Correct me if I'm wrong, but you should have more than two choices for your vote. Sure voting independent has it's pitfalls, but choosing not to vote will not change anything.

I thought that too, but wikipedia and other online sources say that this only applies when a defensive player is attempting to make a play on the runner. At that point the runner must proceed on the most direct path to the base, without deviating by more than 3ft, otherwise the runner is called out.

Online references aside, this makes a lot of sense thinking of the baseball that I've played and watched on tv.

It looks like a gladius to me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladius

And who is to decide which programmers work is better? Hey wait..

Next you'll have to have another competition between two managerial candidates to see who does a better job of judging the programmers' work.

Gimmickry is not going to solve the issues that we have in software development. You can probably only count on two hands the number of true 'one size fits all' solutions and this isn't one of them.

Seriously, how often is it the case that machines pay out *LESS* than they are meant to. We'll never know and I don't anyone in the industry is looking very hard to find out. Code and electronics aren't perfect, but that isn't the player's fault. Perhaps players cannot be paid out in full in all cases, but the awarded prize shouldn't be miniscule.

Yes, that was the point that I was attempting to make.

I'd like to point out though, that just because a game has simple rules, doesn't mean it isn't very complicated to play. Look at how long it too for someone to completely 'solve' the game of checkers (using a computer).

And how does this situation differ other than the fact that the alloc/free operations are done local to the JVM instead of making system calls? The fact that the JVM is doing the work doesn't magically make memory management easier.

The other thing that I'm skeptical about is that the article seems to be contradicted by a more recent paper by the author that they are referencing (see Zorn http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=582419.582421). In the newer paper, Zorn et al. say that custom allocators are less efficient than a modern general purpose allocator.