A lawyer's analysis of Bilbo's contract in The Hobbit
wired.com
wired.com
So he's basically praising pointless lawyering! :)
Or a more charitable reading: he's geeking out as we might about the terminal commands in a 'hacker' movie.
- Clicking back twice in rapid succession doesn't bring me back;
- Clicking and holding back button and selecting HN doesn't take me back;
which is a feat few other websites manage to pull off. I wonder if they had a team put together just for this purpose. Would have loved to be a fly on the wall in one of those meetings.
"How can we keep people on our site longer?"
"Sir, I know! Lets not let them leave!"
"Brilliant! Someone make this guy CEO stat!"
Utterly frustrating and inexcusable for a technology website.
</sorry>
That said, yeah Wired may be doing it on purpose, but we don't know either way, unless someone uncovers some too-clever-to-be-a-mistake behavior in the code.
* This only affects me in Chrome (using the dev channel).
* Firefox Aurora (20.0a2) with noscript off doesn't have the back button 'hijack'.
* A quick debug in Chrome with F8 (stop script execution) and immediately pressing back shows there's a few 'hidden' functions being run -- not sure how to view those quite yet.
FWIW I'm on Chrome 24.0.1312.52 OSX.
I tried to take a gander but it's such a jumbled mess of affiliate/ad bs that I doubt even they'd be able to fix it.
As the Shire lacks an effective government, and particularly lacks awareness of matters outside its borders, Bilbo could easily be strung up under a foreign legal system if he crossed Thorin.
> Disputes arising between the Contract Parties shall be heard and judged by an arbitrator of the Company’s choosing
By that clause, the company should be able to choose Thorin as the arbitrator regardless of the fact that he's the King Under the Mountain. That fact alone would put Bilbo in dire straights if, like you said, he ever crossed Thorin.
The original contract is super short; the movie contract is extremely bloated... maybe it really does take a lawyer to call that bloating "an impressive piece of work". Impressive would have been to make a children's movie out of a children's book, instead of doing whatever with it and staining the careers of otherwise fine actors, just because it can't fight back and money is nice to have.
If this offends anyone; good. The existance of all these movies, their treatment of legit stories for children to turn them into brainless crap ala Star Wars, offends me as well.
Well, the inability to appreciate beauty or subtlety in a movie offends me. What's the more brainless, the person who watches a movie and contemplates it, or one who dismisses it without a thought?
Without a thought, and without paying attention to any indicators.. or merely without watching the full-length movie? Huge difference. But I appreciate the irony of telling me how my decision-making process goes without having the faintest idea of it, not to mention my ability to appreciate beauty or "subtlety". Subtlety.. I might watch The Hobbit one day just to think back to this post and laugh.
But whatever. I think I'll take a lesson from The Hobbit myself right now, which is don't feed the trolls, for nothing good will come of it.
How much shovelware do I have to take before I am allowed to skip one? I don't even think Tolkien was the greatest author ever (there's just so much random stuff in LOTR for example), but for me there is bounds and leaps more humanity in one of any of those books than in all LOTR movies combined; so unless I missed the dude remarking that LOTR was horrible, and that he is making The Hobbit differently to make up for it, I know that for me this thing is going to be neither subtle, nor beautiful. I just didn't want to point all of this out in detail because it makes me seem like such a snob, I'll take the "troll" thanks. If this stuff is fine art for you, I'll be rolling in the dirt having fun.
Before you skip one? As much as suits your preference, of course!
But in this case, you took pride in offending other people, some of them with more information than you (e.g. they watched the movie). And you appear to be engaged in a protracted (3-comment) campaign to defend your analysis of the movie. It should be obvious that this campaign is doomed to failure, given that you explicitly admit ignorance of the actual subject matter. How much shovelware do you have to take before you successfully persuade other HN commenters of your analysis of the shovelware? Probably all of it.
I only mention all this as a suggestion on how to better enjoy your time commenting on fora, and how to help others to better enjoy their time. Just a suggestion, YMMV.
Maybe off-topic: I wasn't very impressed with the LOTR movie adaptation either, and I'm not bothering to see The Hobbit. But, you know, whatever. The books are available any time I want to re-read them. No big need to attempt to offend passers-by with my disdain.
you explicitly admit ignorance of the actual subject matter
Bullshit. Read it again, slowly this time.
No big need to attempt to offend passers-by with my disdain.
There is plenty of need. Nietzsche said "it's not your job to be a fly swatter", and I was all like "fuck you Nietzsche, you can't tell me what to do!". It's nice for you if that's not your thing, but not really relevant to me otherwise.