I used to know basically no gamers who didn't play WoW. Now I don't know that I still know any. I was one of the loud defenders of Blizzard's choice to enter into a business merger with Activision, and I have been forced to admit that I was wrong. Blizzard's handling of events since then has been spectacularly bad -- I left over the Real ID stuff, myself. (Yes, I know, lots of people say they "backed down". Only temporarily and from the most ridiculously stupid parts; many other aspects are still horrible now, and some of the bad ideas they postponed may come back.)
Thing is, in MMOs, network effects are king. If you want to play a game with your friends, the game your friends play wins. But once you start losing that "everyone I know plays X" spot, there's not really any particularly great technical advantages of WoW over a lot of other MMOs, and quite a few are in many ways better. Even apart from my personal grudge against Blizzard, I found other games to do a better job of things that mattered to me, and I really got sick of Blizzard's active hostility to various parts of their user base. It was a real eye-opener when, after Blizzard spent several years explaining that it could never be possible to tweak the rulesets between PvE and PvP servers, Trion turned around and did it in a week during the Rift beta.
So now I play whatever I happen to know other people who play. And none of the individual games have the population density WoW did, but I am not totally unhappy about that, because it means more choice and more selection.
Stuff that's still going: DDO: Very different philosophy and design, pretty cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with how Turbine runs things. The microtransaction stuff isn't as intrusive as I thought it would be, and the game design has some really nice appeal. Rift: As a game, this is basically what I always wished Blizzard would do, and then some. Developers have been pretty responsive to user feedback, and there's a lot less of a focus on tedious time sinks. Big weakness, from my point of view, is that there's been basically no visible community maintenance in ages, so not only are there people who engage in massive, long-term harassment and abuse, but now there are lots more people who are abusive because they're convinced they can get away with it. Still, if you just wanna play with a few friends and ignore public channels, the game itself is amazing. (Slashdotters may care more than others: The addon API is beautiful. One of the nicest development APIs I've used.) TSW: Not hugely happy with Funcom, but the game is fascinating, and does a lot of things which are radically different from other MMOs, some in very interesting ways. Also pretty responsive to user feedback in a lot of ways.
They managed to reproduce results fifteen or twenty years, and offer a stupid interpretation. Not bad!
The sleep-deprivation thing is well known, and not new. However, there's nothing tying it to "mobile devices". Rather, there's strong evidence that teenagers tend to have a circadian rhythm which favors being up later and not getting up that early. Schools have historically shoved their schedules extra-early so that extracurricular events like sports can occur before the sun goes down, but after school. Last time I heard about this, a school district had tried simply moving the high school day an hour later, and gotten a very noticable improvement in basically every measure of achievement available to them.
Now that I'm an adult, I sleep until I feel like getting up, and if I'm up a bit late, fine. I pretty much wake up between 11 and noon, and I work "late" most nights... But I get a heck of a lot more done, and a lot better, than I did when I was trying to work 9-5.
If they don't change his GAF score, and people change their handling of him significantly, then people are doing something wrong.
That said, I am pretty unhappy with the "high functioning" label these days; the idea that if you are mostly functional that means you don't need help is a great way to make people stop being functional.
You can't measure a single/unified physical thing, but you can very definitely measure autistic traits. There's a heck of a lot of measurements out there that show noticeable and fairly consistent patterns.
And so far as I can tell, a whole lot of that disparity in outcomes is less a question of differences in brains than of the environments people are in over a long period of time. I melt down pretty badly if I'm badly stressed for a long time, but put me in a livable environment and I'm practically like people!
Look, imagine that we discovered that about 2% of our population were heavily vulnerable to simple trickery, like they were much more enthusiastic about a 10% chance of survival than a 90% chance of mortality, even though they're the same thing. And they were easily manipulated by actors who knew how to show a particular emotion on command. And they had some cool things, like they were unusually good at reading emotions from facial expressions, but overall they had crippling problems that made it hard for them to function like rational adults.
Now, consider: If 98% of people were ASD, and 2% weren't, that would be what we'd have. We'd have a diagnostic criterion for "obsessive social behavior", but some people would argue that these poor overly-socialized kids are actually pretty tolerable once you get used to them, and maybe we should just accept that there's a few people who have this driving need for social interaction and can't focus on work and hobbies like normal people.
Neurodiversity isn't about dysfunction, it's about function that really is different, and not necessarily obviously better or worse.
Actually, he won't be "cured". He'll have autism spectrum disorder, rather than asperger syndrome, most likely. I can't see a way someone could have an AS diagnosis under DSM-IV and not be considered ASD under DSM-V.
What he said wasn't exactly super formal clinical language, but it certainly fits a pretty well-observed pattern. People do not deal well with autistics.
I've done some consulting work for him in the past.
Honestly... He's sort of a jerk sometimes, and he makes some really poor decisions sometimes. But he's honest, and he's not a total moron. He isn't suing people to create some kind of crazy profit center, he's trying to deal with people using forged or incorrect tickets to get on buses. People like to point to his (admittedly a little wacky) terms and conditions and imply that he's suing over stupid shit. He's not, so far as I know. He's suing over people who do stuff like print three copies of the same ticket and get on three different buses that are running the same schedule. This isn't about "socially acceptable behavior", for the most part. (Some of the later stuff, like the defamation claims, was pretty dumb IMO, though.)
And everyone jumps in with some "oh, hey, I know how you could easily solve this!" solution. It's like the thing where, if you spend ten years working with doctors to try to treat insomnia, anyone who hears about this will suggest you cut down on caffeine after dinner. Because, obviously, neither you nor the doctors have ever thought of that!
Yes, there really are reasons that checking passengers against a manifest is at the very least a substantially higher cost than the (fairly small, compared to the user base) amount of fraud. Yes, there are reasons it probably wouldn't be a good tactic at all. It's not that he's too much of an idiot to think of this, it's that he has more information about what is actually happening than those of us who are reading couple-paragraph summaries over the Internet.
FWIW, I got a ThinkPad in 2001, got the 3-year extended warranty. Two and a half years in, I bought another two year extension. I got some repairs under it. It was pretty cost-effective.
I still have that machine. Heck, I've used it in the last year because I had Windows stuff that needed XP.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I think Zero Tolerance polices are bullshit regardless of history -- and indeed, once you start taking history into account, you can't be talking about a zero tolerance policy, because if there were history to talk about, there wouldn't still be a student.
As to whether she "lied" in saying it was a project: She didn't say it was a project assigned by a teacher. "Project" and "project specifically assigned by a teacher" are not the same thing. Maybe she lied, maybe she didn't. She may well have been intending to do something like this for the science fair, and screwed it up. Or maybe she was just making excuses. We don't know! Asserting that it can't have been a project because the teacher said it wasn't is stupid for two reasons:
1. Not all projects are assigned. 2. Teachers also lie.
Pretty sure that, if you're a kid, but not a black kid, "what's coming to you" for a thing that doesn't injure anyone does not involve felony charges and being tried as an adult.
I was under the impression that charges which don't lead to convictions get dropped and that, say, employers are not allowed to ask or investigate that; they can ask whether you've been convicted, but not whether you've been charged.
I think you miss a key point: Racism doesn't necessarily imply people not getting along. It just implies that, say, they might be more likely to arrest a black person than a white person for doing the same things. Say, arresting a kid and charging her with a felony for doing a science experiment.
Dungeon Master was pretty amazing, too. I recently noticed that one of the "believed good" cracked images floating around still has some of the secondary protection in it. (And I have really no regrets about "pirating" the game, given that I've bought at least one copy of every DM game I've ever been able to find, and two of a couple of them. I even have the Sega CD version of DM2.)
(DM also wins points for the ludicrously over-careful design; I was once informed that the fact that you had to fall through a pit to get the rope that would let you drop into pits without taking damage was, in fact, discussed internally, and allowed on the grounds that you could have chosen to start with a character who had a rope.)
Uh, that's not piracy. That's imitation, and that's not illegal. You're allowed to make games that are a whole lot like other games that other people have made. Game designs are not protected by copyright, and I don't think that's a problem; imitation and improvement are good things.
Because we haven't come up with a way to induce people to do jobs which need doing but aren't pleasant without a general policy that you have to work to get money, and have money to get food. If you don't have to work to eat, the theory is, a lot of people will just not-work, and we won't have people willing to do some of the jobs which need to get done. And if nearly everyone can find work, that can be tolerable up to a point, but if we only had 10% of people working, we'd need a radically different way to organize and structure things.
How the hell would you measure that? The most extreme testing stuff I've ever heard of can't get you anywhere near that much information. If you could get definite information that you were at the 1-in-1,000,000 level, that'd get you into the top seven thousand and change. And the thing is, we can't get accurate measurements even that far out.
Once you're to "the test can't produce meaningful results anymore", you're done. You might be way smarter than other people with that trait, you might be on the stupid end of the pool, we don't know, we can't tell, we have no way to measure it.
Actually, bigotry creates ostracization. Modifying your body doesn't intrinsically do that. These days, most people deal with trans folks just fine; the few Archie Bunker wannabes running around calling them names are still a problem, but are rapidly becoming a small problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to know basically no gamers who didn't play WoW. Now I don't know that I still know any. I was one of the loud defenders of Blizzard's choice to enter into a business merger with Activision, and I have been forced to admit that I was wrong. Blizzard's handling of events since then has been spectacularly bad -- I left over the Real ID stuff, myself. (Yes, I know, lots of people say they "backed down". Only temporarily and from the most ridiculously stupid parts; many other aspects are still horrible now, and some of the bad ideas they postponed may come back.)
Thing is, in MMOs, network effects are king. If you want to play a game with your friends, the game your friends play wins. But once you start losing that "everyone I know plays X" spot, there's not really any particularly great technical advantages of WoW over a lot of other MMOs, and quite a few are in many ways better. Even apart from my personal grudge against Blizzard, I found other games to do a better job of things that mattered to me, and I really got sick of Blizzard's active hostility to various parts of their user base. It was a real eye-opener when, after Blizzard spent several years explaining that it could never be possible to tweak the rulesets between PvE and PvP servers, Trion turned around and did it in a week during the Rift beta.
So now I play whatever I happen to know other people who play. And none of the individual games have the population density WoW did, but I am not totally unhappy about that, because it means more choice and more selection.
Stuff that's still going:
DDO: Very different philosophy and design, pretty cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with how Turbine runs things. The microtransaction stuff isn't as intrusive as I thought it would be, and the game design has some really nice appeal.
Rift: As a game, this is basically what I always wished Blizzard would do, and then some. Developers have been pretty responsive to user feedback, and there's a lot less of a focus on tedious time sinks. Big weakness, from my point of view, is that there's been basically no visible community maintenance in ages, so not only are there people who engage in massive, long-term harassment and abuse, but now there are lots more people who are abusive because they're convinced they can get away with it. Still, if you just wanna play with a few friends and ignore public channels, the game itself is amazing. (Slashdotters may care more than others: The addon API is beautiful. One of the nicest development APIs I've used.)
TSW: Not hugely happy with Funcom, but the game is fascinating, and does a lot of things which are radically different from other MMOs, some in very interesting ways. Also pretty responsive to user feedback in a lot of ways.
Yeah. Being allowed to adapt to when your body likes to be awake is a huge benefit.
So far as I know, most online games have a transaction store, so they can roll back to any second they want.
They managed to reproduce results fifteen or twenty years, and offer a stupid interpretation. Not bad!
The sleep-deprivation thing is well known, and not new. However, there's nothing tying it to "mobile devices". Rather, there's strong evidence that teenagers tend to have a circadian rhythm which favors being up later and not getting up that early. Schools have historically shoved their schedules extra-early so that extracurricular events like sports can occur before the sun goes down, but after school. Last time I heard about this, a school district had tried simply moving the high school day an hour later, and gotten a very noticable improvement in basically every measure of achievement available to them.
Now that I'm an adult, I sleep until I feel like getting up, and if I'm up a bit late, fine. I pretty much wake up between 11 and noon, and I work "late" most nights... But I get a heck of a lot more done, and a lot better, than I did when I was trying to work 9-5.
If they don't change his GAF score, and people change their handling of him significantly, then people are doing something wrong.
That said, I am pretty unhappy with the "high functioning" label these days; the idea that if you are mostly functional that means you don't need help is a great way to make people stop being functional.
You can't measure a single/unified physical thing, but you can very definitely measure autistic traits. There's a heck of a lot of measurements out there that show noticeable and fairly consistent patterns.
And so far as I can tell, a whole lot of that disparity in outcomes is less a question of differences in brains than of the environments people are in over a long period of time. I melt down pretty badly if I'm badly stressed for a long time, but put me in a livable environment and I'm practically like people!
Uh, no.
Look, imagine that we discovered that about 2% of our population were heavily vulnerable to simple trickery, like they were much more enthusiastic about a 10% chance of survival than a 90% chance of mortality, even though they're the same thing. And they were easily manipulated by actors who knew how to show a particular emotion on command. And they had some cool things, like they were unusually good at reading emotions from facial expressions, but overall they had crippling problems that made it hard for them to function like rational adults.
Now, consider: If 98% of people were ASD, and 2% weren't, that would be what we'd have. We'd have a diagnostic criterion for "obsessive social behavior", but some people would argue that these poor overly-socialized kids are actually pretty tolerable once you get used to them, and maybe we should just accept that there's a few people who have this driving need for social interaction and can't focus on work and hobbies like normal people.
Neurodiversity isn't about dysfunction, it's about function that really is different, and not necessarily obviously better or worse.
Actually, he won't be "cured". He'll have autism spectrum disorder, rather than asperger syndrome, most likely. I can't see a way someone could have an AS diagnosis under DSM-IV and not be considered ASD under DSM-V.
What he said wasn't exactly super formal clinical language, but it certainly fits a pretty well-observed pattern. People do not deal well with autistics.
No, you broke it. It was, if not right, at least coherent before.
Psychiatrists are the ones that are MDs and prescribe medicine. The ones who sell therapy sessions are psychologists and counselors.
Except it's not the sneaky terms, it's the blatant fraud. I am not super convinced by the student newspaper report...
I've done some consulting work for him in the past.
Honestly... He's sort of a jerk sometimes, and he makes some really poor decisions sometimes. But he's honest, and he's not a total moron. He isn't suing people to create some kind of crazy profit center, he's trying to deal with people using forged or incorrect tickets to get on buses. People like to point to his (admittedly a little wacky) terms and conditions and imply that he's suing over stupid shit. He's not, so far as I know. He's suing over people who do stuff like print three copies of the same ticket and get on three different buses that are running the same schedule. This isn't about "socially acceptable behavior", for the most part. (Some of the later stuff, like the defamation claims, was pretty dumb IMO, though.)
And everyone jumps in with some "oh, hey, I know how you could easily solve this!" solution. It's like the thing where, if you spend ten years working with doctors to try to treat insomnia, anyone who hears about this will suggest you cut down on caffeine after dinner. Because, obviously, neither you nor the doctors have ever thought of that!
Yes, there really are reasons that checking passengers against a manifest is at the very least a substantially higher cost than the (fairly small, compared to the user base) amount of fraud. Yes, there are reasons it probably wouldn't be a good tactic at all. It's not that he's too much of an idiot to think of this, it's that he has more information about what is actually happening than those of us who are reading couple-paragraph summaries over the Internet.
FWIW, I got a ThinkPad in 2001, got the 3-year extended warranty. Two and a half years in, I bought another two year extension. I got some repairs under it. It was pretty cost-effective.
I still have that machine. Heck, I've used it in the last year because I had Windows stuff that needed XP.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I think Zero Tolerance polices are bullshit regardless of history -- and indeed, once you start taking history into account, you can't be talking about a zero tolerance policy, because if there were history to talk about, there wouldn't still be a student.
As to whether she "lied" in saying it was a project: She didn't say it was a project assigned by a teacher. "Project" and "project specifically assigned by a teacher" are not the same thing. Maybe she lied, maybe she didn't. She may well have been intending to do something like this for the science fair, and screwed it up. Or maybe she was just making excuses. We don't know! Asserting that it can't have been a project because the teacher said it wasn't is stupid for two reasons:
1. Not all projects are assigned.
2. Teachers also lie.
Pretty sure that, if you're a kid, but not a black kid, "what's coming to you" for a thing that doesn't injure anyone does not involve felony charges and being tried as an adult.
I was under the impression that charges which don't lead to convictions get dropped and that, say, employers are not allowed to ask or investigate that; they can ask whether you've been convicted, but not whether you've been charged.
I think you miss a key point: Racism doesn't necessarily imply people not getting along. It just implies that, say, they might be more likely to arrest a black person than a white person for doing the same things. Say, arresting a kid and charging her with a felony for doing a science experiment.
I don't recall actually encountering it, not when I was younger, not now. (I'm starting to be on the older end of the spectrum, I think.)
Dungeon Master was pretty amazing, too. I recently noticed that one of the "believed good" cracked images floating around still has some of the secondary protection in it. (And I have really no regrets about "pirating" the game, given that I've bought at least one copy of every DM game I've ever been able to find, and two of a couple of them. I even have the Sega CD version of DM2.)
(DM also wins points for the ludicrously over-careful design; I was once informed that the fact that you had to fall through a pit to get the rope that would let you drop into pits without taking damage was, in fact, discussed internally, and allowed on the grounds that you could have chosen to start with a character who had a rope.)
Copying ideas is not the same thing as copying implementation.
Ideas are cheap. Implementation is expensive.
Uh, that's not piracy. That's imitation, and that's not illegal. You're allowed to make games that are a whole lot like other games that other people have made. Game designs are not protected by copyright, and I don't think that's a problem; imitation and improvement are good things.
Because we haven't come up with a way to induce people to do jobs which need doing but aren't pleasant without a general policy that you have to work to get money, and have money to get food. If you don't have to work to eat, the theory is, a lot of people will just not-work, and we won't have people willing to do some of the jobs which need to get done. And if nearly everyone can find work, that can be tolerable up to a point, but if we only had 10% of people working, we'd need a radically different way to organize and structure things.
All but about a dozen?
How the hell would you measure that? The most extreme testing stuff I've ever heard of can't get you anywhere near that much information. If you could get definite information that you were at the 1-in-1,000,000 level, that'd get you into the top seven thousand and change. And the thing is, we can't get accurate measurements even that far out.
Once you're to "the test can't produce meaningful results anymore", you're done. You might be way smarter than other people with that trait, you might be on the stupid end of the pool, we don't know, we can't tell, we have no way to measure it.
Actually, bigotry creates ostracization. Modifying your body doesn't intrinsically do that. These days, most people deal with trans folks just fine; the few Archie Bunker wannabes running around calling them names are still a problem, but are rapidly becoming a small problem.
May be some variance. I know a fair number of pretty decent programmers, and many of them use at least one or two social media sites.