Well, my phrasing obviously sucked, and it does create the semantic difference you correctly identified. But basically I don't expect failure every single time, or, you know, I wouldn't even try anything ever. But I think everyone is aware that there is the possibility of failure, and specificially the possibility of rejection, and one may have various degrees of anxiety or fight-or-flight reaction or whatever apropriate. I can't speak for all aspies, of course, but I've certainly been affraid that something could go wrong before. It doesn't look to me like it comes with some inherent immunity to fear.
Dude, I'm not talking about a couple of friendly remarks while she scans your goods, or wishing her a nice weekend. I'm talking about for example someone who was holding out a 1 hour queue at the bank (monday and pension day, see) after being basically told goodbye, trying to strike a conversation.
That's not being friendly, that's being antisocial. There was a long line of us missing work to solve some real problem at the bank, and someone is basically wasting the time of every single person in that line to try to start a conversation with the teller. That's not just being the bandit archetype (her gain was at the expense of other people's loss), it's the dumb or particularly antisocial kind of bandit who causes a big loss for a small gain. Those few minutes of conversation she got, well, multiply that by two dozen people behind her in the line.
If anyone does that to be friendly and social, well, they can start being social and friendly towards those people behind them, and getting the fuck out of the way. Making those wait isn't friendly, it's being an antisocial prick.
Basically it just means being completely oblivious to any body language clues or cues, much in the same someone colour-blind might not even be aware that someone dyed their hair blue. It's a mixed blessing. On one hand it is the obvious handicap, on the other hand for example I see some people fall for the most blatantly bogus sales pitches and can only assume that some body signal was giving them confidence there.
It doesn't really mean anything else, though. You can still be an aspie extrovert (oy vey) or introvert (count your blessings) for example.
It _does_ have a very high co-morbidity rate with, well, practically any other mental condition or syndrome in the DSM. So someone could be aspie + ADHD, another one could be aspie + sociopath, yet another aspie + OCPD (seems a popular combination, actually), and so on. So YMMV and conclusions from observing one may not match another one, since you may be observing the other part actually, rather than the aspie part.
It does lead to perceiving stuff differently, in as much as missing you're missing a whole information channel from the input. Which can lead to some wildly inadequate remarks at times. But otherwise basically, if you prick us, we still bleed, same as anyone else. Being told to fuck off still hurts like it hurts anyone else, for example. And expecting rejection is, far as I can tell, still expecting rejection. I'm certainly not immune to that. Just not being able to tell when I said something that offended, didn't mean I didn't notice some kids avoided me in school, for example. If anything, for a long while it just made it seem even more unfair for lack of a logical reason why they're avoiding me or trying to basically chase me off.
But the point I was getting at was more like "don't tell _me_ I don't know about problems with finding an audience."
Though the flip side is that even as an aspie you _can_ learn to function adequately in society by, basically, just learning what you're expected to do and what not to do. And some honest introspection helps too. E.g., one thing I had to learn the hard way was that people like it when you agree with them. ELIZA mode ftw. E.g., that a conversation is not a monologue. People want their turn to be listened to. E.g., that when someone complains about some problem, they want sympathy, not a logical solution. (Obviously I'm ignoring that one for the purpose and scope of this thread.) E.g., what makes people laugh. (Laughter I do 'sense'.) Etc.
Basically if even I can learn when to offer a shoulder to cry on, I find it hard to believe that someone else -- regardless of age -- would be totally and utterly incapable of holding a conversation with anyone else. I honestly have a problem imagining a room full of people who are desperate enough to even try to chat up the cashier, yet are incapable of talking to each other. Surely you can find someone there who you can tolerate to listen to about her children or such, for a limited time. Maybe it's my limited imagination, though.
I also wanted to add that there are sites and MMOs and IRC channels for just about any interest group imaginable, if that's more tolerable for you than in-person dealing with another lonely senior or your set of interests is particularly under-represented in your area. If you can label your hobby or fetish in less than 50 characters, chances are there's at least one IRC channel and one newsgroup/mailing list about it. Or you can organize a casual player guild on the MMO of your choice, or whatever.
So, seriously, if someone is on the internet and capable of posting a complaint about how lonely they are, why wouldn't they be there?
I read the suggestions of others here and all I can say is "Do you think we haven't tried and failed at these methods?" Either you're not as old as we are, or you're a damn-sight more social than you realize.
There's a reason why males unmarried by 45 tend to die alone. They have better chances at the 6 pick lotto.
Dude, I'm an aspie. I have about as much savvy and finesse for social occasions as my cat has for scuba diving.
But what's being proposed here doesn't boil down to "go pick up a super-model in a bar", nor even something as radical as finding someone you can live with all day long for a marriage, but basically to "there must be other people at your age and with the same interests." Since you tried and failed, exactly what _was_ the problem? No, seriously, I'm curious.
As I've been saying before, there are literally thousands of retired seniors in any town worth that name. Some hundreds to thousands of them profess being terminally lonely and badly in need to talk to someone. The OP even basically proposes to pay for someone to talk to.
Exactly what _is_ the great impediment that prevents all this pool of people who badly want to talk to someone, from talking to each other?
I mean, really. You want to talk to someone. They want to talk to someone. Some even desperately. I'm obviously missing something, because to me it sounds like the problem is its own solution. Surely if you're that badly in need of social interaction, you can tolerate another willing interlocutor for an hour or two even if their personality isn't exactly bride/groom class. What _is_ preventing it?
Then I suddenly don't understand the problem any more. In fact I'm thoroughly confused.
I see people for whom loneliness in the old age is a very serious problem. I see them desperate enough for human interaction to wait in a line for a human teller instead of using the ATM in the hall and then desperately try to chat up the teller. And you can occasionally hear one complain about how lonely he/she is, how everyone abandoned her, daughter doesn't call often enough, nobody else ever wants to talk to him/her, etc.
Now you're telling me there _are_ senior centers for just that.
Umm... So why don't these people use them, then? I must be missing something very obvious there.
The thing is, it seems to be a common ailment. I see people all the time who are that desperate for social interaction that they'll try to chat up the cashier at the supermarket or the teller at the bank... with a long line forming behind them. Typically old people too. You can see a select few really desperate at it, too.
What I really don't get is why doesn't someone make a club of sorts for that. There are literally thousands of old people who'd like to talk to someone, in any given town. Can't someone, maybe even one of them, organize something? Doesn't even have to involve any fancy or expensive stuff. I'm thinking even something like "let's all go to the river and chat".
The difference between Amazon and Netflix is that Netflix product fits comfortably in a mailbox.
This just tells me that USPS employees are wimps;)
Seriously, at one point, after getting used to ordering games and movies from Amazon and finding the DVD case in an envelope that just about fit through the mailbox slot, I order IIRC City Of Villains. The game was packed in one of those big cardboard boxes, instead of the DVD cases we've got for the last half a decade. It was easily twice as thick as the mailbox slot. The German post employee had obviously not been deterred by that, and had managed to actually shove the damned thing half-way through that narrow slot.
I had gained proper appreciation for the awesomeness of said employee while trying to get it out. It was so firmly jammed in the slot, that it wouldn't go either forward or back at all, no matter how hard I pulled or shoved. I had to tear the box apart, partially working through the slot at that, and retrieve its contents piece-wise. It wasn't just that the cardboard box was thicker than the slot, but the sum of what was inside, you know, manual and CDs and all, was actually thicker on the whole than the slot.
(And while I'm at being awed by employees, having to work through that narrow slot also gave me a new perspective and a deep respect for gynecologists;))
I'm thinking it must have been the kind of guy who, when asked to fit various geometric figures through various shaped holes in kindergarten, thought it was a test of strength.
I dunno, wasn't the hype that Android is all open and based on Linux, and _totally_ unlike the iron grip that Steve Jobs has on the iPhone?
And weren't most of us ranting about how even DRM and "Trusted Computing" are bad because someone else gets to decide what you can or can't run on your computer? When did _that_ become good if it's Google doing it?
Actually, a bunch of us don't particularly believe in any conspiracy, but are nevertheless kinda jaded and cynical after hearing one too many (or a few thousand too many) press releases that promise the moon and then some.
Don't get me wrong. I for one don't propose to cut their funding or anything. It's good that they research stuff. I do wish though the press and PR didn't have the tendency to grandstate.
Well, I guess it's hard to guess what was actually meant. You're right that any programmer with half a brain-cell _should_ not even need to think twice to cover capitals, unicode and name length. But there _are_ sites out there where an O'Maley can't register because someone enforced a "no non-alphabetic characters" rule, or where names are restricted to 32 characters. As I was saying, some people just feel they have to give rules.
Not everyone, granted, but to put it otherwise, you'd be surprised how many programmers without half a brain cell get hired anyway at some companies.
Well, granted, if your program has to run on an ancient version of Oracle which lacks VARCHAR2, things could get hairier. I'm pretty sure VARCHAR2 was already there in Oracle 7 (though back then with a maximum of 2000 instead of the 4000 it has nowadays), but no idea in which version it started existing. Was it version 5 or 6?
Still, I'm not proposing to invent a new storage layer to work around DB limitations. If you're on a pre-5.0.3 MySQL and the max string is 255, ok, then you don't count as setting your own limits in my book. They're set for you by the DB.
But you have to admit even that doesn't account for some of the limits out there. E.g., most name or email fields are limited to something _far_ below even 255. And then there are checks like forbidding hyphens, or for that matter the apostrophes in Irish names, or enforcing some capitalization rules, or in other fields stuff like one site which didn't let me register as a non-US customer without picking one of the US states as my state. I don't think the varchar limit explains those, really. Basically it still looks to me like some people are just into making up rules, sad to say.
Also, well, while I see your point about storage size, we're really talking about 1 byte length vs 2 byte length. It's a whole 1 byte per record we're talking about. You'd need 1 billion customers before that adds up to a whole gigabyte of HDD space. I'm thinking someone has to be pretty obsessed to optimize HDD space at that level.
And again that still doesn't justify some of the restrictions out there. While there is that 1 byte difference above 255, there is no saving _below_ 255. Setting the limit to 32 characters or 16 or some other restrictions out there really won't produce any saving at all.
Really? how to you program with no rules? Please, give me an example of a system with no rules.
There is a difference between no rules, and less rules, or even "only strictly the absolutely needed assertions." Making a BS dichotomy between excessive rules and no rules is exactly the kind of OCPD I was talking about.
" he just had to define a byte limit" So you write programs with infinite byte limits?
More BS sophistry, or you genuinely don't know that a VARCHAR already has a 4000 byte limit in Oracle -- and YMMV in other databases -- hence not setting your own means that default, not "infinite"?
But really, I just see more false dicohotomy between setting your own restrictive limits and "infinite". If you genuinely can't see anything in between, it's your shortcoming, not mine.
but those are rules. you don't want rules or limits.
Right. We can also add sarcasm to things that go right over your head.
it needs to have the space to be ABLE to go to the max length. You must be an hell of a programmer to not know that. Then any program used to put data into the data must also be able to deal with the limit. so those variable will need to reserve that much memory.
You pick on my programming ability, yet judging by the above paragraph you never heard of dynamic allocation. You don't need to pre-reserve space for the maximum possible name, lemming. If more people realized that, not only we'd have less naming restrictions, we'd also have less buffer overflow exploits.
And space in the database... are you serious? You're proposing to restrict names just to limit the maximum size of the table? Do you also have a maximum number of customer rows, or what? Because you can run over the maximum size for the database that way too,. You do know tablespaces can be extended, right?
And, generally, it's a stupid optimization in so many ways it's not even funny. For a start, again, each individual row is _not_ saved with 3996 extra bytes if someone named "Alex" is saved in a VARCHAR(4000) field. The extra space is only used for people who literally have a name that large. Which also means you _don't_ need to pre-allocate space in the database for the case that every single customer will have a name that large. Most still won't. Someone called "Wang" will still be called "Wang". Their name won't change from "Wang" to "Wallawallabingbingdingdong" just because you set your limits higher.
It's also stupid because you're optimizing a cheap resource. If every single customer did have 4000 byte long names, and you had a hundred million of them in the database, we'd be talking about four hundred gigabytes. It's peanuts nowadays. The space in memory is a matter of how many concurrent requests you expect. Assuming actually 1000 requests in-flight at the same time on the same machine (which means tens to hundreds of thousands logged into that machine), if every one of them had 4000 byte names, we'd be talking about a whole 4MB of RAM taken up with names. Whop-de-effing-do.
And again, both are for an unrealistic worst case scenario: for most users you _don't_ actually save even a byte by defining it as VARCHAR(32), because their name doesn't grow or shrink with the size of that field.
You would be correct on any system with infinite storage, memory and CPU power.
I was mostly correct so far on systems with a realistic amount of all three. It's funny what you can do when you actually measure and calculate, instead of applying knee-jerk premature optimizations.
Other then that, you are a crappy programmer.
There are very good technical and engineering reasons for limits. Are there stupid limitation on some names? yes. Are those limits sometimes imposed arbitrarily by programmers? yes. Are the usually there for a business rule imposed by someone who isn't the pro
I know you're probably just joking, but you provide the perfect example of the kind of BS made-up rule I was railing against in another post.
Instead of asking who'd have a name that breaks your rules, or asking them to fix their name, people should be asking themselves if they actually need that rule at all. Why would you care that the users don't have numbers in names? What other part of the program relies on making that assertion about the input data, and why?
Any programming language or database imaginable can store any combination of letters, numbers and punctuation in a string. It's a string. Virtually any standard library out there (unless you program in something like Brainfuck or Shakespeare) can deal with the string "4L3X" just as well as it can deal with the string "Alex". It can search for it, sort it, index it, print it, etc. As far as the computer is concerned, a digit is just another byte.
That's the kind of thing I don't get: why do some people make up rules for their users, that really are just unneeded in the first place?
(Maybe not _you_ specifically, but you did provide an example of something that does happen.)
You know, attitudes like yours are IMHO the root of all that's wrong with computers today. And I'm saying that as a programmer, not as Jane Grandma. The whole idiotic OCD idea that you _must_ make up rules about everything, and that your rules are more important than what people are actually trying to do. The idea that if even someone's name doesn't fit "your" database, then you can just brush them off and have a beer.
Here's some free clue: yes, you can't handle every edge case in the universe, but you'll find it's easier if you don't create such edge cases in the first place. If your database (actually more likely the program in front of it) can't handle last names with more than one capital letter, or with a dash in the middle, or which are more than 32 bytes long (which with UTF-8 might mean less than you'd think), then guess what? _You_ created an artificial edge case that had no reason to be there in the first place. Instead of handling every edge case in the universe, how about not creating them in the first place?
I find that about 90% of the problems boil down to the above: some idiot put some artificial limits or rules, that really aren't needed anywhere else. Just because he has the delusion that he's some kind of Moses on the mountain and just _has_ to come down with some rules.
E.g., he just had to define a byte limit, because he's prematurely optimizing a non-problem he doesn't understand. God forbid wasting space in the database by allowing 256 or 2000 byte strings... never mind that if he actually understood that underlying database, he'd know that a VARCHAR is not padded to that max length. If someone just entered "Alex", the same 4 bytes will be actually used in the database, regardless if the field is a defined as maximum 4, 32, 256 or 2000 characters. But nah, he has to put some restrictive number there, 'cause it looks more like he's doing some smart job.
There is hardly any reason to even use a user name for anything other than display purposes. (You do have a primary key for that record for everything else, right?) As such there is no reason to make any assumptions about it, or enforce any particular format, or anything. There's no reason to even disallow SQL keywords (just effing quote it before using it in SQL) or angular brackets (just quote it before using it in HTML.)
There is no reason to create any edge cases in the first place.
And really it's not even just about names. Names are just one case where people make up BS rules just to feel more like they did the great design job. One could make the same case for the gazillion other pointless rules imposed upon the user or his work-flow or data, not because they're actually needed anywhere, but just because some OCD idiot feels like he _must_ impose some rigid structure upon things that really have none and don't need any. But he'd just feel naked without defining that kind of rigid structure, or without imposing upon humans some data structures theory that was intended only for use by programs.
Yeah, I know. The actual post I was answering to was about keyword matching, though, and I answered to _that_.
To answer your point, though, well, that's why you have some control over the cookies in your browser. Unlike many other privacy problems on the Internet, this is trivial to solve. Simply disallow third party cookies and block Google and some of the other egregious unrepentant trackers from storing any persistent cookies at all in your browser. Problem solved.
That kind of thing happens a lot, actually, if you actually look at the ads. Mind you, keyword matching has never yet given me a single ad I was interested in, but I still occasionally look at the ads because of gems like these:
- I'm looking up the lyrics of a goth kinda song, you know, about death and suicide, and it mentions eternal sleep. An ad on the side dutifully offers to sell me sleeping pills. (Not only morbid, but I really don't think that they want to become known as the company desperate enough for a sale that they'll even offer to sell a means to commit suicide to depressed teens.)
- I'm looking up the meaning of the word "insipid." Of course, a lot of the words in the definition have to do with taste and cuisine. An ad on the side (or was it two?) point me at some traditional Jewish cuisine cookbook. (I figure having that as an illustration for "insipid" in the dictionary isn't exactly an inspiration to buy it, you know?)
- I'm looking up the meaning of the word "sycophant". An ad on the side points at some book for children about how one can become president. (I guess it would explain Dubya;)
While technically taxpayers will work in those mines, in the sense that they'll also be taxed for their bare subsistence wages, it doesn't mean they'll actually see much of a benefit from it. It's very possible and in fact probable that the same will happen as in Africa. A tiny minority will get obscenely rich, while the actual guys digging underground will barely get enough to survive from day to day.
Or as an intermediate example, look at China. Or Russia. While the GDP of China has been rising like there is no tomorrow, the purchasing power of most of its citizens has lagged behind massively. All that happened was that its GINI index (i.e., the disparity between rich and poor) rose a lot. Some people got to be billionaires, while the workers of the sweatshops that made those rich are often living in comparable conditions to concentration camps and have to work 14 hours a day just to have enough bread on the table.
Additionally, it would be nice if indeed corporations actually did pay their taxes like that. In reality it'll probably be some daughter company registered in the Cayman Islands or some other such tax dodge country. And which likely doesn't even have more than a PO Box there. A lot of corporations actually cost the local communities or the country as a whole (e.g., via extorting subsidies in exchange for "creating jobs" there) a lot more than they give back in taxes.
Additionally, even out of whatever taxes will be paid, under a corrupt government a lot less will actually benefit the people. Likely a lot of that money will be circulated around in bribes or privileges for the already privileged, diverted to some swiss account of the "emir", used to buy more weapons, or really whatever else than actually caring for their citizens.
Actually, it shouldn't really be a problem at all.
Methanol is a problem when you _only_ have methanol in your system, or at least more methanol than ethanol. The enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase transforms it into formic acid which is poison to the mitochondria.
When ethanol is present too, though, that enzyme has a higher affinity to the ethanol than methanol. Given enough ethanol in the system, only trace quantities of methanol will be processed to something toxic, and the rest will go out via the kidneys and smaller quantities out the lungs.
So basically if you suspect you've ingested a small quantity of methanol, the best antidote you can get is to wash it down with a pint of vodka.
Which is to say that this beer probably has enough antidote in it.
Well, yes, there are a lot of books but basically they all boil down to going at length into some (logically invalid and/or based on strawmen) way in which Darwinism is all wrong.
Just ask anyone to explain ID to you without mentioning Darwin and evolution. No seriously. All that is left is basically "god did it!" No more, no less, no falsifiable claim of its own.
It's not even a theory or even hypothesis in its own right. It can't even tell you if God made the Platypus on day 5 of Genesis 1 together with the the birds and the fish, or on day 6 together with the animals and the humans. Or was it what happens when god wakes up at midnight between the two days with a bright new idea and just has to try it? Was it made later by the devil to test you faith? Or what? You won't find that kind of stuff on ID because it doesn't actually have any theory that would go into those details, or for that matter into anything else than "Darwin was wrong!!!!111eleventeen"
Heck, for that matter you won't even find in ID if it was the abrahamic God, or the Chinese goddess Nuwa, or what?
The whole thing is pretty much based on the implied stupidly false dichotomy that if Darwin was wrong, then specifically _their_ fairy tale is right. Which is like saying that if I found a coin in my bed in high school and I'm fairly sure it my parents probably didn't come into my room at night, then it _must_ be a late payment from the Tooth Fairy. In reality, there are a lot of other possibilities, such as that it fell out of my pocket. But they're not even at that point in ID.
But at any rate, there is nothing to teach in ID if you try to actually teach ID and not "but Darwin was wrong!!!!" All that's left is "umm, so God must have done it." You don't even need more than 1 minute in class for that: "Some people believe Darwin was wrong and God made them, because it makes them feel more special. The name for those people is 'stupid.'" Done.
Bah, just when I was thinking that if it's this thin and flexible, they could put it on a condom and give you the choice of what to display on it (like, say, a $100 bill or a credit card for wives who won't touch anything else of their husband's)... you just have to come and give me the mental image of it bursting into flames.
You forgot the corporate environment, where the best asshole gets the promotions.
I thin you may be on to something, though probably not in the way you think.
One thing I remember from my brief interest in anthropology is that people don't answer polls about themselves according to what they are, but to what they'd like to be, and/or what is more socially acceptable to be. E.g., a tribe who traditionally glorified the role of hunter and warrior answered mostly that yeah, they still are hunters and warriors, although they were an agrarian society in the meantime and most didn't even have weapons any more.
It's not that they lie, and most aren't even aware that they're lying. People just like to thin of themselves as an idealized self, which usually means one more acceptable to the group.
The poll companies discovered even more problems there. For a start, if the phrasing gives any hint as to what you'd think of who picks option B, it will influence what people answer. Then there's the fact that most people pick the "yes" choice, presumably because usually when asking a "yes"/"no" question, most people really expect a "yes" answer. So a poll asking everyone "should we stop the war?" will paint a different picture than one asking everyone "should we continue the war?" Then in multi-choice questions there's a bias to pick the first one.
The poll companies by now figured out how to deal with that, by randomizing the order of choices and phrasing. But an online "diagnose yourself" piece of BS typically won't. And it's trivial to make one which uses the above lessons to skew the results towards whatever result you wish to get.
But even those factors boil down to what answers would make one more acceptable to the interlocutor in a casual conversation. People don't tell the truth, they tell what they think the other would like to hear.
And to finally get to the point, I think you may be on to something there in that way. If it seems more socially acceptable to be a sociopath (and there seems to be no shortage of apologists for that in the USA, corporate or otherwise), and the questions are transparent enough to guess which answer means which, most people will answer as if they were sociopaths.
But that doesn't necessarily say what they _are_. Just what's their image of what is a better answer.
While he may not have called himself a captain, I'm pretty sure he called himself a cyborg and has been lecturing about the ethics and rights in relation to cyborgs.
I'm also pretty sure that he's been calling himself a cyborg long before that chip was connected to anything. The phase one of his experiment literally involved nothing more than an RFID chip under the skin, and that didn't stop him from presenting himself as becoming a cyborg and other such attention whoring. The only things that he could control with it were devices which basically just sensed the proximity of the chip itself, not any particular input from his brain.
It would be no less that four effing years before someone actually designed a neural interface to implant him with. Someone _else_ designed it for him, yes. (Incidentally, the muppet who is the star of today's story.)
But it didn't stop him from calling it "Project Cyborg", and presenting himself as becoming a cyborg, and talking about the rights of cyborgs, for four solid years of having no more merit than having injected a RFID chip under his skin.
So, yes, I think my original assessment was actually correct. Warwick was indeed presenting himself as a cyborg at a point where he only had an RFID chip under the skin, and not connected to any nerve. And if you're going to berate me for it, please be sure that you have _your_ facts right first.
And, yes, "Captain Cyborg" was a pithy nickname for him. I fear not pithy enough for such a monumental media troll, but I guess it will have to do.
PS: and frankly, if we're talking cyborgs and neural connections, the blind folks which got a CCD camera chip implanted and actually started seeing, _still_ have a much better claim than Warwick.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my phrasing obviously sucked, and it does create the semantic difference you correctly identified. But basically I don't expect failure every single time, or, you know, I wouldn't even try anything ever. But I think everyone is aware that there is the possibility of failure, and specificially the possibility of rejection, and one may have various degrees of anxiety or fight-or-flight reaction or whatever apropriate. I can't speak for all aspies, of course, but I've certainly been affraid that something could go wrong before. It doesn't look to me like it comes with some inherent immunity to fear.
Dude, I'm not talking about a couple of friendly remarks while she scans your goods, or wishing her a nice weekend. I'm talking about for example someone who was holding out a 1 hour queue at the bank (monday and pension day, see) after being basically told goodbye, trying to strike a conversation.
That's not being friendly, that's being antisocial. There was a long line of us missing work to solve some real problem at the bank, and someone is basically wasting the time of every single person in that line to try to start a conversation with the teller. That's not just being the bandit archetype (her gain was at the expense of other people's loss), it's the dumb or particularly antisocial kind of bandit who causes a big loss for a small gain. Those few minutes of conversation she got, well, multiply that by two dozen people behind her in the line.
If anyone does that to be friendly and social, well, they can start being social and friendly towards those people behind them, and getting the fuck out of the way. Making those wait isn't friendly, it's being an antisocial prick.
Basically it just means being completely oblivious to any body language clues or cues, much in the same someone colour-blind might not even be aware that someone dyed their hair blue. It's a mixed blessing. On one hand it is the obvious handicap, on the other hand for example I see some people fall for the most blatantly bogus sales pitches and can only assume that some body signal was giving them confidence there.
It doesn't really mean anything else, though. You can still be an aspie extrovert (oy vey) or introvert (count your blessings) for example.
It _does_ have a very high co-morbidity rate with, well, practically any other mental condition or syndrome in the DSM. So someone could be aspie + ADHD, another one could be aspie + sociopath, yet another aspie + OCPD (seems a popular combination, actually), and so on. So YMMV and conclusions from observing one may not match another one, since you may be observing the other part actually, rather than the aspie part.
It does lead to perceiving stuff differently, in as much as missing you're missing a whole information channel from the input. Which can lead to some wildly inadequate remarks at times. But otherwise basically, if you prick us, we still bleed, same as anyone else. Being told to fuck off still hurts like it hurts anyone else, for example. And expecting rejection is, far as I can tell, still expecting rejection. I'm certainly not immune to that. Just not being able to tell when I said something that offended, didn't mean I didn't notice some kids avoided me in school, for example. If anything, for a long while it just made it seem even more unfair for lack of a logical reason why they're avoiding me or trying to basically chase me off.
But the point I was getting at was more like "don't tell _me_ I don't know about problems with finding an audience."
Though the flip side is that even as an aspie you _can_ learn to function adequately in society by, basically, just learning what you're expected to do and what not to do. And some honest introspection helps too. E.g., one thing I had to learn the hard way was that people like it when you agree with them. ELIZA mode ftw. E.g., that a conversation is not a monologue. People want their turn to be listened to. E.g., that when someone complains about some problem, they want sympathy, not a logical solution. (Obviously I'm ignoring that one for the purpose and scope of this thread.) E.g., what makes people laugh. (Laughter I do 'sense'.) Etc.
Basically if even I can learn when to offer a shoulder to cry on, I find it hard to believe that someone else -- regardless of age -- would be totally and utterly incapable of holding a conversation with anyone else. I honestly have a problem imagining a room full of people who are desperate enough to even try to chat up the cashier, yet are incapable of talking to each other. Surely you can find someone there who you can tolerate to listen to about her children or such, for a limited time. Maybe it's my limited imagination, though.
I also wanted to add that there are sites and MMOs and IRC channels for just about any interest group imaginable, if that's more tolerable for you than in-person dealing with another lonely senior or your set of interests is particularly under-represented in your area. If you can label your hobby or fetish in less than 50 characters, chances are there's at least one IRC channel and one newsgroup/mailing list about it. Or you can organize a casual player guild on the MMO of your choice, or whatever.
So, seriously, if someone is on the internet and capable of posting a complaint about how lonely they are, why wouldn't they be there?
Dude, I'm an aspie. I have about as much savvy and finesse for social occasions as my cat has for scuba diving.
But what's being proposed here doesn't boil down to "go pick up a super-model in a bar", nor even something as radical as finding someone you can live with all day long for a marriage, but basically to "there must be other people at your age and with the same interests." Since you tried and failed, exactly what _was_ the problem? No, seriously, I'm curious.
As I've been saying before, there are literally thousands of retired seniors in any town worth that name. Some hundreds to thousands of them profess being terminally lonely and badly in need to talk to someone. The OP even basically proposes to pay for someone to talk to.
Exactly what _is_ the great impediment that prevents all this pool of people who badly want to talk to someone, from talking to each other?
I mean, really. You want to talk to someone. They want to talk to someone. Some even desperately. I'm obviously missing something, because to me it sounds like the problem is its own solution. Surely if you're that badly in need of social interaction, you can tolerate another willing interlocutor for an hour or two even if their personality isn't exactly bride/groom class. What _is_ preventing it?
Then I suddenly don't understand the problem any more. In fact I'm thoroughly confused.
I see people for whom loneliness in the old age is a very serious problem. I see them desperate enough for human interaction to wait in a line for a human teller instead of using the ATM in the hall and then desperately try to chat up the teller. And you can occasionally hear one complain about how lonely he/she is, how everyone abandoned her, daughter doesn't call often enough, nobody else ever wants to talk to him/her, etc.
Now you're telling me there _are_ senior centers for just that.
Umm... So why don't these people use them, then? I must be missing something very obvious there.
Actually, I find nothing to laugh about there.
The thing is, it seems to be a common ailment. I see people all the time who are that desperate for social interaction that they'll try to chat up the cashier at the supermarket or the teller at the bank... with a long line forming behind them. Typically old people too. You can see a select few really desperate at it, too.
What I really don't get is why doesn't someone make a club of sorts for that. There are literally thousands of old people who'd like to talk to someone, in any given town. Can't someone, maybe even one of them, organize something? Doesn't even have to involve any fancy or expensive stuff. I'm thinking even something like "let's all go to the river and chat".
This just tells me that USPS employees are wimps ;)
Seriously, at one point, after getting used to ordering games and movies from Amazon and finding the DVD case in an envelope that just about fit through the mailbox slot, I order IIRC City Of Villains. The game was packed in one of those big cardboard boxes, instead of the DVD cases we've got for the last half a decade. It was easily twice as thick as the mailbox slot. The German post employee had obviously not been deterred by that, and had managed to actually shove the damned thing half-way through that narrow slot.
I had gained proper appreciation for the awesomeness of said employee while trying to get it out. It was so firmly jammed in the slot, that it wouldn't go either forward or back at all, no matter how hard I pulled or shoved. I had to tear the box apart, partially working through the slot at that, and retrieve its contents piece-wise. It wasn't just that the cardboard box was thicker than the slot, but the sum of what was inside, you know, manual and CDs and all, was actually thicker on the whole than the slot.
(And while I'm at being awed by employees, having to work through that narrow slot also gave me a new perspective and a deep respect for gynecologists;))
I'm thinking it must have been the kind of guy who, when asked to fit various geometric figures through various shaped holes in kindergarten, thought it was a test of strength.
I dunno, wasn't the hype that Android is all open and based on Linux, and _totally_ unlike the iron grip that Steve Jobs has on the iPhone?
And weren't most of us ranting about how even DRM and "Trusted Computing" are bad because someone else gets to decide what you can or can't run on your computer? When did _that_ become good if it's Google doing it?
Actually, a bunch of us don't particularly believe in any conspiracy, but are nevertheless kinda jaded and cynical after hearing one too many (or a few thousand too many) press releases that promise the moon and then some.
Don't get me wrong. I for one don't propose to cut their funding or anything. It's good that they research stuff. I do wish though the press and PR didn't have the tendency to grandstate.
Well, I guess it's hard to guess what was actually meant. You're right that any programmer with half a brain-cell _should_ not even need to think twice to cover capitals, unicode and name length. But there _are_ sites out there where an O'Maley can't register because someone enforced a "no non-alphabetic characters" rule, or where names are restricted to 32 characters. As I was saying, some people just feel they have to give rules.
Not everyone, granted, but to put it otherwise, you'd be surprised how many programmers without half a brain cell get hired anyway at some companies.
Well, granted, if your program has to run on an ancient version of Oracle which lacks VARCHAR2, things could get hairier. I'm pretty sure VARCHAR2 was already there in Oracle 7 (though back then with a maximum of 2000 instead of the 4000 it has nowadays), but no idea in which version it started existing. Was it version 5 or 6?
Still, I'm not proposing to invent a new storage layer to work around DB limitations. If you're on a pre-5.0.3 MySQL and the max string is 255, ok, then you don't count as setting your own limits in my book. They're set for you by the DB.
But you have to admit even that doesn't account for some of the limits out there. E.g., most name or email fields are limited to something _far_ below even 255. And then there are checks like forbidding hyphens, or for that matter the apostrophes in Irish names, or enforcing some capitalization rules, or in other fields stuff like one site which didn't let me register as a non-US customer without picking one of the US states as my state. I don't think the varchar limit explains those, really. Basically it still looks to me like some people are just into making up rules, sad to say.
Also, well, while I see your point about storage size, we're really talking about 1 byte length vs 2 byte length. It's a whole 1 byte per record we're talking about. You'd need 1 billion customers before that adds up to a whole gigabyte of HDD space. I'm thinking someone has to be pretty obsessed to optimize HDD space at that level.
And again that still doesn't justify some of the restrictions out there. While there is that 1 byte difference above 255, there is no saving _below_ 255. Setting the limit to 32 characters or 16 or some other restrictions out there really won't produce any saving at all.
There is a difference between no rules, and less rules, or even "only strictly the absolutely needed assertions." Making a BS dichotomy between excessive rules and no rules is exactly the kind of OCPD I was talking about.
More BS sophistry, or you genuinely don't know that a VARCHAR already has a 4000 byte limit in Oracle -- and YMMV in other databases -- hence not setting your own means that default, not "infinite"?
But really, I just see more false dicohotomy between setting your own restrictive limits and "infinite". If you genuinely can't see anything in between, it's your shortcoming, not mine.
Right. We can also add sarcasm to things that go right over your head.
You pick on my programming ability, yet judging by the above paragraph you never heard of dynamic allocation. You don't need to pre-reserve space for the maximum possible name, lemming. If more people realized that, not only we'd have less naming restrictions, we'd also have less buffer overflow exploits.
And space in the database... are you serious? You're proposing to restrict names just to limit the maximum size of the table? Do you also have a maximum number of customer rows, or what? Because you can run over the maximum size for the database that way too,. You do know tablespaces can be extended, right?
And, generally, it's a stupid optimization in so many ways it's not even funny. For a start, again, each individual row is _not_ saved with 3996 extra bytes if someone named "Alex" is saved in a VARCHAR(4000) field. The extra space is only used for people who literally have a name that large. Which also means you _don't_ need to pre-allocate space in the database for the case that every single customer will have a name that large. Most still won't. Someone called "Wang" will still be called "Wang". Their name won't change from "Wang" to "Wallawallabingbingdingdong" just because you set your limits higher.
It's also stupid because you're optimizing a cheap resource. If every single customer did have 4000 byte long names, and you had a hundred million of them in the database, we'd be talking about four hundred gigabytes. It's peanuts nowadays. The space in memory is a matter of how many concurrent requests you expect. Assuming actually 1000 requests in-flight at the same time on the same machine (which means tens to hundreds of thousands logged into that machine), if every one of them had 4000 byte names, we'd be talking about a whole 4MB of RAM taken up with names. Whop-de-effing-do.
And again, both are for an unrealistic worst case scenario: for most users you _don't_ actually save even a byte by defining it as VARCHAR(32), because their name doesn't grow or shrink with the size of that field.
I was mostly correct so far on systems with a realistic amount of all three. It's funny what you can do when you actually measure and calculate, instead of applying knee-jerk premature optimizations.
I know you're probably just joking, but you provide the perfect example of the kind of BS made-up rule I was railing against in another post.
Instead of asking who'd have a name that breaks your rules, or asking them to fix their name, people should be asking themselves if they actually need that rule at all. Why would you care that the users don't have numbers in names? What other part of the program relies on making that assertion about the input data, and why?
Any programming language or database imaginable can store any combination of letters, numbers and punctuation in a string. It's a string. Virtually any standard library out there (unless you program in something like Brainfuck or Shakespeare) can deal with the string "4L3X" just as well as it can deal with the string "Alex". It can search for it, sort it, index it, print it, etc. As far as the computer is concerned, a digit is just another byte.
That's the kind of thing I don't get: why do some people make up rules for their users, that really are just unneeded in the first place?
(Maybe not _you_ specifically, but you did provide an example of something that does happen.)
You know, attitudes like yours are IMHO the root of all that's wrong with computers today. And I'm saying that as a programmer, not as Jane Grandma. The whole idiotic OCD idea that you _must_ make up rules about everything, and that your rules are more important than what people are actually trying to do. The idea that if even someone's name doesn't fit "your" database, then you can just brush them off and have a beer.
Here's some free clue: yes, you can't handle every edge case in the universe, but you'll find it's easier if you don't create such edge cases in the first place. If your database (actually more likely the program in front of it) can't handle last names with more than one capital letter, or with a dash in the middle, or which are more than 32 bytes long (which with UTF-8 might mean less than you'd think), then guess what? _You_ created an artificial edge case that had no reason to be there in the first place. Instead of handling every edge case in the universe, how about not creating them in the first place?
I find that about 90% of the problems boil down to the above: some idiot put some artificial limits or rules, that really aren't needed anywhere else. Just because he has the delusion that he's some kind of Moses on the mountain and just _has_ to come down with some rules.
E.g., he just had to define a byte limit, because he's prematurely optimizing a non-problem he doesn't understand. God forbid wasting space in the database by allowing 256 or 2000 byte strings... never mind that if he actually understood that underlying database, he'd know that a VARCHAR is not padded to that max length. If someone just entered "Alex", the same 4 bytes will be actually used in the database, regardless if the field is a defined as maximum 4, 32, 256 or 2000 characters. But nah, he has to put some restrictive number there, 'cause it looks more like he's doing some smart job.
There is hardly any reason to even use a user name for anything other than display purposes. (You do have a primary key for that record for everything else, right?) As such there is no reason to make any assumptions about it, or enforce any particular format, or anything. There's no reason to even disallow SQL keywords (just effing quote it before using it in SQL) or angular brackets (just quote it before using it in HTML.)
There is no reason to create any edge cases in the first place.
And really it's not even just about names. Names are just one case where people make up BS rules just to feel more like they did the great design job. One could make the same case for the gazillion other pointless rules imposed upon the user or his work-flow or data, not because they're actually needed anywhere, but just because some OCD idiot feels like he _must_ impose some rigid structure upon things that really have none and don't need any. But he'd just feel naked without defining that kind of rigid structure, or without imposing upon humans some data structures theory that was intended only for use by programs.
Nope, but give a couple dozen monkeys a few weeks and you'll get a pretty good equivalent of an Uwe Boll movie ;)
Yeah, I know. The actual post I was answering to was about keyword matching, though, and I answered to _that_.
To answer your point, though, well, that's why you have some control over the cookies in your browser. Unlike many other privacy problems on the Internet, this is trivial to solve. Simply disallow third party cookies and block Google and some of the other egregious unrepentant trackers from storing any persistent cookies at all in your browser. Problem solved.
That kind of thing happens a lot, actually, if you actually look at the ads. Mind you, keyword matching has never yet given me a single ad I was interested in, but I still occasionally look at the ads because of gems like these:
- I'm looking up the lyrics of a goth kinda song, you know, about death and suicide, and it mentions eternal sleep. An ad on the side dutifully offers to sell me sleeping pills. (Not only morbid, but I really don't think that they want to become known as the company desperate enough for a sale that they'll even offer to sell a means to commit suicide to depressed teens.)
- I'm looking up the meaning of the word "insipid." Of course, a lot of the words in the definition have to do with taste and cuisine. An ad on the side (or was it two?) point me at some traditional Jewish cuisine cookbook. (I figure having that as an illustration for "insipid" in the dictionary isn't exactly an inspiration to buy it, you know?)
- I'm looking up the meaning of the word "sycophant". An ad on the side points at some book for children about how one can become president. (I guess it would explain Dubya;)
While technically taxpayers will work in those mines, in the sense that they'll also be taxed for their bare subsistence wages, it doesn't mean they'll actually see much of a benefit from it. It's very possible and in fact probable that the same will happen as in Africa. A tiny minority will get obscenely rich, while the actual guys digging underground will barely get enough to survive from day to day.
Or as an intermediate example, look at China. Or Russia. While the GDP of China has been rising like there is no tomorrow, the purchasing power of most of its citizens has lagged behind massively. All that happened was that its GINI index (i.e., the disparity between rich and poor) rose a lot. Some people got to be billionaires, while the workers of the sweatshops that made those rich are often living in comparable conditions to concentration camps and have to work 14 hours a day just to have enough bread on the table.
Additionally, it would be nice if indeed corporations actually did pay their taxes like that. In reality it'll probably be some daughter company registered in the Cayman Islands or some other such tax dodge country. And which likely doesn't even have more than a PO Box there. A lot of corporations actually cost the local communities or the country as a whole (e.g., via extorting subsidies in exchange for "creating jobs" there) a lot more than they give back in taxes.
Additionally, even out of whatever taxes will be paid, under a corrupt government a lot less will actually benefit the people. Likely a lot of that money will be circulated around in bribes or privileges for the already privileged, diverted to some swiss account of the "emir", used to buy more weapons, or really whatever else than actually caring for their citizens.
Actually, it shouldn't really be a problem at all.
Methanol is a problem when you _only_ have methanol in your system, or at least more methanol than ethanol. The enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase transforms it into formic acid which is poison to the mitochondria.
When ethanol is present too, though, that enzyme has a higher affinity to the ethanol than methanol. Given enough ethanol in the system, only trace quantities of methanol will be processed to something toxic, and the rest will go out via the kidneys and smaller quantities out the lungs.
So basically if you suspect you've ingested a small quantity of methanol, the best antidote you can get is to wash it down with a pint of vodka.
Which is to say that this beer probably has enough antidote in it.
Well, yes, there are a lot of books but basically they all boil down to going at length into some (logically invalid and/or based on strawmen) way in which Darwinism is all wrong.
Just ask anyone to explain ID to you without mentioning Darwin and evolution. No seriously. All that is left is basically "god did it!" No more, no less, no falsifiable claim of its own.
It's not even a theory or even hypothesis in its own right. It can't even tell you if God made the Platypus on day 5 of Genesis 1 together with the the birds and the fish, or on day 6 together with the animals and the humans. Or was it what happens when god wakes up at midnight between the two days with a bright new idea and just has to try it? Was it made later by the devil to test you faith? Or what? You won't find that kind of stuff on ID because it doesn't actually have any theory that would go into those details, or for that matter into anything else than "Darwin was wrong!!!!111eleventeen"
Heck, for that matter you won't even find in ID if it was the abrahamic God, or the Chinese goddess Nuwa, or what?
The whole thing is pretty much based on the implied stupidly false dichotomy that if Darwin was wrong, then specifically _their_ fairy tale is right. Which is like saying that if I found a coin in my bed in high school and I'm fairly sure it my parents probably didn't come into my room at night, then it _must_ be a late payment from the Tooth Fairy. In reality, there are a lot of other possibilities, such as that it fell out of my pocket. But they're not even at that point in ID.
But at any rate, there is nothing to teach in ID if you try to actually teach ID and not "but Darwin was wrong!!!!" All that's left is "umm, so God must have done it." You don't even need more than 1 minute in class for that: "Some people believe Darwin was wrong and God made them, because it makes them feel more special. The name for those people is 'stupid.'" Done.
Bah, just when I was thinking that if it's this thin and flexible, they could put it on a condom and give you the choice of what to display on it (like, say, a $100 bill or a credit card for wives who won't touch anything else of their husband's)... you just have to come and give me the mental image of it bursting into flames.
I thin you may be on to something, though probably not in the way you think.
One thing I remember from my brief interest in anthropology is that people don't answer polls about themselves according to what they are, but to what they'd like to be, and/or what is more socially acceptable to be. E.g., a tribe who traditionally glorified the role of hunter and warrior answered mostly that yeah, they still are hunters and warriors, although they were an agrarian society in the meantime and most didn't even have weapons any more.
It's not that they lie, and most aren't even aware that they're lying. People just like to thin of themselves as an idealized self, which usually means one more acceptable to the group.
The poll companies discovered even more problems there. For a start, if the phrasing gives any hint as to what you'd think of who picks option B, it will influence what people answer. Then there's the fact that most people pick the "yes" choice, presumably because usually when asking a "yes"/"no" question, most people really expect a "yes" answer. So a poll asking everyone "should we stop the war?" will paint a different picture than one asking everyone "should we continue the war?" Then in multi-choice questions there's a bias to pick the first one.
The poll companies by now figured out how to deal with that, by randomizing the order of choices and phrasing. But an online "diagnose yourself" piece of BS typically won't. And it's trivial to make one which uses the above lessons to skew the results towards whatever result you wish to get.
But even those factors boil down to what answers would make one more acceptable to the interlocutor in a casual conversation. People don't tell the truth, they tell what they think the other would like to hear.
And to finally get to the point, I think you may be on to something there in that way. If it seems more socially acceptable to be a sociopath (and there seems to be no shortage of apologists for that in the USA, corporate or otherwise), and the questions are transparent enough to guess which answer means which, most people will answer as if they were sociopaths.
But that doesn't necessarily say what they _are_. Just what's their image of what is a better answer.
It's not gay if it's with an elf
While he may not have called himself a captain, I'm pretty sure he called himself a cyborg and has been lecturing about the ethics and rights in relation to cyborgs.
I'm also pretty sure that he's been calling himself a cyborg long before that chip was connected to anything. The phase one of his experiment literally involved nothing more than an RFID chip under the skin, and that didn't stop him from presenting himself as becoming a cyborg and other such attention whoring. The only things that he could control with it were devices which basically just sensed the proximity of the chip itself, not any particular input from his brain.
It would be no less that four effing years before someone actually designed a neural interface to implant him with. Someone _else_ designed it for him, yes. (Incidentally, the muppet who is the star of today's story.)
But it didn't stop him from calling it "Project Cyborg", and presenting himself as becoming a cyborg, and talking about the rights of cyborgs, for four solid years of having no more merit than having injected a RFID chip under his skin.
So, yes, I think my original assessment was actually correct. Warwick was indeed presenting himself as a cyborg at a point where he only had an RFID chip under the skin, and not connected to any nerve. And if you're going to berate me for it, please be sure that you have _your_ facts right first.
And, yes, "Captain Cyborg" was a pithy nickname for him. I fear not pithy enough for such a monumental media troll, but I guess it will have to do.
PS: and frankly, if we're talking cyborgs and neural connections, the blind folks which got a CCD camera chip implanted and actually started seeing, _still_ have a much better claim than Warwick.