A long time ago I heard about an infringement case that said something like 4 notes was a copyrightable melody. I then heard some one calculated how many unique combinations that you can get with 4 notes including various timings of the notes and what not. It was fairly small like 100,000 combinations. The thing I always thought about that is that there is 100s if not 1000s of years of public domain music. Wouldn't that make the easiest defense to such an infringement case that you actually copied a public domain work? Even better if you can find the work.

Plaintiff: You copied these 4 notes from my defendant.
Defendant: No. Both your defendant and I copied those notes from this Beethoven symphony which is public domain.
<play 4 notes from symphony>
Judge: Case dismissed.

The real challenge would be to not identify a specific work, but convince a judge mathematically and historically that the melody in question must be public domain.

Laziness is the mother of invention

I give you the microwave oven and the TV dinner. And, I am sure many can name more.

Do not underestimate the power of the truly lazy.

This hit home. The one I run into with developers is that if it looks like I could have done something different to make your life easier, don't just code around it. Tell me. There is a good chance I either screwed up or did it right, but can make your life easier with 5 minutes of work instead of you spending 5 hours.

That is how I did it.

Alternatively you can also stop at 50*3=150 and realize the answer must be less than 150 and only one answer was available.

I am going to be a little blunt here. Past a certain ability level of the testee, multiple choice does not test whatever the test creator intended, and instead is a contest between the test creator and the testee to see if the test creator can actually make you do the problem the test intended you to do. I usually win that game.

It probably should just say remnant. Type 1a supernova are the complete destruction of a white dwarf by nuclear fusion of a substantial portion of the white dwarf's mass, which does not leave behind a core.

Probably not a good thing, but immersive Dirty Jobs. Who would not want to have the smell of an empty sewage treatment tank in their living room while watching Mike Rowe replace the lift pump.

Yes. I did the same thing and went hmmm.... free software plus $1000 in hardware to get my 20 year old $600 guitar to play with Rock Band.... Ain't gonna happen.

I aprefer.

Cost, Scope, Schedule.

Two can be fixed, one must be flexible. Cost is cost per unit time i.e. fixed number of people.

What is typical is management tries to pretend all three can be fixed. Which causes overtime and since many devs don't get paid for overtime means cost can pretend to be fixed.

This is highly unlikely in typical development, the reason is that schedules are based on a web of falsehoods. Not lies, just things that everyone should know are false but pretend are true.

Project scope usually ends up being a falsehood, the scope changes and everyone pretends it has not and the schedule for the previous scope can still be hit. Which leads to late nights and these are typically not the fault of direct management but hte whole management structure.

Time to complete the project is usually a falsehood because estimates are made which by definition are wrong, and the schedule is set as if those estimates are fact. Is this the fault of the direct manager or the whole organization.

All of which lead to attempts to over-estimate which are bad because most of the time the project fills the time available, which means they cost more than they should.

I am sure a lot of us can think of many other things in project management that are treated as fact when in reality they are false.

One decision the manager should be making is if there is something wrong that is out of your control, perhaps the responsibility of some other development team that thinks they are done, so left on time. The manager should be there to decide whether it should be worked around, call in the manager of the other dev team to get their butt in, or call it a night and return in the morning.

Leave the devs alone and the most likely choice would probably be a work around that I expect is usually non-optimal because it is the devs ass on the line to deliver, and delivering crap that works is safer than not delivering.