Well, let's see what statistics has to say.

I ignored failures of the payload, non-propulsion systems, or any failures where I could not identify which stage failed. Failures of staging mechanisms were rounded up to the higher stage. Flights with missing stages were still counted. All variants of each rocket family were included - Soyuz includes R7 launches, Thor/Delta includes Japanese licensed derivatives.

Soyuz: 25 first-stage failures, 18 second-stage failures, 29 third-stage failures
Proton: 9 first-stage failures, 11 second-stage failures, 17 third-stage failures
Ariane: 4 first-stage failures, 0 second-stage failures, 4 third-stage failures
Thor/Delta: 5 booster failures, 22 first-stage failures, 16 second-stage failures, 11 third-stage failures

Soyuz and Thor racked up a lot of early failures of the first stage, which seems attributable to simple inexperience (each had one failure from failing to fill the fuel tanks before launch). Even compensating for that, it seems the first stage is a dangerous stage, prone to failure.

However, your statement seems to bear out - the third stage does seem disproportionately dangerous. Oddly, it often seems to be control of the third stage that fails, not always the rocket itself.

The Proton rocket has gone through a number of redesigns over its long life. The latest version, the Proton-M, first flew in 2001, and they kept flying the Proton-K for many years (for reasons I actually don't know). They've only done 90 flights of the Proton-M, and half of them were in that post-2010 period of "repeated failures" (although they had about as many failures for pretty much all of the 2000s as well).

I would highly expect the faulty pump to have been redesigned with the Proton-M modifications, based simply on that analysis.

So where does selling a fake passport to a murderer or a rapist come in on your scale of "non-violent crimes"? I'm not saying that the stupid regulations about the banks aren't as screwed up or moreso, I'm just saying that there's plenty of things going on beyond the sale of those drugs that seem to be the only thing anyone cares about.

It costs more than that to ship a pack of guitar strings (I work in music retail shipping equipment all across the US). USPS is the cheapest and that costs $3.00 plus $0.95 for insurance. FedEx and UPS come in at around $11 to ship (including insurance) halfway across the country, and that's at our discounted rates. I literally lose money every time someone orders a pack of strings through me.

Companies that ship stuff like that for free are using them as loss leaders in hopes that you'll come back and buy something big from them that they can recoup the shipping costs and make a profit. I would bet that USB PacMan light comes in at around 10-15 pts of margin, so once they pay the credit card fees, if you weren't shipping it, they'd be making a whopping $5 gross profit. Again, that's gross profit. Even if they have a whole bunch of robots that handle literally every step they can, net profit on a piece like that (after you pay shipping) can't be much more than $2, and I'm probably guessing high.

That would mean the school would have to notify EVERY attendee with a camera that they are not allowed to sell photos due to an exclusivity contract. The only reason the student is in the wrong is if he were notified that such an arrangement exists and therefore he cannot sell them. Even then, I doubt such an arrangement is enforceable.

I'd like your source for this. Why does it matter that he wasn't paying taxes? Did he sign a contract saying that he could not use school equipment for private profit? None of the information you've provided* changes the fact that he holds the copyrights.

*"provided" in this case indicating that you have stated it as fact with no supporting evidence.

Okay, I know it's probably the least important thing about the craft, but still...

Why are they using such an ancient, decrepit-ass rocket motor? The AR2-3 is incredibly old - it dates back to a Gemini-era trainer, basically a modded F-104 that NASA used for early tests and training for spaceflight. It was made back when rocket chemistry was still in the "even the experts don't know much" stage, so it burned jet fuel and high-test peroxide (90%+ H2O2 in H2O).

Jet fuel is not good for rockets - basically, the restrictions on what compounds can be present is fine for jet engines, but leads to horrible problems with rockets. There's a specific petroleum-product blend designed for rockets, called RP-1, which clamps down on things like sulfur compounds or alkenes that love to gum up the works. This rocket was originally used on a jet fighter and shared fuel with it, so that was understandable... but the USAF recertified the engine for modern JP-8 instead of the old JP-4. So they already went through the effort of making it work with a new but similar fuel. Unless the X-37 hides a jet engine on itself somewhere, I don't see why they couldn't have used RP-1 instead.

Further, rocket science moved away from peroxide for a reason - it's dangerous. It will explode for basically any reason - peroxide decomposes exothermically, so once it starts reverting to H2O + O2, it's nearly impossible to stop. And it reacts with tankage surprisingly often. Oh, and it does horrible things to your specific impulse, which really hurts you on a last-stage engine like this one.

Honestly, using the engine at all is a weird choice. Sure, maybe they had some laying around... from the sixties... but that's like putting an F-104 engine in a prototype aircraft, it just doesn't seem right when other off-the-shelf systems work better. An AJ-10 would have worked beautifully. An RL10 might not have fit the aero package (hydrogen is a bulky fuel), but would have given them some impressive dV if they wanted it. Aestus would be a perfect match as well, if they didn't mind outsourcing to the Euros. Even Kestrel would work (although it first flew around the same time as this, so understandable not to use it). Point is, they had options, and being the Air Force, they could easily have just had an engine custom-made for it if they so wanted.

So what are the implications? All I can think of is a) they don't care how badly the rocket performs, b) they probably aren't going to keep that engine in whatever "production" version they build, or c) they have some other reason to use peroxide or JP8. Maybe peroxide is also their monoprop for RCS? That isn't really worth it though, particularly when UDMH works better as RCS and in the main motor.

Do you understand the difference between "has to be" and "can be"?

Steam is in charge of downloading and installing the game. After that, you can launch it directly.

If, and only if, the game was coded to additionally use Steam's DRM features, it will then check that Steam is running and attempt to authenticate (which can be as simple as the local Steam instance having a cached authentication).

If it doesn't use Steam's DRM, it will just run as a regular old executable. Steam does not mandate ANY DRM, it only mandates that if you use non-Steam DRM, you have to make a note of it on your store page.

I have dozens of games bought and downloaded on Steam that do not touch Steam's DRM. I've actually copied some of them over to other computers and had it still work without Steam even being installed.

A majority would be any number greater than 6 (AKA anything more than 50%), not 9 of the 12 jurors (75%)...

Rust is not yet production-usable. It has enough known bugs in the tracker that I can't even contemplate using it for a personal project, let alone for real.

And yet they're already pushing the marketing, proclaiming it as a guaranteed C-killer. I'm sorry, but they've said that about every compiled language since C, and it hasn't been true for one of them. And you're pushing it this hard, when you're still this early along in development?

Nobody uses C or C++ because they love the language. They use it because it has all the tools they need to debug, and all the libraries they need to run, and all the performance they need for the task. Rust maybe has the last one, but only has the second by being C-compatible (defeating the purpose of using a new language, particularly when you have to write this much wrapper code around it) and has none of infrastructure needed for large modern projects.

Dear Rust devs: stop writing articles about how great Rust will be, and start writing stuff to make your language actually usable. Maybe then people with their heads outside their asses will listen to you.

Steam itself doesn't universally apply DRM - a large number of games on Steam don't have DRM at all, you can just copy the files to wherever you want and run them.

They do offer their own DRM, which is about as non-intrusive as you can get while still being DRM, and they allow publishers to include their own DRM as long as it is noted on the store page. You can be mad about games using DRM, but Valve isn't the one to be angry at.

PS: Valve's talked about issuing a patch to disable the DRM if they ever go out of business. Realistically that probably won't happen (too many licensing problems), but the DRM is trivially bypassed as long as you have the game downloaded already, so they really can't stop it.

FTA:

A Central California woman claims she was fired after uninstalling an app that her employer required her to run constantly on her company issued iPhone —an app that tracked her every move 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

emphasis mine.