in itself is not dangerous; what one needs to do is say that "rich people and poor people need to work together to enrich society" not the Hugo Chavez-like antagonism towards the rich.

In regards to "But when the differences turn to taking what I have to satisfy those who have not." - The government is not forcibly seizing private property like in the communist takeover of Cuba. The government is simply trying to restructure a few businesses to make them more profitable. Whether that works or doesn't work is a matter of debate, but I don't think the Obama administration created a Weimar-like environment.

The hyperinflation is waiting in the wings with the government printing money to purchase its own debt that others do not want.

Obama seems to be scapegoating those in this country who have been successful, the middle, upper middle and upper classes. He is moving the usual political dialogue from a left-right, liberal-conservative difference to a social, have-have not, rich-poor difference. That is very very dangerous. The same thing happened in Colombia in mid 20th century. Folks can deal in a nonviolent way with liberal-conservative differences. But when the differences turn to taking what I have to satisfy those who have not. It becomes more personal and WILL become violent. The operative word there is "taking" I will freely give some of what I have to help those who have less, but I will not let the govt make those decisions for me.

What I see the Obama admin and the Pelosi-Reid congress doing is pitting American against Americans and I predict that it will turn violent if things do not change at the midterm elections.

This country needs a strong middle of the road, independent party for the sane people in the middle, rather than the two polarizing choices that we currently have. Unfortunately, the independent parties always have some wackjob.

But there were also a lot of differences..

Hitler scapegoated the Jews as a simple cause of Germany's economic woes, and the anti-Semitic population bought into it

But Obama's not scapegoating any particular group. If anything, I do not believe that he insinuated that there was a quick fix or a simple solution to a complex problem.

Also the US in 2009 never had to deal with overinflation.

Why do I need to explain the obvious?

Both were hailed by the populace as saviors of a nation which was perceived by that populace as headed for failure. The parallels are uncanny and are obvious to those who don't have their head stuck so far up Acorn's ass. Obama and the ultraleft thugs that he has in his administration will do much harm to this nation.

I don't know if they're still there, but I recall signs on northbound 59 and 288 indicating the "Chinatown" district just before you reach DT (Gray St. exit). I wonder if they'll eventually place "EaDo" signs in their place.

AFAIK those signs have been whited out. It was strange seeing "Chinatown" disappear. I have not seen the EaDo signs yet...

For a city of 2.5 million, that's more than a reasonable number.

I don't think including on the Houston city limits is an accurate measure of how popular a group of universities should be, as Houston does not exist in a vacuum. I would consider the entire metropolitan area, which has an overall population of at least 5 million people, as a better subject for determining the possible demand for a group of universities.

I didn't call you liberal. I said you stole from their playbook. You tried to diminish the message by discrediting the messenger. You don't like or agree that anyone might say something bad about your neighborhood, so you discredit the messenger as someone's opinion that shouldn't count.. because they are obviously shills being paid to say something so preposterous.

People on both sides of the political spectrum try to discredit the messengers.

Having said that, whether one is paid or not, disrupting a town hall meeting is not at all kosher.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/rape.asp says " Most such offenders derive little pleasure from the act, says Groth, but "they want to degrade their victims, and sex is something bad, dirty, the worst thing you could do to someone. That reflects a lot of our values in society." "

So in that sense sex is being used to harm someone.

The same article says: "The anger rape is usually unpremeditated and impulsive, but the impulse drives the rapist into excessive force: the victim is punched, choked, and kicked into submission."

And from the same article: "Rape is also not always about getting sex quickly. Often it's an act of rage or punishment directed at a vulnerable person for perceived injustices done to the attacker by others. Getting a woman out of her clothes quickly isn't a factor in these rapes; terrorizing her and inflicting bodily harm is."

I'm not sure I totally believe that.

One, anger is not what makes anyone get it up. Two, who seriously thinks that if they want to hurt someone physically that they'll do it sexually? No, you use your fist.

Maybe anger could be part of it, but I don't think anyone could honestly say sexual reasons are not part of the reason they raped someone.

Where does the desire to rape someone come from?

Speaking of that, according to this Snopes article, Nicholas Groth, Director of Forensic Mental Health Associates, said that most rape perpetrators were not sexually deprived; therefore the concept "that men rape because they're unable to get sex any other way" is largely untrue - Also it states that there are three main motivations for rape (anger, power, and sadism), and the article discusses all three: http://www.snopes.com/crime/prevent/rape.asp

The comments on his blog were tame - not at all like the typical chron.com drivel. I consider myself somewhat conservative and chron.com commentors strike me as ignorant right wing reactionaries that border on racist.

If their posts indeed display racism, have them reported. If people report and get the admins to delete bad posts, chron.com would be a much better place.