Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.

No, if you stay at a Universal owned hotel you get to skip the lines on all rides at Universal theme parks as many times as you want. Outside guests can buy this feature for around $40 a day but you are only allowed to skip the line in each ride once.

Disney's virtual queuing system, called Fastpass, does not create different classes of users. The only people that get special privileges are those that are doing something like Make a Wish or winners of a contest and these extremely limited superpasses don't impact overall wait times. The advantage given to Disney guests is that on each day a park will be open one hour early and up to three hours late. This isn't that much of a benefit during peak times because the park that was open early will have more guests than the other parks and you have to get up an hour early for optimal touring. The late hours aren't that much of an advantage because everyone wants to stay late in the park.

A naive perspective on Disney's Fastpass is that it doesn't actually impact total waiting time because the standby lines will take twice as long. This is incorrect because Fastpass lets the Disney engineers redistribute traffic however they want, which measurably reduced wait times for the most popular rides right after the implementation of Fastpass. Wait times are still higher than they've ever been though, because park attendance keeps going up. Disney is a profit machine.

For more information about waiting in line at Disneyworld, I strongly recommend Industrial Engineer Bob Sehlinger's The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, whatever the latest edition is. He also mapped out a mathematically near-optimal plan for riding every single ride at the Magic Kingdom in one day. I really want to try doing that one day.

An aggregator for social news sites with a recommendation engine to feed you stories you like.

That would make the guy in question an idiot.

Here's one, but if no one does it and it's feasable, some day I might. I'd like to implement a large continual self-report study via email for the public good. Via an email every day or so, data is slowly gathered from participants--all anonymized in a number of ways. The emails would be questions proposed by researchers or lifestyle data to look for correlations with product use, habits, physical traits and disease incidence. For example, looking back in time, thalidomide use and birth defects would be one type of correlation that you might hope to pick up, or perhaps more recently certain shampoos (with ingredient X) might correlate with infertility. Yes you would have to be thorough and careful about the anonymization, but I think the benefits could be there.

Correlation is not causation, though, and the nature of correlating a number of factors dictate you would get many false alarms. However, like a metal detector, the clues for new things to look at would be worth the false alarms. The idea of all this would be to give researchers new targets and areas of research, all free and open.

Thoughts? Impediments?

I like it. Maybe also standardizing the way of phrasing input so as to make it somewhat machine understandable?

Another idea to go along with this that I've thought cool would be to create a wikipedia like system where people logically state their info and arguments in a machine understandable format. The machine would then crunch everything and tell people what the contradictions and possible truths were in the overall system of thought, or particular sub systems.

Combining these two systems could make a very powerful research tool.