Well, like I said, that was from my personal observations. Your peers seem to have been significantly different than mine.

Ok, I'll bite. I'm currently a STEM major. The main reason, at least that I have personally observed anyways, of why STEM majors dislike being forced to take a lot of humanities:

1: Most of them are useless, at least to us. We (usually) don't need philosophy classes to teach us logic and argument, knowing that the Mesopotamians had a primitive battery technology is equally useless, and we really dislike the subjectivity in grading in literature / composition courses. My one history class I had to take, early civ, was extremely interesting; yet I have forgotten most of it since I literally have not had to use a single thing I learned in the class.

2: There is a disparity in the classes needed for each. Humanities majors need to take maybe two "science" classes and maybe college algebra, these classes are generally big pit classes where you are spoon fed grade school basic science... I.E. " A scientist comes up with an idea to test, this is called a hypothesis........". Meanwhile the STEM majors have to take classes from ALL the humanities - philosophy, non-western culture, religious studies / womens studies, history, literature, composition ETC.

3: Refer back to point 1 about usefulness of many of the courses, the STEM courses, once past the stuff the humanities majors need to take, are MUCH more difficult and need greater time devotion than many of the humanities classes. We resent having to take time off from studying for useful classes for stuff we will never use.
Conversely for the humanities taking basic science classes, at least that is teaching basic trouble shooting skills, skills that can actually be useful in the humanities.

Oh my, what a place to drop a letter...

Don't worry, I do the same thing sometimes, usually it's with the letter "s" though.

Are you kidding? Coal plants are located on the same ( usually ) fresh water resources that nuclear is, and have thousands of tons of radioactive and chemo-carcinogenic ash slurry on site. All you need to do to really hurt an entire regions water supply is get the slurry into the groundwater system. PPM wise the slurry is far more harmful than any subarial radio isotope releases, and quite arguably still worse than isotope leaching into groundwater.

This completely ignores the CO2 and other combustion byproducts that coal / gas fired plants dump into the atmosphere during operation. The argument could be made that the last 5 years or less of coal did more environmental harm than the entire releases of Chernobyl and Fukushima combined... since the Chernobyl explosion and meltdown.

Honestly, I think it is a little of both; FPS's need SOME plot, and games have been declining in recent years with the race for the best graphics at the cost of all else... the HL series was kind of a mashup of almost RPG with FPS elements to FPS with some RPG-like storyline immersion.

The way it sounds, at least for you and BF4, there just isn't enough plot to drive the game along, hence why I said it needs enough plot to get you to the next slaughter zone. Too many games in recent times just try to rely on who has the prettiest most intense graphics and don't care about story and gameplay.

Honestly, if a game had an awesome story combined with decent gameplay I couldn't care less what the graphics are like.... as long as they aren't so horrible that they make my eyes bleed.

Wow, engineer must mean "train throttle puller" in this case. There sure as hell isn't any indication of the logic that a builder / designer type engineer should exhibit.

It is quite obvious that " if the story didn't make sense it wouldn't be satisfying" refers to the previous sentence, particularly the last subject matter of the previous sentence having to do with the satisfaction of bringing a story to a fitting conclusion. It is further supported by the next portion of the sentence stating that "if that wasn't the aim there would have to be something else to provide satisfaction."

Furthermore, nothing, and I mean nothing past base biological necessities, applies to "everyone". The target in this, as well as nearly all arguments like it, target the majority. In arguments like these no one cares about the few individuals out on the fringe.
 

You are 100% correct in that not all games need a deep plot. FPS's for example just need enough plot to get you to the next slaughter zone.

A RPG with little to no plot would be pretty much worthless though. Yet as we have seen with Square-Enix and the unfortunate butchering of the Final Fantasy series post X / X-2 a good plot can't help if you have a battle system that people hate because it radically deviates from the 11 prior main story-line games that literally grew your franchise and people loved. FF-13's story was decent, but the game play just didn't feel like the FF series people had grown to love... especially for those who cut their teeth on FF7. It just wasn't fun running through a map that was basically a curved tunnel ( FF-13).

Same goes for the Tales of (____) series games, without the plot, and just as important, character interactions the games would just be doing boring repetitive shit for no reason.

In other words, games have to have enough plot to drive game play ( how much depends on the genre of game), and good enough game play ( not deviating too far from prior games if in a series and pissing off long time fans ) to keep people interested.
   

Some sciences would be the king, namely Geology and Chemistry...

Geology for not only knowing where to look for essential ores and mineral deposits, but also best / worst places to build settlements. Other than plague, most of the big high death disasters in history were from people building on or near geologically unstable zones. Well that, and geologists are used to camping it out rough and cooking over fires when out doing field work.

Chemists, well you can really do quite a lot with a small foundation of even basic chemicals and using solubility rules to move from the basics to more advanced chemicals... it would just take a lot longer than today since it can't be mass produced at first.

Umm, no, chromebooks are not just media consumption devices. I'm on one right now, find me another 100% Linux compatible laptop with a decent keyboard for ~$300USD. It should also be x86_64 and have a battery life of ~8-10+ hours with normal use and WiFi on.

QuickOffice / GoogleDocs ( even offline ) damn well better be good enough for highschool papers, it's good enough for college papers unless you are juggling enough sources to need a reference manager.

Honest question since I looked at powershell when it first came out, does it have the built in flexibility that bash / ash et al. does? When I looked at it, it looked more like a programming language than a command line interpreter, and it seemed to have some pretty weird syntax so I went with cygwin on the few windows machines I have ( not a major network admin ). Cygwin had the advantage of SSH, both client and server ( if needed ) as well.

Some examples of what I am asking if powershell supports:
testing if files / directories exist like bash [ -f $FILE ] / [ -d $DIR ] tests? With available "!" ( not operator )
general piping E.G. "cat $FILE | sed $changes | $TEXT_EDITOR to review changes
named pipes ( streaming the output of a program through a specific named pipe to another program )
something like the for / do loops in bash.

I really should look into it more, I think it is installed by default on my win8.1 laptop.

Anyways, hope to get a honest answer... since this is a honest question.

It could even be more simple than that; I don't remember 100% about the plague era history, but if I remember correctly near end symptoms were vomiting and swelling / cracking of the tongue. In both cases there is high probability that bacterium from the bloodstream would come in contact with the persons teeth. If you really want to get down to it, many victims were buried in mass graves and it is possible that there was cross contamination due to higher level corpses buboes rupturing when they had been tossed into the grave.

I do agree that rat > flea > human is not the only infection vector, after all, there was plenty of human > human contact in the incubation periods. Infected human > flea > human ( day to day life / brothel visiting ETC) would spread much faster due to larger amounts of contact, yet you would still need an original instigator action (the rat carriers).

This is all ignoring the fact of the Pnuemonic variants of the plague as well...

Final Fantasy 14 did something similar, you could give out positive reputation to the good players in the randomly generated parties for dungeons( you got 1 point to give, and 3 other party members to choose between who gets it). After certain amounts of positive reputation you got certain in game things ( title / eventually a mount thingy ), there was no negative reputation options. Less than a week after this option was launched party play improved significantly, but even then there were still occasional trolls.

Personally I think it would work out better if most ranking systems took this type of rep system into account ( get rated on how "good" you are ) using your rep score and amount of time played... that way new players aren't punished and it is harder to game the system.

I would say it probably has to do with the "unskippable" previews on DVDs.

Of course the streaming source could always include the previews, and disable seeking in the stream player during previews, so who knows.

Dude, it's literally a 30 second download for classicshell and maybe 1-2 minutes playing clicky clicky in the classicshell settings and you have win7 back, albeit with a shell start menu icon instead of the 7 winlogo icon. I haven't seen the metro shit in months ( bluetooth toggling is the last time).

Once classic shell was installed 8.0 is essentially the same as 7... 8.1 sucks if you use skydrive ( or whatever they call it now ) since you can't have a local acount AND use skydrive.

TL;DR - win8 + classic shell pretty much = win7. So if win7 wroked for you win8 can too.

Seriously, where do you find this tripe? First the completely implausible "explosion defies all physical known laws to throw heavy mass 30km" story, and yes, nuclear fuel is damn heavy mass... it's what makes it actually reactive.

Then you get this wonderful piece of drivel. On the off chance you you really do care about this lets take a look at why it is an absolute crap article shall we?

Well, damn. Oh wait, there is absolutely nothing to back this up, plus "it" isn't defined. "it" could be anything from the entire complex to a workboot. This is besides the fact that if "it" melted down the reactions would stop and the decay heat would not be enough to keep the fuel from spreading and solidifying. Solid fuel that literally can't sustain a reaction ( hence why it is solid ) isn't just randomly going to explode. The only explosions possible would be steam or hydrogen gas explosions, and only during the actual melt, with little to no risk of explosion after the fuel melted and solidified. This is also ignoring the fact that to date there has never been a nuclear explosion at anything other than intentional detonations.

That said it's a bigger pain to contain and dismantle a big blob of re-solidified core material than it is to try and keep it from melting.

What a load of shit.... this kind of writing would get an F in high school science / journalism classes. It's all just a bunch of contradictions, " an unknown but significant"...."no doubt twisted and melted...".
The "journalist" "writing" this article can neither agree with himself nor bother to cite any type of sources.

I would go on further but I actually started laughing at what he said would happen if you broke a fuel assembly....