Yeah, I didn't particularly care for Discworld, but I liked Good Omens. My wife despised Good Omens but loves most Gaiman.

With a business major boss like I've had (not currently), it'd go something like this:

Boss: We need to synergize our efficiency and put a sustainable product in the cloud. First course of action, we need a language - I've heard html5/javascript is the one to use.
Me: Everyone uses that, but Intercal would make a much better choice for us
Boss: Great! I want a dynamic prototype in the cloud by morning!
Me: No problem... writes the program in perl, leave it on my dev machine, and proxy it from a cloud site.
Boss: This is fantastic! Great job!

My current boss would laugh at that joke and force me to write it in html5/javascript (which I don't mind, it just often takes me longer than perl for quick mockups).

C++ breaks the object model by not including encapsulation, so calling it object oriented is a stretch. It also lacks a primary object. Both of those can be worked around to make it more like true OOP, but I've seen few people do it. Personally I think C++ is a bit long of the tooth and there seems to be a lot of things poorly implemented, STL being a big one - this functionality should have been built into the language, not added with abstract functions leaving us with bloated code and incomprehensible errors. For a long time those same abstract functions also caused a massive performance hit, but that is better these days (but it was horrible 20 years ago - 600% slower than non-abstract in a chunk of code I wrote because of the lookup tables according to the profiling I did).

Yep - this is my problem with this case, too. This is like if everyone that played Samba had to pay the originator of Samba to play it or Soul had to pay the originator of Soul or Blues Blues. I certainly hope they appeal and get a better jury.

I've been there - just started jamming with a band and quickly knock out four songs on the 4-track (this was a while back, lol).

OTOH, I have another piece I've been working on off-and-on for 22 years because I can't find a transition I like between two sections. It is an absolutely lovely piece with lots of transitions and closely related key changes and on my bucket list to finish and record.

I heard the same thing - at the time Al was told by Coolio's record label that Coolio was OK with it. After the fact he apologized to Coolio about it.

In any case, parody is protected free speech and he doesn't even need to get permission to do it. He can even play the same music without having to pitch a dime to the original musicians (it is considered a separate performance).

I find it absolutely stunning that this court case lost. Usually the industry's mantra is that there are only so many notes (12) and chords so the music itself is not copyrightable unless there is a very distinctive passage that is unequivocally tied to a specific song. For instance, the bass line for Under Pressure that Vanilla Ice stole for Ice Ice Baby.

Yeah, I disagree with this one after listening to both. Honestly, I'd say it was a bad parody of Marvin Gaye and since parody is protected, you owe the original artist nothing.

Technically Canon in D is I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V and all of those other ones are a shortened version I-V-vi-IV (and yes, I've seen Pachelbel rant). You can throw in P!nk (like every hit), U2 (With or Without You), Taylor Swift (at least two), Of Monsters and Men (Little Talks), Lady Gaga (like ever hit), Nickelback (like every hit) just to name a few more.

Still, I-V-vi-IV and its inversions (particularly the "sensitive singer songwriter" vi-IV-I-V) probably have been around long enough to be able to cite prior art. Kinda like the 12 bar blues. We probably can find examples of the 50s progression of I-vi-IV-V (to name a few songs, Crocodile Rock [Elton John], D'yer Mak'er [Led Zeppelin], The Man Comes Around [Johnny Cash], Every Breath You Take [the Police], Heart and Soul [Larry Clinton], Lollypop [Ronald and Ruby], Earth Angel [the Penguins]), that predate the 50s too (in fact, Heart and Soul was recorded in the 1930s and covered multiple times, especially in the 1950s).

Except due to loopholes, corporations pay far less. And I quote from Citizens For Tax Justice (and I've seen far less flattering numbers, like most companies pay 5% or less, but they probably included unprofitable ones that don't pay any taxes - this study only included profitable companies).

While the federal corporate tax law ostensibly requires big corporations to pay a 35 percent corporate
income tax rate, the 288 corporations in our study on average paid barely more than half that amount:
19.4 percent over the 2008-12 period. Many companies paid far less, including 26 that paid nothing at all
over the entire five-year period. "

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.