According to Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore, he has “a sick sense of humour” and when he dies, he expects to find God laughing.
It’s important to remember, though, that Depeche Mode was wary of starting Blasphemous Rumours, though, so please take this with a grain of salt.
Who my real father is/was.
A snapshot & short biography of every single one of my ancestors going back a couple hundred thousand years.
How in the hell did you get here? Time travel’s supposed to be impossible. Please dumb down the explanation so I can easily understand it.
Who did Adam Sandler fellate to get all those movie roles?
What did Shang-era (1500-1000 BC) Chinese sound like? What about their music - did it sound anything like modern Chinese music?
Where was the Indo-European homeland?
When did the proto-Greeks arrive in Greece and what did their language sound like then? I want to record their long-lost epics of conquest which predate the Iliad. Also the epics of the Germanic peoples from pagan days, which have long vanished.
oh yeah, and I’d love to hear the ancestors of today’s musical forms. Did Russian music of AD 800 sound at all Slavic? If you were at an Ashkenazic Jewish wedding in AD 1000 would the orchestra have the distinctive Klezmer sound?
I want to read the contents of the Library at Alexandria.
And I want to know why people are so cruel to each other.
I can answer this to an extent. I work as a tester. Your typical game might have a team of 20-30 full time testers working for a year before release. But they don’t spend that time testing the final game, changes are being made right up until the last. At some point you declare lockdown, but every bug fix has the potential to completely hose the game. And 20-30 people working 80 hour weeks don’t come close to the hours thousands of players can put in. So you are running as fast as you can to try to find new bugs, and also regress to verify that everything else works. You typically are still finding major bugs the week before ship. At that point the PMs start punting bugs, even bad ones because of the risk of causing new bugs trying to fix the old ones.
As far as hardware compatibility, think of the nightmare testing this is. Even if you have a major compatibility lab, you are never going to be able to test every combination of video card, sound card, RAM, hard drive, and motherboard. And new models are coming out every day. Even if you could run a complete test on all available hardware on your release candidate build, that test becomes obsolete the day you ship.
Games have a very short shelf life, you have to get them out on time. Once the game is complete, you pretty much have to ship on the agreed upon date or you have to pay huge penalties to the retailers who have already printed ads and allocated shelf space. If you don’t ship on time you can pretty much guarantee that your game is going to lose money. So the pressure to ship is intense. And the risk for bugs in games is a lot less than the risk of bugs in business software. No one is going to sue you if the game crashes just as you’re about to defeat Zzarkon the Terrible, but they might sue you if their spreadsheet crashes, they lose data, and lose money.
So you ship, even with the bugs.
Oh yeah, forgot the most important one:
“Could you please pull up a copy of the complete Caunterbury Tales that Chaucer would have written if he hadn’t died?”
Is there something by which I can infallibly judge everything else? What is it? In other words, how can I tell truth from falsehood?
It’s even more astounding when applied to individual solipsism.
What colour were the dinosaurs?
Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Knowing what happened to Hoffa, as well as Zebra’s request for the straight dope on the JFK assassination, would clear up two of the great historical mysteries of our time (if by “our time” you mean those of us who grew up in the sixties!)
I won’t get into the big picture questions so I’ll just say that I would REALLY like to know what really happening to Jon Benet.
Complete print-outs of the lost Plays & lost Sonnets of William Shakespeare.
What is Beverly Sills’s natural hair color?
…what Tina Fey looks like under that suit she’s always wearing.
Where, specifically, is Mozart buried?
What it would’ve been like to be married to my ex-fiancee
Ummm…why exactly did Jimmy Kimmel get a talk show? Is it because he fellated the same guy that Adam Sandler did? Who is that guy, exactly?
Did Jack Palance really read the wrong name at the Oscars?
Did Elvis really die in 1977?
Was Princess Diana’s death a conspiracy or what?