Torque was also one of the better engines I've tried, and so very much better than Gamebryo, which was supposedly great as NetImmerse, but years of aging and mismanagement left it a steaming pile of poo by the time I got to try it. I haven't used Torque in a long time though - I can imagine if they didn't rewrite it there'd be problems today. I remember hitting the same problem on an engine I was working on with Mac support when OpenGL 3.0 came out. 3.0 completely tossed out the state machine and you need to manually do everything yourself. That means large parts of OpenGL engine code needs to be rewritten (functionally it works much more like HLSL and Cg, so at least porting shaders is easier now).

I still haven't tried many of the newer commercial engines that aren't free like CryEngine or some that are like Source 2 and am curious what devs think of them. I'm not a huge fan of Unity or Unreal Engine so far, but that may be the curmudgeon in me that is used to other game engines.

Irrlicht was never poised to destroy anything, had some terrible design decisions and the developer refused to incorporate some major fixes, preferring to do everything himself. This caused several developers to fork the project. I fixed errors in his BMP importer and rewrote his TIFF importer to properly work with the complete spec and he refused to include them, so I gave up on that project (and I already had patched it extensively from the forums). At that time Crystal Space was going through a complete rewrite and Ogre was known to be difficult to use, so I actually used Open Scene Graph in my own project for a while, but that was just to develop ideas. I wrote my own engine (that basically set things up good enough to play around with shaders, nothing serious) before getting too busy with work to devote time to it.

That said, all of the mentioned were graphics engines, not game engines, at least at the time. I know jMonkeyEngine is marketed as a game engine, but I haven't tried it (didn't even know about it until last week). I've played around a bit with Unity and Unreal and they are game engines with full asset management and IDEs. I haven't had extensive time to work with either one, but I have run their demos, modified terrain and other resources and added assets I made to a scene. I still haven't tried to start my own project in either one or write any code.

I got ~$35k (in Minnesota, making straight to Wal-Mart cheapie games) at one employer while still in school and $45k (in California making A list games) at another in 1996 straight out of school. $45000 is about $65000 today, adjusted for inflation. Pay in the industry has gone up way faster than inflation, so it would not surprise me if $80k/year was starting in California.

And yeah, crappy hours doesn't even begin to address it - we literally lived off of pizza and cola in the office during crunch. I went home to shower and water the plants I think twice during the final week and that was the only time I spent at home that week (they set up cots for us in the office, and that is where I slept).

Even worse would be linking to GPL libraries before they leave and then telling the Gnu foundation about it just to screw your former company and deny responsibility because you wiped all systems logs after hacking root. I would never do such a thing, personally, but I do know how to think evil :)

The radio stations pay the publisher (songwriter's publisher), which is usually held for the artist by the studio. The studio is then supposed to pay the songwriter. As someone else said, the band gets nothing, radio is considered promotional.

Actually, it isn't quite that - artists get 10-20 cents a track after all expenses, which get taken out of their cut. Songwriters and all other studio jobs get a cut off the top and do not pay expenses out of their cut. This is how some studios stay afloat despite the recording artists not making a penny.

Just because a packet is encrypted and outbound from Iran, they don't know the packet is necessarily VPN. There are some signatures that signify use of certain VPNs and they can get that with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) according to forums I've read, but it also sounds like they would need to block them one by one including new and modified ones. Unlike viruses, though, some of those connections may be legitimate business or government ones.

Lack of patching never stopped me from striving for high uptimes, but now I can have high uptimes, safely.

Eye colors other than brown are technically caused by a defective gene as well.

Personally, I think if you can alter genes to get rid of certain bad things, that child once grown would thank you for it. I would definitely thank my parents for breeding out my dad's asthma and my mom's allergies, which when combined made my mainly asthmatic reaction to cats so bad I can't even be around people that own cats without heavy medication, and even then, the sooner I get away, the better.

Just wait until we get the artificial womb (aka ectogenesis), a controversy I've been expecting since reading about such things in futurist-lit as a teen. I imagine just the controversy over gays being able to naturally have their own kids would just be the start of it, but the upside of any kids born from such a womb always having proper nutrition and not being dependent on bad habits of the mom (like booze, so no fetal alcohol syndrome) seems a good thing. I see religious zealots never letting this become a reality, though.

I think it also depends deeply on who makes the discovery. If we sent a ship to Alpha Centauri and found some pre-industrial or ancient peoples (intelligent, but less technologically advanced), I think we'd study them and do anal probes and stuff. Fear would depend on how aggressive and destructive the species was, and in this case could warrant a few nukes from orbit. An intelligent race of bunnies would probably strike less fear than an intelligent race of velociraptor-cyborg ninjas.

Intelligent life finding us may be an entirely different matter.

Well conservatives downright hate the poor - cuts to SNAP and food stamps tucked into the farm bill? Hell yeah! (yes, that is sarcasm)

My problem with liberals usually has more to do with the money. They want all these fancy social programs but don't want to pay for them, so the programs are doomed to go belly-up starting in about the next decade likely with Medicaid. If you want these fancy programs, either increase taxes, fix the broken corporate tax system so corporations pay taxes (most pay zero tax, 94% of US corporations pay less than 5%, and yes the tax rate is 35%), or make cuts (military spending would make sense, since we're not actively in any wars, yet Obama is asking for more spending here) to pay for them. I miss Clinton in this regard, but also hate him for burying the actual debt numbers that show money needed to be able to keep social programs running, mainly to garner favor of older voters (and every president since has continued this).

Or security at all, really. X11 is vulnerable to packet sniffing as well (which still requires trust on the host). Really, the solution is use X over ssh, which is also how I start all terminal sessions, as well.I personally usually run from a Windows PC using XMing and PuTTY, but I'll occasionally use an actual box (I use a lot of headless boxes and VMs, though).

I haven't written Pascal since a little after college, and that was mostly stub-ins for Mac OS 7/8 (basically, extending the GUI). Once I bought Code Warrior, though, the only thing I used Pascal for was strings I had to pass to and from the OS. The other versions of Pascal I used on UNIX boxes I remember had horrible device support (if you touched a device driver it would not cross-compile on different UNIX flavors). XWindows helped immensely for display drivers in that regard, but it still wasn't adopted at my college until the early 1990s. I have no idea where Pascal is at these days in that regard.

hmm... html <pre> </pre> tags used to work for that, but they seem to catch < as a comment now. I had to change those to & lt; (remove the space) to make slashcode not comment it; for example:

void main(a,b)
{
    char** bl;
    bl = new string("test");

    for (int x=0; x < 1000; x++)
    {
    print("%s\n",bl);
    }
}