I worked in a Best Buy computer department from 2004-2006. The pushy salesmanship is completely a product of management (and I'm sure it's pushed on them just as hard.) I remember being told that every customer had to be greeted within 15 feet of entering a department area, or 30 seconds after entering. We were also strongly rebuked for a simple 'Hey can I help you out with anything today?'. Management would hawk around, and if they saw you interact with a customer, and it end quickly they would quiz you: what was the customer's name, what were they looking for, why was the interaction so short. If you told them the customer specifically said they would like to be left alone, it wasn't acceptable; go back and try again. Management also encouraged us to flat out lie about products (I assume a lot of it was due to their lack of education about technical specifications, though it is certainly plausible due to malice.) As a part timer, if you didn't do exactly as you were told in the above areas, your hours would quickly get diminished (4-6 hours a week of the worst possible shifts). Threats of termination weren't uncommon either. All in all it was an interesting experience for a teenage job, though I vowed never to work retail again.

Jeez man you don't have to be such a Nazi about it.

Maybe try Automator? It's included with OS X.

Pretty sure Ron Paul wants oversight on banking, just the largest one (the Fed) is where we should start in his opinion.

As mentioned by someone above, Logo is being used in a lot of agent-based modeling research. One in particular came up time and time again in a seminar class I took on complex systems was NetLogo. Some poor economics PhD was working on modeling the relationship between groundwater depletion and policy approaches to curbing its overuse, and his simulations were taking weeks with something like 100 nodes. Too bad it isn't open source, might be fun to try to parallelize simulation runs.

I used an average in this case. My upload is typical of cable (terrible) and my download is around 11Mbit. So 4Mbit was my selection. However if I were to weight it based on use (%TimeUpload * Upload Speed + %TimeDownload*DownloadSpeed) it would be closer to the 11Mbit number. So if it's a simple dichotomy between producer and consumer, I'm by far a consumer based on the number of bits. However the things I produce don't measure up solely based on bits (even a large codebase is dwarfed by a half hour of video).

I'd currently say I'm libertarian leaning, and that's exactly my stance on marriage. It's a religious ceremony, and the government has zero business in it at all. Straight couples and gay couples may both have a civil union, which takes care of all those tax and insurance issues but we could cut that crap too. What that federal court ban (I haven't read up on it) would do is stop the judiciary from legislating from the bench, overriding the decision made by the states. This is a crucial idea, as legislating from the judiciary has led to erosion of our Bill of Rights.

I tried when the Patriot Act was up for renewal. The form letter I received in return made it ostensibly clear that my representative did not read, nor care to address any of the points I made in my letter.

As much as he's been marred for his personal mishaps, Tiger Woods has set up Learning Centers in LA, DC, and a couple of other locations that focus on teaching STEM type curriculum, while providing some physical activity to break up any academic tedium (exercise is good for the mind). I have no accounts of the quality, however it is an option to be explored. www.tigerwoodsfoundation.org

Even so, those $7700 come from US tax payers. So really (and at the same time not really) they are getting them back.

No that's quadratic.