I wanted to say the exact same thing. I'm not a Mac user, nor am I a Mac Linux user, but speaking as one who roomed with someone who was for a while, parent post is dead on. My friend managed to find endianness bugs in both GAIM and GCC (I think). Now this was a while back, and things have likely improved, but the fact that these two (or one, if I'm remembering GCC wrong) major projects had compatibility issues with PPC, implies that maybe having someone high up using this relatively obscure architecture isn't such a bad idea. With luck, this might knock some of the less caring projects into gear. I mean, if you're running a random open-source project, whose bug report are you going to address, if forced to choose? MacFree4Life25, or frickin' Linus Torvalds?
There are countless x86 Linux users, with varying degrees of clout, to test drivers and submit bug reports. But Mac Linux users are kind of rare, and as such, their complaints tend to fall by the wayside. And to people complaining that his use of non-commodity hardware will cause it to not work as well on x86 platforms, please understand that a) he is about as likely to switch hardware configurations on his x86 box for testing purposes as he is to switch between x86 and PPC, and b) compared with most x86 hardware peripherals, PPC is about as nonstandard as you can get without going embedded. You have nothing to worry about -- the only conceivable result is a more robust Linux.
I disagree with the assertion that obsession with athletics and academic performance cannot coexist. I'm teaching English (just helping, really) at a Japanese public middle school, and I'll submit two pieces of evidence.
1) Their level of math taught here is about one year ahead of where I was at their grade level.
2) Their sports participation is way higher than at any American school I've been to.
I think the difference is that over here, people just care about school, period. Sports, while for some is an opportunity to show off, isn't exclusively so. Unless you go to a school that's geared primarily towards athletic performance, you can play. And non-athletic schools have been known to compete at the national level. And normal people care about high school sports to a sometimes unhealthy extent.
And the really respected sports stars do well in academics too. I've seen some athletic kids who didn't give a shit in class, too, but I'll tell you up front that they don't get to be team captains.
In America, it's generally the gas-pumping losers who still take pride in their high school sports achievements, while those who excelled in math and science tend to think of high school as a grand old waste of time (oh yeah and sports suck). The result? Kids with athletic role models see school as a way to be a sports star for a good two or three years (nobody's a star in 9th grade) before moving on to "real life," while kids with academic role models are implicitly encouraged to wait until college to get serious.
I think that in Japan, a more rounded education is encouraged, with conscientious parents telling their children things like, "good to hear about the math test, but what was the end of that 200m all about?" Of course, there are shitty parents and students in every country, and Japan's got plenty of other problems too, but I do believe that societal pressure tends to push more towards a well-rounded individual than in the US.
Kids should play sports. If they have talent, they should *really* play sports. But they should also learn math, science, social studies, music and art, and even if they don't excel, they should at least be fairly comfortable with it. And sports coaches shouldn't be assholes to students who have a good attitude but lack natural talent.
I'm just curious, but what was so disasterous about ISO 9000? I'm not trying to argue the contrary, just interested in hearing some examples of things gone horribly wrong. I've never really come into contact with it, so I don't know.
Everyone's the hero of their own story, but the story determines the character of the hero. Try reading some Machiavelli if you want to see how people can be evil while thinking they're good.
There is one problem with your argument, and that's that there is no process by which we can complain that the FCC is too strict. Colin Powell's son can say, "look at all these complaints," and all of those complaints will say the same thing. And that's because you don't get to complain about what *isn't* shown on TV.
There's a process to get shows taken off the air and get stations fined. There's no process to put them back on the air and to reimburse money to stations whose livelihoods have been taken away by overzealous prudes.
This means that the complaints to the FCC carry the same weight as lawsuits, in that they are both actions taken against others to which there is no easy defense in the case of innocence. There are penalties against frivolous lawsuits (which are perhaps too rarely applied), and yet there are no penalties for baseless complaints to the FCC. Why is this?
there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them.
The Japanese Diet passed a law a few weeks ago, banning reverse importation of CDs. Beginning in January, it will be against the law to bring a legimately licensed US version of a Japanese music CD into Japan, because of the differences between the two markets.
If you don't believe it, read this favorably-worded article in Japan's most reputable newspaper. Or read this response from one of Japan's major music distributors.
It's BS, and of course I didn't believe it when I first heard about it. The worst part is that in some facility, I work for the bill's sponsors.
Yes, it's quite interesting. When webmail first became big, it was kind of a neat trick, but kind of useless. Sure, you could check it from anywhere, but getting internet access from "anywhere" was mainly a luxury afforded students.
And then the virii came. Nowadays, when you use webmail, you have a built-in buffer between your computer and your spam, you have a spam filter trained by the data of hundreds of thousands of users, you've got universal accessability (which is nice now that you can actually use the internet somewhere other than your own home), and now you've got high-quality software that's constantly being updated, with more storage space than you probably have free on your hard drive now.
Webmail has all of a sudden actually become a good idea, rather than some gimmick that dot-coms used to try to get extra hits. Of course, this all makes me wonder, where does Hotmail come into all of this? Does anybody use Hotmail anymore?
Maybe a little less scary, but I'm guessing it would be negligably so. Windows has regedit, which is pretty much what you're talking about, and it's still a nightmare. It's still a hackers-only tool, and there's no way an A.T. (I'm assuming the reader has read the article) would ever use it. Firefox has about:config, which also does this, and is also a nightmare.
A poorly-designed options panel is just as bad (maybe even worse, since you can't use text-manipulation commands) as an excessively long config file, and the design criteria for an options panel are significantly different than for an easily-maintainable config file.
I just read this in conjunction with the story on Best Buy and FatWallet, and I can only hope, maybe people are finally seeing the DMCA the way we see it. Here we have two cases against major companies challenging the DMCA for its chilling effects. How long before it works its way up to the Supreme Court?
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
This would not solve the problem. The real problem is that the only people who use 10^x when referring to kilo/mega/giga/terrabytes of hard disk space are the hard drive manufacturers themselves.
If you go and buy a piece of software and look on the box, it's going to say, "Requirements: 3.4 GB of hard disk space," or some such thing, and it's going to mean 3.4*2^30, not 3.4*10^9. If I buy a new hard drive for the purposes of using this and other pieces of software, all marketed the same way, I'm going to make an incorrect calculation when determining which drive I should buy.
I add up the numbers, and for the software I use, I'm going to need 34.6 Gigs of HD space. I'll probably want another 20 Gigs free, so that makes 50. Windows takes 2.4 GB (this is a bullshit figure, I just needed an example), so I want a drive that is at least 57 GB. Except I don't want 57 GB, I want 57 GiB (to use the language that has become so popular in the last 25 minutes). I go and buy that 60 Gigger at Fry's and take it home, expecting to be able to install all my software and have the right amount of space to spare, and find out that I don't have the 60 Gigs like I thought I had. I've actually got 55.9 Gigs, at least in the language of software documentation, and now I'm short by a little over a Gig.
So true, the SI units sort of make sense, but the software world is quite entrenched in its base-2 lingo, and it doesn't matter if the next version of Windows or Redhat or Mac OS X gives you numbers in SI units. The industry is bigger than just them, and the confusion over such a change is bound to be even worse than it is right now.
Face it, hard drive and monitor manufacturers should give us the specs, if not in our language, then at least in the language of all the other expensive toys on our desks. Refusing to conform, when in the past they did conform, is blatantly deceptive marketing.
We may have done some terrible things, but that doesn't make our enemies absolved for their crimes, either. I don't care if your name is Kissinger or Bin Laden, if you kill innocents, you deserve to be punished. Israel buldozes people's homes in Palistine. Palistine goes and blows up a school in Israel. Who's right? Neither; they both need to be brought before a war crimes tribunal.
Americans need to know what happened -- I think we can agree on this. But that doesn't mean that our foes are any more right than we are. Saddam Hussein is a terrible, terrible person, as was Manuel Noriega. Oliver North and Henry Kissinger need to face what they've done, too.
Should Japan have been allowed to conquer Southeast Asia? No. Should America have interned the Japanese Americans? No! Should Hitler have been allowed to take over the world and kill all the Jews? No!! Were Americans really taking the moral high ground when they created "Victory cabbage" and "Victory meat?" Well, not really.
I hate to be a moral absolutist, but there are times when, as the cliche goes, two wrongs really don't make a right. Generally, I draw my line at the slaughter of thousands or millions of innocents. Although petty, inconsequential things that are just plain dumb also disturb me greatly.
It's funny, I wrote a paper in high school claiming that the US constitution isn't discriminatory, with the exception of the rather strange 3/5 compromise during the slave period. Kind of funny that Congress would prove me wrong.
Yes, surely their mutant psychic powers will convince everyone that we should all look the other way since they are of no consequence to us and have no plot for world domination sorry, what was I saying?
Here's how it is. The Earth got used up. So, we moved out and terraformed ourselves a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and plush with the new technologies. Others, not so much. The central planets, them as formed the Alliance, fought a war to bring all the worlds under their control. Some idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself.
I think that pretty much sums up why they have covered wagons and revolvers.
Won't that break webpages that rely on the use of the referrer tag? For instance, if you click on a link from somethingawful.com, you get a funny picture or something, but if you click on the same link from another site, you get the naked fat man in front of the computer.
If you strip all the referrer tags, won't you get the fat man picture every time?
Although it may be true that many people with absolute pitch perception feel their ability start to wane if they don't make music, I disagree that it's the same for all cases.
Particularly, I haven't noticed it, even though there have been periods of maybe nine months at a time where I haven't picked up an instrument. Sure, my viola technique is shot to hell, but I can still hear and correctly identify many notes at a time without issue. Actually reproducing those sounds is more an issue of technique, and can certainly go away with lack of practice.
Actually, it is true that speakers of highly inflected Eastern languages like Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese
Ummm, when last I checked, Korean wasn't a tonal language. You wouldn't be able to expect a Korean to have absolute pitch any more than you'd expect a Japanese or American. Not that I'm trying to say Koreans can't carry a tune, just that there's no linguistic disposition towards absolute pitch.
Is it possible that the reason you haven't heard much from them is that you aren't in the right market? In the US, nobody has sub-notebook computers, and thus nobody (aside from HP) has Transmeta processors. In Japan, however, you'll find that Transmeta's Crusoe processors are all over the place. Their main competition is not the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, but Intel's Centrino processor, which you also no doubt have never heard of, being on the wrong side of the Pacific.
Americans, as a whole, don't spend enough money on portable electronics to make really niftysub-notebooks a worthwhile investment for a manufacturer. Hopefully, when the economy picks up, Transmeta will have its day, and other companies will be competing with their own low-power technologies.
From the message board: #61 - BOFH - Aug 7, 2003 10:35
I actually said earlier on that I was using Soliatire from a floppy, as I was merely testing that 32-bit exe files were still supported under the stripped-down OS.
So no, they did ditch Solitaire. Sorry to rain on your parade =(
That's kind of what I thought when I read the first book: where's the balance in this game? Sounds like a sport whose entire purpose is to make Harry look good. I think Rowlings realized this later on, and has tried to make it look more balanced in the fifth book. Basically, if every goal is worth 10 points, and goals are going in right and left, then the seeker, while being more important than any other player on the team, does not determine the outcome of the entire game.
The game of Street Fighter on the sidelines is equal in importance to the rest of the game, rather than trumping it absolutely. It's sort of like when you go out in a game of Mah Jongg (Chinese Classical scoring). You get 10 points for going out, and that means you'll quite likely win the hand, but it's still not guaranteed.
I still don't think the game is well designed, and I can't imagine a game being played for that long without its inherent imbalances being worked out. But hey, Rowlings is a storyteller, not a game theorist. I'll give her a little leeway there. Maybe in the next book she'll introduce a revised Quidditch, much to the anger of Ron and Harry...
It seems as if the purpose of this new "policy" is to blend those two even further. Over the past few years I've been horrified to hear that friends of mine who work in low-level dev or testing positions are told they are overtime-exempt, when under current law, they are not.
See, I used to work in a company that does nothing but HR, and my boss used to answer calls every day from customers who didn't understand why they couldn't make their dishwashers OT-exempt. I learned exactly what makes an employee exempt, at least in the states of Hawaii and California, and have been quite convinced for some time that 90% of the tech industry is breaking the law.
With this new policy, that seems no longer to be the case. The writing on the wall says that employers can do whatever they damn well want in the tech sector, because we're all "learned professionals." Doesn't matter that we can't get a job anywhere else...
Whatever happened to those goddamned Mentos commercials? Mentos - breath mint of the master race. Christ, I don't even know what that meant! And if anyone actually smiled as wide as they do in toothpaste commercials, their brains would pop out. I guess it's a good thing that these dogfood grade morons with the idiot grins plastered on their botoxed lippage don't have brains in the first place.
Hey, those Mentos ads were awesome. I think surrealism in commercials should be encouraged. Of course, they all looked like they'd been recorded 5-10 years ago in Germany, but that sort of added to their edgy feel.
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I wanted to say the exact same thing. I'm not a Mac user, nor am I a Mac Linux user, but speaking as one who roomed with someone who was for a while, parent post is dead on. My friend managed to find endianness bugs in both GAIM and GCC (I think). Now this was a while back, and things have likely improved, but the fact that these two (or one, if I'm remembering GCC wrong) major projects had compatibility issues with PPC, implies that maybe having someone high up using this relatively obscure architecture isn't such a bad idea. With luck, this might knock some of the less caring projects into gear. I mean, if you're running a random open-source project, whose bug report are you going to address, if forced to choose? MacFree4Life25, or frickin' Linus Torvalds?
There are countless x86 Linux users, with varying degrees of clout, to test drivers and submit bug reports. But Mac Linux users are kind of rare, and as such, their complaints tend to fall by the wayside. And to people complaining that his use of non-commodity hardware will cause it to not work as well on x86 platforms, please understand that a) he is about as likely to switch hardware configurations on his x86 box for testing purposes as he is to switch between x86 and PPC, and b) compared with most x86 hardware peripherals, PPC is about as nonstandard as you can get without going embedded. You have nothing to worry about -- the only conceivable result is a more robust Linux.
I disagree with the assertion that obsession with athletics and academic performance cannot coexist. I'm teaching English (just helping, really) at a Japanese public middle school, and I'll submit two pieces of evidence.
1) Their level of math taught here is about one year ahead of where I was at their grade level.
2) Their sports participation is way higher than at any American school I've been to.
I think the difference is that over here, people just care about school, period. Sports, while for some is an opportunity to show off, isn't exclusively so. Unless you go to a school that's geared primarily towards athletic performance, you can play. And non-athletic schools have been known to compete at the national level. And normal people care about high school sports to a sometimes unhealthy extent.
And the really respected sports stars do well in academics too. I've seen some athletic kids who didn't give a shit in class, too, but I'll tell you up front that they don't get to be team captains.
In America, it's generally the gas-pumping losers who still take pride in their high school sports achievements, while those who excelled in math and science tend to think of high school as a grand old waste of time (oh yeah and sports suck). The result? Kids with athletic role models see school as a way to be a sports star for a good two or three years (nobody's a star in 9th grade) before moving on to "real life," while kids with academic role models are implicitly encouraged to wait until college to get serious.
I think that in Japan, a more rounded education is encouraged, with conscientious parents telling their children things like, "good to hear about the math test, but what was the end of that 200m all about?" Of course, there are shitty parents and students in every country, and Japan's got plenty of other problems too, but I do believe that societal pressure tends to push more towards a well-rounded individual than in the US.
Kids should play sports. If they have talent, they should *really* play sports. But they should also learn math, science, social studies, music and art, and even if they don't excel, they should at least be fairly comfortable with it. And sports coaches shouldn't be assholes to students who have a good attitude but lack natural talent.
I'm just curious, but what was so disasterous about ISO 9000? I'm not trying to argue the contrary, just interested in hearing some examples of things gone horribly wrong. I've never really come into contact with it, so I don't know.
Everyone's the hero of their own story, but the story determines the character of the hero. Try reading some Machiavelli if you want to see how people can be evil while thinking they're good.
There is one problem with your argument, and that's that there is no process by which we can complain that the FCC is too strict. Colin Powell's son can say, "look at all these complaints," and all of those complaints will say the same thing. And that's because you don't get to complain about what *isn't* shown on TV.
There's a process to get shows taken off the air and get stations fined. There's no process to put them back on the air and to reimburse money to stations whose livelihoods have been taken away by overzealous prudes.
This means that the complaints to the FCC carry the same weight as lawsuits, in that they are both actions taken against others to which there is no easy defense in the case of innocence. There are penalties against frivolous lawsuits (which are perhaps too rarely applied), and yet there are no penalties for baseless complaints to the FCC. Why is this?
The Japanese Diet passed a law a few weeks ago, banning reverse importation of CDs. Beginning in January, it will be against the law to bring a legimately licensed US version of a Japanese music CD into Japan, because of the differences between the two markets.
If you don't believe it, read this favorably-worded article in Japan's most reputable newspaper. Or read this response from one of Japan's major music distributors.
It's BS, and of course I didn't believe it when I first heard about it. The worst part is that in some facility, I work for the bill's sponsors.
Yes, it's quite interesting. When webmail first became big, it was kind of a neat trick, but kind of useless. Sure, you could check it from anywhere, but getting internet access from "anywhere" was mainly a luxury afforded students.
And then the virii came. Nowadays, when you use webmail, you have a built-in buffer between your computer and your spam, you have a spam filter trained by the data of hundreds of thousands of users, you've got universal accessability (which is nice now that you can actually use the internet somewhere other than your own home), and now you've got high-quality software that's constantly being updated, with more storage space than you probably have free on your hard drive now.
Webmail has all of a sudden actually become a good idea, rather than some gimmick that dot-coms used to try to get extra hits. Of course, this all makes me wonder, where does Hotmail come into all of this? Does anybody use Hotmail anymore?
Maybe a little less scary, but I'm guessing it would be negligably so. Windows has regedit, which is pretty much what you're talking about, and it's still a nightmare. It's still a hackers-only tool, and there's no way an A.T. (I'm assuming the reader has read the article) would ever use it. Firefox has about:config, which also does this, and is also a nightmare.
A poorly-designed options panel is just as bad (maybe even worse, since you can't use text-manipulation commands) as an excessively long config file, and the design criteria for an options panel are significantly different than for an easily-maintainable config file.
Don't trust the pusher robot. The pusher robot lies. Space has a terrible secret.
I just read this in conjunction with the story on Best Buy and FatWallet, and I can only hope, maybe people are finally seeing the DMCA the way we see it. Here we have two cases against major companies challenging the DMCA for its chilling effects. How long before it works its way up to the Supreme Court?
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
This would not solve the problem. The real problem is that the only people who use 10^x when referring to kilo/mega/giga/terrabytes of hard disk space are the hard drive manufacturers themselves.
If you go and buy a piece of software and look on the box, it's going to say, "Requirements: 3.4 GB of hard disk space," or some such thing, and it's going to mean 3.4*2^30, not 3.4*10^9. If I buy a new hard drive for the purposes of using this and other pieces of software, all marketed the same way, I'm going to make an incorrect calculation when determining which drive I should buy.
I add up the numbers, and for the software I use, I'm going to need 34.6 Gigs of HD space. I'll probably want another 20 Gigs free, so that makes 50. Windows takes 2.4 GB (this is a bullshit figure, I just needed an example), so I want a drive that is at least 57 GB. Except I don't want 57 GB, I want 57 GiB (to use the language that has become so popular in the last 25 minutes). I go and buy that 60 Gigger at Fry's and take it home, expecting to be able to install all my software and have the right amount of space to spare, and find out that I don't have the 60 Gigs like I thought I had. I've actually got 55.9 Gigs, at least in the language of software documentation, and now I'm short by a little over a Gig.
So true, the SI units sort of make sense, but the software world is quite entrenched in its base-2 lingo, and it doesn't matter if the next version of Windows or Redhat or Mac OS X gives you numbers in SI units. The industry is bigger than just them, and the confusion over such a change is bound to be even worse than it is right now.
Face it, hard drive and monitor manufacturers should give us the specs, if not in our language, then at least in the language of all the other expensive toys on our desks. Refusing to conform, when in the past they did conform, is blatantly deceptive marketing.
So, a bunch of lawyers get obscenely rich and 2 years from now we all get a $5.00 coupon toward the purchase of a new disk.
Yeah, but that $5.00 will probably buy you the hard drive that got you into this mess in the first place.
We may have done some terrible things, but that doesn't make our enemies absolved for their crimes, either. I don't care if your name is Kissinger or Bin Laden, if you kill innocents, you deserve to be punished. Israel buldozes people's homes in Palistine. Palistine goes and blows up a school in Israel. Who's right? Neither; they both need to be brought before a war crimes tribunal.
Americans need to know what happened -- I think we can agree on this. But that doesn't mean that our foes are any more right than we are. Saddam Hussein is a terrible, terrible person, as was Manuel Noriega. Oliver North and Henry Kissinger need to face what they've done, too.
Should Japan have been allowed to conquer Southeast Asia? No. Should America have interned the Japanese Americans? No! Should Hitler have been allowed to take over the world and kill all the Jews? No!! Were Americans really taking the moral high ground when they created "Victory cabbage" and "Victory meat?" Well, not really.
I hate to be a moral absolutist, but there are times when, as the cliche goes, two wrongs really don't make a right. Generally, I draw my line at the slaughter of thousands or millions of innocents. Although petty, inconsequential things that are just plain dumb also disturb me greatly.
It's funny, I wrote a paper in high school claiming that the US constitution isn't discriminatory, with the exception of the rather strange 3/5 compromise during the slave period. Kind of funny that Congress would prove me wrong.
Those with three eyes.... uhm, never mind.
Yes, surely their mutant psychic powers will convince everyone that we should all look the other way since they are of no consequence to us and have no plot for world domination sorry, what was I saying?
From the opening:
Here's how it is. The Earth got used up. So, we moved out and terraformed ourselves a whole new galaxy of Earths. Some rich and plush with the new technologies. Others, not so much. The central planets, them as formed the Alliance, fought a war to bring all the worlds under their control. Some idiots tried to fight it, among them, myself.
I think that pretty much sums up why they have covered wagons and revolvers.
Won't that break webpages that rely on the use of the referrer tag? For instance, if you click on a link from somethingawful.com, you get a funny picture or something, but if you click on the same link from another site, you get the naked fat man in front of the computer.
If you strip all the referrer tags, won't you get the fat man picture every time?
Great, just what we need, Microsofties spending even MORE time together.
Although it may be true that many people with absolute pitch perception feel their ability start to wane if they don't make music, I disagree that it's the same for all cases.
Particularly, I haven't noticed it, even though there have been periods of maybe nine months at a time where I haven't picked up an instrument. Sure, my viola technique is shot to hell, but I can still hear and correctly identify many notes at a time without issue. Actually reproducing those sounds is more an issue of technique, and can certainly go away with lack of practice.
Actually, it is true that speakers of highly inflected Eastern languages like Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese
Ummm, when last I checked, Korean wasn't a tonal language. You wouldn't be able to expect a Korean to have absolute pitch any more than you'd expect a Japanese or American. Not that I'm trying to say Koreans can't carry a tune, just that there's no linguistic disposition towards absolute pitch.
Is it possible that the reason you haven't heard much from them is that you aren't in the right market? In the US, nobody has sub-notebook computers, and thus nobody (aside from HP) has Transmeta processors. In Japan, however, you'll find that Transmeta's Crusoe processors are all over the place. Their main competition is not the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, but Intel's Centrino processor, which you also no doubt have never heard of, being on the wrong side of the Pacific.
Americans, as a whole, don't spend enough money on portable electronics to make really nifty sub-notebooks a worthwhile investment for a manufacturer. Hopefully, when the economy picks up, Transmeta will have its day, and other companies will be competing with their own low-power technologies.
From the message board:
#61 - BOFH - Aug 7, 2003 10:35
I actually said earlier on that I was using Soliatire from a floppy, as I was merely testing that 32-bit exe files were still supported under the stripped-down OS.
So no, they did ditch Solitaire. Sorry to rain on your parade =(
That's kind of what I thought when I read the first book: where's the balance in this game? Sounds like a sport whose entire purpose is to make Harry look good. I think Rowlings realized this later on, and has tried to make it look more balanced in the fifth book. Basically, if every goal is worth 10 points, and goals are going in right and left, then the seeker, while being more important than any other player on the team, does not determine the outcome of the entire game.
The game of Street Fighter on the sidelines is equal in importance to the rest of the game, rather than trumping it absolutely. It's sort of like when you go out in a game of Mah Jongg (Chinese Classical scoring). You get 10 points for going out, and that means you'll quite likely win the hand, but it's still not guaranteed.
I still don't think the game is well designed, and I can't imagine a game being played for that long without its inherent imbalances being worked out. But hey, Rowlings is a storyteller, not a game theorist. I'll give her a little leeway there. Maybe in the next book she'll introduce a revised Quidditch, much to the anger of Ron and Harry...
It seems as if the purpose of this new "policy" is to blend those two even further. Over the past few years I've been horrified to hear that friends of mine who work in low-level dev or testing positions are told they are overtime-exempt, when under current law, they are not.
See, I used to work in a company that does nothing but HR, and my boss used to answer calls every day from customers who didn't understand why they couldn't make their dishwashers OT-exempt. I learned exactly what makes an employee exempt, at least in the states of Hawaii and California, and have been quite convinced for some time that 90% of the tech industry is breaking the law.
With this new policy, that seems no longer to be the case. The writing on the wall says that employers can do whatever they damn well want in the tech sector, because we're all "learned professionals." Doesn't matter that we can't get a job anywhere else...
Whatever happened to those goddamned Mentos commercials? Mentos - breath mint of the master race. Christ, I don't even know what that meant! And if anyone actually smiled as wide as they do in toothpaste commercials, their brains would pop out. I guess it's a good thing that these dogfood grade morons with the idiot grins plastered on their botoxed lippage don't have brains in the first place.
Hey, those Mentos ads were awesome. I think surrealism in commercials should be encouraged. Of course, they all looked like they'd been recorded 5-10 years ago in Germany, but that sort of added to their edgy feel.
Mentos, der freshmacher...