That's good to hear and a credit to Sony. Maybe MS should learn from the other examples.

... the companies pushing for more visas are NOT doing it because they're looking for the best and the brightest from around the world. They're doing it to drive the price of programming

They're also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The depressed prices for programmers and refusal of employers to hire Americans (for any but a few top-level jobs requiring rare or broad-ranging talents and experience), while importing H1Bs from several countries for any position short of startup principals and early-hires, has not been missed by the Millenials. The latter are, entirely rationally, avoiding computer science degree programs in droves.

There is no shortage of US computer scientists now. But if this keeps up, in another 20 years there WILL be a shortage of YOUNG US computer scientists.

Not even all American SENATORS believe in that "playbook". Never mind the actual population.

When that happens, you'll still complain about how much you think the battery pack will cost to replace (though you'll use numbers in direct contradiction of the manufacturers estimates). Oh, and you'll complain about the space, size, shape, look, colors, and name of it as well.

We've seen too many "if only" complainers. Every complaint met just creates a new complaint.

With minor tuning in the suspension, goes away. The balance is so complex that most over-simplify because it's easier.

The only problem with your slander is that many of us that abhor the notion of creating an inferior underclass have no problem with the idea of importing equals and we often quite vocally say so.

Perpetrating the current immigation regime for importing tech talent is mainly advocated by those that seek to take advantage of the weak. They want an exploitable labor pool that they have leverage over. Corporations want people they can easily abuse.

Watch, or pay for. The fact that your comments seem to support the latter would put them in downmod territory.

I see the main potential is of having a part library and being able to bring up of of many special use tools designed earlier.

powdered material could take the same stresses that a drop-forged or milled object can

Among other things the Rolls Royce Trent engines in the Airbus A380 have a turbine disk made from metal powder. Of course the secret is that it's effectively drop-forged metal powder (hot isostatic pressing) which then is cleaned up to the correct tolerances with milling.

But I can guarantee you that there was no way to get into offline mode at that time

Since you called me a liar with your "Apparently you're supposed to know ahead of time when your Internet connection will die for a week" what sort of value do you think I'm going to place on that guarantee? You appear to be scum that take politeness as weakness. I should have just called you out as a liar to start with instead of politely giving a real example to counter your deliberate misinformation.

I imagine you are referring to the Sony/MS game station outages, but they are overblown by liars. I have a game that requires a PSN login, and it worked fine with the network down. Though any achievements might not count. I'll have to check when the network is back up.

You most certainly cannot start Steam in this state

Bullshit. You can start the games without any network connectevity at all which IMHO is what they should all fall back too apart from the obvious multiplayer ones where the actual program needs a network to function.

So now I'm getting curious - I know that you are wrong and I'm betting that you know as well, so what is the motivation for you pushing the bullshit? Is this some fanboy thing where you have decided you have to claim that team B suffers from the same problems as team A that you are cheering for?

Apparently you're supposed to know ahead of time when your Internet connection will die for a week.

In my recent experience, nothing like that at all. All it takes is for you to pull your network cable out for a couple of minutes to demonstrate - but of course you are not going to do that becuase it ruins your story.

I really don't care about steam one way or the other but lying pricks deliberately misleading the kiddies here just for the purpose of cheerleading really gets my goat. You really should be ashamed of yourself _xeno_ since this is no innocent mistake, it's deliberate deception.

It wasn't a reactor. It was a fuel production plant. It's likely that their reactors are walled off to a greater extent.

To get Steam into Offline mode, you must first connect to Steam.

Very wrong.
I was changing between net connections a few months ago - three weeks with no internet, and due to hot weather I had my computer turned off when I wasn't actually sitting in front of it, so no persistent data from a login. Maybe a minute or two after startup in MS Windows a message about Steam being unable to connect would come up. I played Skyrim ten to twelve times offline during that time.
I had connection problems last week, once again no internet but I could play Skyrim.

So are you sure Steam was down and it wasn't just an authentication problem? I suggest as a learning exercise that you unplug your network connection and have another try. You'll see then what we are talking about here.

I'll compare that to Sykrim on Steam. No internet connection means just not being able to sync character data with their server and not being able to get updates. So long as it's on the same computer you played it on last time a lack of connectivity is completely ignorable.
I think that's a far better approach than needing to log onto the server before you can play.