... I sure hope you've filed for the patent on that idea. Not that it isn't obvious (I've been thinking for a while that all meat will eventually come out of some kind of roller), but it's obviously a valuable idea, so get your claim in. Wahoo! You're going to be rich, you lucky dog.
I recently sent email resumes to the HR email addresses of about 40 companies. I found the addresses by searching miscellaneous job sites for work in a particular, highly specialized field. I didn't apply for any of those specific jobs, though, for a simple reason: I'm looking for telecommuting and/or freelancing work in this field, and no major corporation that I've seen advertises telecommuting or freelance opportunities on a regular basis.
I didn't send to any of the addresses without first going to the company's website to check out their business and their careers page, but I didn't do an exhaustive investigation of their business either.
So, was it spam? Will they think it was spam? There's no way for them to know what my approach was... so how can they evaluate it? Will somebody stick my name up somewhere as an example of serious evilness? (I'm especially worried about the company to whom I accidentally sent a second email 3 days after the first, because I was copying the resume from the email I had previously sent them. THAT sure makes me look like some doofus mailing to a list.)
Incidentally, each email included a link to a detailed online resume, and the first several of them did not include a resume-in-brief within the email itself. Site logs indicate that nobody has visited the resume links.
When speaking of rape, I was actually thinking less of money launderers and drug lords than of the bandit-kings like duvalier and marcos, sitting atop underdeveloped nations and diverting their subjects' wealth into their swiss accounts.
Unfortunately, I must disagree. I'm not sure whether I'm a dirty, geeky nerd, or a whiny competitor, or both, but I do know that Microsoft has harmed both me and the people I have worked for by producing software that doesn't work properly. I have probably spent hundreds of hours working around Microsoft bugs/features. Some of these would have likely destroyed a company that didn't enjoy the advantage of being IBM's business partner.
It would be thousands of hours, but I've been fortunate enough to do most of my work outside the MS domain. I have claimed in the past (without any real analysis, I admit) that the historical cost to the economy of Microsoft's monopoly entirely dwarfs the company's market capitalization (nevermind the actual amount of money it has ever earned).
I should note that as a young geek I had no particular animosity for MS. I had a generalized contempt for the quality of their product, but I figured, hey, if people are stupid enough to buy it that's their problem. I even interviewed for a summer job back in 88 or 89. The fact that Bill Gates was preposterously wealthy even though he seemed to possess extremely mediocre talent -- of any kind -- was just one more annoying injustice in a universe characterized by injustice. No, he doesn't deserve all that wealth, but then, neither does the Emir of Kuwait.
It was only when the gory details of MS's strongarming of OEMs started to come out that I got hot under the collar, and I've stayed pretty steamed ever since. MS's miscellaneous undermining of standards and deliberate thwarting of interoperability have certainly represented real damages to many American consumers and businesses.
I bought a Next computer sometime around '92 or '93, and I was pretty jazzed when NextStep came out -- but it irked me (and puzzled me, until I learned the ugly truth) that nobody would sell me a PC that didn't have a Microsoft OS already in it.
At about the same time, for miscellaneous reasons, I found myself compelled to earn my living working on MS systems, and MY GOD WHAT A NIGHTMARE. It was at this point that my generalized contempt for MS turned into a very personal anger. Make no mistake, there's a small chunk of BG's wealth that can be assigned directly to a large chunk of frustration and suffering by me.
So, I repeat, I don't know whether I'm whiny or whether I'm dirty, but I do know that my life would have been better if Bill Gates had wrapped his Porsche around a tree on the way to negotiate PC-DOS with IBM. I'm not saying I would have been a wealthy software multimillionaire, because I was never on that path. I just would have suffered less.
A group of people who assemble and work together in any manner which suits them is a partnership, not a corporation. There is a big difference. The biggest difference is limited liability, although the lawyers finally got tired of working without that and created the LLC, which is essentially a limited liability partnership.
Corporations are a legal invention that stimulate economic and technological progress by:
a. sheltering stockholders from liability, thus encouraging investment
b. creating a manageable system for joint property ownership. without this, transferring ownership of part of the business from one person to another would require resolving the ownership of EACH AND EVERY ITEM OF PROPERTY assigned to the business. This can be a legal nightmare even for a small business. it would prevent the creation of a truly large business, and it would make it more difficult to invest in either new or established businesses.
c. providing a stable institutional structure that doesn't depend on the health/participation/reliability of any particular individual or group of individuals.
Imagine that we simply struck from the law books ALL of the law relating to corporations, including the laws that charter them. In other words, corporations would cease to be independent, meaningful legal entities. (This is how the world was for most of the 6000 years of Western Civilization). Now, if Alice and Bob start a business together, and they need to buy a building, the names on the deed are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. If, in the course of doing business they violate a contract and are taken to court, the defendants are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. And, significantly, if they are negligent and do harm, the responsibility for reparation falls squarely on Alice and Bob, and the money in their personal bank accounts -- not whatever money happens to be left in AliceAndBobCo's bank account. This is the "natural" state, in which people are held individually and completely responsible for their activities in society
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to do business in a modern way. We needed something to lubricate the wheels, and we created the corporation to do that. (BTW, the first corporations were chartered in ancient Rome, and the law governing them was created explicitly to serve the needs of non-stock charitable organizations that needed to be able to hold property and enter into contracts. They were not capitalist institutions, as there were no owners. The joint-stock corporation is a much more recent development, coming and going over the last 500 years.)
Since the whole thing is just an invention intended to serve our social needs, it is perfectly proper for us to make the rules exactly what we want them to be. Nobody is ever REQUIRED to form a corporation. They can always do business as a sole proprietor or as a partnership. (We also have laws defining these sorts of business relationships, so even they enjoy privileges absent in a "natural" state of law that treats all human interaction as just that -- interaction between individual humans.) This will, of course, limit the scope of their success; but if they want to remove that limit it is perfectly fair for the rest of us to add whatever restrictions we like.
The same point applies to intellectual property. It's an invention of society intended to serve society. Since a patent is something that clearly only exists because "we" say it does, the terms of the patent and the rights it bestows are entirely up to us. If we want to limit the profit the company can make, why shouldn't we? (We already do: Patents last for 18 years, an entirely arbitrary period.) They wouldn't make any profit at all if we didn't pay for the police and the justice system that will enforce their patent. If we want to insist on sliding-scale prices so that poor/middle class/whoever people aren't priced out of the market by the power that monopoly pricing gives to the patent-holder, why shouldn't we? Since most of us are either poor or middle class, we'd have to be insane to support a system of intellectual property that excludes us from its benefits.
A side note on the morality and beneficiaries of intellectual property is that the principle immediate beneficiaries are rarely the individuals who do the thinking. The beneficiaries today are mainly the managers and shareholders of the corporations for whom the "intellectuals" and "artists" work.
Well, just to clarify the point, Microsoft did not win in the marketplace. Microsoft won by exploiting restrictions that the US government places on the creation and distribution of software (while simultaneously skirting or violating those counterbalancing restrictions that Bill et al found distasteful). Microsoft would not exist at all if the government did not create and enforce the strange stuff called "intellectual property rights".
The only justification for having these rights is that without them, people wouldn't create the stuff that we want, whether software or pharmaceuticals or whatever. This is also true of all corporate activity. We aren't required to allow corporations, you know. We only do so because they are useful to all of us, not just to their overpaid managers and their stockholders.
With these concepts in mind, it's pretty obvious to me (since I don't worship at the altar of private property) that society should construct and manage the rules of intellectual property for the benefit of society. Period.
The little rant about people not being able to AFFORD drugs is a great launching point for a debate about the nature of markets and the unfree, government-granted monopolies called patents. Because the drug company has a monopoly on the drug, there is no relationship between the cost of the drug and the price of the drug. The drug company will charge the particular amount that generates the greatest net profit. To illustrate, if Merck had a drug that cured brain cancer, and if Bill Gates had brain cancer, Merck could easily, and according to these ranters ethically and morally, set the price of the full course of treatment at 50 billion dollars. Suddenly (and arbitrarily) nobody on Earth except Bill would have "earned" the right to have their brain cancer treated. If Bill were then run over by a truck, suddenly tens of thousands would have "earned" the right to treatment. Ah, dream a little dream...
Not to pick overly on the Swiss, but a very big difference between US freedom of speech and Swiss banking privacy is that the price for American freedom of speech is paid by Americans, while the price for Swiss banking privacy is paid by all the citizens of the nations whose economies are being raped. The Swiss don't pay any meaningful price that I can see, other than that much of the rest of the world views them with contempt.
Of course, much of the rest of the world views the US with contempt, for pretty much the same crime: supporting an absurdly luxurious lifestyle on the backs of lots of poor people in other countries.
I hate to break it to all you terraformers, but colonizing space is not the solution to overpopulation on earth. The population of earth will always be growing faster than rockets or whatever can possibly carry folks away. The number of people who get to leave will inevitably a tiny fraction of the number who must stay and suffer. Invading Titan or Ganymede would be economically absurd, morally questionable, and of course soooo romantic.
People use facial -- and other -- expressions constantly and often unconsciously. It is simply an information channel. Choosing to ignore it because you have some high-falutin' justification is a pretty minor vice, but probably not in your self-interest. The evidence, however, suggests that Aspies have broken receptors -- they can't properly process the signals, even if they care to.
My excuse for using such cues as tone of voice (another problem for Aspies) and facial expression is the same as everybody else's -- it works. Especially when words alone fail to convey subtle nuance. Smileys weren't invented by frustrated morons, they were invented by high-functioning geeks who got tired of their text being misinterpreted -- typically, misinterpreted by Hymie-like Aspies who don't "get" irony and who are deaf to many other semantic subtleties of language.
Intellectual pleasures do, in fact, begin to wear out, when you realize that you're usually hearing the same shtick again and again. As far as I can tell, ALL pleasures wear out. However, just as with the body language, we're not talking about folks who are tired of sex. We're talking about people who quite possibly weren't very interested in sex to begin with. More to the point, they've never been interested in most physical activity, and in particular, they're not interested in social physical activity.
You may not want to worry about a dead writer, but since her work is supposedly Alan Greenspan's chief philosophical inspiration, perhaps you should be.
I rarely criticize spelling, since I don't actually think it's very important. I used to work for a borderline Aspie (whose son is autistic) who couldn't spell worth a damn. He was also an extraordinary genius -- you have seen some of his work, though you probably don't know his name (few do). I save spelling criticism for people who seem a little too smug about their own intellectual accomplishments.
You make an amusing case, but the analogy can be picked apart in some important ways.
For example, virtually ALL animals communicate using body language. Significantly, Aspies can't pick up the signals. They are deficient in this capability. One study discovered that they just don't pay any attention to a speaker's face. Trying to argue that there is something wrong with people who can both send and receive in multiple modes is a difficult stretch.
Similarly, severe Aspies may seem more intelligent, but their intelligence often seems very constrained. They take a lot for granted in ways that are surprising for such "smart" people. A disproportionate number don't seem to comprehend that Ayn Rand is evil.
They're also alienated from their bodies in ways that make it impossible for them to experience the kinds of physical pleasure that normal folk do.
They also seem to be really bad spellers, but I think that may just be a problem with our education system. ("hierarchies", "benefit", "independence", "fields" "condescending")
Many here insist NO! It's just an arbitrary classification by the majority of a minority whose members are discomfitting to the majority. This is pretty funny, if you've ever met a severely autistic person. Severely autistic people are, simply put, non-functional. If you took them out of their bedrooms and put them anywhere other than a grocery store, they would die within a week. To my mind, that's pretty clearly a disease.
On the other hand, milder varieties of autism (such as Asperger's syndrome) are more about culture than about disease. When a culture decides to identify a set of behaviours as a disorder, just because those behaviours don't fit the culture, then it seems to me it is the culture that has the disease.
The same argument holds for ADHD. It's one thing for a child to be pinging off the walls and screaming non-stop, and it's another thing entirely for a child to be unable to sit quietly for hours on end in a boring schoolroom. The remarkable thing, given our evolutionary history, is that there are any kids who CAN sit quietly like that, at least without sleeping. If you're medicating 25% of your kids because their behaviour doesn't suit your cultural needs, your culture has a disease. Most of your kids are fine. By definition.
On the other other hand, there are deaf people who don't think there's anything wrong with them. (They're wrong.)
On the other other other hand, an Australian psychiatrist named John Ellard wrote a great book of essays called Some Rules for Killing People, in which he made a good argument that the definitions of madness are usually cultural. He suggests that the indications that mark the "disease" schizophrenia have changed with time and place, and that what we call schizophrenia today didn't even exist when the term schizophrenia was coined.
Meanwhile, a contributor elsewhere in this thread says his schizophrenia is a good thing. One wonders whether Jim Gordon felt the same way about HIS schizophrenic symptoms, which included voices that told him to kill his mother with a hammer. He obliged. Too bad, he was a great drummer.
Today, there is almost no doubt that there is a genetic component to both Asperger's and autism. And all the people in here insisting that this is just pop psychology psychobabble need to understand that while Asperger's is not the worst thing that can happen to someone, severe autism is WAY up there on that list. If Asperger's and autism really are just different points on the same genetic spectrum, then mating pairs of Aspies are playing with a very promethean variety of fire.
I could, by the way, make an argument that Asperger's is a fairly dangerous syndrome to everybody else. Self-absorption by artists is socially insignificant. Self-absorption by curiosity-driven technologists is Pandora's Box.
Uh.. okay. 10,000 hours x $75/hour (pretty expensive programmers, too). $750,000. We'll double it to cover some of that code re-use. 1.5 MBucks. How many of these do you plan to sell? If you sell 1,000,000, then all that software costs a max of $15/box. (If you aren't going to sell a million, it wasn't worth building to begin with.)
And I still don't understand what it has that a decent $1200 iMac doesn't have -- although the iMac would of course have a bigger hard drive & a few additional capabilities.
It seems to me (from what others have said) that this surveillance does not meet the criteria for a wiretap (no interception of communication etc.).
So, are there any special rules about the authorities going into your home and installing a tiny surveillance camera? That wouldn't be a wiretap either.
The Bill of Rights seems pretty clear: a warrant only allows them to enter your home looking for some particular and prespecified stuff. Installing surveillance equipment of any kind seems a pretty long stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
As spam goes, this seems less pink than grey.
... so how can they evaluate it? Will somebody stick my name up somewhere as an example of serious evilness? (I'm especially worried about the company to whom I accidentally sent a second email 3 days after the first, because I was copying the resume from the email I had previously sent them. THAT sure makes me look like some doofus mailing to a list.)
I recently sent email resumes to the HR email addresses of about 40 companies. I found the addresses by searching miscellaneous job sites for work in a particular, highly specialized field. I didn't apply for any of those specific jobs, though, for a simple reason: I'm looking for telecommuting and/or freelancing work in this field, and no major corporation that I've seen advertises telecommuting or freelance opportunities on a regular basis.
I didn't send to any of the addresses without first going to the company's website to check out their business and their careers page, but I didn't do an exhaustive investigation of their business either.
So, was it spam? Will they think it was spam? There's no way for them to know what my approach was
Incidentally, each email included a link to a detailed online resume, and the first several of them did not include a resume-in-brief within the email itself. Site logs indicate that nobody has visited the resume links.
When speaking of rape, I was actually thinking less of money launderers and drug lords than of the bandit-kings like duvalier and marcos, sitting atop underdeveloped nations and diverting their subjects' wealth into their swiss accounts.
Unfortunately, I must disagree. I'm not sure whether I'm a dirty, geeky nerd, or a whiny competitor, or both, but I do know that Microsoft has harmed both me and the people I have worked for by producing software that doesn't work properly. I have probably spent hundreds of hours working around Microsoft bugs/features. Some of these would have likely destroyed a company that didn't enjoy the advantage of being IBM's business partner.
It would be thousands of hours, but I've been fortunate enough to do most of my work outside the MS domain. I have claimed in the past (without any real analysis, I admit) that the historical cost to the economy of Microsoft's monopoly entirely dwarfs the company's market capitalization (nevermind the actual amount of money it has ever earned).
I should note that as a young geek I had no particular animosity for MS. I had a generalized contempt for the quality of their product, but I figured, hey, if people are stupid enough to buy it that's their problem. I even interviewed for a summer job back in 88 or 89. The fact that Bill Gates was preposterously wealthy even though he seemed to possess extremely mediocre talent -- of any kind -- was just one more annoying injustice in a universe characterized by injustice. No, he doesn't deserve all that wealth, but then, neither does the Emir of Kuwait.
It was only when the gory details of MS's strongarming of OEMs started to come out that I got hot under the collar, and I've stayed pretty steamed ever since. MS's miscellaneous undermining of standards and deliberate thwarting of interoperability have certainly represented real damages to many American consumers and businesses.
I bought a Next computer sometime around '92 or '93, and I was pretty jazzed when NextStep came out -- but it irked me (and puzzled me, until I learned the ugly truth) that nobody would sell me a PC that didn't have a Microsoft OS already in it.
At about the same time, for miscellaneous reasons, I found myself compelled to earn my living working on MS systems, and MY GOD WHAT A NIGHTMARE. It was at this point that my generalized contempt for MS turned into a very personal anger. Make no mistake, there's a small chunk of BG's wealth that can be assigned directly to a large chunk of frustration and suffering by me.
So, I repeat, I don't know whether I'm whiny or whether I'm dirty, but I do know that my life would have been better if Bill Gates had wrapped his Porsche around a tree on the way to negotiate PC-DOS with IBM. I'm not saying I would have been a wealthy software multimillionaire, because I was never on that path. I just would have suffered less.
As implied by other responses, the question is not, "is he drunk or sober"? The question is, "is he drunk or dead?"
And of course, until we open the box, he is both: dead drunk.
A group of people who assemble and work together in any manner which suits them is a partnership, not a corporation. There is a big difference. The biggest difference is limited liability, although the lawyers finally got tired of working without that and created the LLC, which is essentially a limited liability partnership.
Corporations are a legal invention that stimulate economic and technological progress by:
a. sheltering stockholders from liability, thus encouraging investment
b. creating a manageable system for joint property ownership. without this, transferring ownership of part of the business from one person to another would require resolving the ownership of EACH AND EVERY ITEM OF PROPERTY assigned to the business. This can be a legal nightmare even for a small business. it would prevent the creation of a truly large business, and it would make it more difficult to invest in either new or established businesses.
c. providing a stable institutional structure that doesn't depend on the health/participation/reliability of any particular individual or group of individuals.
Imagine that we simply struck from the law books ALL of the law relating to corporations, including the laws that charter them. In other words, corporations would cease to be independent, meaningful legal entities. (This is how the world was for most of the 6000 years of Western Civilization). Now, if Alice and Bob start a business together, and they need to buy a building, the names on the deed are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. If, in the course of doing business they violate a contract and are taken to court, the defendants are Alice and Bob, not AliceAndBobCo. And, significantly, if they are negligent and do harm, the responsibility for reparation falls squarely on Alice and Bob, and the money in their personal bank accounts -- not whatever money happens to be left in AliceAndBobCo's bank account. This is the "natural" state, in which people are held individually and completely responsible for their activities in society
Unfortunately, this makes it almost impossible to do business in a modern way. We needed something to lubricate the wheels, and we created the corporation to do that. (BTW, the first corporations were chartered in ancient Rome, and the law governing them was created explicitly to serve the needs of non-stock charitable organizations that needed to be able to hold property and enter into contracts. They were not capitalist institutions, as there were no owners. The joint-stock corporation is a much more recent development, coming and going over the last 500 years.)
Since the whole thing is just an invention intended to serve our social needs, it is perfectly proper for us to make the rules exactly what we want them to be. Nobody is ever REQUIRED to form a corporation. They can always do business as a sole proprietor or as a partnership. (We also have laws defining these sorts of business relationships, so even they enjoy privileges absent in a "natural" state of law that treats all human interaction as just that -- interaction between individual humans.) This will, of course, limit the scope of their success; but if they want to remove that limit it is perfectly fair for the rest of us to add whatever restrictions we like.
The same point applies to intellectual property. It's an invention of society intended to serve society. Since a patent is something that clearly only exists because "we" say it does, the terms of the patent and the rights it bestows are entirely up to us. If we want to limit the profit the company can make, why shouldn't we? (We already do: Patents last for 18 years, an entirely arbitrary period.) They wouldn't make any profit at all if we didn't pay for the police and the justice system that will enforce their patent. If we want to insist on sliding-scale prices so that poor/middle class/whoever people aren't priced out of the market by the power that monopoly pricing gives to the patent-holder, why shouldn't we? Since most of us are either poor or middle class, we'd have to be insane to support a system of intellectual property that excludes us from its benefits.
A side note on the morality and beneficiaries of intellectual property is that the principle immediate beneficiaries are rarely the individuals who do the thinking. The beneficiaries today are mainly the managers and shareholders of the corporations for whom the "intellectuals" and "artists" work.
Well, just to clarify the point, Microsoft did not win in the marketplace. Microsoft won by exploiting restrictions that the US government places on the creation and distribution of software (while simultaneously skirting or violating those counterbalancing restrictions that Bill et al found distasteful). Microsoft would not exist at all if the government did not create and enforce the strange stuff called "intellectual property rights". ...
The only justification for having these rights is that without them, people wouldn't create the stuff that we want, whether software or pharmaceuticals or whatever. This is also true of all corporate activity. We aren't required to allow corporations, you know. We only do so because they are useful to all of us, not just to their overpaid managers and their stockholders.
With these concepts in mind, it's pretty obvious to me (since I don't worship at the altar of private property) that society should construct and manage the rules of intellectual property for the benefit of society. Period.
The little rant about people not being able to AFFORD drugs is a great launching point for a debate about the nature of markets and the unfree, government-granted monopolies called patents. Because the drug company has a monopoly on the drug, there is no relationship between the cost of the drug and the price of the drug. The drug company will charge the particular amount that generates the greatest net profit. To illustrate, if Merck had a drug that cured brain cancer, and if Bill Gates had brain cancer, Merck could easily, and according to these ranters ethically and morally, set the price of the full course of treatment at 50 billion dollars. Suddenly (and arbitrarily) nobody on Earth except Bill would have "earned" the right to have their brain cancer treated. If Bill were then run over by a truck, suddenly tens of thousands would have "earned" the right to treatment. Ah, dream a little dream
Not to pick overly on the Swiss, but a very big difference between US freedom of speech and Swiss banking privacy is that the price for American freedom of speech is paid by Americans, while the price for Swiss banking privacy is paid by all the citizens of the nations whose economies are being raped. The Swiss don't pay any meaningful price that I can see, other than that much of the rest of the world views them with contempt.
Of course, much of the rest of the world views the US with contempt, for pretty much the same crime: supporting an absurdly luxurious lifestyle on the backs of lots of poor people in other countries.
I hate to break it to all you terraformers, but colonizing space is not the solution to overpopulation on earth. The population of earth will always be growing faster than rockets or whatever can possibly carry folks away. The number of people who get to leave will inevitably a tiny fraction of the number who must stay and suffer. Invading Titan or Ganymede would be economically absurd, morally questionable, and of course soooo romantic.
My excuse for using such cues as tone of voice (another problem for Aspies) and facial expression is the same as everybody else's -- it works. Especially when words alone fail to convey subtle nuance. Smileys weren't invented by frustrated morons, they were invented by high-functioning geeks who got tired of their text being misinterpreted -- typically, misinterpreted by Hymie-like Aspies who don't "get" irony and who are deaf to many other semantic subtleties of language.
Intellectual pleasures do, in fact, begin to wear out, when you realize that you're usually hearing the same shtick again and again. As far as I can tell, ALL pleasures wear out. However, just as with the body language, we're not talking about folks who are tired of sex. We're talking about people who quite possibly weren't very interested in sex to begin with. More to the point, they've never been interested in most physical activity, and in particular, they're not interested in social physical activity.
You may not want to worry about a dead writer, but since her work is supposedly Alan Greenspan's chief philosophical inspiration, perhaps you should be.
I rarely criticize spelling, since I don't actually think it's very important. I used to work for a borderline Aspie (whose son is autistic) who couldn't spell worth a damn. He was also an extraordinary genius -- you have seen some of his work, though you probably don't know his name (few do). I save spelling criticism for people who seem a little too smug about their own intellectual accomplishments.
For example, virtually ALL animals communicate using body language. Significantly, Aspies can't pick up the signals. They are deficient in this capability. One study discovered that they just don't pay any attention to a speaker's face. Trying to argue that there is something wrong with people who can both send and receive in multiple modes is a difficult stretch.
Similarly, severe Aspies may seem more intelligent, but their intelligence often seems very constrained. They take a lot for granted in ways that are surprising for such "smart" people. A disproportionate number don't seem to comprehend that Ayn Rand is evil.
They're also alienated from their bodies in ways that make it impossible for them to experience the kinds of physical pleasure that normal folk do.
They also seem to be really bad spellers, but I think that may just be a problem with our education system. ("hierarchies", "benefit", "independence", "fields" "condescending")
Is Asperger's/Autism a real disease?
Many here insist NO! It's just an arbitrary classification by the majority of a minority whose members are discomfitting to the majority. This is pretty funny, if you've ever met a severely autistic person. Severely autistic people are, simply put, non-functional. If you took them out of their bedrooms and put them anywhere other than a grocery store, they would die within a week. To my mind, that's pretty clearly a disease.
On the other hand, milder varieties of autism (such as Asperger's syndrome) are more about culture than about disease. When a culture decides to identify a set of behaviours as a disorder, just because those behaviours don't fit the culture, then it seems to me it is the culture that has the disease.
The same argument holds for ADHD. It's one thing for a child to be pinging off the walls and screaming non-stop, and it's another thing entirely for a child to be unable to sit quietly for hours on end in a boring schoolroom. The remarkable thing, given our evolutionary history, is that there are any kids who CAN sit quietly like that, at least without sleeping. If you're medicating 25% of your kids because their behaviour doesn't suit your cultural needs, your culture has a disease. Most of your kids are fine. By definition.
On the other other hand, there are deaf people who don't think there's anything wrong with them. (They're wrong.)
On the other other other hand, an Australian psychiatrist named John Ellard wrote a great book of essays called Some Rules for Killing People, in which he made a good argument that the definitions of madness are usually cultural. He suggests that the indications that mark the "disease" schizophrenia have changed with time and place, and that what we call schizophrenia today didn't even exist when the term schizophrenia was coined.
Meanwhile, a contributor elsewhere in this thread says his schizophrenia is a good thing. One wonders whether Jim Gordon felt the same way about HIS schizophrenic symptoms, which included voices that told him to kill his mother with a hammer. He obliged. Too bad, he was a great drummer.
Today, there is almost no doubt that there is a genetic component to both Asperger's and autism. And all the people in here insisting that this is just pop psychology psychobabble need to understand that while Asperger's is not the worst thing that can happen to someone, severe autism is WAY up there on that list. If Asperger's and autism really are just different points on the same genetic spectrum, then mating pairs of Aspies are playing with a very promethean variety of fire.
I could, by the way, make an argument that Asperger's is a fairly dangerous syndrome to everybody else. Self-absorption by artists is socially insignificant. Self-absorption by curiosity-driven technologists is Pandora's Box.
"The Altair is nothing if innovative. It's clear that a good deal of design and engineering has been expelled on this speaker system."
And I still don't understand what it has that a decent $1200 iMac doesn't have -- although the iMac would of course have a bigger hard drive & a few additional capabilities.
I dunno. I think those Texas Instruments mirrors represent real nanotechnology, as do the microarrays being used for DNA/protein analyses.
Jeez, don't geeks read Godel, Escher, Bach anymore? Hofstadter did the ant thing 25 years ago.
When I grew up in Canada, the word Legos was never heard. We played with Lego. It still rubs me wrong when my kids say they are playing with Legos.
But then, my Canadian friends don't drink a couple of beers, they drink a couple of beer, eh?
It seems to me (from what others have said) that this surveillance does not meet the criteria for a wiretap (no interception of communication etc.). So, are there any special rules about the authorities going into your home and installing a tiny surveillance camera? That wouldn't be a wiretap either. The Bill of Rights seems pretty clear: a warrant only allows them to enter your home looking for some particular and prespecified stuff. Installing surveillance equipment of any kind seems a pretty long stretch.