I've found that having a skeptical friend and a calculator are indispensable tools when at the dealership.

Any time the salesman makes a claim about how much something will save you or cost you.. run it through the calculator. Eventually he'll get the point that you're not falling for the bullshit and will temper his claims a bit.

And the skeptical friend will keep you from drowning in said bullshit.

I'd like to see someone dig up one of these units, strip out the guts, and replace them with a modern projector.

Retro 70's style, modern HD picture! With all that surface area on the top, it'd be no problem adorning it with plants. Can't do that with a modern LCD screen, can you?

Who cares about the perspective, I want to know how he does colors. It's one thing to describe that parallel lines will converge on a vanishing point, but explaining color to someone who has no way to see them?

It seems like the entire concept of color should be meaningless in such a situation. Sure you could associate the word "green" with "trees" based on someone's description, but handling lighter and darker shades? Or any shading at all?

Defies all my expectations, which makes this guy's work even more amazing.

Perhaps there was a child on the bus!

To be completely precise, it says the bottle is "an invitation". The word innovation is not used. ;)

Which is still pretentious, just not as bad.

The other obvious solution is to build under the surface.

Yeah it's the boring option but I would imagine it makes a whole bunch of various problems easier to deal with.

Giant lasers shooting meteorites out of the sky could provide the necessary cool factor.

Thrust from the plane is acting against the air, not the pavement. The propeller/jet will move the plane forward whether or not there is a treadmill underneath it.

The speed it achieves will be unrelated to the treadmill, because the wheels are only there to keep the plane from damaging itself while on the ground. I hope Mythbusters have a really really long treadmill, or else the plane will simply pull itself off the end and continue along on solid ground.

The way I envision it is swimming in a fast moving current. You may not be able to swim fast enough to move against the current, but if you had an anchored rope you could pull yourself along. The rope is the air, the water is the treadmill.