Posted 05/23/2007 at 11:01:22pm

I don't understand this "wasteful" talk. Moving from 11 verdict slots to 6 saves you .. what? One bit? One character? I don't see that it makes any difference that some verdicts are practically unused. Let's face it: there just aren't many products that MPC reviews that deserve the low-end ratings, and that's mostly a good thing. If the current scale reflects real-world experience, what's the problem? Cramming those verdicts into one doesn't add any value to the reader. Playing games with scale to achieve a bell curve seems largely arbitrary to me.