daniwo59-
The intention was for 500 characters (words in the previous response was my error) to respond to each of the two questions. As I stated earlier, we did not specify whether blank spaces between words are characters or whether links are characters.
This doesn't make much of a difference, I don't care about 100 chars extra here or there, I care about 1000 characters here or there.
Since you don't want to do anything else about this, I will change the candidate page to reflect the current practice.
Regards,
Erik