This is a question that can only really be answered by a lawyer familiar with your circumstances and the laws in your jurisdiction. For example, by default, in Canada, if you're hired as a contractor to produce a work, you retain the copyright on that work (or so I was taught in my 100-level Business Law class). However, I don't believe this is true in the US. It's also not true in either country if you're hired as a salaried employee.

But really, plenty of other people will be offering legal advice, and the reality is that this matter won't go to court because it's not worth the time or money for you or the university. You can get a lawyer's opinion that you're in the clear to release your work, but even that's only so helpful to you -- if you threaten or bully your employer, that may just set them against you. (On the other hand, it may be just the thing! Maybe they need to see that you won't be pushed around. Different people respond to different tactics.)

The most elegant solution to your problem is politics. Convince your boss's boss and your boss's respected colleagues that your work would be better off shared -- people's opinions are ultimately derived from the opinions of the people they respect. You've made good use of an open-source base, right? Make sure they understand that there's value in tapping into that community. Allay their fears. Show them the positive side. Get people on your side.

If you can swing this right, it won't matter what the legalities are because the one of the university's officers will sign a waiver disclaiming interest in the code and you'll be in the clear for sure -- and your boss will be pleased at having done something good.

Sure, you should have got the signature before you started working; then you wouldn't have to spend cycles on this problem. Still, it may be fixable.

And if that doesn't work, just remember: the implementation is twice as good and ten times as quick to write when you've done it once before!

This is actually still the way it works for many higher-value items. It's not always the manufacturer that offers the information, but sites like PowerBook Medic give disassembly instructions and sell part so you can do simple repairs yourself. Some laptop keyboards can be replaced with just a pen knife!

The components are still modular, it's just the idea of what makes a component that's changed. Now it's an entire mainboard assembly with a transistor count in the billions, rather than a single tube.

Also, I don't know if you've looked inside your large appliances recently, but my washing machine had a wiring diagram tucked inside when I opened it to get at a bad bearing. My motorcycle came with a simplified one in the owner's manual and a detailed schematic in the shop manual. For machines that are simple enough where a schematic is useful for troubleshooting and repair, schematics are actually still the norm.

Sure, but you don't have to sue them. You just have to ask nicely, "could you please sign a license agreement?"

Unless they were asked, and they refused, or they insisted on conditions GW couldn't abide. I mean, companies don't usually jump straight to litigation without even sending a letter or making a phone call first, but that doesn't tell us about this particular case. The claim from Curse is that that's exactly what happened.

Reading the complaint does turn up some interesting information. Among other things, it asserts that the warhammeralliance.com domain was registered in 2009 using false WHOIS information, which would make this particular iteration of the site, at least, *way* younger than 5 years. A cursory check on archive.org, though, suggests that the site's been in existence at that URL since 2006.

It's hard to call, from here. It sounds like GW's being at least a little inept, but on the other hand the site doesn't disclaim a relationship with GW anywhere obvious. I could totally have believed it was the official GW Warhammer forum site if I were a little more naive than I am; the logo's obviously a little unprofessional, but otherwise...

The gunner was mistaken about the RPG. He's referring to the camera -- when he says it's pointed around the corner, that's the camera being used to photograph a Bradley. The report makes this clear, apparently they found photos on the camera whose timestamp agrees with the object being pointed around the corner.

The infantry just also happened to find an RPG round. The gunner did correctly identify the AK-47s, though, which is better than I did on my first watch through the video.

I dispute the "clearly shown" part, but there was definitely a guy holding something about the size and shape of an AK-47. In the ~18-minute video embedded on BoingBoing, look at the guy just above the crosshair at 3:39, and the guy left of him; those are the probable AKs that I see. Comments in the video refer to these people being near US ground forces: 4:28 in the video, "he was right in front of the Brad".

Considering the released report claims the ground troops actually found these weapons at the scene, as well as the cameras which apparently contained photos of the Bradley, the narrative that the photographers were walking around with a group of people who were intending to do violence to US forces and were near US ground forces seems at least adequately supported.

If you want to know why they weren't ducking and covering, did you see the delay between the gun firing and the hits? The bullets must have been in the air a good 2 seconds. That puts the person shooting like a kilometer away! The guys on the ground probably had no idea where the shots came from. They were too busy looking at the Bradley right next to them, and thought they were perfectly shielded.

The audio track is certainly pretty ugly, and what happened to the kids in the van is tragic -- but in context it all seems pretty understandable. Once it was decided that this war would be fought, there were bound to be tragic incidents like this.

I am, at the moment, willing to believe the government line that this was a small number of civilian casualties in the heat of battle, and I'm a lot unhappier about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. If this is what it takes to get people talking about the real issues again, fine, but I don't see that this is one of those issues. This is the cost of war. Apparently there was probably an ROE violation when they shot the van -- which is sad, and the attitude of the soldiers is ugly, but this is no My Lai massacre.

Why do you think a rotating light won't put 10W/square meter on the wall? Those lights focus their light into a very narrow beam, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the spot they projected was in the neighbourhood of 10W/square meter. Say a 1/2 square meter patch from a 50W light at 10% efficiency?

... instead of focusing all your energies on creating fancy graphics for your latest title, why don't you try something different like making the game actually compelling and fun to play?

I guess you haven't noticed, but that's actually what's happening to the PC. That's what the article is complaining about, basically: nobody's really investing in graphics that work exclusively on the PC high end.

PC games are still a very risky market. If you're going to make a PC game (rather than a cross-platform game that also runs on the PC), you're probably not investing very much money in an expensive graphics engine or tons of art -- you're going to make a Flash game, or a tiny MMO or free-to-play game that starts small and adds content incrementally. In that arena it's far better to aim low to reduce the production costs, and to make sure everyone can actually run your game; boil the game down to its core gameplay.

The games that get big graphics budgets and engine development are cross-platform console games that sell a lot more reliably, but they're tied to yesterday's hardware.

Oh, and it doesn't help that MS ties the latest versions of DirectX to the latest version of Windows. It's super annoying to make a DX10 or DX11 game that can also run on XP, which is DX9 only. You have to make two completely independent rendering pipelines.

Are you kidding indeed. Did you mean a monitor arm?

What's more baffling is that the monitor stand sales rep didn't point out that they already exist. But then, maybe he didn't want you buying anything from another company.

Unfortunately the "always have something deliverable" part is actually one of the least useful parts of Scrum for game development, in my experience.

The concept is too vague. Any larger game has a quality bar for shipping -- there's no point if it's not at least so good. So saying "deliverable" actually ends up confusing the team; "not completely broken" is what you want to communicate, but the programmers should already be keeping the game runnable. If they weren't doing that, the designers and artists would be screaming that they can't get any work done!

I have yet to work on a game project where it wasn't implicitly understood by the programmers that unblocking the content team was top priority.

New technology requires rapid iteration from a lot of stakeholders, in a search to find something that is workable, balanced, fun, expandable, etc., which sounds "agile" to me. Established technology seems more like something you can give marching orders to the art department and have a fixed production schedule.

This agrees with my (more recent) experience, but the fact is unless you have your own supply of cash to burn, your money source is going to want milestone deliveries, and probably will not tolerate much deviation from a fixed schedule. That means that no matter how bullshit it is when you first draft it, your development is going to be driven by the overall waterfall development arc your milestone commitments lock you to...

Not that it's a bad development model, in fact I think it's what most developers use in practice because it works: make an overall plan that says when you'll deliver, but figure out the details of what you're delivering through agile iteration.

It's easy to lose track of the fact that good software is written by good teams.

I've worked on a couple of game teams that used scrum, and I'm kind of with you in that I don't think it made a whole lot of sense. However, nobody on our teams believed scrum precluded longer-term waterfall-style planning -- so we did that too, we just used scrum for the week-to-week divvying up the work. My impression is that a functional, experienced team can make something workable out of pretty much any process, we certainly did.

Those were traditional fire-and-forget commercial titles, though. Scrum makes a lot more sense for a long-life-cycle online game where you're adding features on a regular basis for 5 years post-launch. This is actually very similar to the context where (I understand) scrum is usually employed: internal information systems that see regular revisions for years after they're put in service.

But selective breeding is an entirely different beast than the GMO process. Selective breeding allows corn to vary according to the "natural" laws of the corn itself.

The other responses are also correct, but I really wonder why you think that this is meaningful, even if it were true. Lots of completely "natural" things are incredibly toxic and dangerous to us, either by coincidence or so we wouldn't eat them. Just because something is natural doesn't mean you can assume it's safe.

What, did you actually take George Carlin seriously?

The reason you're supposed to wash your hands after going to the bathroom has nothing to do with getting sick yourself. We teach kids that their own shit is dirty because it's the easiest way to get them to stop playing with it, but the truth is everything in it is already inside you anyway. It's not particularly dangerous to you.

The reason you wash your hands after wiping your ass is to keep you from giving your asymptomatic cholera (or hepatitis, or etc.) to OTHER people.

Please wash your hands with plain soap and water for 30 seconds after using the toilet, whether you're preparing food or just touching everything in your damn house before I come over.

You do realize that's just a bunch of handmade animations someone put together? That's the kind of stuff you put together to make a pitch, not a playable game. It's not a bad pitch, but that's the kind of work one talented artist (and maybe a programmer to help get it going in-game) could do in a month or two.

There are worlds of difference between that and a full, playable game.