it renders most afflicted persons unsociable and awkward and therefore highly unlikely to pass on their genes?

What makes you think it meakes them any less likely to pass on their genes - on the average? Autism spectrum is virtually synonomous with "nerd". Recent studies (referenced in at least one recent slashdot discussion) have shown that "nerds" are nearly as likely to marry as the average, and MUCH more likely to have a stable, long-lasting, marriage.

While I didn't see anything about their reproduction rate, stable marriages tend to lead, not just to children, but to an upbringing that produces SUCCESSFUL children. (In particular, a male role model is virtually required for the male offspring to avoid mis-socialization that leads to a tendency to violent crime and prison time.)

Add to that the observation that some of the best paying jobs tend to be performed very well by, and dominated by, people with various Ausbergers-spectrum "disorders" and you have obvious advantages for both attracting a mate to a stable relationship and providing children with competitive advantages (especially health care and education).

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel. Way to prove Linux is superior.

This thread shows a lot of what is wrong in the Linux community.

This thread does nothing of the sort.

The problem was posted to Slashdot. The bulk of the ENORMOUS Slashdot community is NOT the tiny subset of the Linux community that actually hacks Xorg. So the bulk of the comments are by people TALKNIG ABOUT IT but not actually involved with a fix.

But a FEW of the people who are either involved, or know how to do this stuff, DID dig right in. Above here you find posts describing work that isolated the patch that broke the feature and makig a start on identifying a fix. Near by is another set of posts showing that the actual developers were already on it, had already made a fix, and were discussing the schedule of the fix's release.

So it looks to me like the posting DID do EXACTLY what RMS says such things do:
  - It got someone to start working on a fix - and make substantial progress in a matter of hours. If there wasn't already a fix in the pipe this would have put it there.
  - It identified that the maintainers are already on it and the fix is probably coming out in a future release Real Soon Now (TM).
  - It may, very shortly (if it hasn't already) make a patch (or several) available for those who can't wait.
  - It has probably lit a fire under the regular maintainers.
And, of course, because it's Slashdot:
  - It has created a LOT of talk about it - much of it uninformed, much of it griping, with a few jems of pure-quill information.

If you focus on the large volume of cabbaging and meta-discussion by interested but uninvolved parties, it's easy to miss that EXACTLY what was desired HAS occurred and IS occurring.

And let's see any commercial provider of proprietary and closed-source software react this quickly, now that the poster has found a forum where submitting a bug report gets attention and feedback.

Leaving out the 2nd is not some grand conspiracy. It illustrates what the ACLU fights hardest for, and everyone knows the ACLU doesn't bother with the 2nd amendment.

I wouldn't mind if they just ignored it - and left it for other groups (like the Secon Amendment Foundation or the Cato Institute.) But they don't restrict themselves to that.

For instance: A guy had a gun locked in a safe in his office. The crooks cracked the safe, stealing the valuables and the gun. Then the stoen gun was used in a later crime where someone died. The ACLU financed a wrongful death suit against the guy whose gun was stolen from the locked safe.

Now this WAS a few decades ago. It was about the same time another office of the ACLU was defending the rights of the American Socialist Party (i.e. the American neo-NAZIs) to march in a Chicago suburb with a substantial population of Jewish NAZI death-camp survivors.

Since then they've even allied with the NRA when their interests coincided. (Notably: when Chicago instituted warrantless searches of the south-side low-income housing projects for legal pistolsk, which they'd purported to ban by a housing authority rule. The NRA didn't like house-to-house gun sweeps and government landlords banning guns with unconstitutional, non-law, rules (giving the poor the choice of being homeless or gunless), while the ACLU didn't like warrantless searches. But I still don't trust them anywhere near a gun-rights issue, and haven't donated since that wrongful death suit.

What I'd rather know about that ad, is that him walking along the beach with the girl in the blue bikini with the really nice ass?

The girl doesn't come across well on the radio.

On what station(s) have you seen the TV version? B-)

Everywhere this psychopath goes, ...

Why is Slashdot giving this guy a forum?

Because they can?

---
(For those not familiar with psychopathy, that's a psychopath joke. It's funny, laugh.)

An observation more than a question, but feel free to comment (especially if you have information on the subject).

Starting shortly after your Belizian adventure I've noticed a rash of radio advertising, touting Belize as a tax haven and secure retirement site for those ith substantial assets, and trying to sell land to them. These adds always strike me as funny.

Since their authorities went after you, has Belize suffered a sudden drop in interest as a "safe haven" for the retiring well-off, or perhaps an exodus of others already there?

otherwise known as "learning sociopathic manipulation"?

An occultist I knew (now on the "other side", unfortunately) considered charisma to be a form of Black Magic: mind control of others to get them to do things for the charismatic that would not be their reasoned choice and might be enormously harymful to their own interests.

Having said that, it's clear that a lot of nerds are so far at the other end of this arms race that they need substantial help to be able to hold their ground against the Pointy Haired among the boss class. It's refreshing to find that it is learnable, and that nerd/tech techniques can be applied to understanding and controlling it.

Look out world: After a few years of application of the psychological equivalent Moore's Law, you might see an explosion of technocrats from the tech incubator enclaves like Silicon Valley.

And look out techies: If the above meme starts circulating among the current powers that be, you might see a burst of government interventioin in and suppression of the tech enclaves.

Wait, Homeopathy is like vaccination????

Yep.

For a long time allergists and allergy desensitization treatments were disparaged by much of the medical community because of the procredure's similarity to Homeopathic treatments and theory.

Does it cause Autism?

Nope.

Neither, apparently, does vaccination. If I recall correctly: The research claiming to show that was sponsored by trial lawyers, many attempts were made to replicate it but they all failed, the journal which published it (and, eventually, even the doctor who performed it) withdrew it. Vaccines have some risks and downsides, both from the active ingredients and the preservatives, but apparently autism is not one of them.

Of course, after all the publicity, there are plenty of people who still believe in a vaccine/autism connection. Just as there are still people who believe in autointoxication and that a lack of "regular" daily bowel movements sickens people - a theory that was heavily pushed by the US government during WW I, when it was covering up the spreading of the influenza epidemic by its refusal to "hamper the war effort" by minimizing movement of infected troops among US bases at home.

So they can distribute "Bill of Rights" posters with the Second Amendment deleted?

... apparently people are still using Facebook.

Well, they were two years ago. From TFA:

Riley was 13, in sixth grade, when she posted on Facebook two years ago that she hated a school hall monitor because she was mean.

Letting such agorithms compete seems an excellent reason to encourage, rather than reject by law, ride-coordination services like Uber and Lyft.

Taxi licensing laws aren't about giving the CUSTOMERS good service. They're about limiting competition so the licensed cab owners have a regulated oligopoly that limits competition and keeps the prices higher than market-clearing.

It's much like the laws limiting car sales to dealers that are giving Tesla such a problem.

This is crony capitalism at its most blatant.

Heck, you don't even have to dig that deep to realize that an atom does not resemble the solar system, even though both have small things orbiting a large central mass.

Actually electrons DON'T orbit nuclei. What they do is more akin to being standing waves surrounding them. With the opposite charges on the electrons and the nuclei, if they orbited in the classical mechanics sense they'd continuously emit electromagnetic radiation and the orbit would quickly decay. This is part of what put physicists onto the track of quantum mechanics.

It's one of the big differences between the nanoscopic world where quantum mechanical effects become obviously far larger than the classical mechanics approximations they approach at large scales in incoherent bulk material.

I'm curious about which patents are being asserted. The news items somehow never get around to listing the patent numbers or describing them.

(I worked for a router company when Nortel was sinking and suing everybody who did anythig with SONET for infringement, in a desperate attempt to come up with enough money to avoid going under. Very much like a drowning person dragging others down. Some of my inventions (including patented ones) were in a chip that had something to do with SONET, so I (and other designers on the project) were called in to explain how the way WE did things didn't infringe these particular paptents. My stuff didn't infringe, IMHO, though I don't know about other people's. Nevertheless, the company settled the suit by cutting a cross-license deal (incuding paying them a few million because Nortel had more patents).

[Parent poster talks of ONE of his many anti-gun (i.e. anti-gun-in-private-hands) projects.]

Prohibition of something means the illegal providers of it have less competition and can thus sell for a higher price. So it's very convenient for those sellers. Thus, for instance, drug lords are just fine with keeping the drug laws strong and complex, and opposed to legalization of their product (which would put them in competition with efficient conglomerates who could compete the pants off them).

(Incidentially: I suspect Yee's opposition to video games was a spinoff of his antigun agenda.)

By the way: Pro-gunners are celebrating tonight. (The call from a friend a few hours ago with the news made both my wife my own day. B-) )

... people fully EXPECT the NSA to be upto nasty secret snooping habits. That is actually the minor part of the story that caused the outrage. The more dangerous fact is that the NSA can demand companies or individuals turn over data to them and impose a gag order thus forcing them to keep it secret.

I agree that the latter IS a big problem. But I don't agree that it's the ONLY problem, or the only BIG one.

National Security Letters are still relatively narrow compared to what the NSA did. They also tapped the fibers Google and others used to communicate with each other, and used these taps to snoop everything that went across them, without Google's knowledge.

I encountered a Google engineer with job responsibilities related to that at a conference last year, and he was LIVID. They'd tapped fibers OWNED BY GOOGLE - trespassing and damaging them (aong with Google's credibility) in the process - with no letters, warrants, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, or what-have-you. Google has since been installing encryption thorughout it's network - not just where it leaves the building, but even from rack to rack.

Maybe they're still stuck disclosing SOME stuff. But at least they're trying to know what it is, do their best to minimize it (and protect their model), and avoid inadvertently firehosing EVERYTHING into the maw of the NSA.