fwiw, they've been running an investment fund and Joost, a distributed video streamer w/ content deals.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were clearly not content to hack compelling software. Their travails sound like a Gibson novel. As far as I can tell, they made themselves the monarchs of Skype. One day, some enterprising journalist will tell us how the fuck they managed to sell Ebay an empty XBOX 360 box for billions of dollars.

While you do not have enough tabs to fill the title bar in Chrome, their non-standard window increases the size of the target for maximization.

I love Windows usability standards (I'm stuck in the XP era of fitts's law, screen real estate conservation, responsiveness) and that is the main reason I use Chrome.

This isn't like Apple shipping Safari for Winders w/ a close box in the upper right that doesn't activate when you click the top right pixel on the screen. Google has worked out the kinks here.

Just because there's nothing like it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

if the iPhone explosion rate is higher than competitive phones,

Is it? It isn't news if a freebie Nokia explodes. I'm not saying that has ever happened, but I don't think it would be international news if it did.

At a party w/ a ton of Apple engineers, I overheard a sociopathic (There was other evidence.) Apple kernel dev trying to recruit this sweetheart Sun kernel dev:

"The best thing about Apple is that we're not Google. We totally do evil. DRM, software patents, whatever."

Of course there were a ton of other, very nice Apple devs also who were nothing like that guy.

Her name was Dilemma?

People always think that the decisions are the hard part of robotics.

Carrying stuff and throwing it is way harder.

Sure, you can work out (+1 STR), get plastic surgery (+1 CHA), or sit at a computer all day (+1 INT, -1 CON, -1 STR, -1 CHA), but your life skills are really just tweaking the basics you started with.

This is patent bullshit. There are certainly very important predispositions to skill learning, but the Prime Requisite for skill learning in real life is time spent.

It's a horrible form factor concept. It only makes sense if you 1) are wedded to an x86 desktop OS, and 2) must have thumb typing. This is the case for very, very few people. Most people are better off with either 1) a netbook for your desktop OS, or 2) a smartphone for thumb typing.

Getting both in one device costs $$ for a reason: tiny market, no economy of scale.

No screaming diatribes over 'purity' of ideology.

"Oh dear," said comment #28724745, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly disappeared in a puff of logic.

Also, if anybody can interpret most inkblots to look like harmless things and this person sees "their mother attacking them with a machete" then any ink blot will work in your example.

The point isn't just whether it's harmful or harmless. The point is that hundreds of thousands of other people have all looked at this picture - for the first time - and we have statistics about their collected responses.

We do not have statistics about their second responses. Or their responses after someone told them it looks like a piglet. There are no studies indicating that the Rorschach has any validity in these cases.

For that person, having a horrific dream/experience/fantasy that your butterfly actually matches more closely to their memory, your test/tool gives a false positive.

Please, rest assured that 1) the test is not that simple and 2) no one uses it the way you seem to think. Try reading the article.

Yes of course. It is absolutely possible to resist diagnosis via the Rorschach. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it is not.

I don't know if it has "lie scale" type measurements like the MMPI, but I do think you'd have to be able to fake well-ordered thinking to totally fool the Rorschach. That leaves many, many situations in which the test is still useful.

I'd just like to highlight that a diagnostic tool relying on a patient answering honestly is a little naive.

No, it is naive if you think your patient can't lie. As per the effing article, "It has been employed in diagnosing underlying thought disorder and differentiating psychotic from nonpsychotic thinking in cases where the patient is reluctant to admit openly to psychotic thinking."

The whole point is that the Rorschach is just one more way to try to get information out of a dishonest patient. It may or may not work. Sometimes it is helpful, sometimes it is not.

you can't lie to a stethoscope or an MRI.

Uh... unfortunately they are pretty bad at diagnosing psychosis. Once you figure out how to use a stethoscope to diagnose psychosis, I promise, everyone will throw away their Rorschach tests.

The problem most people have with the Rorschach test or 'tool', however you want to word it - is that it doesn't measure anything. It's some pictures. They don't do ANYTHING.

You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers and use that to help show you the state of mind of the person answering. But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind.

I think this hilights your misunderstanding of the test. The point is that you compare the patient's responses to the responses of thousands of other people who have looked at the image before. It is NOT a Freudian inspection of a person's subconscious. If you show them something that everyone on the planet agrees looks like a piglet and they say it looks like their mother attacking them with a machete, that is a helpful tool for a psychologist.