OK - as a parent of a six-year old with "primary" autism (e.g. low-functioning), I'd like to clear the air on a few points:

• "Most" of the parents of autistic kids don't buy into the vaccine-causes-autism bunk - only a very vocal minority, which unfortunately our media amplifies
• The mechanism behind autism is, as you undoubtedly know, not well-understood. In the absence of a good understanding, this kind of uninformed speculation thrives.
• Lives have been lost as a result due to botched "Chelation" therapies, and money is being made by the self-styled DAN doctors who tell desperate parents what they want to hear

I have met a number of other parents of autistic kids. Those that are desperate enough to by into these theories are (often) otherwise rational, intelligent people. They are desperate for hope, and feel they owe it to their child to attempt some kind of cure. Whether this is due to denial (of the permanent disability) or unrelenting hope and a moral code that says "anything is better than nothing", I don't know. I do know I can relate to this, to a point, and was frustrated at the limited medical treatments available for my own son. Please have some sympathy for these misguided parents, as the real culprits are the alt-medicine charlatans who claimed to have found the cure, and the DAN doctors who really ought to know better.

I'm replying to the first response here, but this applies to about 3 or 4 posts below as well...

(Note: I'm not especially knowledgeable about current spaceflight technology. I read a lot on digg/popular mechanics/NASA news and make some attempts at keeping up with current technology, but I'm by no means an expert. If I said anything that is completely wrong, please just let me know and link me to the correction :-) )

You guys watch WAY too much star trek and star wars. We are nowhere remotely close (either in NASA or anywhere else) to a feasible transport mechanism capable of industrializing space, much less planetoids. Consider the following points:

1.) Space elevators for Earth and her Moon as well one for any planetoids or moon one wishes to mine. Rail launch systems are almost certainly too energy consumptive and the fuel requirements for interception and deceleration would negate the profits of recovery.
2.) Travel time from the Earth to Mars is too long for regular human flight. This means that cargo would have to be "shot at" the earth and the accuracy requirements would challenge our best procedures. We would also be required to expend most if not all volatiles we could mine in space just getting the materials back home. You can also scratch that idea of a "Mars vacation" right there. No matter how rich a person is, taking two years off to visit mars is a rather long vacation.
3.) How do we get very heavy things from space to earth? Dropping large rocks on the earth is a risky business. Even if you could devise a safe landing point for the objects that wouldn't kick up tons of debris into the atmosphere, every single earth friendly organization in the world would have a fit about all of the stuff left in the atmosphere by transit. If you packaged the materials to be delivered to reduce this, you have just created a huge expense for yourself in carting the stuff up to space.
4.) Propulsion systems capable of reaching mars by tiny unmanned spacecraft are grossly expensive to build and largely untested due to the very few times we have sent things to mars. Manned propulsion systems have never been tested. The only realistic assertion is that we do not yet have any propulsion system that is a viable candidate for the industrialization of our solar system.

NASA's role is largely experimental. There simply isn't any viable way for corporations to justify the incredibly massive budgets required for any project in space with the single possible exception of a space elevator. I sincerely believe that if anyone is willing to invest a trillion or so in the project, it would (eventually) pay off since it would be the delivery system of choice for nearly everything we want to put into space.

this isn't an exploit for your computer, it only affects IRC networks.

wait... wat?

"found guilty of indexing"!?!?

wtf does that mean exactly? Guilty of writing a program to search data? Guilty of writing a program to search data and then letting others view the results?

The only way that the MPAA/RIAA even know what is out there is by doing the same thing, the only difference being they aren't providing a service, they are angry about what they found.

What we find ourselves faced with is the guilt or innocence of someone writing software and then *giving away the software and/or the results of the software*. If indexing is a crime, then it is only a very very small step to say that writing software that gives others access to "features" of their hardware that the manufacturer doesn't want to give access to is illegal. After all, without VLC and mplayer it would be pretty easy for Quicktime/iTunes and Microsoft Media player to lock down the watching of illegal movies and listening of illegal music.

Keep walking down that path, and soon we loose all our digital freedoms...