You have really thoroughly assumed your conclusion here. You have no non-circular argument.
Your argument comes down to "when only particular manifestations were recognized, there were many fewer diagnoses, there are more diagnoses now and those are obviously wrong because the incidence rate can't have changed that fast, therefore the cases that are diagnosed now and weren't in the past must not really be autism."
Look, imagine that we invent the term "allism" to refer to a sort of obsession with social interactions, and a difficulty maintaining focus on a particular topic. And we diagnose only people with severe developmental disorders, and also those traits, as "allistic". And then someone points out that lots of fairly functional people really do seem to have this same kind of obsessive social instinct, and flit around from topic to topic erratically. And we conclude that actually they're all allistic, and it's just that in some cases, allistic traits coexist with other kinds of cognitive dysfunction.
And then you come along and explain that, no, the people who are able to function aren't really allistic, they're autistic just like all the other normal people, because real allistics aren't able to care for themselves.
See the problem? You're assuming that only the things that fit your extreme stereotype count, and handwaving the rest away. Doesn't make for good science...
You are using that word incorrectly. "Antisocial" does not mean "not social". Hanging out in your room instead of going to parties isn't antisocial; violence and abuse are antisocial.
You are also misunderstanding the changes in the DSM, which don't have nearly as much impact on how many people are diagnosed with something autism-related as it does on the specific subcategories or names used.
I think you are conflating several issues. Everything we've got suggests that the underlying differences in social processing are genuinely biological, but much of the outward presentation is, of course, learned. But I wouldn't blame parents nearly as much as I'd blame schools. The autistics I know with social anxiety often had very good parents, but crappy school teachers. So they learned that people who were not their parents were arbitrary, capricious, and often malicious.
Normality isn't hard for me, it's impossible. That's fine. Being under five feet tall is also impossible for me. So is having brown eyes. I could fake any of them, but I can't see why I'd want to.
1. No, "autism" does not imply "non-functioning". There's a strong tendency for people not to get diagnosed unless they are having problems, though, because who spends a lot of time talking to psychiatrists just in case? 2. Functional ability is often largely a function of whether your environment is within your tolerances. The same person can be very functional in one environment, very non-functional in another. 3. Autism Speaks is a propaganda mill for anti-autistic propaganda. I have not yet met a single autistic person who approves of them. The rhetoric about them promoting anti-autistic eugenics is not nearly as exaggerated as you would likely assume it to be. 4. "Person with autism" is, in fact, usually regarded as insulting by autistic people. Anyone who dogmatically tells you that it's better should probably be regarded as unreliable. 5. For the most part, the autistics I know think that the distinction being eliminated was in fact a meaningless distinction, and I don't know any who considered it a significant differentiation. There is some concern about people who are unambiguously autistic, but who may now be considered not autistic, and therefore not entitled to the accommodations without which they cannot function. 6. If you haven't seen it already, you may find it very entertaining to read up on any of the reframings in which people describe what non-autism would look like in a predominantly autistic society, because much of what we regard as "disability" in our culture wouldn't be a problem if it were the norm; it's only a problem because it's not the norm. 7. If someone indicates a preference for written communications, please don't push them to switch to the phone. They probably dislike the phone. 8. Yes, being autistic is probably part of why I'm often unintentionally insulting. It is in no way an explanation or justification for when I'm intentionally insulting, though. That's just me being sort of an asshole. I do not expect special deference to be given to my jerk behaviors in general, but I appreciate it if people will accept my claims that I did not mean offense when I actually make them. (I am conceptually aware that in theory people could lie about this, but it sounds stupid to me; if you lie about your intent, people will become less likely to understand what you mean, and that would be annoying.)
I suspect you are rather missing the point of this decision: You're imposing a narrative on your experience that was influenced by the choices of labels. If the lines had been drawn differently, you'd have seen big differences between whatever two categories.
I'm autistic. Most of my friends are autistic. In my case, since we didn't have very detailed records of the relevant data from when I was a kid, there was no way at all to distinguish between the two diagnoses for me -- I match either, depending on things about my language acquisition that neither I nor my mom remember.
Here's the thing. I'm clearly "able to function". I have friends who mostly aren't. But that's not because I have a different set of cognitive traits to begin with; it's because I got lucky in how people treated me and they didn't. So I got to be what I needed to be in order to function. Put them in an environment they can work with, they're fine too.
To put it in programming terms:
Don't write code with #ifdefs based on the operating system, use specific feature tests. Otherwise you'll guess wrong because feature lists change over time.
Don't make decisions about interacting with people based on whether they are diagnosed with "Asperger Syndrome" or "Autism", make decisions based on those specific people. Because they are gonna be a lot more different than you will be able to see if you are filtering everything through the expectations you have based on the terminology.
So what? The point is, if you can conclude that even if APIs are copyrightable, there wasn't infringement, everyone can go home early. If the premise is false, you can derive nonsense from it, but we also don't care because no one will be deriving anything from it. Except slashdot posters.
But I dislike a lot of things, and one thing that hanging around with gay and trans people has taught me is: We appear to need these laws, in that in their absence, people get away with a lot of crap.
Here's the thing. Someone said this was "punch in the nose" wrong behavior. Well, think of what happens if people decide that punching people like you in the nose is okay, or possibly morally obligatory. So it's not that some guy punches you in the nose once; it's that everywhere you go, about 10% of the time when you walk into a public place, someone punches you in the nose.
The cumulative effect is wildly different from what you'd expect if you just looked at the severity of a single offense and multiplied by the number of times it happens. It turns out that there is a big difference between "sometimes people are a jerk to you, it happens, you deal", and "people are systematically and consistently a jerk to you and anyone like you no matter what you personally have or haven't done."
I really don't see a problem with this outcome. You bully a lot of people, especially people that you know to already be subject to excessive harassment, and sometimes things go very wrong. Solution: Don't bully people, and especially don't bully people you know to be members of groups that are systematically bullied by lots of other people. If you do, you take the risk that the bullying will go horribly wrong and people will blame you for it. Possibly because, if you hadn't done it, that wouldn't have happened.
Basically, what the comments here do is illustrate, to me, why hate crime laws are a necessary thing; because the world is full of people who, never having been the subject of systematic harassment, are quick to dismiss it as no big deal and think it's funny when it happens to people they look down on. So we do need a way to clarify that, yes, this really is a big deal, and really is a problem. Congratulations! The reason we need hate crime laws is that a significant number people, some of them slashdot commenters, have not yet reached the level of empathic response to other peoples' circumstances that we would typically expect from an autistic teenager.
(... And I know, because I was an autistic teenager, and I was a little better than what I'm seeing here. Not much better, though.)
Do we actually know that they [b]stored[/b] unencrypted information, or only that attackers were able to extract it in some way?
Except for passwords, customer information [b]must[/b] be at least temporarily in a decrypted form to be used. That means that there exists a way to decrypt it. So if that were compromised, you could get decrypted data even though the [b]storage[/b] was encrypted.
Not saying the storage was encrypted, just pointing out that the extraction of unencrypted data doesn't prove that it was stored unencrypted.
I am not interested in doing business with a company sufficiently clueless about the Internet that they would ever have supported that bill.
If they are that unclear on what the Internet is or why it matters, they can go be clueless without me.
I think we've reached the point where it's time to remember that the purpose of copyright is not to ensure absolute and perfect control, it's to give good enough control that people can figure out a way to make money doing creative work. You know what? People are making money doing creative work. We're done. The "problem" of piracy isn't a problem, any more than the expiration of copyright was a problem.
Disclaimer: I'm a pretty big RIFT fan. (I post there as the_real_seebs.)
Database compromises happen, and Trion's a newish company that has a lot of customers, and is thus a very good target.
This is the second security problem Trion has ever had, and the only one that made it possible to leak any personal information. (The first was an authentication hole that let you log in to game servers on arbitrary accounts without name or password -- but did not disclose the account name to you.) In each case, they reacted quickly, they announced it, they sent email to people to make sure people who don't watch the site found out, they disclosed what information was compromised, they took steps to correct it...
Now, I know comparing someone favorably to Sony is damning with faint praise, but compare this with Sony's handling of their systems leaking complete credit card numbers and unencrypted passwords.
IMHO, Trion's doing it right. Yeah, it'd be awesome if nothing ever got compromised. But anyone who has the ability to run active services which can be accessed at all, and which cannot be compromised, has clearly made enough money to be able to buy the company and fix it.:)
I've been running OS X Server for a couple of years now. Got a Mini, put Server on it, and the time it's saved me compared to doing my own admin on more conventional systems has totally been worth it. I like it.
A friend of mine used to be pretty open about her online identity... until she got a box of sex toys mailed to her with no return address.
The arguments for lack-of-privacy are fundamentally inconsistent. We are told that people "behave better" when there is a risk of consequences, but also that there are no harmful consequences. These cannot both be true. While most people don't need privacy most of the time, you rarely know in advance that you will later turn out to have needed privacy.
People tend to make arguments like "well, don't do anything you'd be ashamed of", but this only works if you have a guarantee that the rest of the people in the world are all basically sane. They're not. Furthermore, lots of people don't get a choice; you don't get to say "hmm, lots of people object to transgendered people, guess I won't be one."
I don't know. I have a coworker who likes comic books, and I may have others. Also, we have an entire IRC channel for people who like computer games, though only a few people are usually active in it.:)
Human nature is not necessarily universal among humans. In particular, some autism spectrum people seem to have a much lower tendency, if any, to judge people either initially or at all. I honestly can't tell you whether I judge people. People who know me inform me that I don't, but since I can't comprehend the descriptions people give of what "judging people" is, I really don't know. It seems to be some kind of... uhm. Thing. Where people stop reacting to an actual stimulus and instead to a pattern of stimuli they think is likely. That, uhm. That seems dumb.
But I know people do this sometimes, so I go out of my way in some cases to carefully present things that tend to trigger it. (e.g., I carefully refer to "my spouse" and avoid using gendered pronouns for that most excellent person, because this tends to drive away a class of people I don't enjoy interacting with.)
Agreed. I found out about sudo, and I fell in love with it. When I started using OS X, I think I still enabled root and used su. By a year or two later I'd converted to sudo.
No one would have paid me shiny American dollars to write about optimizing code for the computer. They were happy to pay me to write multiple articles about the Cell SDK and developing for the Cell.
I got it because I got well over 1000% ROI within a year. I am well aware that other options existed which would have provided better performance, but there wasn't a cheap way to get a Cell at the time.
Oh, no! It is possible that my exaggeration for humorous effect was not strictly factually accurate! HORRORS!
Point is, I had at least two PS1s, at least two PS2s, and dozens of games for each. I haven't turned my PS3 on in over a year, even though the PS1 and PS2 systems are still getting played. Sony's managed to offend, alienate, or drive off, a surprising number of die-hard fans.
41 million units? Compare that to how many the PS2 had sold a few years in. Compare it to how many the Wii sold. Sony took a position of utter and unquestioned market dominance, where everyone knew their next system would be the #1 system just like the previous two, and managed to come in a distant third, before a lot of the recent things they've done. I used to hang out on a PS3 fan board. The day before the "40GB" unit came out, the moderators were marking any threads about the rumored loss of backwards compatibility with "debunked" because people were in such a tizzy about that insulting and obviously false rumor.
A lot of Sony fans have been made to look really, really, stupid this generation, because things they used as big examples of how awesome the PS3 was were taken away after having previously worked. Why? Because Sony is stupid.
So other people will invite him to work on their products, which he'll do, and that'll generate buzz and excitement for those products. And they'll win, and Sony will lose. This is awesome! I really have to say, I am amazed at the skill and precision with which Sony has managed the PS3. They've got some kind of dream team working on this. There's a cycle. First, identify the largest clearly identifiable remaining demographic. Second, piss them off. Repeat.
PS3: Buy it for the Other OS feature, keep it because no one will take it off your hands. (No, really. I have a launch 60GB which I bought entirely for the Other OS feature. It's now useless for playing games because games require "updates" that disable the only functionality I got it for, but no one's gonna buy the old loud monster to play video games...)
Maria Cantwell was a long-term die-hard spammer. Hearing about her doing anything related to the Internet that doesn't include actively shitting on it is sort of surreal.
Slashdot Mirror
You have really thoroughly assumed your conclusion here. You have no non-circular argument.
Your argument comes down to "when only particular manifestations were recognized, there were many fewer diagnoses, there are more diagnoses now and those are obviously wrong because the incidence rate can't have changed that fast, therefore the cases that are diagnosed now and weren't in the past must not really be autism."
Look, imagine that we invent the term "allism" to refer to a sort of obsession with social interactions, and a difficulty maintaining focus on a particular topic. And we diagnose only people with severe developmental disorders, and also those traits, as "allistic". And then someone points out that lots of fairly functional people really do seem to have this same kind of obsessive social instinct, and flit around from topic to topic erratically. And we conclude that actually they're all allistic, and it's just that in some cases, allistic traits coexist with other kinds of cognitive dysfunction.
And then you come along and explain that, no, the people who are able to function aren't really allistic, they're autistic just like all the other normal people, because real allistics aren't able to care for themselves.
See the problem? You're assuming that only the things that fit your extreme stereotype count, and handwaving the rest away. Doesn't make for good science...
You are using that word incorrectly. "Antisocial" does not mean "not social". Hanging out in your room instead of going to parties isn't antisocial; violence and abuse are antisocial.
You are also misunderstanding the changes in the DSM, which don't have nearly as much impact on how many people are diagnosed with something autism-related as it does on the specific subcategories or names used.
I think you are conflating several issues. Everything we've got suggests that the underlying differences in social processing are genuinely biological, but much of the outward presentation is, of course, learned. But I wouldn't blame parents nearly as much as I'd blame schools. The autistics I know with social anxiety often had very good parents, but crappy school teachers. So they learned that people who were not their parents were arbitrary, capricious, and often malicious.
Normality isn't hard for me, it's impossible. That's fine. Being under five feet tall is also impossible for me. So is having brown eyes. I could fake any of them, but I can't see why I'd want to.
1. No, "autism" does not imply "non-functioning". There's a strong tendency for people not to get diagnosed unless they are having problems, though, because who spends a lot of time talking to psychiatrists just in case?
2. Functional ability is often largely a function of whether your environment is within your tolerances. The same person can be very functional in one environment, very non-functional in another.
3. Autism Speaks is a propaganda mill for anti-autistic propaganda. I have not yet met a single autistic person who approves of them. The rhetoric about them promoting anti-autistic eugenics is not nearly as exaggerated as you would likely assume it to be.
4. "Person with autism" is, in fact, usually regarded as insulting by autistic people. Anyone who dogmatically tells you that it's better should probably be regarded as unreliable.
5. For the most part, the autistics I know think that the distinction being eliminated was in fact a meaningless distinction, and I don't know any who considered it a significant differentiation. There is some concern about people who are unambiguously autistic, but who may now be considered not autistic, and therefore not entitled to the accommodations without which they cannot function.
6. If you haven't seen it already, you may find it very entertaining to read up on any of the reframings in which people describe what non-autism would look like in a predominantly autistic society, because much of what we regard as "disability" in our culture wouldn't be a problem if it were the norm; it's only a problem because it's not the norm.
7. If someone indicates a preference for written communications, please don't push them to switch to the phone. They probably dislike the phone.
8. Yes, being autistic is probably part of why I'm often unintentionally insulting. It is in no way an explanation or justification for when I'm intentionally insulting, though. That's just me being sort of an asshole. I do not expect special deference to be given to my jerk behaviors in general, but I appreciate it if people will accept my claims that I did not mean offense when I actually make them. (I am conceptually aware that in theory people could lie about this, but it sounds stupid to me; if you lie about your intent, people will become less likely to understand what you mean, and that would be annoying.)
I suspect you are rather missing the point of this decision: You're imposing a narrative on your experience that was influenced by the choices of labels. If the lines had been drawn differently, you'd have seen big differences between whatever two categories.
I'm autistic. Most of my friends are autistic. In my case, since we didn't have very detailed records of the relevant data from when I was a kid, there was no way at all to distinguish between the two diagnoses for me -- I match either, depending on things about my language acquisition that neither I nor my mom remember.
Here's the thing. I'm clearly "able to function". I have friends who mostly aren't. But that's not because I have a different set of cognitive traits to begin with; it's because I got lucky in how people treated me and they didn't. So I got to be what I needed to be in order to function. Put them in an environment they can work with, they're fine too.
To put it in programming terms:
Don't write code with #ifdefs based on the operating system, use specific feature tests. Otherwise you'll guess wrong because feature lists change over time.
Don't make decisions about interacting with people based on whether they are diagnosed with "Asperger Syndrome" or "Autism", make decisions based on those specific people. Because they are gonna be a lot more different than you will be able to see if you are filtering everything through the expectations you have based on the terminology.
So what? The point is, if you can conclude that even if APIs are copyrightable, there wasn't infringement, everyone can go home early. If the premise is false, you can derive nonsense from it, but we also don't care because no one will be deriving anything from it. Except slashdot posters.
Hard to be sure, but I think being dead limits his legal coptions.
I dislike the concept of hate crimes laws.
But I dislike a lot of things, and one thing that hanging around with gay and trans people has taught me is: We appear to need these laws, in that in their absence, people get away with a lot of crap.
Here's the thing. Someone said this was "punch in the nose" wrong behavior. Well, think of what happens if people decide that punching people like you in the nose is okay, or possibly morally obligatory. So it's not that some guy punches you in the nose once; it's that everywhere you go, about 10% of the time when you walk into a public place, someone punches you in the nose.
The cumulative effect is wildly different from what you'd expect if you just looked at the severity of a single offense and multiplied by the number of times it happens. It turns out that there is a big difference between "sometimes people are a jerk to you, it happens, you deal", and "people are systematically and consistently a jerk to you and anyone like you no matter what you personally have or haven't done."
I really don't see a problem with this outcome. You bully a lot of people, especially people that you know to already be subject to excessive harassment, and sometimes things go very wrong. Solution: Don't bully people, and especially don't bully people you know to be members of groups that are systematically bullied by lots of other people. If you do, you take the risk that the bullying will go horribly wrong and people will blame you for it. Possibly because, if you hadn't done it, that wouldn't have happened.
Basically, what the comments here do is illustrate, to me, why hate crime laws are a necessary thing; because the world is full of people who, never having been the subject of systematic harassment, are quick to dismiss it as no big deal and think it's funny when it happens to people they look down on. So we do need a way to clarify that, yes, this really is a big deal, and really is a problem. Congratulations! The reason we need hate crime laws is that a significant number people, some of them slashdot commenters, have not yet reached the level of empathic response to other peoples' circumstances that we would typically expect from an autistic teenager.
(... And I know, because I was an autistic teenager, and I was a little better than what I'm seeing here. Not much better, though.)
Do we actually know that they [b]stored[/b] unencrypted information, or only that attackers were able to extract it in some way?
Except for passwords, customer information [b]must[/b] be at least temporarily in a decrypted form to be used. That means that there exists a way to decrypt it. So if that were compromised, you could get decrypted data even though the [b]storage[/b] was encrypted.
Not saying the storage was encrypted, just pointing out that the extraction of unencrypted data doesn't prove that it was stored unencrypted.
I am not interested in doing business with a company sufficiently clueless about the Internet that they would ever have supported that bill.
If they are that unclear on what the Internet is or why it matters, they can go be clueless without me.
I think we've reached the point where it's time to remember that the purpose of copyright is not to ensure absolute and perfect control, it's to give good enough control that people can figure out a way to make money doing creative work. You know what? People are making money doing creative work. We're done. The "problem" of piracy isn't a problem, any more than the expiration of copyright was a problem.
This is why I use software to generate and store passwords. It's a risk, but it's a smaller risk than I would be taking otherwise.
And... TOR's a great game, doubtless, but are you seriously telling us you think EA is going to be more secure?
Could you point to an example, anywhere of the world, of a "robust and secure" customer information database such that no breach is possible?
Seems to me that if such a thing were possible, surely we'd have heard of it by now.
Disclaimer: I'm a pretty big RIFT fan. (I post there as the_real_seebs.)
Database compromises happen, and Trion's a newish company that has a lot of customers, and is thus a very good target.
This is the second security problem Trion has ever had, and the only one that made it possible to leak any personal information. (The first was an authentication hole that let you log in to game servers on arbitrary accounts without name or password -- but did not disclose the account name to you.) In each case, they reacted quickly, they announced it, they sent email to people to make sure people who don't watch the site found out, they disclosed what information was compromised, they took steps to correct it...
Now, I know comparing someone favorably to Sony is damning with faint praise, but compare this with Sony's handling of their systems leaking complete credit card numbers and unencrypted passwords.
IMHO, Trion's doing it right. Yeah, it'd be awesome if nothing ever got compromised. But anyone who has the ability to run active services which can be accessed at all, and which cannot be compromised, has clearly made enough money to be able to buy the company and fix it. :)
I've been running OS X Server for a couple of years now. Got a Mini, put Server on it, and the time it's saved me compared to doing my own admin on more conventional systems has totally been worth it. I like it.
A friend of mine used to be pretty open about her online identity... until she got a box of sex toys mailed to her with no return address.
The arguments for lack-of-privacy are fundamentally inconsistent. We are told that people "behave better" when there is a risk of consequences, but also that there are no harmful consequences. These cannot both be true. While most people don't need privacy most of the time, you rarely know in advance that you will later turn out to have needed privacy.
People tend to make arguments like "well, don't do anything you'd be ashamed of", but this only works if you have a guarantee that the rest of the people in the world are all basically sane. They're not. Furthermore, lots of people don't get a choice; you don't get to say "hmm, lots of people object to transgendered people, guess I won't be one."
At least a few, and you would not enjoy hanging out with them. :)
I don't know. I have a coworker who likes comic books, and I may have others. Also, we have an entire IRC channel for people who like computer games, though only a few people are usually active in it. :)
Human nature is not necessarily universal among humans. In particular, some autism spectrum people seem to have a much lower tendency, if any, to judge people either initially or at all. I honestly can't tell you whether I judge people. People who know me inform me that I don't, but since I can't comprehend the descriptions people give of what "judging people" is, I really don't know. It seems to be some kind of... uhm. Thing. Where people stop reacting to an actual stimulus and instead to a pattern of stimuli they think is likely. That, uhm. That seems dumb.
But I know people do this sometimes, so I go out of my way in some cases to carefully present things that tend to trigger it. (e.g., I carefully refer to "my spouse" and avoid using gendered pronouns for that most excellent person, because this tends to drive away a class of people I don't enjoy interacting with.)
Agreed. I found out about sudo, and I fell in love with it. When I started using OS X, I think I still enabled root and used su. By a year or two later I'd converted to sudo.
I think the need for an Internet kill switch is now clear.
No one would have paid me shiny American dollars to write about optimizing code for the computer. They were happy to pay me to write multiple articles about the Cell SDK and developing for the Cell.
I got it because I got well over 1000% ROI within a year. I am well aware that other options existed which would have provided better performance, but there wasn't a cheap way to get a Cell at the time.
Oh, no! It is possible that my exaggeration for humorous effect was not strictly factually accurate! HORRORS!
Point is, I had at least two PS1s, at least two PS2s, and dozens of games for each. I haven't turned my PS3 on in over a year, even though the PS1 and PS2 systems are still getting played. Sony's managed to offend, alienate, or drive off, a surprising number of die-hard fans.
41 million units? Compare that to how many the PS2 had sold a few years in. Compare it to how many the Wii sold. Sony took a position of utter and unquestioned market dominance, where everyone knew their next system would be the #1 system just like the previous two, and managed to come in a distant third, before a lot of the recent things they've done. I used to hang out on a PS3 fan board. The day before the "40GB" unit came out, the moderators were marking any threads about the rumored loss of backwards compatibility with "debunked" because people were in such a tizzy about that insulting and obviously false rumor.
A lot of Sony fans have been made to look really, really, stupid this generation, because things they used as big examples of how awesome the PS3 was were taken away after having previously worked. Why? Because Sony is stupid.
Uh, yeah. That's why he will be working on other peoples' products instead of on the PS3. That was sort of the point.
So other people will invite him to work on their products, which he'll do, and that'll generate buzz and excitement for those products. And they'll win, and Sony will lose. This is awesome! I really have to say, I am amazed at the skill and precision with which Sony has managed the PS3. They've got some kind of dream team working on this. There's a cycle. First, identify the largest clearly identifiable remaining demographic. Second, piss them off. Repeat.
PS3: Buy it for the Other OS feature, keep it because no one will take it off your hands. (No, really. I have a launch 60GB which I bought entirely for the Other OS feature. It's now useless for playing games because games require "updates" that disable the only functionality I got it for, but no one's gonna buy the old loud monster to play video games...)
Maria Cantwell was a long-term die-hard spammer. Hearing about her doing anything related to the Internet that doesn't include actively shitting on it is sort of surreal.