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.

Obligatory Evan Roth Intellectual Property Asshole Competition Link

Although it seems both assholes are refusing the bait.

The only reason they might replace X11 is to better fit whatever security model they use. And even though it is not resource intensive, they may be using such a small feature set from their windowing model that they want a slimmer install.

Back when Compiz was in its infancy or nonexistent, didn't there used to be a few compositing projects for Linux that could either run inside of X11 or on its own console? I would not be terribly surprised if they went with something that light weight.

Good point. Bram Cohen made a relevant post today about Ludology in City of Heroes:

Consider a game with the following semantics: You sit, unmoving, for two hours, with no user feedback, no buttons to push, nothing, completely passive, while the game plays out in front of you, exactly the same way as it would for anybody else. This sounds like a terrible game, but it's exactly what movies are, and movies are very popular and get little criticism that they're terrible games.

Compare that with an RTS or an [FPS] (that's what you meant, right?), where using somebody else's character doesn't really help you at all.

Iduno. TF2 has done this very very well. Character determines many things, including how high you can jump. If you spend a lot of time at the game, you get new capabilities. But every new capability is a tradeoff, and a beginning player using your items wouldn't necessarily do any better than without. If there were RPGs where time spent provided you more very well balanced tradeoffs to choose between, that would be perhaps interesting. And hard to develop.

The problem with too many RPGs is that easy encounters are easy, and hard encounters are impossible until you level up, at which point they are easy. It FEELS like you are gaining skill at the game, which is enjoyable, but in fact your character is just tougher. You didn't learn shit.

It makes sense for your character to change over time: that makes the game keep feeling new. But the best system of all is one where your new characteristics are a tradeoff, and every player's capabilities remain somewhat balanced. Success should be from solving a problem in novel ways, not grinding. Like TF2, StarCraft. It is of course very hard to build games like this.

This has come up for me playing crap iPhone games. Since there isn't enough development time for them to put in real challenge, every goddamned thing has a level up mechanic. And certain things are just unbeatable until you level up, and then they are beatable through button mashing. It is lame as hell and apparently the customers don't care.

I'm not sure I follow your point. What you are describing is the result of a decade of anti-trust litigation against Microsoft. Had they been allowed, they certainly might have attempted to prevent you from installing Firefox or Opera.

Christ, 20 responses and no answers:

If you log in, you can change your discussion viewing preferences to disable "Interactive Discussions aka D2". This will return you to classic /. style discussions, which were perfect.

Ok, perfect aside from the content. But an excellent software solution. Then, of course, you should change your threshold & highlight threshold so you never see comments under +4, and assign a +1 "reason modifier" to all downmod reasons. (Downmodding is great for discouraging poor behavior, but doesn't actually reflect what is worth reading). Reparent highly rated comments & do not display scores are nice but up to you. The rest is required to make /. work, imnsho.

I think CmdrTaco once suggested setting it so that you have a lower comment threshold that is increased the moment you've got over 50 comments on your screen, or something, but I don't know how to set that up. Comment limit? Index spill? I forget. I prefer to wait until the discussion has identified valuable content.

Of course, the whole point is that you get to decide which of your contacts can reach you at which phone. You can make it so that if they're not in your contact list, they get voice mail only.

You can also screen callers (they state their name to a recording) based on whether they are in your contact list or whether they are blocking caller ID.

Yes! For example, my contract is over in December 2009. If I would like to renew now for 2 years, I only have to pay $499 for the 32GB phone.

Lucky me!

Of course, the real $$ in all of these smartphones is the monthly service. So the primary reason I am not dying to pay $500 is that I am not dying to sign up for $2400 over the next two years.

Eventually, Google Voice will port in #s. That'll be an interesting day. Then maybe they'll offer iPhone plans at mifi prices.

And did everyone see the "curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal" error message that popped up in the lower right when the demo crashed?

1. make a game with decent content
2. market it successfully
3. sell a bunch of copies
4. neglect marketing
5. update app, locking users out of previously accessible content
6. reap microtransactions