The system itself wasn't flawed, but rather whoever set it up decided that they should be category B. The system did exactly what it was told, it just was told to do something different than in the US, and something that was later deemed to be suboptimal.
The sterilized males are usually created using radiation, get a bunch of males together and irradiate them. Some may die, the rest will be sterile, although they may be weaker than wild insects. They've discovered a way to overcome the weakness in the sterilized males by feeding them a super diet.
I've never quite understood this whole 'so called' deal. You only use it when the term is in doubt. But it's not the 'so called gram stain test' IT IS called the gram stain test.
You're missing the point though, Cal Poly isn't a research university. This isn't research, and these student's didn't do it for some research grant and probably won't publish a paper about it or anything. They did it for the hell of it.
So basically you wanted a super engineer that could do everything for you?
At my college there are at least a dozen different types of engineers. What exactly is 'engineering school' anyways? a structural engineer wouldn't know what a PID controller is or how to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor.
I can't tell from your questions if you want a materials engineer or a computer engineer...
I think the problem is that your job description was too general.
Engineers take a real world problem or a variation on a real world problem and come up with a solution. Scientists figure out the laws that govern physical phenomenon. Mathematicians stare at a bunch of stuff and magically (ok not really) come up with ideas that help both engineers and scientists.
Electrical engineers come up with new components. Computer engineers come up with chips and boards that use these new components. Computer scientists come up with algorithms to use these new chips and boards. Software engineers come up with programs to solve real world problems using these new algorithms.
For me the key difference between a programmer and a software engineer is the parts of the solution that they come up with.
A software engineer takes the customer's problem, determines what exactly they want, writes a spec, designs the system, implements their design with sufficient documentation, goes through all the testing including security testing, shows the customer, and goes back to implementation/design until they get what exactly the customer wants.
A programmer might be able to design, and can probably implement the design without sufficient documentation, and MIGHT be able to test it properly.
So programming is a sub-discipline of software engineering.
Kind of what a carpenter is to a structural engineer. Except the structural engineer is also the carpenter (but there's also a lot of other carpenters working with him).
You asked for an 'engineer with programming experience' You should have asked for a computer engineer... I think... I can't even tell what you want.
Engineering has nothing to do with physical components, it's just that until software most problems were solved with physical objects.
Arthritis is a class of diseases, meaning chronic degenerative joint pain.
There is osteoarthritis which is caused by wearing out the protective cartillage in your joints. Some arthritis is caused by auto-immune diseases, including psoriatic and rheumatoid.
My mother has both psoriatic and rheumatiod and until recently had a lot of pain when moving. Some new steriods are allowing her to move pain free for the most part.
Ignoring contaminates, HFCS used in the majority of products is a mixture of about 50% glucose and 50% fructose (Both monosacharides). Sucrose (table sugar) is a disacharide made up of one glucose and one fructose bonded. Our body ends up having to break up the sucrose into glucose and fructose in order to process it, so mostly there is no difference between the two.
There are three possible reasons that HFCS is worse than table sugar - HFCS doesn't require sucrase (the enzyme that breaks sucrose into the two monosacharides). This means that a person could ingest the same amounts of HFCS and sucrose, but get more energy out of the HFCS, because he doesn't have enough sucrase to break all of the sucrose up. I have no idea what the amount of sucrose we can process at once is though.
-HFCS has to go through more chemical processing than table sugar, leading to the potentiality of additional contaminates.
-Finally HFCS is CHEAP. That is the main difference, a food maker can easily put more in to make their product more appealing why leaving the price pretty low.
I'm an advocate of herbal remedies. Well, the ones that work. Plants can be pretty potent, and to think otherwise is shockingly naive. Not every herb is going to be a cure-all, but there's a gamut of plants that effectively address an array of health problems. Or recreational desires.
Over-reliance on synthetics created by for-profit organizations is itself basically a disease. If, say, your first choice for addressing depression is an SSRI prescription, you've been infected by advertising.
Said by someone who has probably never had major depression. I have, and the best way to describe it without using medical terms is to consider the brain as a chemical based state machine.
Your brain gets stuck in this mode of being depressed, and to treat it you have to kick it hard enough for it to get out of that mode and stay out. Many ways exist to do that, SSRI based medications work very well at changing the state of your brain into a mode that either is no longer depressed, or is now able to be kicked by something else out of that mode. The best use of anti-depression medications are to get you functional long enough to address the problems in your life (if any) or to go into therapy. One thing that a lot of people don't understand about depression is that it may (and commonly does) have no external cause. Your life may be going great, but that doesn't matter because your brain has gotten stuck in depression mode.
One of the major plusses of SSRI based medications is that they are another thing to try before going to MAOI medications, and those can be pretty nasty.
Just making sure you know, "rapped" != "raped". I couldn't tell by your response which word you thought it was. Being rapped means to take a gentle blow, for example being rapped on the knuckles. Being raped, is well, being raped.
Oh, and the government has put spy chips in our heads too!
In all seriousness, this whole big oil conspiracy is a load of junk. I'm sure the oil companies would do that if they could, but look at it from the car company point of view. If a car company could come out and say "Hey! we got a car that gets amazing mpg and behaves just like any other car!" they would have an instant fortune. How exactly would oil companies go about stopping these companies? I've never heard of oil companies buying car companies, left and right. Did they go and kill everyone who has worked on a high efficiency engine program?
Whats changed more than anything recently is modeling software and rapid prototyping. There is only so much math you can do by hand when trying to model an internal combustion engine while it's running. For a long time we made engines with trial and error and whatever math could be done by hand, but now we're at the point where we can make accurate simulations of the workings of an engine. Hell I wouldn't doubt if they run these simulations with genetic algorithms trying to find the right shape or timings to run in a prototype.
As for this engine compared to that battery, there they've said "we have this working battery, it's not all that good, but it works!" and here we have "Not only does it work, but it's current form is better than other engines!"
Additionally it is in the oil companies' best interest to develop production of producible fuels (rather than extracted fuels) because the costs for extracting keep going up, and the amount of energy required to extract keeps going up. Eventually we will run out of oil, it's a matter of when. Once the price gets high enough if one company has been investing in producible fuels while the others have been slacking off, they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money.
Ideally the best solution is using the electricity generated from a fission nuclear power plant to power the vehicles, indirectly through some storage medium. The question then becomes which storage medium? Hydrogen is inefficient and a compressed gas, making cars into mobile flamethrowers (since there is no oxygen in the tank it won't explode, but any that escapes will sure burn, and any rupture in the tank is a lot worse when working with a compressed gas than with a vaporous liquid like gasoline). Batteries will require large amounts of certain metals (I don't know what the current estimates for usage versus supply of battery metals are, but there are a LOT of cars in the world) and don't have the energy density of gasoline. This leaves us with biologically derived fuels. Let me first say that this whole 'ethanol from corn' is the true load of crap that being fed to Americans, corn is terrible for production of ethanol. It would be better if we could get the enzymes that break down cellulose into a fuel to work right, but we're not quite there yet. Algae grown in large salt water ponds are our best option currently, but that doesn't get the corn area swing votes quite as well as making a whole new use of the staple crop for several states.
So, in conclusion, nuclear fission power plants (with reprocessing, and newer reactor designs) used to power a storage medium for cars. Tada! Ok, not that simple, but more or less, yeah.
If I had to take a guess it would be because the ford used the same design as previous 2 stoke engines, just in a different form factor to fit into a fiesta. Two stroke engines usually suffer from having to burn their oil at the same time as their fuel and letting fuel leak out the exhaust (since the intake and exhaust from the chamber happen at the same time).
Systems probably don't do comparisons between different fingers, if you don't know which finger it is yes it should. But comparing a finger known to be the left thumb against another finger known the be the right thumb? or even worse they switch the prints on the middle 3 fingers and swap them around from index to ring finger or something. The computing time for a problem like that goes up 10x if you have to compare each incoming print against all fingerprints on a person.
Each time we went through those periods we adopted more stringent testing. Additionally plasma is different because it has been known about for quite some time, but only recently been harnessed into medical use. Plasma is a lot less penetrating than mercury (which I assume they ate/drank, I can't remember if it can be absorbed into the skin) and certainly less penetrating than any kind of ionizing radiation used back then (although alpha is pretty harmless unless the source is inside of you). Finally the way plasma works is fundamentally different, it simply annihilates every organic chemical is comes in contact with, so very little chance of cancer or side effects. It's kind of like worrying about the side effects of being decapitated.
If they happen to tear the road up more than others, then yes, they would be illegal. For a more accurate analogy however, if your alterations somehow caused you to stop paying taxes for the roads, then yes, that would too be illegal.
Simply put, he sold something that sole purpose was to break the law, then yes, that (should) be illegal.
Simple, there is no such rule. It depends instead on the particular license that Wikipedia uses. Some open source works use a license that allows closed source derivatives, others do not.
Of course, thanks to our wonderful American election system, that will never happen.
People will vote for the party in government that gave them money, in the form of subsidies. Guess which states produce the most corn? Battleground states.
Unfortunately, gun control laws never have the desired effect, for the simple reason that if you're going to commit bank robbery, you don't really care about gun laws. The only place I've ever heard of having gun laws that work is Japan, for the simple reason that they have had an absolute ban for 60 years now, and therefore nobody has them, versus in the US where if they're banned, law abiding citizens will turn them in, while criminals won't give a crap.
Gun control laws in the US could work if you could simultaneously destroy every gun in the US and start fresh, but other than that, they're a band-aid on a missing limb.
The problem here being that most of those people would ask someone with more experience in the field. If I was trying to grow garlic I would probably get a book on garlic growing.
This guy just jumped the gun and went straight to "zomg radiation"
I agree with you on the 'majority of it isn't actually doing any good' but I disagree on the hold carbon part. It's not like toxic waste where it's still a problem if something absorbs it. Carbon in the concrete isn't carbon in the air, and only carbon (dioxide) in the air is considered harmful to the environment. If it is in solid form (as calcium carbonate, or some other chemical, not as solid carbon dioxide) then it does nothing to the environment except sit, which it was doing before in the form of hydrocarbons (coal, gas, oil).
Ultimately a much better solution to the concrete problem would be to increase the efficiency of the production rather than change the end product to absorb carbon. As others have stated, not only is carbon release not the only problem with high energy use, but as this absorbs carbon what happens to its chemical structure? does it stay as strong as when it has finished curing? I can see it being used in applications where strength is unimportant like sidewalks, but no architect/civil engineer/ construction contractor worth anything is going to use an unproven concrete, just too risky.
There is another version of this scam, one or two people with guard uniforms and a strong deposit box sit out front of a bank. They've placed an 'out of order' sign on the normal deposit box and tell anybody who asks that the normal box is broken and they are there to guard a temporary box. Once one or two people have put their deposits in, they take down the sign and walk away with the money.
If "terrorists" really wanted to screw up air travel in the US for a long time, they would bomb security points once or twice.
The reality is that the power of terrorism comes from the people it's used against, by being afraid, we're giving them power. Even after 9/11 air travel is still far safer than driving by far.
Too bad you're talking out your ass for most of your post. Have you ever had depression or anxiety? Addictions are very similar, it's not that you make a decision to do something, rather it's that you never make the decision, it simply becomes true.
With depression you may have no reason to be down, you simply are, you do not make a decision to be. With anxiety you may have no reason to be worried, you simply are, you do not make a decision to be. With addictions you may have no reason to want it, you simply do, and it's so powerful that it suppresses appetite, discomfort from a full bladder, and it makes decisions for you. It's just like a physical addiction, if you're a drug addict there is no "Should I take that next hit?" question, it instead is a statement in your mind "I NEED that next hit".
Addictions in all forms distorts one's priorities, makes decisions for you, and skews your thinking.
Now of course none of these are black and white issues. You can be mildly addicted to something, and still be in full control of your thought processes, but it can reach a point where it just overrides everything.
Sexual disorders (such as pedophilia) fall into the same category. You can have mild pedophilia and be attracted, but still have control of your actions, you can have severe pedophilia and still have control of your actions, and you can have extreme pedophilia where it just dominates everything you think about. There is the distinction with pedophilia in that the act directly harms another, and therefore the act itself takes an extreme condition to override your decision making. Not to mention that what most people identify as pedophilia isn't actually pedophilia. Pedophilia is only when the person is below the reproductive age (13), anything above that is a different condition I can't remember the name of.
I am not in any way condoning these acts however, if you have an addiction of any type you need to get help to break it. This is especially so if your addiction directly harms another. The addiction may remove some of the responsibility and blame over to forces of nature, however that doesn't mean it's ok to be addicted. A person cannot always be held 100% accountable for their actions. If a man goes into the woods and gets attacked by a bear, is he 100% responsible? no, it is mostly just bad luck, forces of nature are mostly responsible.
As I said though, this doesn't mean it's ok to be addicted, or to have sexual desires so powerful that they override your decision making. You have to identify that you have a problem, and need help.
There is a big difference between addiction and making bad mortgage decisions. Those people are just idiots for not looking through everything extremely carefully. Since you can't see 20 years into the future, but your mortgage might last that long you need to cover your ass. A mortgage is a decision that you go over everything half a dozen times with several people, and has nothing to do with addiction.
Re:I will never buy another Steam game: Dawn of Wa
on
The Age of Steam
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· Score: 1
Usually steam alone works fine for people, DOWII has a fatal flaw in that it requires both steam and windows Live (which doesn't work on my uni's dorm network). However it sounds like most of your problems are with DOWII itself, which while a good game generally, it runs on a pretty finicky engine. Their decision to make the cutscenes at the start impossible to bypass via a button was stupid, I had a bug with the beta where the game didn't like my video drivers, and I ended up having to watch those opening cutscenes 10 times over until I finally found the launch option command line doobie to stop it.
Once you've set up steam the first time you can set it into offline mode (or if you don't have an internet connection). That's one of the main reasons I don't consider it to be that bad of DRM. I have no idea what took it so long though, unless the dvd was just mainly blank and instead it downloaded all of the data.
As for the desktop icon, there should have been an option when you installed, I haven't bought or installed the full DOWII game yet since windows Live won't work on my network, so I dunno about that.
Don't cross off relic just yet, they did make the Homeworld series as well as Company of Heroes, they did botch DOWII though...
In addition to the rest of the comments above me, these are 1% errors, not 1% critical errors. It's more like you're walking out the door and you leave your keys behind. Result: you go and get your keys, you car doesn't blow up.
Similar situation here, errors don't have to be big. We build machines and computers to be able to handle the errors they make in a competent fashion, same thing happens when you forget your keys, you go back and get them.
Slashdot Mirror
The system itself wasn't flawed, but rather whoever set it up decided that they should be category B. The system did exactly what it was told, it just was told to do something different than in the US, and something that was later deemed to be suboptimal.
The sterilized males are usually created using radiation, get a bunch of males together and irradiate them. Some may die, the rest will be sterile, although they may be weaker than wild insects. They've discovered a way to overcome the weakness in the sterilized males by feeding them a super diet.
Same species, just sterilized and fed an amped up diet. This has been used in the past (especially with mosquitoes) without the amped up diet.
I've never quite understood this whole 'so called' deal. You only use it when the term is in doubt. But it's not the 'so called gram stain test' IT IS called the gram stain test.
You're missing the point though, Cal Poly isn't a research university. This isn't research, and these student's didn't do it for some research grant and probably won't publish a paper about it or anything. They did it for the hell of it.
So basically you wanted a super engineer that could do everything for you?
At my college there are at least a dozen different types of engineers. What exactly is 'engineering school' anyways? a structural engineer wouldn't know what a PID controller is or how to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor.
I can't tell from your questions if you want a materials engineer or a computer engineer...
I think the problem is that your job description was too general.
Engineers take a real world problem or a variation on a real world problem and come up with a solution. Scientists figure out the laws that govern physical phenomenon. Mathematicians stare at a bunch of stuff and magically (ok not really) come up with ideas that help both engineers and scientists.
Electrical engineers come up with new components.
Computer engineers come up with chips and boards that use these new components.
Computer scientists come up with algorithms to use these new chips and boards.
Software engineers come up with programs to solve real world problems using these new algorithms.
For me the key difference between a programmer and a software engineer is the parts of the solution that they come up with.
A software engineer takes the customer's problem, determines what exactly they want, writes a spec, designs the system, implements their design with sufficient documentation, goes through all the testing including security testing, shows the customer, and goes back to implementation/design until they get what exactly the customer wants.
A programmer might be able to design, and can probably implement the design without sufficient documentation, and MIGHT be able to test it properly.
So programming is a sub-discipline of software engineering.
Kind of what a carpenter is to a structural engineer. Except the structural engineer is also the carpenter (but there's also a lot of other carpenters working with him).
You asked for an 'engineer with programming experience' You should have asked for a computer engineer... I think... I can't even tell what you want.
Engineering has nothing to do with physical components, it's just that until software most problems were solved with physical objects.
Arthritis is a class of diseases, meaning chronic degenerative joint pain.
There is osteoarthritis which is caused by wearing out the protective cartillage in your joints.
Some arthritis is caused by auto-immune diseases, including psoriatic and rheumatoid.
My mother has both psoriatic and rheumatiod and until recently had a lot of pain when moving. Some new steriods are allowing her to move pain free for the most part.
Ignoring contaminates, HFCS used in the majority of products is a mixture of about 50% glucose and 50% fructose (Both monosacharides). Sucrose (table sugar) is a disacharide made up of one glucose and one fructose bonded. Our body ends up having to break up the sucrose into glucose and fructose in order to process it, so mostly there is no difference between the two.
There are three possible reasons that HFCS is worse than table sugar
- HFCS doesn't require sucrase (the enzyme that breaks sucrose into the two monosacharides). This means that a person could ingest the same amounts of HFCS and sucrose, but get more energy out of the HFCS, because he doesn't have enough sucrase to break all of the sucrose up. I have no idea what the amount of sucrose we can process at once is though.
-HFCS has to go through more chemical processing than table sugar, leading to the potentiality of additional contaminates.
-Finally HFCS is CHEAP. That is the main difference, a food maker can easily put more in to make their product more appealing why leaving the price pretty low.
I'm an advocate of herbal remedies. Well, the ones that work. Plants can be pretty potent, and to think otherwise is shockingly naive. Not every herb is going to be a cure-all, but there's a gamut of plants that effectively address an array of health problems. Or recreational desires.
Over-reliance on synthetics created by for-profit organizations is itself basically a disease. If, say, your first choice for addressing depression is an SSRI prescription, you've been infected by advertising.
Said by someone who has probably never had major depression. I have, and the best way to describe it without using medical terms is to consider the brain as a chemical based state machine.
Your brain gets stuck in this mode of being depressed, and to treat it you have to kick it hard enough for it to get out of that mode and stay out. Many ways exist to do that, SSRI based medications work very well at changing the state of your brain into a mode that either is no longer depressed, or is now able to be kicked by something else out of that mode. The best use of anti-depression medications are to get you functional long enough to address the problems in your life (if any) or to go into therapy. One thing that a lot of people don't understand about depression is that it may (and commonly does) have no external cause. Your life may be going great, but that doesn't matter because your brain has gotten stuck in depression mode.
One of the major plusses of SSRI based medications is that they are another thing to try before going to MAOI medications, and those can be pretty nasty.
Just making sure you know, "rapped" != "raped". I couldn't tell by your response which word you thought it was. Being rapped means to take a gentle blow, for example being rapped on the knuckles. Being raped, is well, being raped.
Oh, and the government has put spy chips in our heads too!
In all seriousness, this whole big oil conspiracy is a load of junk. I'm sure the oil companies would do that if they could, but look at it from the car company point of view. If a car company could come out and say "Hey! we got a car that gets amazing mpg and behaves just like any other car!" they would have an instant fortune. How exactly would oil companies go about stopping these companies? I've never heard of oil companies buying car companies, left and right. Did they go and kill everyone who has worked on a high efficiency engine program?
Whats changed more than anything recently is modeling software and rapid prototyping. There is only so much math you can do by hand when trying to model an internal combustion engine while it's running. For a long time we made engines with trial and error and whatever math could be done by hand, but now we're at the point where we can make accurate simulations of the workings of an engine. Hell I wouldn't doubt if they run these simulations with genetic algorithms trying to find the right shape or timings to run in a prototype.
As for this engine compared to that battery, there they've said "we have this working battery, it's not all that good, but it works!" and here we have "Not only does it work, but it's current form is better than other engines!"
Additionally it is in the oil companies' best interest to develop production of producible fuels (rather than extracted fuels) because the costs for extracting keep going up, and the amount of energy required to extract keeps going up. Eventually we will run out of oil, it's a matter of when. Once the price gets high enough if one company has been investing in producible fuels while the others have been slacking off, they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money.
Ideally the best solution is using the electricity generated from a fission nuclear power plant to power the vehicles, indirectly through some storage medium. The question then becomes which storage medium? Hydrogen is inefficient and a compressed gas, making cars into mobile flamethrowers (since there is no oxygen in the tank it won't explode, but any that escapes will sure burn, and any rupture in the tank is a lot worse when working with a compressed gas than with a vaporous liquid like gasoline). Batteries will require large amounts of certain metals (I don't know what the current estimates for usage versus supply of battery metals are, but there are a LOT of cars in the world) and don't have the energy density of gasoline. This leaves us with biologically derived fuels. Let me first say that this whole 'ethanol from corn' is the true load of crap that being fed to Americans, corn is terrible for production of ethanol. It would be better if we could get the enzymes that break down cellulose into a fuel to work right, but we're not quite there yet. Algae grown in large salt water ponds are our best option currently, but that doesn't get the corn area swing votes quite as well as making a whole new use of the staple crop for several states.
So, in conclusion, nuclear fission power plants (with reprocessing, and newer reactor designs) used to power a storage medium for cars. Tada! Ok, not that simple, but more or less, yeah.
If I had to take a guess it would be because the ford used the same design as previous 2 stoke engines, just in a different form factor to fit into a fiesta. Two stroke engines usually suffer from having to burn their oil at the same time as their fuel and letting fuel leak out the exhaust (since the intake and exhaust from the chamber happen at the same time).
Systems probably don't do comparisons between different fingers, if you don't know which finger it is yes it should. But comparing a finger known to be the left thumb against another finger known the be the right thumb? or even worse they switch the prints on the middle 3 fingers and swap them around from index to ring finger or something. The computing time for a problem like that goes up 10x if you have to compare each incoming print against all fingerprints on a person.
Each time we went through those periods we adopted more stringent testing. Additionally plasma is different because it has been known about for quite some time, but only recently been harnessed into medical use. Plasma is a lot less penetrating than mercury (which I assume they ate/drank, I can't remember if it can be absorbed into the skin) and certainly less penetrating than any kind of ionizing radiation used back then (although alpha is pretty harmless unless the source is inside of you). Finally the way plasma works is fundamentally different, it simply annihilates every organic chemical is comes in contact with, so very little chance of cancer or side effects. It's kind of like worrying about the side effects of being decapitated.
If they happen to tear the road up more than others, then yes, they would be illegal.
For a more accurate analogy however, if your alterations somehow caused you to stop paying taxes for the roads, then yes, that would too be illegal.
Simply put, he sold something that sole purpose was to break the law, then yes, that (should) be illegal.
Simple, there is no such rule.
It depends instead on the particular license that Wikipedia uses.
Some open source works use a license that allows closed source derivatives, others do not.
Of course, thanks to our wonderful American election system, that will never happen.
People will vote for the party in government that gave them money, in the form of subsidies. Guess which states produce the most corn? Battleground states.
Unfortunately, gun control laws never have the desired effect, for the simple reason that if you're going to commit bank robbery, you don't really care about gun laws. The only place I've ever heard of having gun laws that work is Japan, for the simple reason that they have had an absolute ban for 60 years now, and therefore nobody has them, versus in the US where if they're banned, law abiding citizens will turn them in, while criminals won't give a crap.
Gun control laws in the US could work if you could simultaneously destroy every gun in the US and start fresh, but other than that, they're a band-aid on a missing limb.
The problem here being that most of those people would ask someone with more experience in the field. If I was trying to grow garlic I would probably get a book on garlic growing.
This guy just jumped the gun and went straight to "zomg radiation"
I agree with you on the 'majority of it isn't actually doing any good' but I disagree on the hold carbon part. It's not like toxic waste where it's still a problem if something absorbs it. Carbon in the concrete isn't carbon in the air, and only carbon (dioxide) in the air is considered harmful to the environment. If it is in solid form (as calcium carbonate, or some other chemical, not as solid carbon dioxide) then it does nothing to the environment except sit, which it was doing before in the form of hydrocarbons (coal, gas, oil).
Ultimately a much better solution to the concrete problem would be to increase the efficiency of the production rather than change the end product to absorb carbon. As others have stated, not only is carbon release not the only problem with high energy use, but as this absorbs carbon what happens to its chemical structure? does it stay as strong as when it has finished curing? I can see it being used in applications where strength is unimportant like sidewalks, but no architect/civil engineer/ construction contractor worth anything is going to use an unproven concrete, just too risky.
There is another version of this scam, one or two people with guard uniforms and a strong deposit box sit out front of a bank. They've placed an 'out of order' sign on the normal deposit box and tell anybody who asks that the normal box is broken and they are there to guard a temporary box. Once one or two people have put their deposits in, they take down the sign and walk away with the money.
If "terrorists" really wanted to screw up air travel in the US for a long time, they would bomb security points once or twice.
The reality is that the power of terrorism comes from the people it's used against, by being afraid, we're giving them power. Even after 9/11 air travel is still far safer than driving by far.
Too bad you're talking out your ass for most of your post. Have you ever had depression or anxiety? Addictions are very similar, it's not that you make a decision to do something, rather it's that you never make the decision, it simply becomes true.
With depression you may have no reason to be down, you simply are, you do not make a decision to be.
With anxiety you may have no reason to be worried, you simply are, you do not make a decision to be.
With addictions you may have no reason to want it, you simply do, and it's so powerful that it suppresses appetite, discomfort from a full bladder, and it makes decisions for you.
It's just like a physical addiction, if you're a drug addict there is no "Should I take that next hit?" question, it instead is a statement in your mind "I NEED that next hit".
Addictions in all forms distorts one's priorities, makes decisions for you, and skews your thinking.
Now of course none of these are black and white issues. You can be mildly addicted to something, and still be in full control of your thought processes, but it can reach a point where it just overrides everything.
Sexual disorders (such as pedophilia) fall into the same category. You can have mild pedophilia and be attracted, but still have control of your actions, you can have severe pedophilia and still have control of your actions, and you can have extreme pedophilia where it just dominates everything you think about.
There is the distinction with pedophilia in that the act directly harms another, and therefore the act itself takes an extreme condition to override your decision making. Not to mention that what most people identify as pedophilia isn't actually pedophilia. Pedophilia is only when the person is below the reproductive age (13), anything above that is a different condition I can't remember the name of.
I am not in any way condoning these acts however, if you have an addiction of any type you need to get help to break it. This is especially so if your addiction directly harms another. The addiction may remove some of the responsibility and blame over to forces of nature, however that doesn't mean it's ok to be addicted. A person cannot always be held 100% accountable for their actions. If a man goes into the woods and gets attacked by a bear, is he 100% responsible? no, it is mostly just bad luck, forces of nature are mostly responsible.
As I said though, this doesn't mean it's ok to be addicted, or to have sexual desires so powerful that they override your decision making. You have to identify that you have a problem, and need help.
There is a big difference between addiction and making bad mortgage decisions. Those people are just idiots for not looking through everything extremely carefully. Since you can't see 20 years into the future, but your mortgage might last that long you need to cover your ass. A mortgage is a decision that you go over everything half a dozen times with several people, and has nothing to do with addiction.
Usually steam alone works fine for people, DOWII has a fatal flaw in that it requires both steam and windows Live (which doesn't work on my uni's dorm network). However it sounds like most of your problems are with DOWII itself, which while a good game generally, it runs on a pretty finicky engine. Their decision to make the cutscenes at the start impossible to bypass via a button was stupid, I had a bug with the beta where the game didn't like my video drivers, and I ended up having to watch those opening cutscenes 10 times over until I finally found the launch option command line doobie to stop it.
Once you've set up steam the first time you can set it into offline mode (or if you don't have an internet connection). That's one of the main reasons I don't consider it to be that bad of DRM. I have no idea what took it so long though, unless the dvd was just mainly blank and instead it downloaded all of the data.
As for the desktop icon, there should have been an option when you installed, I haven't bought or installed the full DOWII game yet since windows Live won't work on my network, so I dunno about that.
Don't cross off relic just yet, they did make the Homeworld series as well as Company of Heroes, they did botch DOWII though...
In addition to the rest of the comments above me, these are 1% errors, not 1% critical errors. It's more like you're walking out the door and you leave your keys behind. Result: you go and get your keys, you car doesn't blow up.
Similar situation here, errors don't have to be big.
We build machines and computers to be able to handle the errors they make in a competent fashion, same thing happens when you forget your keys, you go back and get them.