"a particular drug can mitigate the symptoms of the behavior in 75% of the population that has the disorder"
Uh, dude, if 75% of the population is a certain way, wouldn't the term disorder apply to the remaining 25%? After all, what is a mental disorder other than a deviation from the majority rule of "normal"?
And if the drug companies truly do want to convince a significant majority of the population that they're all suffering from a disorder and should therefore take their medicine, doesn't that just prove the parent's point about pharma-extortion?
"Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't."
Oh, that one's easy. To make people feel sorry for you, obviously. Look at how much of a hero our friend Bram tries to make himself out as - it's not enough for him to be, like Justin Frankel for example, simply a guy who spent loads of time coding a pet project, became a success, all the while not having any problems with his supposedly diminished social skills; he's married, has a kid, can negotiate business deals, etc.
I also don't understand why any deviation from the majority, or "normal people", has to be labelled a disorder or a syndrome of some kind or other. On one hand we're all supposed to celebrate our uniqueness, but the minute we don't fit the mold we're either ADHD or Asperger's or obsessive-compulsive and we're getting drugs shoved down our throats.
Leave the diseases for people who are truly sick and can't function without assistance.
"In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)"
Marathon coding sessions are not a symptom of Asperger's. If that were the case you'd hear a lot more people whining about being afflicted with this condition.
If anything, Coen is a hypochondriac, because let's face facts, anyone who can get married, have a kid, go out and meet some bigshot CEO for drinks and actually make a positive impression, and who can actually go out and do something big with his little project, is someone with "all the right stuff", and not Asperger's.
Now, if his sob story included things like the inability to speak coherently in the presence of a woman or an audience focused on him, an inability to deal with people one on one without offending them with unintentionally offending gestures, or just not impressing them in the slightest, then I might have a bit of sympathy.
Christ, the more I think about it the more it pisses me off, here's a successful guy in pretty much every way and he goes and whines to the world about how sick he his and how much of a hero people should consider him for battling his horrible ailment. Makes me sick.
That's easy - until they can make a goddamn watch that can keep time accurately which isn't a $3000+ Swiss Certified Chronometer (this means you, Timex, and you, fucking 2 minutes/week slow $130 Casio), then you'd always be poking yourself to set the bloody thing to the right time. I'm guessing the radio receiver and circuitry req'd for it to receive accurate time from, say, the cell network would be a little larger than the clock itself.
It's a shame that the one company that's actually providing diesel vehicles on a somewhat respectable scale in North America (VW) has bowed to the North American marketing-driven braindead demand for MORE POWER MORE POWER!
My friend has a '99 Golf TDI and gets 1200km for $40 bucks in Diesel (CDN). I went to a dealership with him to take a look at the new models of the Golf and Jetta and they said that due to complaints about low power (the 99 Golf has 93 horses - plenty of punch for a diesel engine) they had to raise the engine output and this has significantly cut down on fuel effiency. Now the new diesels probably cost more to operate because on top of spending nearly as much on diesel as you would on gas in an economy car, you have the expensive maintenance of the diesel engines (synthetic oil, strange and expensive cartridge oil filters).
Canada's there, once you zoom in - it just lacks the zoomed out detail of the US. (Well, at least the more populated parts of Canada, I didn't try the accuracy of the Yellowknife city map).
Aren't most people who've heard of a car engine familiar with the concept of RPM? Seems like a more appropriate measure for the rate of rotation of a turbine, right?
"Now it tells me it won't run because I have CD emulation software running. Okay, I disable daemon tools."
Odd that it complains about Daemon Tools, but it won't make a peep about Alcohol 120%. Even an MDF image of the original CD1 will load perfectly off the emulated drive while the original's safely tucked away. No need to worry about downloading updated NO-CD.exe's either, just the straight patch ma'am.
They didn't become a monopoly because their products are great. They got to be a monopoly by working over the suppliers to that MSware became ubiquious. It's smart, but illegal when you start penalizing them for putting Netscape icons on the desktop.
I suppose I'm a bit late in asking this, but how is this different from Walmart demanding that its suppliers meet certain set-in-stone criteria otherwise their products will flat-out not be carried? Just like MS refusing to license Windows to a vendor that doesn't play by MS's rules would kill that vendor, a refusal to carry some company's merchandise can kill that company.
Ok so MS has more marketshare than Walmart, granted, but if either company's ruthless dealmaking can kill off another company, isn't the situation basically the same, monopoly or not?
That's easy - half the time it's the copy protection which the crackers so helpfully strip out of the game that breaks things. That's why a lot of people who actually buy games still go to gamecopyworld and download no-cd cracks.
You're one of those people who hold up the checkout line by sitting there FILLING OUT A CHEQUE and you have the gall to complain about anyone or anything else? Pah!
Perhaps if you weren't a lunatic bent on inconveniencing everyone else you wouldn't have this problem - Walmart can't touch your account if you pay with cash or Interac.
Sorry but the use of cheques nowadays (and especially in stores) is so antiquated and useless that it irks me to see someone voluntarily use them and then complain that they're a source of problems.
In fact I'm almost tempted to salute Walmart for helping turn people away from this very stupid form of in-store payment.
I'll admit I don't know about the different specs, but I do know that a $80000 SUV doesn't seem to light up the road (yes, I've driven in it at night, and since we live in the boons I got to see the highbeams in action) any better than my $16000 Corolla. (Though the Corolla lights things up better than many other cars...)
All of this high priced technology is primarily about one thing. Fuel efficience/Emmissions requirements. It's an impossible choice really. We can have cars that we can fix affordably or we can have maximum fuel efficiency with minimal pollution.
That part of the high priced technology is confined to the things that have to do with the engine and drivetrain.
The fact is that the cars are stuffed with a lot more techno-uselessness than they need to be. I don't want voice commands, I don't want my dashboard to have an LED display that will scroll scheduled maintenance reminders at me. I don't want radio controls on my steering wheel or voice commands. I don't want ABS and traction control and stability programs, because I a) don't need them and b) don't like them because with them switched on the car does not behave the way it should given certain input by me. I don't want computerized climate control for 4 different zones in the car, I don't want a DVD entertainment system, and I don't want to drive around in the fear that if I bump into something I'm going to get pummeled by airbags that are inflated by explosives.
So basically my only option is an economy car. I can't have a luxury car nowadays without having to accept that a computer decides when my ass is too cold and will start the seat warmer for me, or having to not have any other choice but an automatic transmission which shifts according to commands from a usually braindead computer.
I can foresee a day when the only bastion of automotive sanity will be the cutrate econoboxes from Hyundai and Kia and such, because even a simple Corolla these days is getting pretty complex.
"FYI, they were all broken by the previous owner, who was a bit hard on them I think.:)"
Wouldn't you also think, though, that an automaker that gleefully overprices the hell out of its cars in North America all the while moaning about German engineering and what a high performance vehicle you're forking over way too much money for, would be capable of building a transmission able to withstand the stresses of hard driving in a supposed sports car being driven like *gasp* a sports car?
"Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city? Wouldn't any old headlight be good enough for most purposes?"
Absolutely. Case in point - my neighbor bought a BMW X5 a few years ago. It's got the HID headlights, so the light illuminating the ground immediately forward of the vehicle is pretty and white. Inexplicably, however, this wonderful bright illumination stops just when you actually need it - the high-beams are halogen only.
What, aside from trying to look cool and annoying other drivers with the glare, is the point of brightly illuminating lit city streets while not having any advantage over a $12000 Hyundai when you hit the country roads?
Except that BitTornado doesn't exactly have the best throttling capabilities. The ABC Yet Another Bittorrent Client has a global upload throttle - regardless of how many torrents are running you can change the setting at any time and the client simply divides up the specified bandwidth equally among the running torrents.
As a bonus it doesn't launch a separate BT client for each torrent running, which can eat up a LOT of memory, meaning that for any given number of torrents it'll use about half the RAM of Tornado.
Maybe the issue here isn't necessarily new software and new computers, but simply user training.
I grew up with DOS and learned through and through anything new that came out on PC's. If you such basic things as what constitutes an executable or script file, and what sort of software you should stay away from (things which are usually self-evident to someone who's an experienced user) then you should have no trouble with viruses and and trojans and adware, etc.
Parents will rarely have this experience. They'll start using the computer to send email and view the web and if some nefarious software starts popping up at, claiming that if they don't click "YES" right this instant that their connection will suck and their kids will all die, of course they'll quite naively click YES.
So instead of getting them a machine and saying "Here, this is something not even YOU can screw up" educate them so they know the same basics as you do.
I've never gotten bit by any ad/spyware, virus, or any such thing in all my years of computer use (nearly 2 decades). I made sure that the knowledge that allowed me to not get screwed was passed onto my parents when THEY started using the computer (only a couple years ago, when they realized how handy email and the web could be). Yeah, I set them up with Mozilla (and before that IE with popup blockers) so they wouldn't be annoyed, and set their machine to auto-install the Windows updates, but otherwise I've given them free reign, confident that they know enough not to screw up the machine. And so far so good.
Heaven forbid it not be a tightly-knit geek thing.
I don't think that's the big issue among/.ers. Consider LOTR - I'd say the vast majority of people here were almost fanatically for the project, counting down the seconds to the movies' opening. Granted, H2G2 is a bit more fringe than LOTR, but I think that if people saw that it had people passionate about the source material behind the project (which does not seem to be the case) such as the LOTR movies had, they'd come to anticipate the movie version as well.
Unfortunately, I think in this case, it is just a Hollywood moneygrab and not a realization of a long-time dream (like LOTR for P. Jackson).
S4? The Audi? Or the Porsche 928 S4? Or the comet 1999 S4? I realise you're trying to be cool by not typing out the entire name of the car because it'll make you seem like a part of the elite crowd that automatically knows what's being talked about when a cryptic acronym or partial name is mentioned, but you *are* writing to an audience of half million people so relax, hit a few more keys to clear things up for people, we pass no judgments here.
Mmm... so how long before they catch up to cable speed? I had cable almost from the day they started offering it in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and aside from the 1st few months when I had 512kbps both ways, I ended up with 3Mbps/512kbps for the rest of the time I was with them (until last year, when I moved out into the semi-boonies, an area which only 3 months ago finally got DSL, and will most likely never get cable because of the low population density - Rogers told us that unless we want to pay to have the cable run out there, we're out of luck).
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"a particular drug can mitigate the symptoms of the behavior in 75% of the population that has the disorder"
Uh, dude, if 75% of the population is a certain way, wouldn't the term disorder apply to the remaining 25%? After all, what is a mental disorder other than a deviation from the majority rule of "normal"?
And if the drug companies truly do want to convince a significant majority of the population that they're all suffering from a disorder and should therefore take their medicine, doesn't that just prove the parent's point about pharma-extortion?
"Also, I can't imagine why anybody would *want* to claim they're one of us if they aren't."
Oh, that one's easy. To make people feel sorry for you, obviously. Look at how much of a hero our friend Bram tries to make himself out as - it's not enough for him to be, like Justin Frankel for example, simply a guy who spent loads of time coding a pet project, became a success, all the while not having any problems with his supposedly diminished social skills; he's married, has a kid, can negotiate business deals, etc.
I also don't understand why any deviation from the majority, or "normal people", has to be labelled a disorder or a syndrome of some kind or other. On one hand we're all supposed to celebrate our uniqueness, but the minute we don't fit the mold we're either ADHD or Asperger's or obsessive-compulsive and we're getting drugs shoved down our throats.
Leave the diseases for people who are truly sick and can't function without assistance.
"In the case of BT's creator, it seems to me like the guy is following the same path I did - and I'd predict his days of intensely focused, marathon coding sessions are nearly over. (He got married, etc.)"
Marathon coding sessions are not a symptom of Asperger's. If that were the case you'd hear a lot more people whining about being afflicted with this condition.
If anything, Coen is a hypochondriac, because let's face facts, anyone who can get married, have a kid, go out and meet some bigshot CEO for drinks and actually make a positive impression, and who can actually go out and do something big with his little project, is someone with "all the right stuff", and not Asperger's.
Now, if his sob story included things like the inability to speak coherently in the presence of a woman or an audience focused on him, an inability to deal with people one on one without offending them with unintentionally offending gestures, or just not impressing them in the slightest, then I might have a bit of sympathy.
Christ, the more I think about it the more it pisses me off, here's a successful guy in pretty much every way and he goes and whines to the world about how sick he his and how much of a hero people should consider him for battling his horrible ailment. Makes me sick.
That's easy - until they can make a goddamn watch that can keep time accurately which isn't a $3000+ Swiss Certified Chronometer (this means you, Timex, and you, fucking 2 minutes/week slow $130 Casio), then you'd always be poking yourself to set the bloody thing to the right time. I'm guessing the radio receiver and circuitry req'd for it to receive accurate time from, say, the cell network would be a little larger than the clock itself.
I may just be a little dense here, but what in holy hell is the point of having a bot play solitaire for you?
You forgot to label them as mindless jerks...
It's a shame that the one company that's actually providing diesel vehicles on a somewhat respectable scale in North America (VW) has bowed to the North American marketing-driven braindead demand for MORE POWER MORE POWER!
My friend has a '99 Golf TDI and gets 1200km for $40 bucks in Diesel (CDN). I went to a dealership with him to take a look at the new models of the Golf and Jetta and they said that due to complaints about low power (the 99 Golf has 93 horses - plenty of punch for a diesel engine) they had to raise the engine output and this has significantly cut down on fuel effiency. Now the new diesels probably cost more to operate because on top of spending nearly as much on diesel as you would on gas in an economy car, you have the expensive maintenance of the diesel engines (synthetic oil, strange and expensive cartridge oil filters).
Canada's there, once you zoom in - it just lacks the zoomed out detail of the US. (Well, at least the more populated parts of Canada, I didn't try the accuracy of the Yellowknife city map).
Aren't most people who've heard of a car engine familiar with the concept of RPM? Seems like a more appropriate measure for the rate of rotation of a turbine, right?
"Now it tells me it won't run because I have CD emulation software running. Okay, I disable daemon tools."
.exe's either, just the straight patch ma'am.
Odd that it complains about Daemon Tools, but it won't make a peep about Alcohol 120%. Even an MDF image of the original CD1 will load perfectly off the emulated drive while the original's safely tucked away. No need to worry about downloading updated NO-CD
"having to listen to the complete audio logs over and over just to get a code to the cabinets"
And it's never ocurred to you to simply write them down?
They didn't become a monopoly because their products are great. They got to be a monopoly by working over the suppliers to that MSware became ubiquious. It's smart, but illegal when you start penalizing them for putting Netscape icons on the desktop.
I suppose I'm a bit late in asking this, but how is this different from Walmart demanding that its suppliers meet certain set-in-stone criteria otherwise their products will flat-out not be carried? Just like MS refusing to license Windows to a vendor that doesn't play by MS's rules would kill that vendor, a refusal to carry some company's merchandise can kill that company.
Ok so MS has more marketshare than Walmart, granted, but if either company's ruthless dealmaking can kill off another company, isn't the situation basically the same, monopoly or not?
That's easy - half the time it's the copy protection which the crackers so helpfully strip out of the game that breaks things. That's why a lot of people who actually buy games still go to gamecopyworld and download no-cd cracks.
You're one of those people who hold up the checkout line by sitting there FILLING OUT A CHEQUE and you have the gall to complain about anyone or anything else? Pah!
Perhaps if you weren't a lunatic bent on inconveniencing everyone else you wouldn't have this problem - Walmart can't touch your account if you pay with cash or Interac.
Sorry but the use of cheques nowadays (and especially in stores) is so antiquated and useless that it irks me to see someone voluntarily use them and then complain that they're a source of problems.
In fact I'm almost tempted to salute Walmart for helping turn people away from this very stupid form of in-store payment.
I'll admit I don't know about the different specs, but I do know that a $80000 SUV doesn't seem to light up the road (yes, I've driven in it at night, and since we live in the boons I got to see the highbeams in action) any better than my $16000 Corolla. (Though the Corolla lights things up better than many other cars...)
All of this high priced technology is primarily about one thing. Fuel efficience/Emmissions requirements. It's an impossible choice really. We can have cars that we can fix affordably or we can have maximum fuel efficiency with minimal pollution.
That part of the high priced technology is confined to the things that have to do with the engine and drivetrain.
The fact is that the cars are stuffed with a lot more techno-uselessness than they need to be. I don't want voice commands, I don't want my dashboard to have an LED display that will scroll scheduled maintenance reminders at me. I don't want radio controls on my steering wheel or voice commands. I don't want ABS and traction control and stability programs, because I a) don't need them and b) don't like them because with them switched on the car does not behave the way it should given certain input by me. I don't want computerized climate control for 4 different zones in the car, I don't want a DVD entertainment system, and I don't want to drive around in the fear that if I bump into something I'm going to get pummeled by airbags that are inflated by explosives.
So basically my only option is an economy car. I can't have a luxury car nowadays without having to accept that a computer decides when my ass is too cold and will start the seat warmer for me, or having to not have any other choice but an automatic transmission which shifts according to commands from a usually braindead computer.
I can foresee a day when the only bastion of automotive sanity will be the cutrate econoboxes from Hyundai and Kia and such, because even a simple Corolla these days is getting pretty complex.
"FYI, they were all broken by the previous owner, who was a bit hard on them I think. :)"
Wouldn't you also think, though, that an automaker that gleefully overprices the hell out of its cars in North America all the while moaning about German engineering and what a high performance vehicle you're forking over way too much money for, would be capable of building a transmission able to withstand the stresses of hard driving in a supposed sports car being driven like *gasp* a sports car?
"Why would anyone want a $3K headlight, or a car that required them? Isn't there a limit to the candlepower a headlight can legally have when driving in a city? Wouldn't any old headlight be good enough for most purposes?"
Absolutely. Case in point - my neighbor bought a BMW X5 a few years ago. It's got the HID headlights, so the light illuminating the ground immediately forward of the vehicle is pretty and white. Inexplicably, however, this wonderful bright illumination stops just when you actually need it - the high-beams are halogen only.
What, aside from trying to look cool and annoying other drivers with the glare, is the point of brightly illuminating lit city streets while not having any advantage over a $12000 Hyundai when you hit the country roads?
Except that BitTornado doesn't exactly have the best throttling capabilities. The ABC Yet Another Bittorrent Client has a global upload throttle - regardless of how many torrents are running you can change the setting at any time and the client simply divides up the specified bandwidth equally among the running torrents.
As a bonus it doesn't launch a separate BT client for each torrent running, which can eat up a LOT of memory, meaning that for any given number of torrents it'll use about half the RAM of Tornado.
And, it looks nicer! IMO, of course.
Maybe the issue here isn't necessarily new software and new computers, but simply user training.
I grew up with DOS and learned through and through anything new that came out on PC's. If you such basic things as what constitutes an executable or script file, and what sort of software you should stay away from (things which are usually self-evident to someone who's an experienced user) then you should have no trouble with viruses and and trojans and adware, etc.
Parents will rarely have this experience. They'll start using the computer to send email and view the web and if some nefarious software starts popping up at, claiming that if they don't click "YES" right this instant that their connection will suck and their kids will all die, of course they'll quite naively click YES.
So instead of getting them a machine and saying "Here, this is something not even YOU can screw up" educate them so they know the same basics as you do.
I've never gotten bit by any ad/spyware, virus, or any such thing in all my years of computer use (nearly 2 decades). I made sure that the knowledge that allowed me to not get screwed was passed onto my parents when THEY started using the computer (only a couple years ago, when they realized how handy email and the web could be). Yeah, I set them up with Mozilla (and before that IE with popup blockers) so they wouldn't be annoyed, and set their machine to auto-install the Windows updates, but otherwise I've given them free reign, confident that they know enough not to screw up the machine. And so far so good.
Heaven forbid it not be a tightly-knit geek thing.
/.ers. Consider LOTR - I'd say the vast majority of people here were almost fanatically for the project, counting down the seconds to the movies' opening. Granted, H2G2 is a bit more fringe than LOTR, but I think that if people saw that it had people passionate about the source material behind the project (which does not seem to be the case) such as the LOTR movies had, they'd come to anticipate the movie version as well.
I don't think that's the big issue among
Unfortunately, I think in this case, it is just a Hollywood moneygrab and not a realization of a long-time dream (like LOTR for P. Jackson).
Photoshop CS - improved file browser, layer comps, text on a path (finally)
That one surprised me - isn't that a feature that's been available in the Corel graphics apps for about 6 years now?
S4? The Audi? Or the Porsche 928 S4? Or the comet 1999 S4? I realise you're trying to be cool by not typing out the entire name of the car because it'll make you seem like a part of the elite crowd that automatically knows what's being talked about when a cryptic acronym or partial name is mentioned, but you *are* writing to an audience of half million people so relax, hit a few more keys to clear things up for people, we pass no judgments here.
Here in North America people actually have baths in their own homes.
Mmm... so how long before they catch up to cable speed? I had cable almost from the day they started offering it in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and aside from the 1st few months when I had 512kbps both ways, I ended up with 3Mbps/512kbps for the rest of the time I was with them (until last year, when I moved out into the semi-boonies, an area which only 3 months ago finally got DSL, and will most likely never get cable because of the low population density - Rogers told us that unless we want to pay to have the cable run out there, we're out of luck).