Malice, guile, whatever. The point is that, while there may be some job interviewers that deliberately try to use such tactics, the odds are strongly in favor of most interviewers really just being that stupid.
"Also, there are a few things to be aware of... part of the interview process intentionally (from talking to insiders there, and at Microsoft) introduces vagueness, incorrectness, and other troubling aspects to problem solving. One of the things they're trying to observe is how a candidate deals with the obstacles."
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
"committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
On the one hand, electoral votes, as a matter of procedure, are always delivered to the President... of the Senate.
On the other hand, ironically perhaps, the actual electoral votes are hand-written FITB, so sayeth the US Constitution, so Diebold would have nothing to do with it.
"And that ought to end every argument about the long-term importance of launch lists."
The launch price of the PS2 was 1/2 of the PS3's. For those prices, people can (and did, especially in Japan) pick it up for its DVD "features" while waiting for games, but even if the PS3 actually sells as a BluRay player, the BluRay library just isn't what the DVD library is, even at PS2 launch.
""We don't like our portable games cut down, with worse graphics, fewer levels and crappy sound, we want a handheld that can come close to our home machines."
I'd say gamers have mostly been saying "I love my Game Boy." However...
"We don't want to play the same games we play at home, we want to play 2D sidescrollers. and puzzle games"
How exactly do these two statements conflict? Isn't it possible that the PSP has many games that are "the same games we play at home" only "with worse graphics, fewer levels and crappy sound?" I'd say that's exactly what's available for the PSP now, while Nintendo handhelds focus on porting the depth and fun of console games than aiming for a/v first and content second.
Three seats out of 435? That is literally less than 1%. And even then, all three will be on the general ballot this November, but even if they lose it will be anything but signifigant.
"Tell Joe Lieberman. Please."
He got his second and third terms with 67% and 64%, respectively. As for this year, the election hasn't happened yet.
"You also might mention it to Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Galen Fox, George Ryan, John Rowland, Tom Noe, Marion Barry, Bob Ney, Vince Cianci, Bill Janklow, Jim West,"
Indicted, indicted, concvicted, convicted, convicted, convicted, convicted, withdrew, convicted, convicted, and Jim West is the only name listed who was removed from office by a popular process. On the contrary, Marion Barry was re-elected to be mayor of DC after he served his sentence (and currently sits on the city council) and Vince Cianci was the longest-tenured mayor in the history of the United States.
All but one of the names you listed seem to be more indicative of how the system is broken, not how it works.
"Ah, but I was created especially to resist it. And "it" in this case is a relative newcommer"
"It" is the product of intelligent design, with a goal of obfuscating your vote, while your goal is, at best, to procreate.
"This isn't about "the system" it's about standing up for what's right."
You "stand up" all you want, several hundreds of thousands of people will still be "sitting down" in each and every House district in this country this November. Whether or not you cast your lone, insignifigant vote means nothing in the modern political scheme.
"Did you know that it's a new age religion, their spiritual leader claims to posses supernatural powers and they believe that homosexuality is morally wrong."
Drop the "new age" reference and you just described Catholicism. What's your point?
"Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and practised in China - there must be a reason as to why Falun Gong is bad."
Only in forms that are palletable to the government, however. Note that the government has appointed their own people in these religions... a lama here, an archbishop there...
"It seems to me an almost-essential characteristic of the early socialization of the human animal: very basic concepts of dominance, social order, and the coping of the various individuals to their places therein. Social ontogeny recapitulating social phylogeny?"
But that doesn't make it right or, more importantly, just. In fact, it seems rather antethetical to the just society we're supposed to be creating; if kids aren't allowed to see what justice looks like, why would they pursue it as adults?
"I determined that I was NOT going to meekly take it anymore, regardless of the consequences (to my physical well-being, to my performance in school, etc). And the abuse stopped."
I take it this was before today's "zero tolerence" rules.
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes you're being picked on simply becase you're a wierdo and adolescents haven't always learned that we tolerate benign wierdos - like chimps or apes, they act to drive oddballs from the group. I don't condone that, but again, it's a fact."
No, your "it's just a fact" stance passivley condones it. Regardless of whether or not you feel the victims should just suck it up and deal with it, unprovoked attacks should not be happening in schools my tax dollars pay for.
"I recommend instead that you carefully consider how much your 'individualism' is worth - at a certain point it's just narcissism anyway."
What's the point of a republican form of government if deviation from social norms cannot be tolerated? "All individuals have rights unless they look different?"
"Too many people use this sort of life experience as a crutch to blame everything else on."
"Too many?" Got numbers?
"I'm not going to blame my lack of success with women on being bullied (is anyone as successful with them as they want to be?)."
Perhaps, but does everybody who wishes more success with women have the trust issues that a bullying victim is left with? Do you yourself push women away the more they seem interested in you, while trying to figure out what her "real" motives are, what kind of trick she's planning?
"no amount of chemical assistance or directed blame is going to change that YOU (alone) need to get along every damn day."
I see contradictions. If being too much of an individual (your view) is what causes a person to be bullied to begin with, why is showing more of this hated individual initiative the solution? And then you you pay a lot of lip service to building social structures and "belonging," but what's the point of social structures if these problems must be solved by the individual?
Really, if anybody here is having trouble dealing with past bullying, it's you: you're trying to apply irrational standards in an effort to justify the injust. Stockholm Syndrome, anyone? After all, if everybody must be responsible for what happens in their own lives, why must the victim be responsible for the actions of their assailants?
I, too, often tell myself to "suck it up and deal with it," but the results of doing so is something I would not wish on another human being, and I'm not as prepared as you are to treat it as a "one size fits all" solution to individual victims of social ills. With your admonishments of "it can't be helped," it seems that you, and not the parent, are the one taking the defeatist, "I'm the victim" attitude.
"Don't kill them, just beat them down and let them know that the next time it happens you won't be so lenient."
Except when I was in high school, I wasn't confident I could follow the "don't kill them" rule. I dind't want to start anything because I was pissed off enough I was araid I wouldn't be able to stop.
"Hmm. I'd say for me, Metroid Prime did too much to retroactively de-mystify the original Metroid."
Then I suggest you can't see the forest through the trees. The point of view of the original Metroid story is that of an outside observer, one that doesn't know Samus on a personal level, and from what can be gleaned from MP2: Echoes, that's the point of view of most of the denizens of the galaxy, even the federation troops (among whom there is apparently doubt that Samus even exists).
And with Metroid Prime, you're not getting to know Samus so much as knowing what third parties think and know of her. The pirates describe her as some sort of natural disaster that's visiting them, the Chozos view her as some sort of transcendent, holy crusader, and neither one seems to be hitting upon Samus as a human being. Even in Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission (and Super Metroid, for that matter), where the story elements are told from a first-person perspective, they're delivered in a matter-of-fact, "mission debriefing" style that still gives little insight to emotions or motivations.
"Incidentally, the first Metroid, and specifically the diagrams of it...
they're carefully designed levels, sculpted hand in hand with the powerups made available."
So you're waxing nostalgic about the "freedom" offered by the first game when you knew, apparently before you even bought it, the exact layout of the entire game? Sounds to me you never had the freedom of falling down a shaft you can't get out of without the Ice Beam (or some damned good bomb jumping) and having to start all over again.
"Seriously, what I dislike about it is the likely implementation with Samus being about as dangerous without her suit as with,"
You mean exactly how it was in the original Metroid game that you put up on a pedistal? It was the new Metroid Zero Mission where the suitless Samus was left weak and vulnerable.
The same "amount?" Same number of watts? Number of volts? Number of joules? Number of amperes? Heck, number of coulombs? Perhaps measuring it by the five-gallon bucket...
If you're going to make claims as drastic as "A will kill you while B will not," I think it'd be better to use a basis of comparison a bit less arbitrary than "amount of electricity."
"Imagine what you could accomplish with your real life if you invested 100 hours a month into it"
Yes, imagine what you could do. Then imagine what you would most likely do. Those 100 hours a month you put into WoW would instead be spent watching TV, or playing offline games, or something along those lines.
If you were going to spend that time doing something "constructive," then you would have been doing it before you picked up WoW, wouldn't you? In fact, you would probably be too busy following those constructive pursuits to have picked up WoW in the first place.
You are playing WoW now becuase what you were doing before was even less meaningful to you, or at least more boring.
All we have is unsubstatiated rumors at best that Microsoft will be releasing a new generation of 360s to offer HDMI output. Aside from the fact that it is a 180 from their current philosophy of making everything an add-on (including the HDD) instead of hardwiring things, these rumors can be either confirmed or denied very easily...
Somebody has the pin-outs of the 360's multi-out port, or else nobody would be making a/v cables for it, right? Are there or are there not leads putting out HDMI signals?
"C'mon MS! Make a $499 "Ultimate" model that has the premium unit plus the HDDVD drive integrated."
That'd be a complete change in philosophy for the 360, where nothing is integrated, at least not as much as you seem to want. If you want everything soldered into place, wait for the PS3, but we gamers who have no desire to either own HD movies or want the specter of a two-tiered game library on the horizon are happy with this arrangement.
"I'll buy one now no questions asked."
The million dollar question is if you'll be able to convince tens of thousands of others to do the same. Remember, these things have (at best) next to no profit margin.
"Second - i think i'm just going to hold off till the hd-dvd is built in before bothering with the 360."
OK, that's you, maybe a few of your friends... but really, how many people are actually that interested in HD movies? Sony seems to believe they'll fly off the shelves ("Just like UMDs!"), but the only possibility for Microsoft to do what you suggest is if there's palpable demand for something like that, and I'm just not seeing it.
By definition, (people who will buy HD movies) = (people who own HDTVs), and for the forseeable future, (people who own HDTVs) (people who own any sort of television). Microsoft wants something with mass-market appeal, which is why the 360 works with NTSC to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
"Who said anything about malice?"
Malice, guile, whatever. The point is that, while there may be some job interviewers that deliberately try to use such tactics, the odds are strongly in favor of most interviewers really just being that stupid.
"Also, there are a few things to be aware of... part of the interview process intentionally (from talking to insiders there, and at Microsoft) introduces vagueness, incorrectness, and other troubling aspects to problem solving. One of the things they're trying to observe is how a candidate deals with the obstacles."
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
"committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
On the one hand, electoral votes, as a matter of procedure, are always delivered to the President... of the Senate.
On the other hand, ironically perhaps, the actual electoral votes are hand-written FITB, so sayeth the US Constitution, so Diebold would have nothing to do with it.
Anybody who goes on about the whole "begging the question" thing is actually begging for a beat-down.
"I still think Sony removed it and shoved in motion cause they didnt want to give Immersion money to license rumble."
The end result is still the same: the only next-gen console without rumble.
Yeah, Georgia is more than just a Delta hub!
"Otherwise I can't see how Microsoft can really promote the drive with just the limited selection of movies around at the moment."
The same way Sony can promote an entire freakin' console even with the limited selection of movies around at the moment.
"No matter how irritating spam is, does it really deserve such extreme aggressive measures to punish the guilty?"
Considering that spamming made the spammer enough money to get platinum and gold ingots to begin with, I'd say "yes."
If the money was made illicitly, why should the spammer be allowed to hold on to it and hide it from the victims?
"Perhaps those who agree with this are also the ones who agree that the RIAA are right to sue file sharers,"
How much money do P2P users get for uploading MP3s? Where's the platinum?
"I doubt Nintendo will offer an IM service to players."
When last I heard, they were calling it "!!M" ("Wii" upside-down).
"And that ought to end every argument about the long-term importance of launch lists."
The launch price of the PS2 was 1/2 of the PS3's. For those prices, people can (and did, especially in Japan) pick it up for its DVD "features" while waiting for games, but even if the PS3 actually sells as a BluRay player, the BluRay library just isn't what the DVD library is, even at PS2 launch.
""We don't like our portable games cut down, with worse graphics, fewer levels and crappy sound, we want a handheld that can come close to our home machines."
I'd say gamers have mostly been saying "I love my Game Boy." However...
"We don't want to play the same games we play at home, we want to play 2D sidescrollers. and puzzle games"
How exactly do these two statements conflict? Isn't it possible that the PSP has many games that are "the same games we play at home" only "with worse graphics, fewer levels and crappy sound?" I'd say that's exactly what's available for the PSP now, while Nintendo handhelds focus on porting the depth and fun of console games than aiming for a/v first and content second.
They've done it before, though. Consider the Rainbow Warrior.
"The people of CT, GA, and MI beg to differ."
Three seats out of 435? That is literally less than 1%. And even then, all three will be on the general ballot this November, but even if they lose it will be anything but signifigant.
"Tell Joe Lieberman. Please."
He got his second and third terms with 67% and 64%, respectively. As for this year, the election hasn't happened yet.
"You also might mention it to Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Galen Fox, George Ryan, John Rowland, Tom Noe, Marion Barry, Bob Ney, Vince Cianci, Bill Janklow, Jim West,"
Indicted, indicted, concvicted, convicted, convicted, convicted, convicted, withdrew, convicted, convicted, and Jim West is the only name listed who was removed from office by a popular process. On the contrary, Marion Barry was re-elected to be mayor of DC after he served his sentence (and currently sits on the city council) and Vince Cianci was the longest-tenured mayor in the history of the United States.
All but one of the names you listed seem to be more indicative of how the system is broken, not how it works.
"Ah, but I was created especially to resist it. And "it" in this case is a relative newcommer"
"It" is the product of intelligent design, with a goal of obfuscating your vote, while your goal is, at best, to procreate.
"This isn't about "the system" it's about standing up for what's right."
You "stand up" all you want, several hundreds of thousands of people will still be "sitting down" in each and every House district in this country this November. Whether or not you cast your lone, insignifigant vote means nothing in the modern political scheme.
"Rather, the taxpayer will face all of the consequences."
Illinois is (ostensibly) a republic. The taxpayers are the state. It's their penalty for letting their sworn representatives do something so foolish.
"Did you know that it's a new age religion, their spiritual leader claims to posses supernatural powers and they believe that homosexuality is morally wrong."
Drop the "new age" reference and you just described Catholicism. What's your point?
"Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and practised in China - there must be a reason as to why Falun Gong is bad."
Only in forms that are palletable to the government, however. Note that the government has appointed their own people in these religions... a lama here, an archbishop there...
"It seems to me an almost-essential characteristic of the early socialization of the human animal: very basic concepts of dominance, social order, and the coping of the various individuals to their places therein. Social ontogeny recapitulating social phylogeny?"
But that doesn't make it right or, more importantly, just. In fact, it seems rather antethetical to the just society we're supposed to be creating; if kids aren't allowed to see what justice looks like, why would they pursue it as adults?
"I determined that I was NOT going to meekly take it anymore, regardless of the consequences (to my physical well-being, to my performance in school, etc). And the abuse stopped."
I take it this was before today's "zero tolerence" rules.
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes you're being picked on simply becase you're a wierdo and adolescents haven't always learned that we tolerate benign wierdos - like chimps or apes, they act to drive oddballs from the group. I don't condone that, but again, it's a fact."
No, your "it's just a fact" stance passivley condones it. Regardless of whether or not you feel the victims should just suck it up and deal with it, unprovoked attacks should not be happening in schools my tax dollars pay for.
"I recommend instead that you carefully consider how much your 'individualism' is worth - at a certain point it's just narcissism anyway."
What's the point of a republican form of government if deviation from social norms cannot be tolerated? "All individuals have rights unless they look different?"
"Too many people use this sort of life experience as a crutch to blame everything else on."
"Too many?" Got numbers?
"I'm not going to blame my lack of success with women on being bullied (is anyone as successful with them as they want to be?)."
Perhaps, but does everybody who wishes more success with women have the trust issues that a bullying victim is left with? Do you yourself push women away the more they seem interested in you, while trying to figure out what her "real" motives are, what kind of trick she's planning?
"no amount of chemical assistance or directed blame is going to change that YOU (alone) need to get along every damn day."
I see contradictions. If being too much of an individual (your view) is what causes a person to be bullied to begin with, why is showing more of this hated individual initiative the solution? And then you you pay a lot of lip service to building social structures and "belonging," but what's the point of social structures if these problems must be solved by the individual?
Really, if anybody here is having trouble dealing with past bullying, it's you: you're trying to apply irrational standards in an effort to justify the injust. Stockholm Syndrome, anyone? After all, if everybody must be responsible for what happens in their own lives, why must the victim be responsible for the actions of their assailants?
I, too, often tell myself to "suck it up and deal with it," but the results of doing so is something I would not wish on another human being, and I'm not as prepared as you are to treat it as a "one size fits all" solution to individual victims of social ills. With your admonishments of "it can't be helped," it seems that you, and not the parent, are the one taking the defeatist, "I'm the victim" attitude.
"Don't kill them, just beat them down and let them know that the next time it happens you won't be so lenient."
Except when I was in high school, I wasn't confident I could follow the "don't kill them" rule. I dind't want to start anything because I was pissed off enough I was araid I wouldn't be able to stop.
"How about we put the burden of raising children on the parents who chose to had them."
You mean the same parents that remain willfully ignorant of bullying to begin with?
What kind of behavior indicates that you're an old person from Korea?
"Hmm. I'd say for me, Metroid Prime did too much to retroactively de-mystify the original Metroid."
Then I suggest you can't see the forest through the trees. The point of view of the original Metroid story is that of an outside observer, one that doesn't know Samus on a personal level, and from what can be gleaned from MP2: Echoes, that's the point of view of most of the denizens of the galaxy, even the federation troops (among whom there is apparently doubt that Samus even exists).
And with Metroid Prime, you're not getting to know Samus so much as knowing what third parties think and know of her. The pirates describe her as some sort of natural disaster that's visiting them, the Chozos view her as some sort of transcendent, holy crusader, and neither one seems to be hitting upon Samus as a human being. Even in Metroid Fusion and Metroid Zero Mission (and Super Metroid, for that matter), where the story elements are told from a first-person perspective, they're delivered in a matter-of-fact, "mission debriefing" style that still gives little insight to emotions or motivations.
"Incidentally, the first Metroid, and specifically the diagrams of it...
they're carefully designed levels, sculpted hand in hand with the powerups made available."
So you're waxing nostalgic about the "freedom" offered by the first game when you knew, apparently before you even bought it, the exact layout of the entire game? Sounds to me you never had the freedom of falling down a shaft you can't get out of without the Ice Beam (or some damned good bomb jumping) and having to start all over again.
"Seriously, what I dislike about it is the likely implementation with Samus being about as dangerous without her suit as with,"
You mean exactly how it was in the original Metroid game that you put up on a pedistal? It was the new Metroid Zero Mission where the suitless Samus was left weak and vulnerable.
"while the same amount of electricity"
The same "amount?" Same number of watts? Number of volts? Number of joules? Number of amperes? Heck, number of coulombs? Perhaps measuring it by the five-gallon bucket...
If you're going to make claims as drastic as "A will kill you while B will not," I think it'd be better to use a basis of comparison a bit less arbitrary than "amount of electricity."
"Imagine what you could accomplish with your real life if you invested 100 hours a month into it"
Yes, imagine what you could do. Then imagine what you would most likely do. Those 100 hours a month you put into WoW would instead be spent watching TV, or playing offline games, or something along those lines.
If you were going to spend that time doing something "constructive," then you would have been doing it before you picked up WoW, wouldn't you? In fact, you would probably be too busy following those constructive pursuits to have picked up WoW in the first place.
You are playing WoW now becuase what you were doing before was even less meaningful to you, or at least more boring.
"So, $399.99 for a new 360 with HDMI output"
All we have is unsubstatiated rumors at best that Microsoft will be releasing a new generation of 360s to offer HDMI output. Aside from the fact that it is a 180 from their current philosophy of making everything an add-on (including the HDD) instead of hardwiring things, these rumors can be either confirmed or denied very easily...
Somebody has the pin-outs of the 360's multi-out port, or else nobody would be making a/v cables for it, right? Are there or are there not leads putting out HDMI signals?
"C'mon MS! Make a $499 "Ultimate" model that has the premium unit plus the HDDVD drive integrated."
That'd be a complete change in philosophy for the 360, where nothing is integrated, at least not as much as you seem to want. If you want everything soldered into place, wait for the PS3, but we gamers who have no desire to either own HD movies or want the specter of a two-tiered game library on the horizon are happy with this arrangement.
"I'll buy one now no questions asked."
The million dollar question is if you'll be able to convince tens of thousands of others to do the same. Remember, these things have (at best) next to no profit margin.
"Second - i think i'm just going to hold off till the hd-dvd is built in before bothering with the 360."
OK, that's you, maybe a few of your friends... but really, how many people are actually that interested in HD movies? Sony seems to believe they'll fly off the shelves ("Just like UMDs!"), but the only possibility for Microsoft to do what you suggest is if there's palpable demand for something like that, and I'm just not seeing it.
By definition, (people who will buy HD movies) = (people who own HDTVs), and for the forseeable future, (people who own HDTVs) (people who own any sort of television). Microsoft wants something with mass-market appeal, which is why the 360 works with NTSC to begin with.