I use to love this show as a teenager. In college, I stopped watching television. Afterwards, it just struck me as stupid and self righteous, but maybe that was a reflection of society as a whole. The dialogs were campy and the situations so contrived. Everything was just so fortuitous. Kirk would make a silly gamble and win. Just did not strike me as real. Especially when others would make the same gamble and lose. I think "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy " made fun of this in the improbability drive.
People would say it was the best SF. I thought Outer Limits was much better in terms of having stories and characters. For one thing, Kirk and the Enterprise would survive.

Once I tried to pick up two Spanish chicks. Would have been useful if I could have know what they were saying about me knowing that I did not know Spanish.

I took AP (chem and calculus) classes in high school. I think I scored a 3 on the AP exams, so did not place out of those classes. Instead, when I got to college, I was put into honor's versions of those classes. There were 2 problems with this approach. As a good student, I was punished twice. Once for having taken them in HS while many of my classmates took the easier regular version of those classes, some of whom scored better overall and got scholarships based on their academic grades. The time I got punished is when taking those honor's version in college, I was competing against a better candidate pool and thus had little time for other activities (girls). The other issue is that those classes were a time drain that could have been better used towards other academic classes. Later on, I learned how students would intentionally rig the game by taking easy classes to boost their GPA. I guess it was too late when I tried to play that game. One of my friends was fully fluent in Spanish, but took that just because he could do an easy course load. Similarly, I had friends who failed out of Biology, switched into Psychology, and got into Med School. I guess I lost faith in the fairness of the system by then.

Why, I think we should build day care centers there.

to get rid of you.
but if you are valuable enough, then they will overlook issues.

Professional sports mess up the priorities of sports. As soon as universities charge for sport events, it is no longer a sport, but a business and profession.
Yes, you can say that the adult athletes should know about the dangers and as such should be in a position to ascertain the risk. Fundamentally, it was one of denial that something will happen to him. The same argument could be made that the Jews knew about the risks when Hitler got elected and opted to move to Birobidzhan as soon as the Nazi movement got started, but did not want to risk loosing their jewelery market investment in Germany until it was too late. Or that the Injuns should have moved to Mexico when the Manifest Destiny movement grained traction.

I have the same problem, unfortunately my Zoosk account doesn't bring me the candidate pool that I seek,

Originally, I was thinking of Mark Twain's quote, "Suppose you are an idiot". Now suppose that you are a member of Congress". Now, I am being redundant".
This came up in an different context. When Ralph Reed tool over Moral Majority from Jerry Falwell. Falwell was a idiot, but Reed presented a new threat as he took the time to think things out, in how issues would benefit his cause and the detriment of his opposition.
blame my style on e.e. elliot.

Is at an all time high.
However, I'd rather have morons in power than smart guys. The smart guys can really screw us!

As opposed to most politicians and preachers who have no knowledge whatsoever and feel that they are doing God's work by bombing Serbia or banning abortion.

Yes, balloons pop, but mechanical systems fail or jam (due to foreign matter).

I have had interviews where the questions asked were not in my forte. I studied math, but worked as programmer for most of my life. At my university, I remember seeing certain classes taught for different audiences. Numerical analysis taught for CS majors was completely different than that taught for math majors. CS people devoted a lot of time to computational complexity formulations for various sort algorithms and approximations to those. Math numerical analysis chose different problems to study. Even year to year, the math problems studied varied based on the professor.
Take differential equations. DE for engineers emphasized recognizing and memorizing certain route formulations for solving "standard classical problems." DE for mathematicians involved heavy theorem proving and esoteric questions like "existence solutions". Engineers would laugh, saying why the hell would we need to know that? Well, the answer is simple. Most of the easy differential equations that "you can solve" can be solved by looking it up in a book or these days, via Google. However, in the real world, you will most likely encounter fresh ill-posed "one of a kind" DEs. Another example happened when an engineer asked me help with solving sets of DE when the Space Shuttle's robotic arm hit an object. The way that we formulated the solution then was completely wrong. To deal with the impulse event, we switched from a high order RK method so a lower order approximation after impact.
When I took my GREs in math, I bombed my DEs part. Well, the reason is that all of the questions asked focused on the Advanced Nonsense taught to EEs and not on stuff which I was taught.
Years later, I had the exact same problem during an interview with Microsoft. I didn't do well because the sort of questions asked came from the CS school rather than the math school. I don't mind that, but I resented him because he just thought that the interviewer dismissed me as an idiot or fraud because I did not know the answers to his questions. Had he said, "Well, you just MIGHT know your shit, but it is not the shit that we do here, and I do not have a way of evaluating your skill set," I would have accepted that compromise.

A serious study would fold in far more information, which ironically is accessible.
It would be interesting if I could enter my transcripts for college as well as grades which could be used for "future predictions". Even things like certificates and "specific job skills" could be added to really drill down to estimation. Moreover, there are "test companies" which could evaluate one's knowledge of Java or C#, which could be tied into a knowledge management and evaluation system. The problem is to get enough statistics entered as well as insuring that the data is correct. The other issue is to make sure that one is not comparing apples to oranges. An intro CS course at MIT is not the same as one at Harvard Extension School taught by U. Lowell's finest who could not get a real day job and have time "to teach".

My favorite for this is an oldie but goodie. Macsyma or now Maxima. Best of all, it is free.
Moreover, it should be the algorithms and techniques which are and should be important. Most of us can cobble together a program with a GUI. I spent a lot of time studying things like Kalman Filters, and have concluded that there is no such thing as one size fits all or that it is possible or even desirable to parametrize additional features and forecast enhancements. There are a lot of formulations which lead to implementation differences which spill all over the code.
Recently, I was reading Mandelbrot's work on chaos. It seems that the biggest critiques of new formations for modeling chaos are that it is not easy to standardize the representations of the models.
Boo-hoo, mommy, my math and philosophical formulations break down and reality is really strange.

In an age where companies collect and trade info about customers, it seems only fair that customers should be able to trade info about companies and governments. I hate it when my bank sends info about me to their financial investment partners. Banking and investing are separate business, however there is money to be made off suckers and to avoid people with financial or legal problems.
The most egregious of these are doctors, who recommend unnecessary procedures just because you have the money to afford them. A patient puts his trust in a doctor, yet it seems as if oftentimes this trust is misplaced. I noticed that Angie's List no longer maintains reviews on doctors. They must have been sued into silence.
The other day, Fox news ran a story about a lawyer who was charging his client money for sleeping with her. Funny story, but it would have been even funnier had they released the name of the lawyer. Whatever happened to free speech and defending to the death our right for it.