I'm just amazed they found a situation where the conservative canard "If you want less of something, tax it" is actually accurate and relevant.
I assume you meant liberal?
The liberals hate Phillip Morris and want less cigarettes, so they tax them. The liberals want less gas usage, so they tax it. The liberals want less sugary sodas, so they tax them.
You could live in a different country than me, where liberal and conservative mean very different stuff, but here in the U.S. it's always the liberals wanting to levy taxes and the push the money where their interests are, and the conservatives are the ones trying to reduce taxes.
Apple is still right on to artificially preventing their software from running on other hardware (be it desktop/laptops, tablets or phones)
I'm no Apple advocate, but I have to say this is quite different. Their newest OS revision (Mountain Lion) costs $29.99, compared to Windows 7 Ultimate at $320 (plus $15 for the backup CD). It should be completely obvious to everyone that the bulk of the cost of Apple's OS is absorbed into the hardware cost. Using quality software to sell your hardware and vice-versa is actually a legitimate model, in my opinion.
and proprietary shit like AirPlay and FaceTime (with it's Apple certificate restrictions).
Not being an Apple fanboy, I've never used either of these, and I don't really know full story on them (but I'd like to!). I do know that I have multiple streaming apps on my iPhone. Slacker Radio is the one I use the most.
My complaints with Apple (speaking as an iOS device customer) is their lack of support of open document formats (my phone handles Excel files, but not any OpenDocument format!!), and the rules against any sandbox-in-a-sandbox apps (such as a flash viewer).
I have nearly a religious hatred towards MS, and it has nothing to do with "Microsoft's desire for profit." I work for a company that sells software for profit, so obviously that would would be hypocritical if I felt that way.
What I've always hated about Microsoft was their willingness to buck standards just to prevent their users from using other products along with MS products.
This started with early versions of Windows that required you to also buy DOS. A competitor to DOS came out (Dr. DOS), and Microsoft responded by putting a check into the Windows bootstrap that would cause it to exit out with an error if Dr. DOS was detected. Any time a company goes out of their way to make their own product not operate with 3rd party software, it generates serious rage from customers like me.
As I look back over the last few years, the last move by MS that really angered me was the whole OOXML vs Open Document war, where Microsoft refused to use the new standard, and instead made their own new standard with built in obfuscation.
There's still a lot terrible decisions that MS makes for their customers (hiding file extensions by default in Windows, modifying extensions on files downloaded with IE without informing the user, automatically removing line breaks on messages read in Outlook without telling the user), but I've seen far less pure evil come from the giant, compared to ages past.
'Patent Troll' is kind of becoming a slur, and it can almost be attributed to any tech company that becomes big enough. Even the good guys occasionally have to buy up patents and use them for counter-suing. They don't want to, but the way our court system works, those who don't engage in this behavior will lose.
A perfect example of this is when Yahoo! acquired Right Media and Microsoft acquired aQuantive, both within April of 2007. Immediately, Google responded and acquired DoubleClick. It doesn't matter which one you think was the good guy, but all three quickly saw the need to sure up their advertising patents and did what was necessary to prevent losing to the others.
Of course, there are still real patent trolls, which I define as companies that exist solely to sue others. I hate to defend them, but they've taken notice of how the system works, and decided to do what is necessary to get a piece of it. But even the best companies have to be resort to patent troll tactics occasionally.
Newton, in his quest to "learn more about our Creator", came to the conclusion that we must assume other stars out there have their own systems of planets in orbit. That was the 18th century, and it has been the pervasive theory since then.
I do remember there being a lot of discussion about "Planet X", when I was young, though. It was stated to be a large planet, beyond the reaches of Pluto, capable of sustaining life, and harboring aliens. Of course, this is just one of the craziest of the many theories surrounding the mythical planet. Several people had devoted their lives to searching for this mythical planet, while others claimed that we had the science to disprove the existence of any large planets in our system beyond Pluto's range. This may be what you were thinking of.
Those who claimed that undiscovered planets larger than Pluto did not exist were partially right and partially wrong. Eris (originally named Xena, to go with the whole 'X' motif) is 27% more massive than Pluto. In a twist of irony, though, neither Eris or Pluto are officially planets today, though. So in a way, the pseudo-experts of my youth were technically accurate.
Republicans broke the Democrats filibuster of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60's.
Everett Dirksen was a republican congressman that grew up in the extremely racially charged town of Pekin, Illinois. I grew up nearby, and Pekin is still regarded as one of the most racially divided towns today, but they have made a lot of progress. At least they got rid of the previous high school mascot (changed from the "Pekin Chinks" to the "Pekin Dragons").
You can't go through the Illinois school system without hearing about what Dirksen did to bring about equality, and Springfield has even tried to make him a local hero, by naming roads after him, etc. But, I don't know how many times I've seen him listed as a democrat, when the truth was the complete opposite. Now, this article is calling civil rights a democrat issue, and it just makes me cringe. Is history education really this bad in this country?
Yeah, if he used his phone for browsing much, then he'd know that most "mobile-accelerated sites" are worse than the originals.
Chances are, he wants to look like a prez that actually gets young people. He wants to be hip, so that people don't catch on to all the cronyism behind the curtains.
This mandate will provide more ways to spend even more money that the government does not have, and no doubt will give out some nice fat government contracts to web-development companies that have funded his campaign. Good catch!
If you are more paranoid than average you can use a second address set to auto-forward as the base.
Most people are not going to be familiar with the system enough to know what you mean by this. Google's FAQ will help:
Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.
Obviously any spammer can figure out that your real address is jane.doe@gmail.com with such a system. Your solution, to chain the alias account to a secondary real account to a primary real account does hide the primary address, but exposes the secondary address, which is just as bad. You can't close that down, or all your aliases stop working.
I haven't used Yahoo!'s system, so I can't speak to whether or not it is better. The best approach is to use spamgourmet's service and watch words, which is essentially what Yahoo and Google were both copying in the first place. It will, of course, work with any email account. They explain watch words here:
Watchwords (the new way) are similar except that they must be contained in the word for the new address to be created. They use regular expression matching (if you know what that is) so you can come up with all sorts of interesting approaches. For a simple example, if you have rope and soap as watchwords, these addresses would work: saddlesoap.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com ouch-ropeburn.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com but this would not: someotherword.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
I've been using spamgourmet before gmail even existed, and am up to 609 created disposable addresses now. It's amazed me which retailers have sold off my address to spammers. For the record, Sony Online Entertainment and Sam's Club were the biggest surprises. I get "Viagra from Canada" spam from the addresses that I created specially for SOE and Sam's Club.
I really do not know why spamgourmet never gets the attention that they deserve. It really is about the greatest free service I've ever found.
300 GB will eventually begin to seem small as video data transmission rates continue to increase, but for the time being, 300GB / mo. is very generous.
I'll bet that at least half of all Comcast users watch video online on a frequent basis, and they all probably feel like they are in the top 5% of users. This is why everyone is so worried about data caps. In reality, most people will be shocked to see how far they are away from th limit.
Um, Ron Paul wants smaller government, and wants to end entitlement programs.
There used to be democrats that wanted the same thing, but they got chased away. There is no chance that any democratic candidate today would ever want to shrink government.
You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons. You, obviously, do not understand DSL.
When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason. With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.
If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.
If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.
The rational approach seems to say that it is either: A) a non-story, or B) a slow-news-day story about how Obama's security team tried and failed to keep secret the president's whereabouts.
I'm not convinced that the grandparent thinks that it is a news-worthy story. He/She's only saying that choice B is a "more accurate way to look at it" than the original headline. It's kind of like saying that a fern is "more human-like" than a sentence.
Even at Osh'Kosh, you can't spit without hitting someone's dream of the next big idea for an affordable consumer plane. It will be parked there, looking all beautiful, and some guy will hand you a brochure stating how affordable it will be, once it is finally available.
I've always wondered how many of these actually go into production. My guess is that they underestimate how expensive it will be to put a new design into production. Not only are the insurance costs astronomical (yes, something like 50% of a Cessna's cost is for insurance for the builder), but you have years of waiting for the FAA to approve any new designs on parts.
If you really want to get into aviation, a home-built is still the best way. Finding one light enough to qualify as an LSA, and learn on that. Then, if you are filthy rich, consider getting a 4-seater that has power.
A 2012 Cessna 182T Skylane costs $398,100, and the turbo version is a little more.
But, I don't think it's a fair comparison. The Cessna has a 230hp engine, and can carry a useful weight of 1140 lbs. This means you can carry luggage, and get to your destination quickly.
There's not a lot of details on this electric canard, but I'm pretty sure that it's not going to have nearly the horsepower. Instead of cruising at 190mph, you'll probably max out around 120mph, and won't be able to carry any luggage if all 4 seats are full.
I don't know of any other canards (planes with the funny 2 wings in the front) that can be bought commercially, until you get into the luxury areas. The closest I can find to a fair comparison would be a common homebuilt design, like the Cozy Mark IV, which actually looks quite similar to the concept drawing. Looking quickly at trade-a-plane.com, I see a clean 1998 Cozy Mark IV for $50,000, and my guess is that is on the high end. Despite the name, a Cozy has pretty good power. I'd be shocked if this "green" plane could come close to competing.
The whole point I was making is that the term is now used too broadly, and you seem to be confirming this. The term "autism", when I first heard it, was narrowly defined. The current HFA classification of autism was all that was originally covered by the original use of "autism", but already the term has been broadened to cover far more than that. It will continue to change meaning, even if the medical community would prefer that it doesn't. Eventually (and regrettably), it will (in common usage) mean any kind of stupidity. For example, just last week, I heard a woman say "I was being autistic the other day and left my purse at home..."
Broad terms are dangerous to use, because you end up grouping people with others that they don't deserve being grouped with. That's clearly what set you off. Not all the broad terms I listed in my first post are equivalent, but, they do have something in common. They were all created as ways to refer to people with disabilities in a way that would not be demeaning. In turn, they've all changed to mean something much different than they originally meant. If you disagree with that statement, please explain.
I will stand by my point that the term "autism" will continue to morph. People already use it in derogatory ways. I have no doubt that 30 years from now, it will be rare for a patient to be diagnosed with "autism", because it will have negative connotations. At that time we can have this same discussion again. You can say that "xxxxx (term of the future) is a specific term for ___ ty ___ ___, and is completely different than people who are just plain autistic."
The first attempt to make the syndrome seem not-so-bad was the labeling of "simple". When you called someone "simple", others knew what you meant, but it was clear you were sympathetic to their state. That changed dramatically over the course of a decade or two, as "simple" took extremely negative connotations.
The next derivation of the term was "dumb". By calling someone this, you avoided the idea of "low intelligence" all together. In fact, you were saying they were quite smart, but just weak with verbal skills. I suppose this is closest to how we use "Asberger Syndrome" today. Of course, time did not honor this PC term well, and it quickly came to mean the exact opposite.
Next was "slow". Unfortunately this term didn't sound scientific enough, so a new term, "retarded" was quickly invented to take its place. Sure, those with Latin language background knew what it meant, but to the general public, it was a new term. So, it was the accepted term for quite a while, but like all those before it, its time was limited. PSA's are shown on TV today to completely end the use of this term that was once promoted by the medical community.
Autism is now usually argued as something separate from all those terms above, however the lack of medical diagnosis of retardation has caused significant confusion among parents today. Although it is more narrowly defined by the medical community than previous terms, I predict that it, like all the others, will eventually became used as a taunt, and suddenly be regarded as a slur.
I don't know if this progression is necessarily a bad thing. Medical diagnoses are getting better, and the fact that we keep changing terms to keep everyone happy shows sensitivity that previous generations may not have had.
But, the down side is that the term is used for just about everything. The current conditions labeled as Autism covers far too much for studies such as the one in this headline to ever be successful. There is almost no chance that a single cause of autism would ever cover more than about 5% of the cases.
Kylie Minogue didn't use the name "Titanic II", but her Doctor Who episode features a luxury liner named the "Titanic" that is on a collision course with the earth, and will wipe out all life on the planet.
"Titanic II" may have flopped because it was too silly. But, "Voyage of the Damned" had 13+ million viewers. Clearly the secret was making it even more silly, adding Kylie Minogue, and marketing it to the British.
The MIT team called it a LED that functions much like a heat pump. It emitted more optical power than the electrical power it consumed. Apparently the trick is that it results in a lower entropy state, and only works on extremely small scales, so it will never lead to a practical device.
This story, however, doesn't seem to say at all that they have broken 100% efficiency. They are trying to get the total efficiency up above 30%. The amount of light given out by the cell and the electrical energy given out add up to less than 100%. The slashdot headline leads you to believe that they broke 100%, but that is not what "efficiency record" means in this case.
Updates... overrated. When the update gives you nothing that you desired, and breaks all your addons, it's extremely annoying.
When v4 came out, I didn't see anything worthwhile in the update list, and decided to not update again until there was. Of course, I would never do this if I didn't also run noscript.
I updated from v3.5 to v11 just 2 weeks ago, so that I could get SPDY support. I don't anticipate updating again until v20+.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just amazed they found a situation where the conservative canard "If you want less of something, tax it" is actually accurate and relevant.
I assume you meant liberal?
The liberals hate Phillip Morris and want less cigarettes, so they tax them.
The liberals want less gas usage, so they tax it.
The liberals want less sugary sodas, so they tax them.
You could live in a different country than me, where liberal and conservative mean very different stuff, but here in the U.S. it's always the liberals wanting to levy taxes and the push the money where their interests are, and the conservatives are the ones trying to reduce taxes.
Unless we have Bender as a pre-cog, in order to pre-cog the pre-cog's plan.
(Yes, I left out several levels of recursion. If you want the full story, then just watch the freakin' episode)
Apple is still right on to artificially preventing their software from running on other hardware (be it desktop/laptops, tablets or phones)
I'm no Apple advocate, but I have to say this is quite different. Their newest OS revision (Mountain Lion) costs $29.99, compared to Windows 7 Ultimate at $320 (plus $15 for the backup CD). It should be completely obvious to everyone that the bulk of the cost of Apple's OS is absorbed into the hardware cost. Using quality software to sell your hardware and vice-versa is actually a legitimate model, in my opinion.
and proprietary shit like AirPlay and FaceTime (with it's Apple certificate restrictions).
Not being an Apple fanboy, I've never used either of these, and I don't really know full story on them (but I'd like to!). I do know that I have multiple streaming apps on my iPhone. Slacker Radio is the one I use the most.
My complaints with Apple (speaking as an iOS device customer) is their lack of support of open document formats (my phone handles Excel files, but not any OpenDocument format!!), and the rules against any sandbox-in-a-sandbox apps (such as a flash viewer).
I agree that this is a positive step.
I have nearly a religious hatred towards MS, and it has nothing to do with "Microsoft's desire for profit." I work for a company that sells software for profit, so obviously that would would be hypocritical if I felt that way.
What I've always hated about Microsoft was their willingness to buck standards just to prevent their users from using other products along with MS products.
This started with early versions of Windows that required you to also buy DOS. A competitor to DOS came out (Dr. DOS), and Microsoft responded by putting a check into the Windows bootstrap that would cause it to exit out with an error if Dr. DOS was detected. Any time a company goes out of their way to make their own product not operate with 3rd party software, it generates serious rage from customers like me.
As I look back over the last few years, the last move by MS that really angered me was the whole OOXML vs Open Document war, where Microsoft refused to use the new standard, and instead made their own new standard with built in obfuscation.
There's still a lot terrible decisions that MS makes for their customers (hiding file extensions by default in Windows, modifying extensions on files downloaded with IE without informing the user, automatically removing line breaks on messages read in Outlook without telling the user), but I've seen far less pure evil come from the giant, compared to ages past.
'Patent Troll' is kind of becoming a slur, and it can almost be attributed to any tech company that becomes big enough. Even the good guys occasionally have to buy up patents and use them for counter-suing. They don't want to, but the way our court system works, those who don't engage in this behavior will lose.
A perfect example of this is when Yahoo! acquired Right Media and Microsoft acquired aQuantive, both within April of 2007. Immediately, Google responded and acquired DoubleClick. It doesn't matter which one you think was the good guy, but all three quickly saw the need to sure up their advertising patents and did what was necessary to prevent losing to the others.
Of course, there are still real patent trolls, which I define as companies that exist solely to sue others. I hate to defend them, but they've taken notice of how the system works, and decided to do what is necessary to get a piece of it. But even the best companies have to be resort to patent troll tactics occasionally.
Finding the download page for the latest binary can be tricky, although it's much easier now than it used to be. Here's a link for the lazy.
For the extremely lazy, here's how to install, assuming that you're using linux, and it went into your Downloads folder:
Newton, in his quest to "learn more about our Creator", came to the conclusion that we must assume other stars out there have their own systems of planets in orbit. That was the 18th century, and it has been the pervasive theory since then.
I do remember there being a lot of discussion about "Planet X", when I was young, though. It was stated to be a large planet, beyond the reaches of Pluto, capable of sustaining life, and harboring aliens. Of course, this is just one of the craziest of the many theories surrounding the mythical planet. Several people had devoted their lives to searching for this mythical planet, while others claimed that we had the science to disprove the existence of any large planets in our system beyond Pluto's range. This may be what you were thinking of.
Those who claimed that undiscovered planets larger than Pluto did not exist were partially right and partially wrong. Eris (originally named Xena, to go with the whole 'X' motif) is 27% more massive than Pluto. In a twist of irony, though, neither Eris or Pluto are officially planets today, though. So in a way, the pseudo-experts of my youth were technically accurate.
Republicans broke the Democrats filibuster of the Civil Rights Laws of the 60's.
Everett Dirksen was a republican congressman that grew up in the extremely racially charged town of Pekin, Illinois. I grew up nearby, and Pekin is still regarded as one of the most racially divided towns today, but they have made a lot of progress. At least they got rid of the previous high school mascot (changed from the "Pekin Chinks" to the "Pekin Dragons").
Dirksen is the one who brought forward the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
You can't go through the Illinois school system without hearing about what Dirksen did to bring about equality, and Springfield has even tried to make him a local hero, by naming roads after him, etc. But, I don't know how many times I've seen him listed as a democrat, when the truth was the complete opposite. Now, this article is calling civil rights a democrat issue, and it just makes me cringe. Is history education really this bad in this country?
Yeah, if he used his phone for browsing much, then he'd know that most "mobile-accelerated sites" are worse than the originals.
Chances are, he wants to look like a prez that actually gets young people. He wants to be hip, so that people don't catch on to all the cronyism behind the curtains.
This mandate will provide more ways to spend even more money that the government does not have, and no doubt will give out some nice fat government contracts to web-development companies that have funded his campaign. Good catch!
If you are more paranoid than average you can use a second address set to auto-forward as the base.
Most people are not going to be familiar with the system enough to know what you mean by this. Google's FAQ will help:
Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.
Obviously any spammer can figure out that your real address is jane.doe@gmail.com with such a system. Your solution, to chain the alias account to a secondary real account to a primary real account does hide the primary address, but exposes the secondary address, which is just as bad. You can't close that down, or all your aliases stop working.
I haven't used Yahoo!'s system, so I can't speak to whether or not it is better. The best approach is to use spamgourmet's service and watch words, which is essentially what Yahoo and Google were both copying in the first place. It will, of course, work with any email account. They explain watch words here:
Watchwords (the new way) are similar except that they must be contained in the word for the new address to be created. They use regular expression matching (if you know what that is) so you can come up with all sorts of interesting approaches. For a simple example, if you have rope and soap as watchwords, these addresses would work:
saddlesoap.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
ouch-ropeburn.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
but this would not:
someotherword.4.spamcowboy@spamgourmet.com
I've been using spamgourmet before gmail even existed, and am up to 609 created disposable addresses now. It's amazed me which retailers have sold off my address to spammers. For the record, Sony Online Entertainment and Sam's Club were the biggest surprises. I get "Viagra from Canada" spam from the addresses that I created specially for SOE and Sam's Club.
I really do not know why spamgourmet never gets the attention that they deserve. It really is about the greatest free service I've ever found.
300 GB will eventually begin to seem small as video data transmission rates continue to increase, but for the time being, 300GB / mo. is very generous.
I'll bet that at least half of all Comcast users watch video online on a frequent basis, and they all probably feel like they are in the top 5% of users. This is why everyone is so worried about data caps. In reality, most people will be shocked to see how far they are away from th limit.
Yeah, this submission should have never been accepted. The discussion will turn into a cesspool pretty fast.
First off, Barney Frank is a democrat, not a republican.
Second off, his live-in boyfriend was making an honest living also, by prostituting himself out to others.
Um, Ron Paul wants smaller government, and wants to end entitlement programs.
There used to be democrats that wanted the same thing, but they got chased away. There is no chance that any democratic candidate today would ever want to shrink government.
That is pretty awesome, but I still have to ask:
Why?
You have to be kidding. Letting luddite politicians control industries they don't understand is bad for a whole lot of reasons. You, obviously, do not understand DSL.
When a company makes a product or service available for some people and not others, there's usually a good reason. With DSL, it all has to do with the costs of adding new infrastructure.
Unlike basic phone lines, DSL performance is extremely sensitive to the distance from the CO.
If the phone company is going to charge me $1000/yr for DSL, and place a new CO just for me, then they better be able to get several hundred others in my neighborhood to also get service from the same CO. There's no way that my $1000/yr will pay for it.
If a mandate went in that all companies had to provide DSL to all possible customers, I guarantee there are some people who would be told that their service would costs thousands per month, because of their location. Now, you may think that this is easy to solve, by just price-fixing the cost also. If feel this way, then you should consider voting for Jimmy Carter this year.
I think you are arguing that it is a non-story.
The rational approach seems to say that it is either:
A) a non-story, or
B) a slow-news-day story about how Obama's security team tried and failed to keep secret the president's whereabouts.
I'm not convinced that the grandparent thinks that it is a news-worthy story. He/She's only saying that choice B is a "more accurate way to look at it" than the original headline. It's kind of like saying that a fern is "more human-like" than a sentence.
Even at Osh'Kosh, you can't spit without hitting someone's dream of the next big idea for an affordable consumer plane. It will be parked there, looking all beautiful, and some guy will hand you a brochure stating how affordable it will be, once it is finally available.
I've always wondered how many of these actually go into production. My guess is that they underestimate how expensive it will be to put a new design into production. Not only are the insurance costs astronomical (yes, something like 50% of a Cessna's cost is for insurance for the builder), but you have years of waiting for the FAA to approve any new designs on parts.
If you really want to get into aviation, a home-built is still the best way. Finding one light enough to qualify as an LSA, and learn on that. Then, if you are filthy rich, consider getting a 4-seater that has power.
A 2012 Cessna 182T Skylane costs $398,100, and the turbo version is a little more.
But, I don't think it's a fair comparison. The Cessna has a 230hp engine, and can carry a useful weight of 1140 lbs. This means you can carry luggage, and get to your destination quickly.
There's not a lot of details on this electric canard, but I'm pretty sure that it's not going to have nearly the horsepower. Instead of cruising at 190mph, you'll probably max out around 120mph, and won't be able to carry any luggage if all 4 seats are full.
I don't know of any other canards (planes with the funny 2 wings in the front) that can be bought commercially, until you get into the luxury areas. The closest I can find to a fair comparison would be a common homebuilt design, like the Cozy Mark IV, which actually looks quite similar to the concept drawing. Looking quickly at trade-a-plane.com, I see a clean 1998 Cozy Mark IV for $50,000, and my guess is that is on the high end. Despite the name, a Cozy has pretty good power. I'd be shocked if this "green" plane could come close to competing.
Now, I will agree that some autistic people ...
The whole point I was making is that the term is now used too broadly, and you seem to be confirming this. The term "autism", when I first heard it, was narrowly defined. The current HFA classification of autism was all that was originally covered by the original use of "autism", but already the term has been broadened to cover far more than that. It will continue to change meaning, even if the medical community would prefer that it doesn't. Eventually (and regrettably), it will (in common usage) mean any kind of stupidity. For example, just last week, I heard a woman say "I was being autistic the other day and left my purse at home..."
Broad terms are dangerous to use, because you end up grouping people with others that they don't deserve being grouped with. That's clearly what set you off. Not all the broad terms I listed in my first post are equivalent, but, they do have something in common. They were all created as ways to refer to people with disabilities in a way that would not be demeaning. In turn, they've all changed to mean something much different than they originally meant. If you disagree with that statement, please explain.
I will stand by my point that the term "autism" will continue to morph. People already use it in derogatory ways. I have no doubt that 30 years from now, it will be rare for a patient to be diagnosed with "autism", because it will have negative connotations. At that time we can have this same discussion again. You can say that "xxxxx (term of the future) is a specific term for ___ ty ___ ___, and is completely different than people who are just plain autistic."
The first attempt to make the syndrome seem not-so-bad was the labeling of "simple". When you called someone "simple", others knew what you meant, but it was clear you were sympathetic to their state. That changed dramatically over the course of a decade or two, as "simple" took extremely negative connotations.
The next derivation of the term was "dumb". By calling someone this, you avoided the idea of "low intelligence" all together. In fact, you were saying they were quite smart, but just weak with verbal skills. I suppose this is closest to how we use "Asberger Syndrome" today. Of course, time did not honor this PC term well, and it quickly came to mean the exact opposite.
Next was "slow". Unfortunately this term didn't sound scientific enough, so a new term, "retarded" was quickly invented to take its place. Sure, those with Latin language background knew what it meant, but to the general public, it was a new term. So, it was the accepted term for quite a while, but like all those before it, its time was limited. PSA's are shown on TV today to completely end the use of this term that was once promoted by the medical community.
Autism is now usually argued as something separate from all those terms above, however the lack of medical diagnosis of retardation has caused significant confusion among parents today. Although it is more narrowly defined by the medical community than previous terms, I predict that it, like all the others, will eventually became used as a taunt, and suddenly be regarded as a slur.
I don't know if this progression is necessarily a bad thing. Medical diagnoses are getting better, and the fact that we keep changing terms to keep everyone happy shows sensitivity that previous generations may not have had.
But, the down side is that the term is used for just about everything. The current conditions labeled as Autism covers far too much for studies such as the one in this headline to ever be successful. There is almost no chance that a single cause of autism would ever cover more than about 5% of the cases.
Kylie Minogue didn't use the name "Titanic II", but her Doctor Who episode features a luxury liner named the "Titanic" that is on a collision course with the earth, and will wipe out all life on the planet.
"Titanic II" may have flopped because it was too silly. But, "Voyage of the Damned" had 13+ million viewers. Clearly the secret was making it even more silly, adding Kylie Minogue, and marketing it to the British.
Well, Physicists from MIT beat 100% efficiency a month ago. (of sorts).
The MIT team called it a LED that functions much like a heat pump. It emitted more optical power than the electrical power it consumed. Apparently the trick is that it results in a lower entropy state, and only works on extremely small scales, so it will never lead to a practical device.
This story, however, doesn't seem to say at all that they have broken 100% efficiency. They are trying to get the total efficiency up above 30%. The amount of light given out by the cell and the electrical energy given out add up to less than 100%. The slashdot headline leads you to believe that they broke 100%, but that is not what "efficiency record" means in this case.
They actually decided to one-up the CERN-OPERA people.
They fired the cable guy before they even hired him!
Updates... overrated. When the update gives you nothing that you desired, and breaks all your addons, it's extremely annoying.
When v4 came out, I didn't see anything worthwhile in the update list, and decided to not update again until there was. Of course, I would never do this if I didn't also run noscript.
I updated from v3.5 to v11 just 2 weeks ago, so that I could get SPDY support. I don't anticipate updating again until v20+.