I got Mass Effect 2 from a friend. I traded him a game for it. I liked the game so much, when Mass Effect 3 came out, I purchased the full retail version because I couldn't wait to play it. If you make your games compelling enough, people will flock to buy them brand new.
Take a look at Madden '10. Within 1 month, 1.9 million people bought it brand new (http://kotaku.com/5356888/madden-tops-charts-again-but-sales-plummet-on-ps2-wii). After a 3 months, 3.9 million (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/10/madden-10-has-shipped-3-9-million-copies/). I'm sure it has sold more since then.. but come on, a quarter of a billion dollars for a single video game that they just re-used old code and made a few tweaks to.
People are still buying brand new games. I am if I like the game enough and typically the only way to get me in to a franchise is by a friend lending me a game, or me buying it used. I don't want to eat up 2 gigs of my 250 gig/mo limit to try some crappy limited demo.
This is a great opportunity for a 4th gaming system to come out without DLC and without prohibiting used games. I would buy it in an instant.
Even scarier, if you have a Facebook account and want to share some links, Facebook has started to censor site URLs they believe are malicious from the Facebook walls. Try to post a link to http://www.spi0n.com/ on your wall to see it in action.
I suppose they should put labels on beer that it causes aggressive behavior. Then a note on cigarettes warning that quitting smoking can cause aggressive behavior. Then go to all of the parents that they convinced should feed their children Ritalin and let them know it causes aggressive behavior. Then visit the gym and let them know. Finally, top it off with letting them know that lying politicians can also cause aggression in the constituents that voted for them.
If a provider is telling me I'm getting 6mb/s, I expect 6mb/s... period. My ISP telling me they are cutting me off because "I'm using 6mb/s for 15 hours of the day" is a load of bull. If they can't sustain 6mb/s for every customer, they need to fire some people in their marketing department and give some money back to their customers for misrepresentation.
Old modem ISPs did this same crap. They would only have a pool of 50, 100, 200 modems, then when the pool was full and someone else was trying to connect, they would disconnect whoever in the pool was online the longest to make room for other people.
Netflix also advertises "Unlimited movies for x dollars!Q" but they secretly stick you on a waiting list if you order too many movies every month.
Lastly, look at gmail. They say you get 3 gigs of online space but do they honestly expect every person to have 3 gigs of space? What would happen if the millions of people with gmail used up even 50% of their allocated space?
Don't over exaggerate your capabilities as a company and don't make stuff up to get more customers. That's a quick way of losing customers and ensuring future customers will go elsewhere.
First off, let me disclaim this with yes, I know ROR is a framework and PHP is a language. Yes its not quite the same comparing PHP to ROR. They are still both tools used to achieve the same result on the web. I haven't used CakePHP so this is only PHP vs ROR. Trols begone:)
I know there are a lot of PHP haters on the ROR side, and a lot of ROR haters on the PHP side. I've used PHP for nearly 8 years now and I love it. About a year ago I got a job offer at a startup and they wanted me to do rails instead of PHP. So, I've been pushing rails to its limits for the last year trying to get things done with the same strength and speed of my former PHP apps. Both are good and bad in their own ways. Here is yet another random coder's 2 cents:
PHP:
Pros:
GREAT community.
Easy to read and accurate documentation
Fairly easy language to pick up
Fast! The performance of PHP is the best of the web languages I've used.
Awesome for creating small scripts in a hurry (ie, displaying an MOTD on your site or something of the like)
CLI php works just as web php does
Easy to get working with most major webservers
Cons:
A royal pain in the ass to maintain if your program starts getting large.
Very easy to make insecure (reg. globals anyone?)
No built in testing
No built in MVC (this is easy to fix this, but still, i *hated* using smarty or the like for my templates)
Lots of crappy applications give it a bad name:) (phpnuke comes to mind)
No namespaces!
Hard to scale
Ruby on Rails:
Pros:
Tons of stuff built right in like ActiveRecord, MVC, etc.
ActiveRecord is awesome for simple queries
Its ruby guts makes for some pretty easy to read code (saying "puts 'hello world' unless social" is much easier to read than "if (!$social) { print 'hello world'; }
Built in testing framework is a awesome and is an incentive for people to test more (I NEVER tested in PHP, i do all the time in rails)
You can create impressive sites fairly quickly
Namespaces, glorious namespaces!
Easy to scale. Add more mongrel clusters and you're done.
Cons:
Tons of stuff built right in (it is bloated all to hell)
ActiveRecord is SLOW SLOW SLOW for complex queries (Pear DB DataObject kicks its ass)
The community is very young and immature -- its a mash up of a few guy's blogs, a few wikis, and $9.99 podcasts
The API documentation is lacking, and in a lot of cases, completely wrong. You have to read the source code to figure out what the API should be.
Extremely verbose if you want a quick and simple piece of code on your static site (as in the aforementioned MOTD example)
No easy integration with major webservers. You have to proxy and mod rewrite all over the place to get it to live in harmony with static files or other code (like PHP)
Those are the major points that I can think of at this time. There are tons of other, smaller things that I encounter on a day to day basis. In the end, I think both are strong in their own ways. I feel its important to not marry either one and look at them as TOOLS that are to be used in the proper situations. If there is one thing I can't stand, its a purist. Purists box themselves in and turn in to stubborn old foagies that no one wants to deal with. Be open to using any tool that gets the job done in the most professional way possible.
I had a similar situation occur to me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I bought a broken router from Wal Mart and when I went in to the store to return it, the 90 year old lady at the front door did not mark my product as being a return by putting a sticker on the packaging. When I went to the counter to return it, they accused me of stealing the router then trying to return it (i was returning it for a replacement, not cash). They told me that they would have to review the security tapes to make sure I walked in with it. They pretty much detained me for 45 minutes while they could review the tape. Aftwards I went online to see if I had a case of false imprisionment, but according to Louisiana state law, Security guards have the right to detain you just as police do. I am not sure if this applies to employees woking in a security capacity, or licensed security guards. I wonder if Ohio has a similar law. In any case it's a bunch of bollocks.
I agree. I'm 5'8.5 and weigh almost 200 lbs. I work out in the gym 3 times a week for 1 hour a day doing nothing but lifting (I bench around 250 and dumbell curl around 55), and I ride my bike 9 miles a day (ove San Francisco's hills). I'm pretty damn healthy, and I have a BMI of around 30.1. I'm obsese!
I don't know why they are using BMI anymore. Displacement is one of the best ways of measuring fat. If you have ANY muscle on you, your BMI will be compleely misleading.
Back to the topic on hand, I agree that unhealthy people should be charged more for insurance but I strongly feel defining what is unhealthy is a slippery slope. Pretty soon, not brushing and flossing your teeth twice a day will be considered unhealthy to your body because some mouth diseases can affect the rest of you.
One of the main reasons I bought a Wii was to avoid spending a ridiculous $60 on games. I think a lot of other people factored this in to their console decision too. In fact, I would so go far to say that only the people who were willing to spend $500 - $750 on a console are the same people who don't mind spending $60 for games... and due to Wii's runaway success and dismal console sales of the other systems, I'd have to disagree with this article.
I have a 720p LCD tv with a resolution of 1280x720, and I have a DVI to HDMI cable going from my Intel Imac to my tv set. Everything looks like complete crap. I don't know if it is due to the setup or what, but all videos have artifacts all over the place, and non video use is just as bad. It's about as good as watching normal TV, really.. but it is in no way HD. As soon as I turn off the TV and on to HBO HD or something, I drool a little bit and remember why I bought the TV. I'm convinced its my MiniDVI to (single link) DVI to HDMI setup losing signal, and I welcome the HDMI video cards:) It's too bad I can't upgrade my Imac with it. Thanks, Steve.
I, like others here, enjoyed the occasional Sunday deals that CompUSA had to offer. They were also good for parts that you HAD to have right then and there... like if you forgot to purchase a heatsink with your brand new computer parts:) But I completely gave up on them when I went spelunking in the CompUSA cavern in San Francisco (yes its actually underground) to buy an HDMI cable. They were asking $180 for a 9 foot HDMI cable for my brand new LCD TV. I got back to work and ordered one from monoprice.com for $8+$5 s/h, and had it in 2 days. CompUSA used to be even more expensive. They were forced to lower a lot of their prices once so many online entities started outselling them. I guess they even it out by ripping customers a new one on speciality parts (like HDMI cables). It's not like they have to pay their staff a lot of money. A friend of mine worked at CompUSA as a computer technician for $6.15 an hour (when minimum wage was $5.15... oh wait, it still is) while CompUSA charged customers over $70/hr for his services. Corporate greed FTL.
Isn't it funny how kids are forced to pledge their allegiance when they aren't old enough legally pledge anything.
What do you think Baptism is:) It's the same bull. Changing someone to a religion before they can object or understand.
As many jokes as people make about the Amish, I highly respect their religious ways. They do not baptize or force their religion upon their young. They wait until their children are old enough (15 to 21 years of age) before sending them out into the real world in a process called rumspringa (literally meaning 'Run Around', see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa). They say 'Go out to the world, see whats out there, have fun, live that life, and when you are ready to make a choice about being Amish, come back and let us know'. The translation of this process literally means 'Run free'
Good point. Hell, there was a video of a cat in a 'Cat Spa' -- pretty much a giant feline washing machine, on YouTube. Funny as hell:) After some people complaing about it to the SPCA, the video mysteriously disspeared within days. Regardless if the video is copywritten, YouTube allows these users' activites to become press fodder for the big, bad media networks by not removing it with the same expediency as it does offensive videos.
I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the fact that if YouTube allows pornographic material on their site, THEY are liable in most countries if some underage person sees it, where as if someone uploads a non offensive, copywritten video, the user is (the "We can't control what users post on our site" defense).
It is illegal, and the user is an idiot for doing it. I just think that YouTube/Google, and the media networks are in bed together and they decided to make an example out of this guy. I wonder what happened to 'Do no evil'.
Even though it is true if your employer fired you, they wouldn't give you notice, giving 2 weeks to your employer is usually the best route to go. It is situation dependent, but in addition to not burning bridges with the people who will be forced to take over your work, you also retain your employer as a positive reference (as long as you weren't a horrible employee). There are other benefits of quitting 'the right way' as well. I gave 2 and some odd weeks of notice at my last company, and put in my resignation notice that I would be available at consulting capacity for a fraction of my previous pay rate. My employer agreed to it and in addition to keeping a positive reference, I have an additional source of income consulting for applications that I wrote.
I had to interface our merchant site with Google checkout and I was pretty dissapointed in the way the API was written, and the way it worked in general.. especially with customer feedback. A customer would pretty much have to 'request action on the account' which would then use google's system to e-mail a tech contact at our company saying 'hey! you have a message! go check it out' instead of supplying the message itself. All e-mail addresses were hidden and it was a real hassle to get a hold of a real person to discuss order issues. Google also had a special order status called 'Cancelled by Google'. I thought to myself, why would Google go about cancelling customers' orders? Lastly, once we got everything working in the sandbox and we deployed, none of the production pricing logic worked like the sandbox. It took us 2 days to correct the undocumented enhancements to the production environment. I held google in the highest regards before my experiences with them, and now I view them as just another online company.
I think its safe to postulate that a good portion of Mac users are liberal hippy emo types (myself included). Given this, shouldn't OSX belong on the left side, and Windows on the right?:)
While I will probably get flamed for mentioning it, JavaScript interpreters do come with all major operating systems that include web browsers. It seems a natural progression for a kid who is doing a web page for his/her favorite band to decide 'Hey, I want to ask a user some information and use that on my webpage'. This is to say they don't have access to PHP or ASP or any of the 'web' languages in the first place.
In addition to that, a lot of games provide rich APIs. Just last night I was marvelling at how extensive of an API World of Warcraft has.
These methods aren't exactly as simple as lauching your favorite MSDOS editor and typing away, but there are a variety of options for any aspiring programmer to learn the art or at least dip their toes in the water.
4 years ago I was flying with my parents from Dallas to Las Vegas and when we got into the boarding area, I couldn't hear the announcements to board. The woman announcing was speaking really low, or the speakers were messed up. In any case, I went up to ask her what the problem was and if she could repeat what she just said. She got an attitude with me and told me to sit down so I got an attitude right back and told her I couldnt hear a thing she was saying and she needs to speak up. When it finally came time to board the plane, I was "Randomly Selected" for a boarding inspection. I was 22 at the time, and I looked like any 22 year old white college student. I was inconvenienced for 10 minutes because the boarding pass woman didn't like me. All of these rules are just to make people FEEL safer, but they aren't accomplishing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I got Mass Effect 2 from a friend. I traded him a game for it. I liked the game so much, when Mass Effect 3 came out, I purchased the full retail version because I couldn't wait to play it. If you make your games compelling enough, people will flock to buy them brand new. Take a look at Madden '10. Within 1 month, 1.9 million people bought it brand new (http://kotaku.com/5356888/madden-tops-charts-again-but-sales-plummet-on-ps2-wii). After a 3 months, 3.9 million (http://www.joystiq.com/2009/11/10/madden-10-has-shipped-3-9-million-copies/). I'm sure it has sold more since then .. but come on, a quarter of a billion dollars for a single video game that they just re-used old code and made a few tweaks to.
People are still buying brand new games. I am if I like the game enough and typically the only way to get me in to a franchise is by a friend lending me a game, or me buying it used. I don't want to eat up 2 gigs of my 250 gig/mo limit to try some crappy limited demo.
This is a great opportunity for a 4th gaming system to come out without DLC and without prohibiting used games. I would buy it in an instant.
Even scarier, if you have a Facebook account and want to share some links, Facebook has started to censor site URLs they believe are malicious from the Facebook walls. Try to post a link to http://www.spi0n.com/ on your wall to see it in action.
I suppose they should put labels on beer that it causes aggressive behavior. Then a note on cigarettes warning that quitting smoking can cause aggressive behavior. Then go to all of the parents that they convinced should feed their children Ritalin and let them know it causes aggressive behavior. Then visit the gym and let them know. Finally, top it off with letting them know that lying politicians can also cause aggression in the constituents that voted for them.
Is it me or could anything from a stick of gum, to ear plugs, to a bottle of water be considered a 'Hoax Device' to somoneone who was paranoid enough?
Actually he's been running his own studio since the release of "Broken" in 1992 :)
If a provider is telling me I'm getting 6mb/s, I expect 6mb/s ... period. My ISP telling me they are cutting me off because "I'm using 6mb/s for 15 hours of the day" is a load of bull. If they can't sustain 6mb/s for every customer, they need to fire some people in their marketing department and give some money back to their customers for misrepresentation.
Old modem ISPs did this same crap. They would only have a pool of 50, 100, 200 modems, then when the pool was full and someone else was trying to connect, they would disconnect whoever in the pool was online the longest to make room for other people.
Netflix also advertises "Unlimited movies for x dollars!Q" but they secretly stick you on a waiting list if you order too many movies every month.
Lastly, look at gmail. They say you get 3 gigs of online space but do they honestly expect every person to have 3 gigs of space? What would happen if the millions of people with gmail used up even 50% of their allocated space?
Don't over exaggerate your capabilities as a company and don't make stuff up to get more customers. That's a quick way of losing customers and ensuring future customers will go elsewhere.
First off, let me disclaim this with yes, I know ROR is a framework and PHP is a language. Yes its not quite the same comparing PHP to ROR. They are still both tools used to achieve the same result on the web. I haven't used CakePHP so this is only PHP vs ROR. Trols begone :)
I know there are a lot of PHP haters on the ROR side, and a lot of ROR haters on the PHP side. I've used PHP for nearly 8 years now and I love it. About a year ago I got a job offer at a startup and they wanted me to do rails instead of PHP. So, I've been pushing rails to its limits for the last year trying to get things done with the same strength and speed of my former PHP apps. Both are good and bad in their own ways. Here is yet another random coder's 2 cents:
PHP:
Pros:
GREAT community.
Easy to read and accurate documentation
Fairly easy language to pick up
Fast! The performance of PHP is the best of the web languages I've used.
Awesome for creating small scripts in a hurry (ie, displaying an MOTD on your site or something of the like)
CLI php works just as web php does
Easy to get working with most major webservers
Cons:
A royal pain in the ass to maintain if your program starts getting large.
Very easy to make insecure (reg. globals anyone?)
No built in testing
No built in MVC (this is easy to fix this, but still, i *hated* using smarty or the like for my templates)
Lots of crappy applications give it a bad name :) (phpnuke comes to mind)
No namespaces!
Hard to scale
Ruby on Rails:
Pros:
Tons of stuff built right in like ActiveRecord, MVC, etc.
ActiveRecord is awesome for simple queries
Its ruby guts makes for some pretty easy to read code (saying "puts 'hello world' unless social" is much easier to read than "if (!$social) { print 'hello world'; }
Built in testing framework is a awesome and is an incentive for people to test more (I NEVER tested in PHP, i do all the time in rails)
You can create impressive sites fairly quickly
Namespaces, glorious namespaces!
Easy to scale. Add more mongrel clusters and you're done.
Cons:
Tons of stuff built right in (it is bloated all to hell)
ActiveRecord is SLOW SLOW SLOW for complex queries (Pear DB DataObject kicks its ass)
The community is very young and immature -- its a mash up of a few guy's blogs, a few wikis, and $9.99 podcasts
The API documentation is lacking, and in a lot of cases, completely wrong. You have to read the source code to figure out what the API should be.
Extremely verbose if you want a quick and simple piece of code on your static site (as in the aforementioned MOTD example)
No easy integration with major webservers. You have to proxy and mod rewrite all over the place to get it to live in harmony with static files or other code (like PHP)
Those are the major points that I can think of at this time. There are tons of other, smaller things that I encounter on a day to day basis. In the end, I think both are strong in their own ways. I feel its important to not marry either one and look at them as TOOLS that are to be used in the proper situations. If there is one thing I can't stand, its a purist. Purists box themselves in and turn in to stubborn old foagies that no one wants to deal with. Be open to using any tool that gets the job done in the most professional way possible.
I had a similar situation occur to me in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I bought a broken router from Wal Mart and when I went in to the store to return it, the 90 year old lady at the front door did not mark my product as being a return by putting a sticker on the packaging. When I went to the counter to return it, they accused me of stealing the router then trying to return it (i was returning it for a replacement, not cash). They told me that they would have to review the security tapes to make sure I walked in with it. They pretty much detained me for 45 minutes while they could review the tape. Aftwards I went online to see if I had a case of false imprisionment, but according to Louisiana state law, Security guards have the right to detain you just as police do. I am not sure if this applies to employees woking in a security capacity, or licensed security guards. I wonder if Ohio has a similar law. In any case it's a bunch of bollocks.
I agree. I'm 5'8.5 and weigh almost 200 lbs. I work out in the gym 3 times a week for 1 hour a day doing nothing but lifting (I bench around 250 and dumbell curl around 55), and I ride my bike 9 miles a day (ove San Francisco's hills). I'm pretty damn healthy, and I have a BMI of around 30.1. I'm obsese!
I don't know why they are using BMI anymore. Displacement is one of the best ways of measuring fat. If you have ANY muscle on you, your BMI will be compleely misleading.
Back to the topic on hand, I agree that unhealthy people should be charged more for insurance but I strongly feel defining what is unhealthy is a slippery slope. Pretty soon, not brushing and flossing your teeth twice a day will be considered unhealthy to your body because some mouth diseases can affect the rest of you.
The dollar may have done down, but gaming shops are gradually outsourcing more and more jobs to Russia and India for $7/hr.
One of the main reasons I bought a Wii was to avoid spending a ridiculous $60 on games. I think a lot of other people factored this in to their console decision too. In fact, I would so go far to say that only the people who were willing to spend $500 - $750 on a console are the same people who don't mind spending $60 for games ... and due to Wii's runaway success and dismal console sales of the other systems, I'd have to disagree with this article.
I have a 720p LCD tv with a resolution of 1280x720, and I have a DVI to HDMI cable going from my Intel Imac to my tv set. Everything looks like complete crap. I don't know if it is due to the setup or what, but all videos have artifacts all over the place, and non video use is just as bad. It's about as good as watching normal TV, really .. but it is in no way HD. As soon as I turn off the TV and on to HBO HD or something, I drool a little bit and remember why I bought the TV. I'm convinced its my MiniDVI to (single link) DVI to HDMI setup losing signal, and I welcome the HDMI video cards :) It's too bad I can't upgrade my Imac with it. Thanks, Steve.
I, like others here, enjoyed the occasional Sunday deals that CompUSA had to offer. They were also good for parts that you HAD to have right then and there ... like if you forgot to purchase a heatsink with your brand new computer parts :) But I completely gave up on them when I went spelunking in the CompUSA cavern in San Francisco (yes its actually underground) to buy an HDMI cable. They were asking $180 for a 9 foot HDMI cable for my brand new LCD TV. I got back to work and ordered one from monoprice.com for $8+$5 s/h, and had it in 2 days. CompUSA used to be even more expensive. They were forced to lower a lot of their prices once so many online entities started outselling them. I guess they even it out by ripping customers a new one on speciality parts (like HDMI cables). It's not like they have to pay their staff a lot of money. A friend of mine worked at CompUSA as a computer technician for $6.15 an hour (when minimum wage was $5.15 ... oh wait, it still is) while CompUSA charged customers over $70/hr for his services. Corporate greed FTL.
What do you think Baptism is
As many jokes as people make about the Amish, I highly respect their religious ways. They do not baptize or force their religion upon their young. They wait until their children are old enough (15 to 21 years of age) before sending them out into the real world in a process called rumspringa (literally meaning 'Run Around', see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa). They say 'Go out to the world, see whats out there, have fun, live that life, and when you are ready to make a choice about being Amish, come back and let us know'. The translation of this process literally means 'Run free'
Good point. Hell, there was a video of a cat in a 'Cat Spa' -- pretty much a giant feline washing machine, on YouTube. Funny as hell :) After some people complaing about it to the SPCA, the video mysteriously disspeared within days. Regardless if the video is copywritten, YouTube allows these users' activites to become press fodder for the big, bad media networks by not removing it with the same expediency as it does offensive videos.
I'm thinking it has a lot to do with the fact that if YouTube allows pornographic material on their site, THEY are liable in most countries if some underage person sees it, where as if someone uploads a non offensive, copywritten video, the user is (the "We can't control what users post on our site" defense).
It is illegal, and the user is an idiot for doing it. I just think that YouTube/Google, and the media networks are in bed together and they decided to make an example out of this guy. I wonder what happened to 'Do no evil'.
Even though it is true if your employer fired you, they wouldn't give you notice, giving 2 weeks to your employer is usually the best route to go. It is situation dependent, but in addition to not burning bridges with the people who will be forced to take over your work, you also retain your employer as a positive reference (as long as you weren't a horrible employee). There are other benefits of quitting 'the right way' as well. I gave 2 and some odd weeks of notice at my last company, and put in my resignation notice that I would be available at consulting capacity for a fraction of my previous pay rate. My employer agreed to it and in addition to keeping a positive reference, I have an additional source of income consulting for applications that I wrote.
I had to interface our merchant site with Google checkout and I was pretty dissapointed in the way the API was written, and the way it worked in general .. especially with customer feedback. A customer would pretty much have to 'request action on the account' which would then use google's system to e-mail a tech contact at our company saying 'hey! you have a message! go check it out' instead of supplying the message itself. All e-mail addresses were hidden and it was a real hassle to get a hold of a real person to discuss order issues. Google also had a special order status called 'Cancelled by Google'. I thought to myself, why would Google go about cancelling customers' orders? Lastly, once we got everything working in the sandbox and we deployed, none of the production pricing logic worked like the sandbox. It took us 2 days to correct the undocumented enhancements to the production environment. I held google in the highest regards before my experiences with them, and now I view them as just another online company.
I'll be watching my Apple stock go up :)
pepople cant memorize computer industry acronyms
I think its safe to postulate that a good portion of Mac users are liberal hippy emo types (myself included). Given this, shouldn't OSX belong on the left side, and Windows on the right? :)
While I will probably get flamed for mentioning it, JavaScript interpreters do come with all major operating systems that include web browsers. It seems a natural progression for a kid who is doing a web page for his/her favorite band to decide 'Hey, I want to ask a user some information and use that on my webpage'. This is to say they don't have access to PHP or ASP or any of the 'web' languages in the first place. In addition to that, a lot of games provide rich APIs. Just last night I was marvelling at how extensive of an API World of Warcraft has. These methods aren't exactly as simple as lauching your favorite MSDOS editor and typing away, but there are a variety of options for any aspiring programmer to learn the art or at least dip their toes in the water.
4 years ago I was flying with my parents from Dallas to Las Vegas and when we got into the boarding area, I couldn't hear the announcements to board. The woman announcing was speaking really low, or the speakers were messed up. In any case, I went up to ask her what the problem was and if she could repeat what she just said. She got an attitude with me and told me to sit down so I got an attitude right back and told her I couldnt hear a thing she was saying and she needs to speak up. When it finally came time to board the plane, I was "Randomly Selected" for a boarding inspection. I was 22 at the time, and I looked like any 22 year old white college student. I was inconvenienced for 10 minutes because the boarding pass woman didn't like me. All of these rules are just to make people FEEL safer, but they aren't accomplishing anything.
How many males do you guys know by the name of Maureen?