They don't see themselves as worthless *because* they have 1000+ plus "friends" on facebook. In their world that proves their worth. I think it's pretty obvious that anyone who has a facebook page and actually uses it to any significant extent is at least somewhat in love with themselves and seeks at least the psuedo-adoration of others to prove to themselves beyond any doubt how right they are to love themselves. I can't imagine giving updates on the intertubes on what I am doing and feeling every 30 minutes. There is something seriously wrong with that. Maybe the worst part is that they think that anyone else is actually going to give a fuck what they happen to be doing or feeling. The problem is that they are all narcissistic to some degree. So they can't really have an actual conversation with each other. They can talk but nobody is actually listening. The beauty of facebook is that they don't even have to wait their turn to talk about themselves as in real life.
People who hire for thinking jobs don't care about your crap jobs. Some people advise to not even bother listing them on your resume since they have zero relevance to the job you are applying for. I had a neuropsychologist advise me not to seek work at any job where I have to learn. So I got a job washing dishes at a fast food restaurant. I'd go for disability if I thought I could get it, but I seem to be able to get jobs like washing dishes, although even that is not easy. But that pretty much disqualifies me. Most people just don't like me. I have hardly ever been hired for jobs that I apply for. Even shit jobs. The hiring manager usually has to be the type who just doesn't give a shit who he hires. Of course, I don't apply for thinking jobs since my accident. Even if by some miracle I were to get hired, I would be fired soon afterwards and rightly so.
After all, 7 years of Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL is 35 years of experience if you read it that way.
No. They could be looking for someone who worked at one job for 7 years where he was required to code in all of those every day. Or someone who worked for 7 years in 2 and 7 years in the other 3. English is English. If they ask for 7 years experience in 5 different languages that doesn't mean 1 year each in 4 languages and 3 years in the 5th. If they want something else they should change how the ad reads. Is it really so hard to hire someone who understands basic English to write ads for you?
The point is to hire the most qualified candidate for the job. If they are going to write code then they should have some code to show you. I don't see the problem. If you were hiring an artist wouldn't you want to see their portfolio? I wouldn't care how long they have worked for x or y company or what their previous salary was or how good their references are. With fields like programming or art you don't have to rely on secondary indicators of ability you can judge the end product for yourself. Either they do good work or they don't. How good they are at conversational chess or whether they are the kind of person you'd like to have a beer with should not factor into the decision. If someone from a community college can code better than an MIT graduate I'd hire the better coder, not the one whose resume is more impressive.
You gotta be kidding me. I thought all the "no experience necessary" IT jobs vanished in the 80s. Your *only* requirement is a CS degree and you can't find anyone who wants the job? Are you located in Antarctica? Are you paying $2/hour? Is the particular kind of coding mind-numbingly boring for some reason? Something is wrong with your story. It just doesn't make sense. Even a single posting at any university should have gotten you lots of "qualified" applicants if you really are just looking for a bachelors in CS. If for some reason you are located in some kind of Einstein-Rosen space-time anomaly where every recent CS grad is fully employed, you might want to consider judging people by the code they can write instead of a piece of paper. Just take out the BS requirement, but mention that you require a code submission instead. I bet there are lots of people who can write superb code, but don't have a CS degree and thus can't get a job doing something that they are actually quite good at. If you want to be extra thorough have them prove to you that they understand and can use big O notation. Oh wait, instead you could just hire some Indian with lots of paper qualifications. I would highly suggest that you verify their abilities before hiring them and not rely on their degrees and certificates to show their worth.
For a foreigner to get a work visa in the UK I thought it was required to show that your skills are unique enough that nobody in the UK could do the same job? Seems kind of hard to prove that no one else in the entire country can do your job. And even more unlikely to actually be true. It sounds like your definition of "very easy" may be different from mine.
How do you know that they are good before you hire them? You have psychics in the HR dept? Being good is never enough to get a job. You also have to be good at selling yourself. The particular interviewer has to like you. Your particular experience has to be a good match with what the company wants. There are lots of factors besides being "good". I think the hiring system is very broken at most companies. There are so many better ways than are currently used. For a coding job there should only be one standard: code that you have already written. The applicants should have to submit the code for a fully functional application that they have written themselves from start to finish and that code should be submitted to several of your best programmers, who can grade it. The person who submits the most impressive and well written program gets the job. Is that what you do? Because if it's not then you are talking out of your ass, hiring based on all sorts of bullshit psuedo-qualifications that ultimately don't matter.
I definitely agree that money can buy you happiness up to a certain point. I've never made more than around $30,000 per year (I currently make about $18,000). So I can't speak to the $75,000 issue. I have no doubt it would improve my life though. When (in a dream) I was in Cuba most people I met made no more than $15 per month. Sometimes $30 per month if they did illegal stuff. The only people who made any real money were the prostitutes and drug dealers, some of whom made as much or more than I did. It is true that their rent and utilities were very, very low and they had ration books (1 per family IIRC) for buying basic food staples like some rice and beans, but $15 per month is still $15 per month. What I noticed very quickly was that, despite the poverty, a lot of people I met seemed happier than I was. Of course, there were plenty of exceptions. People who wanted to escape to the US or really any other country. People who wanted to work hard and actually get rewarded for it. But quite a few Cubans had figured out how to be relatively happy without material goods. Would they have been happier making $75,000 a year instead of $180? I have no doubt. Almost everyone there longed for material goods. They wanted them badly. And yet they still managed to live fairly happy lives. I'm not really sure what their secret was, but I would guess it had something to do with the cliche of enjoying the simple pleasures of life. They spent a lot of time just hanging out with friends and family. Sometimes listening to music or drinking cheap rum.
When I was living in Laos, many people made no more than $100 per month and often worked long hours (12-16 hours a day) to get it. And yet, again, many of them were happier than I was. My Lao friend is unhappy though. He is tired of working 16 hour days nearly every day and getting very little in return. His family was very poor and he feels about money the same way that I feel about my looks, that it is preventing him from really living life. He feels that he is basically without worth. He was recently married to a girl who loves him very much. But he feels unworthy of her. Feels that being poor makes him somehow worthless as a human being.
In Jakarta, I once met a guy who claimed that he was kicked out of his house when he was like 10 years old because his parents didn't have money to support him. He had a story about living on the streets as a child and finding food in trash cans etc. I wasn't sure whether to believe him, but it was an interesting story if true. So who is worse off? Someone like that or someone too ugly to ever have a girlfriend or wife? I guess when you get to the extremes of either case it is pretty unpleasant but I would choose money at that level. If I ever reached a point of living out of trash cans I would just kill myself. I mean, what would be the point of living like that?
My own theory is that money does buy you a piece of the happiness pie. But only a piece. A lot depends on the individual. To what extent they value money compared to valuing relationships with others. Another major piece is what you look like. Just like rich people tend to be happier than poor people (all other things being equal), beautiful people tend to be happier than ugly people. The Elephant Man wouldn't have been happy no matter how many millions of pounds sterling he had. Physical beauty gives you at least as much power in the world as money and is at least as capable of giving you happiness. I think most people who are both beautiful and rich are also happy, or at least as happy as a complex animal like a human can be. You can always find something to complain about no matter how happy you are. The world isn't perfectly suited to our needs. Besides money and looks, I think intelligence may also be a factor. Being stupid is not much fun. You end up with some unbearably boring, monotonous job and you can't ever really accomplish any goals in the world that are not merely physical. Of course, being stupid, you may not realize that you are missing out on something. If y
Exactly. Opiates = bliss. But you need money to buy opiates. Maybe this is why increasing your income up to $75000 makes you happier. It allows you to buy more drugs. But at some point you can't take any more than you do already. Hence the ceiling. OTOH, you could always go back to school and get a BS and masters in Chemistry and then move to some remote area, cultivate a large poppy field and proceed to make your own oxycodone, morphine, codeine and other opium derived happy pills. Just for your own personal use. Then you would be happy with almost no money.
Now that there is no unhacked console left, maybe the consolization of PC games will slow down a bit. And maybe Sony will finally release the PS4, so that PC graphics can finally move ahead. It has been 3 years since Crysis. PC games have been stalled in terms of graphics because the better the graphics are on the PC version the more difficult it is to port to the old tech on the consoles.
Human nature. If the evil corps were handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in briefcases, would you turn them down? I aint no Howard Roark. I would take the money. I don't think many of us would have the kind of integrity to refuse. The only thing that might give me pause is if they wanted the death penalty for file sharing. Since they can't tie an IP address to an individual, entire families would have to be put to death, maybe even without a trial, to save time and unnecessary expense. They'd have to pay me a lot more for that kind of draconian law, but I'd probably still do it.
I loved this movie. So I will eventually have to buy the bluray, but after this I think I will buy a used copy. I can't live with increasing their sales even by a penny.
Yep. The producer of this movie is one of the biggest scum bags in Hollywood and that is saying a lot. It's too bad because I loved the movie itself. I think there is even a slight likeness between Jeremy Renner and Jeffrey Sarver. This movie was clearly based on him. The whole idea for the movie and certainly for the main character was basically stolen from Mark Boal's experiences embedded with Sarver and his team. Pot meet kettle.
The scumbag producer had this to say when asked about his uncredited ripoff of Sgt Sarver (real life call sign "Blaster One"):
Everyone says it's one of the best movies of the year, did he just not like the popcorn when he watched the movie?' Chartier wrote. 'I haven't taken any grossly unfair action against him. I've never heard of him. Did I steal his girlfriend? Never heard of him.'
Hey I'm a bomb tech and I'm gonna walk up and cowboy the shit out of every bomb I come across, not to save some children, but to just act like a badass.
Actually, if you had bothered to finish the movie you would have seen that his reason was because he didn't care about anything anymore. He wasn't trying to kill himself, but if it happened it wouldn't be a big deal. And it was an adrenaline rush. Lots of people do dangerous things that they don't have to do for that rush. You are welcome to try again however. In what ways was the movie unrealistic? I have never been to war. So I don't know. Nothing in the film seemed implausible to me.
Have you ever tried to get an actual bluray disc to play on your computer? The copy protection makes it nearly impossible. At the very least it is a lengthy ordeal. It was actually easier for me to demux it and place it in an mkv container. Although that also takes hours. So for me the cost is the lesser of the evils. When I want to watch a movie I want to watch it. Not wrestle with bypassing the copy protection for an hour first. Quite a few blurays are available for $15 or less, which I don't consider excessive. Admittedly The Hurt Locker costs more than $20 at the moment. It is one of my favorite war movies, but I will wait until the price drops to around $15 before buying a copy. SWIM has a 10 gig 1080p version from TPB. That will hold me over until the price drops and I can rip the bluray to an mkv file without recompressing.
What does "old-skool" mean in this context? What does being old have to do with school anyway? I started playing computer games when I was around 8. Basically anyone who is older than a teenager now could have played the original game. So by "old" I guess you are referring to anyone older than 20. What were you doing in 1996 that was so important you missed out on Duke Nukem? It wasn't a great game IMHO but it was fun for a while and more advanced than most FPS games at the time. I'd say that the 20+ demographic is a pretty large one, although maybe not for consoles.
Seriously, if you think kicking someone's ass over something so minor is worth it you probably need anger management. Or at least think a little harder before posting stupid shit on the Internet.
It's not minor at all. It's the equivalent of someone pissing on you. It shows a total lack of respect. It's like saying "you are nothing". In Eastern Europe I once pushed an old lady to the ground for cutting right in front of me. I have gotten in several fights over the years (in various countries) with people who stepped right in front of me while I was waiting in a long line. It almost never happens in the US or Canada though. If it did happen here and some guy engaged him (hopefully by slugging him hard in the face), I wouldn't be aghast. I would be cheering for the guy. Queue jumpers are no better than vermin and should be treated as such in any civilized society.
I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.
Now that's one "war on terror" fear inspired law that I could get behind 100%. Although I would offer an amendment that only females under 35 and weighing under 150 pounds would be forced to comply. All other compliance would be voluntary to show that you weren't hiding anything. I would also be in favor of selective enforcement by the mostly male police force. I think they could figure out for themselves who the most "egregious offenders" were. Any pretty girl who is clothed is an abomination. It has to stop.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/scales.html Just an obligatory reference to the warp drive when: scales page to remind everyone just how far away even Alpha Centauri is. It turns out that the basic problem is one of fuel to accelerate us to a large enough fraction of c. The most practical choice seems to be an exceedingly large spacecraft built on Moonbase Alpha and ferried to the appropriate Lagrange Point Station manufacturing facility for further assembly. The only practical tech we have would be a scaled up version of Orion pulsed nuke propulsion. We would still need to build a very, very large ship, miles in length and then fill up almost the whole thing with hydrogen bombs. The conclusion on that page is that it is basically hopeless for any reasonable human timescale even if we could figure out a way to manufacture extremely large quantities of antimatter. An alcubierre type of drive that doesn't require fuel would be the only practical way. If such a drive were even theoretically possible it would give us a chance of visiting other star systems. As far as anyone can tell space drives are not possible and they never will be. I actually think we should give the Orion pulsed nuke idea another try.
I don't think all soldiers are jerks who just want a chance to shoot at and intimidate people, but that is not true for cops. Pretty much all of them are like that. Cops are evil through and through. The police are the only reason that police states can become police states.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't see themselves as worthless *because* they have 1000+ plus "friends" on facebook. In their world that proves their worth. I think it's pretty obvious that anyone who has a facebook page and actually uses it to any significant extent is at least somewhat in love with themselves and seeks at least the psuedo-adoration of others to prove to themselves beyond any doubt how right they are to love themselves. I can't imagine giving updates on the intertubes on what I am doing and feeling every 30 minutes. There is something seriously wrong with that. Maybe the worst part is that they think that anyone else is actually going to give a fuck what they happen to be doing or feeling. The problem is that they are all narcissistic to some degree. So they can't really have an actual conversation with each other. They can talk but nobody is actually listening. The beauty of facebook is that they don't even have to wait their turn to talk about themselves as in real life.
People who hire for thinking jobs don't care about your crap jobs. Some people advise to not even bother listing them on your resume since they have zero relevance to the job you are applying for. I had a neuropsychologist advise me not to seek work at any job where I have to learn. So I got a job washing dishes at a fast food restaurant. I'd go for disability if I thought I could get it, but I seem to be able to get jobs like washing dishes, although even that is not easy. But that pretty much disqualifies me. Most people just don't like me. I have hardly ever been hired for jobs that I apply for. Even shit jobs. The hiring manager usually has to be the type who just doesn't give a shit who he hires. Of course, I don't apply for thinking jobs since my accident. Even if by some miracle I were to get hired, I would be fired soon afterwards and rightly so.
After all, 7 years of Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and MySQL is 35 years of experience if you read it that way.
No. They could be looking for someone who worked at one job for 7 years where he was required to code in all of those every day. Or someone who worked for 7 years in 2 and 7 years in the other 3. English is English. If they ask for 7 years experience in 5 different languages that doesn't mean 1 year each in 4 languages and 3 years in the 5th. If they want something else they should change how the ad reads. Is it really so hard to hire someone who understands basic English to write ads for you?
The point is to hire the most qualified candidate for the job. If they are going to write code then they should have some code to show you. I don't see the problem. If you were hiring an artist wouldn't you want to see their portfolio? I wouldn't care how long they have worked for x or y company or what their previous salary was or how good their references are. With fields like programming or art you don't have to rely on secondary indicators of ability you can judge the end product for yourself. Either they do good work or they don't. How good they are at conversational chess or whether they are the kind of person you'd like to have a beer with should not factor into the decision. If someone from a community college can code better than an MIT graduate I'd hire the better coder, not the one whose resume is more impressive.
You gotta be kidding me. I thought all the "no experience necessary" IT jobs vanished in the 80s. Your *only* requirement is a CS degree and you can't find anyone who wants the job? Are you located in Antarctica? Are you paying $2/hour? Is the particular kind of coding mind-numbingly boring for some reason? Something is wrong with your story. It just doesn't make sense. Even a single posting at any university should have gotten you lots of "qualified" applicants if you really are just looking for a bachelors in CS. If for some reason you are located in some kind of Einstein-Rosen space-time anomaly where every recent CS grad is fully employed, you might want to consider judging people by the code they can write instead of a piece of paper. Just take out the BS requirement, but mention that you require a code submission instead. I bet there are lots of people who can write superb code, but don't have a CS degree and thus can't get a job doing something that they are actually quite good at. If you want to be extra thorough have them prove to you that they understand and can use big O notation. Oh wait, instead you could just hire some Indian with lots of paper qualifications. I would highly suggest that you verify their abilities before hiring them and not rely on their degrees and certificates to show their worth.
What were your requirements for experience?
For a foreigner to get a work visa in the UK I thought it was required to show that your skills are unique enough that nobody in the UK could do the same job? Seems kind of hard to prove that no one else in the entire country can do your job. And even more unlikely to actually be true. It sounds like your definition of "very easy" may be different from mine.
How do you know that they are good before you hire them? You have psychics in the HR dept? Being good is never enough to get a job. You also have to be good at selling yourself. The particular interviewer has to like you. Your particular experience has to be a good match with what the company wants. There are lots of factors besides being "good". I think the hiring system is very broken at most companies. There are so many better ways than are currently used. For a coding job there should only be one standard: code that you have already written. The applicants should have to submit the code for a fully functional application that they have written themselves from start to finish and that code should be submitted to several of your best programmers, who can grade it. The person who submits the most impressive and well written program gets the job. Is that what you do? Because if it's not then you are talking out of your ass, hiring based on all sorts of bullshit psuedo-qualifications that ultimately don't matter.
I definitely agree that money can buy you happiness up to a certain point. I've never made more than around $30,000 per year (I currently make about $18,000). So I can't speak to the $75,000 issue. I have no doubt it would improve my life though. When (in a dream) I was in Cuba most people I met made no more than $15 per month. Sometimes $30 per month if they did illegal stuff. The only people who made any real money were the prostitutes and drug dealers, some of whom made as much or more than I did. It is true that their rent and utilities were very, very low and they had ration books (1 per family IIRC) for buying basic food staples like some rice and beans, but $15 per month is still $15 per month. What I noticed very quickly was that, despite the poverty, a lot of people I met seemed happier than I was. Of course, there were plenty of exceptions. People who wanted to escape to the US or really any other country. People who wanted to work hard and actually get rewarded for it. But quite a few Cubans had figured out how to be relatively happy without material goods. Would they have been happier making $75,000 a year instead of $180? I have no doubt. Almost everyone there longed for material goods. They wanted them badly. And yet they still managed to live fairly happy lives. I'm not really sure what their secret was, but I would guess it had something to do with the cliche of enjoying the simple pleasures of life. They spent a lot of time just hanging out with friends and family. Sometimes listening to music or drinking cheap rum.
When I was living in Laos, many people made no more than $100 per month and often worked long hours (12-16 hours a day) to get it. And yet, again, many of them were happier than I was. My Lao friend is unhappy though. He is tired of working 16 hour days nearly every day and getting very little in return. His family was very poor and he feels about money the same way that I feel about my looks, that it is preventing him from really living life. He feels that he is basically without worth. He was recently married to a girl who loves him very much. But he feels unworthy of her. Feels that being poor makes him somehow worthless as a human being.
In Jakarta, I once met a guy who claimed that he was kicked out of his house when he was like 10 years old because his parents didn't have money to support him. He had a story about living on the streets as a child and finding food in trash cans etc. I wasn't sure whether to believe him, but it was an interesting story if true. So who is worse off? Someone like that or someone too ugly to ever have a girlfriend or wife? I guess when you get to the extremes of either case it is pretty unpleasant but I would choose money at that level. If I ever reached a point of living out of trash cans I would just kill myself. I mean, what would be the point of living like that?
My own theory is that money does buy you a piece of the happiness pie. But only a piece. A lot depends on the individual. To what extent they value money compared to valuing relationships with others. Another major piece is what you look like. Just like rich people tend to be happier than poor people (all other things being equal), beautiful people tend to be happier than ugly people. The Elephant Man wouldn't have been happy no matter how many millions of pounds sterling he had. Physical beauty gives you at least as much power in the world as money and is at least as capable of giving you happiness. I think most people who are both beautiful and rich are also happy, or at least as happy as a complex animal like a human can be. You can always find something to complain about no matter how happy you are. The world isn't perfectly suited to our needs. Besides money and looks, I think intelligence may also be a factor. Being stupid is not much fun. You end up with some unbearably boring, monotonous job and you can't ever really accomplish any goals in the world that are not merely physical. Of course, being stupid, you may not realize that you are missing out on something. If y
What makes you think there was a withdrawal. He's probably still a coke-fiend.
Exactly. Opiates = bliss. But you need money to buy opiates. Maybe this is why increasing your income up to $75000 makes you happier. It allows you to buy more drugs. But at some point you can't take any more than you do already. Hence the ceiling. OTOH, you could always go back to school and get a BS and masters in Chemistry and then move to some remote area, cultivate a large poppy field and proceed to make your own oxycodone, morphine, codeine and other opium derived happy pills. Just for your own personal use. Then you would be happy with almost no money.
Now that there is no unhacked console left, maybe the consolization of PC games will slow down a bit. And maybe Sony will finally release the PS4, so that PC graphics can finally move ahead. It has been 3 years since Crysis. PC games have been stalled in terms of graphics because the better the graphics are on the PC version the more difficult it is to port to the old tech on the consoles.
Human nature. If the evil corps were handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in briefcases, would you turn them down? I aint no Howard Roark. I would take the money. I don't think many of us would have the kind of integrity to refuse. The only thing that might give me pause is if they wanted the death penalty for file sharing. Since they can't tie an IP address to an individual, entire families would have to be put to death, maybe even without a trial, to save time and unnecessary expense. They'd have to pay me a lot more for that kind of draconian law, but I'd probably still do it.
I loved this movie. So I will eventually have to buy the bluray, but after this I think I will buy a used copy. I can't live with increasing their sales even by a penny.
Yep. The producer of this movie is one of the biggest scum bags in Hollywood and that is saying a lot. It's too bad because I loved the movie itself. I think there is even a slight likeness between Jeremy Renner and Jeffrey Sarver. This movie was clearly based on him. The whole idea for the movie and certainly for the main character was basically stolen from Mark Boal's experiences embedded with Sarver and his team. Pot meet kettle.
The scumbag producer had this to say when asked about his uncredited ripoff of Sgt Sarver (real life call sign "Blaster One"):
Everyone says it's one of the best movies of the year, did he just not like the popcorn when he watched the movie?' Chartier wrote. 'I haven't taken any grossly unfair action against him. I've never heard of him. Did I steal his girlfriend? Never heard of him.'
Inception = Mission Impossible II meets The Matrix Reloaded but with more explosions and CGI and some implausible pseudo-tech about dream machines.
Hey I'm a bomb tech and I'm gonna walk up and cowboy the shit out of every bomb I come across, not to save some children, but to just act like a badass.
Actually, if you had bothered to finish the movie you would have seen that his reason was because he didn't care about anything anymore. He wasn't trying to kill himself, but if it happened it wouldn't be a big deal. And it was an adrenaline rush. Lots of people do dangerous things that they don't have to do for that rush. You are welcome to try again however. In what ways was the movie unrealistic? I have never been to war. So I don't know. Nothing in the film seemed implausible to me.
Have you ever tried to get an actual bluray disc to play on your computer? The copy protection makes it nearly impossible. At the very least it is a lengthy ordeal. It was actually easier for me to demux it and place it in an mkv container. Although that also takes hours. So for me the cost is the lesser of the evils. When I want to watch a movie I want to watch it. Not wrestle with bypassing the copy protection for an hour first. Quite a few blurays are available for $15 or less, which I don't consider excessive. Admittedly The Hurt Locker costs more than $20 at the moment. It is one of my favorite war movies, but I will wait until the price drops to around $15 before buying a copy. SWIM has a 10 gig 1080p version from TPB. That will hold me over until the price drops and I can rip the bluray to an mkv file without recompressing.
That bubble gum quote was originally from They Live released in 1988, pre-dating the Duke by 8 years.
What does "old-skool" mean in this context? What does being old have to do with school anyway? I started playing computer games when I was around 8. Basically anyone who is older than a teenager now could have played the original game. So by "old" I guess you are referring to anyone older than 20. What were you doing in 1996 that was so important you missed out on Duke Nukem? It wasn't a great game IMHO but it was fun for a while and more advanced than most FPS games at the time. I'd say that the 20+ demographic is a pretty large one, although maybe not for consoles.
Seriously, if you think kicking someone's ass over something so minor is worth it you probably need anger management. Or at least think a little harder before posting stupid shit on the Internet.
It's not minor at all. It's the equivalent of someone pissing on you. It shows a total lack of respect. It's like saying "you are nothing". In Eastern Europe I once pushed an old lady to the ground for cutting right in front of me. I have gotten in several fights over the years (in various countries) with people who stepped right in front of me while I was waiting in a long line. It almost never happens in the US or Canada though. If it did happen here and some guy engaged him (hopefully by slugging him hard in the face), I wouldn't be aghast. I would be cheering for the guy. Queue jumpers are no better than vermin and should be treated as such in any civilized society.
I don't go to Hahvahd
I see that you have never been to Boston either. Only a relatively small percentage of Bostonians drop their Rs. And not many of those people can afford to go to Harvard.
Now that's one "war on terror" fear inspired law that I could get behind 100%. Although I would offer an amendment that only females under 35 and weighing under 150 pounds would be forced to comply. All other compliance would be voluntary to show that you weren't hiding anything. I would also be in favor of selective enforcement by the mostly male police force. I think they could figure out for themselves who the most "egregious offenders" were. Any pretty girl who is clothed is an abomination. It has to stop.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/scales.html Just an obligatory reference to the warp drive when: scales page to remind everyone just how far away even Alpha Centauri is. It turns out that the basic problem is one of fuel to accelerate us to a large enough fraction of c. The most practical choice seems to be an exceedingly large spacecraft built on Moonbase Alpha and ferried to the appropriate Lagrange Point Station manufacturing facility for further assembly. The only practical tech we have would be a scaled up version of Orion pulsed nuke propulsion. We would still need to build a very, very large ship, miles in length and then fill up almost the whole thing with hydrogen bombs. The conclusion on that page is that it is basically hopeless for any reasonable human timescale even if we could figure out a way to manufacture extremely large quantities of antimatter. An alcubierre type of drive that doesn't require fuel would be the only practical way. If such a drive were even theoretically possible it would give us a chance of visiting other star systems. As far as anyone can tell space drives are not possible and they never will be. I actually think we should give the Orion pulsed nuke idea another try.
I don't think all soldiers are jerks who just want a chance to shoot at and intimidate people, but that is not true for cops. Pretty much all of them are like that. Cops are evil through and through. The police are the only reason that police states can become police states.