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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Rat dog micro-cap picks... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fuzzy who wrote (35478)	8/9/2007 5:55:11 PM
From: Bucky Katt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 48461

It's smokin' after hours. ~~ Just kidding, doa as can be. Sales/earning aren't why I own it, thankfully.

To: Fuzzy who wrote (35478)	8/10/2007 9:36:56 AM
From: Bucky Katt	Respond to of 48461

Tie-in In a Crisis, Subway Riders Get Little Guidance>>> Ten minutes after a suspicious package was found at a subway station in Washington on Wednesday, riders read about it on the electronic screens at all of the system’s 86 stations. At 5:30 a.m. the same day, New Jersey Transit bus and train riders were sent the first of 30 alerts on their cellphones and BlackBerry devices as rainstorms pounded the region. In San Francisco, riders planning a subway trip can download maps and schedules onto their iPods. In New York — home to the country’s largest transit system, with an $8 billion annual budget — information is doled out in a more elementary fashion. During Wednesday’s crippling storm, when the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Web site was overwhelmed by people seeking the latest information and directions, legions of commuters had to rely on station agents scrawling updates on white boards. Only a handful of riders already on train platforms had access to digital screens with up-to-date information. Until just a few years ago, a local hot line was one of the only ways to get service updates, assuming riders could find a working pay phone at underground stations, where cellphones rarely work. Even today, the authority’s Web site urges riders to report suspicious packages — but only over the phone, not via e-mail. Compared with commuters in many of the world’s leading cities, subway riders in New York live in something of an information vacuum once they enter the system’s 468 stations. For decades, riders have regarded their creaking and antiquated subway network as a minor miracle, tolerating frequent delays, cramped stations and malfunctioning public-address systems. But the storm this week, highlighting yet again deficiencies in how the authority gets information out, seemed to push riders past the limits of their patience. Those flaws are one focus of a 30-day review that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has ordered into what went wrong after the intense early-morning rains of Wednesday. The authority acknowledges that communications in its vast system lag behind those in other cities, but says it is improving its Web site, getting information to station agents just minutes after disruptions begin and slowly adding digital signs on platforms. Even so, those improvements represent only a small fraction of the billions of dollars being spent to update subway signals, replace train cars and build a Second Avenue subway line. In the view of many riders, the authority is infuriatingly unprepared — after years of repeated flooding and in an age of terror threats — for telling people the best way to go. “I think the senior management of the M.T.A. and the political structure of the state and city are oriented towards megaprojects and not towards what the system means for riders,” said George Haikalis, a longtime transit researcher. “The money being spent on the Second Avenue subway could easily produce a first-class communications system. There’s common sense that’s missing.” Thursday night, after the National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch for the city, Elliot G. Sander, the authority’s chief executive, announced that officials were rechecking storm drains, placing pumps at all of the system’s “flood-prone” locations, calling in additional signal, ventilation and drain maintenance workers, readying buses to ferry stranded passengers, and delaying all but the most urgent construction. As for improving communication, managers and other employees were to be dispatched to the busiest stations. Some were given bullhorns. Of course, the scale of New York’s subways, which deliver 4.9 million rides each weekday, dwarfs any other system in the country, making it much harder — and more expensive — for the authority to maintain and improve its communications system. On Wednesday, the authority’s Web site, one of the busiest in the country, was updated frequently and received a record 44 million hits. (A hit is a request for a single file on a Web server.) nytimes.com