I went to college with the the guy. He has been working on this for coming up on 4 years now. The games I've seen so far are simple platformers reminiscent of the first Mario games, but everything has to start somewhere. That 3D Ludum Dare entry is a step up. It's all very legitimate, but I don't see it generating an RPG any time soon. Simple Mario/Doom clones though are bread and butter.

There is always enough space to maintain a braking distance, the traffic may just have to travel a little slower. The only issue I've seen with it is drivers cutting each other off because they don't understand braking distances or how to safely maneuver between lanes. I manage to maintain safe braking distances, I probably just average 5 mph slower than the traffic around me, which in reality is the result of matching speed with the car in front of me, then having to slow down when somebody gets between us to again increase the space to a safe distance. Doing that has saved me from an accident on exactly 2 occasions since I moved to the US; both times the traffic in my lane only (supposedly the "fast" leftmost lane), stopped very abruptly, then moved off again with no apparent indications as to what had caused the stop in the first place. On one of those occasions, had I not left an appropriate braking distance, I would certainly have hit the car in front of me as I was tired and reacted slowly.

Haha! If I had mod points (and hadn't posted already) I'd give you some for that "back up" comment.

I moved to California from the UK a few years back and frankly, the CA driving test is a joke compared to the UK test. I didn't have to do any reversing, I was not tested on any maneuvers (3 point turn, parallel parking, etc...), and I passed the written component having only done the sample tests on the dmv website. For the UK theory test (identical in style to the written component of the CA test, but done on a computer) you have to know things like average braking distances for a typical car at 10mph speed increments from 20mph to 70mph. Might see a bit less tailgating and fewer multi-car pileups if CA drivers knew those numbers.

I would go with "knew" the rules of the road. They forgot them as soon as they passed the test. That's generally true of any automotive drivers license though, not just the US. If you asked most people to pass the driving test again a year later, I'm willing to put money on the majority failing to pass.

• Good Omens - Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. A comedy about the coming of the anti-christ. Very British humour.
• Nine Tomorrows - A collection of shorts by Asimov. Some very interesting visions of the future that have been the basis for a number of more recent authors' work.
• Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson. The backdrop is an interesting vision of a hyper-privatised world.
• Foundation - Asimov, the whole trilogy. At a deep level, it observes the cycles of civilization and the optimal methods of control exerted at different stages of development.
• The Marching Morons - Cyril Kornbluth. Sometimes I feel this is where the world is headed.

It's a very good effort, it's just unfortunate that Vic Mignogna has such a nasal, weedy voice. Shatner had a voice and way of speaking that exuded confidence and leadership. Vic's voice makes me feel like he'd run away from most Kirk worthy situations.

Open source projects also lack motivation to lock you in to their product (as they have no financial incentive to protect) and therefore have more reason to actually make a product people enjoy and want to use. Of course, there's typically a quality difference between open source projects like Linux and those that fall into the "I built this because I needed it/for fun/for practice, maybe somebody else will find it useful" category.

Plenty of people that aren't assholes can't have an argument and remain friends. Too many people take an argument as a personal affront, "rockstars" especially because they think you're questioning their supposed brilliance.

And you're confusing job title with discipline. Engineering is a discipline with certain methods taught to its practitioners. When I talk about engineers, I mean people I consider members of that discipline.

I'm a tech lead at a startup and have worked at mid-size companies (I've avoided large corporations). Even if your problems are difficulty 10, you don't need a "rockstar" to solve them. My experience with typical rockstar developers has been similar to yours, they work poorly with others, communicate poorly, and often write inscrutable code. I firmly believe that nobody is invaluable. No company can afford to have a person that were they hit by a bus, or just left, the company would fail.

There are plenty of developers out there that wouldn't be considered "rockstars" in the stereotypical sense but when given a problem, I know they will produce good, well thought out, performant code within a short period of time. During development they will seek out criticism from their peers (and they see the rest of the team as their peers) and the final solution will be respected and understood by the team. I think of these people as seasoned engineers, not rockstars and certainly not developers. Engineers break down problems and build a solution before they ever write a line of code. I also believe you can become a seasoned engineer rapidly, possibly even straight out of college. It's about perspective, not necessarily experience.

One of the most important things in an engineering group, in my opinion, is the ability to walk into a room, argue out a solution, possibly admit you're wrong and somebody else's solution is better, but know when to fight your corner, then leave the room as friends and colleagues, ready to build the solution together. The ego rockstars carry makes that scenario impossible.

It depends on the industry, your skills, and why you left. Nobody is going to think badly of you if you leave to gain a post-graduate degree. In that situation the company may be very happy to hire you back, and keep you, as you have strengthened their talent pool.

These days, while a future employer may not check your references, it's not uncommon for them to at least call you previous employer and ask if you're "re-hirable". It's one of the few questions, other than simply confirming that you worked there and your position, that they can ask. Failing to give 2 weeks normally renders you not re-hirable by the company you ditched and raises serious questions for the company considering employing you.

Also worth considering, if you're leaving a job because there's a better offer or it's just the right time in your life to take a risk (I left my last job to join a 4 person startup), you may be back working with your previous employer in the future, At my last company, there was one guy who had left and returned 3 times.

I've tried Nuance speech recognition stuff before. Jabra uses (used?) it for voice control via their bluetooth headsets on Android phones. It was so poor I basically assumed it listened to what you said, threw it away, and made something up.

You're basically calling streaming services a replacement for owning a digital copy, but they're not the same thing. As everything, distribution of content especially has move online, streaming services are replacing Blockbuster and other video rental services. For the amount of content you can consume they are considerably cheaper than buying the content.

There are plenty of services, iTunes and Amazon particularly, that sell you digital media and can't revoke your access one you've purchased it. You can download it and burn a physical copy. There are various ways of removing the DRM (ignoring the legalities of whatever country you happen to be in). Netflix hasn't killed iTunes and isn't likely to, neither has Spotify.