I assume you mean environmentally-caused or genetic? Because "developmental" and "genetic" are in no way whatsoever opposites of each other or mutually exclusive in the least. Even if you do mean environmental, it's a false dichotomy. Very little is entirely one or the other. It's completely possible that certain genes give you an increased proclivity towards autism, but environmental factors (which can include those before you're born) decide whether or not you really make it onto the spectrum, and how far.

Disclaimer: I know very little about autism, but have read enough about nature vs nurture in general to know that the odds of it being entirely one or the other are very, very low.

I dunno, I've downloaded a couple of those myself and they're even more trouble.

First there's the TCO. Keeping them virus-free is a couple hundred a year, plus if you let your subscription to the Kibble service lapse your Pet will stop functioning completely.

They all come preloaded with Poop.app, which can't be removed but needs constant maintenance. And in my models, at least, this sometimes will randomly upgrade itself to Poop 2.0 (code named Diarrhea) - that's a mess to clean up from your desktop, believe me.

And mine always seem to be blocking my access to the Furniture suite of utilities - there are workarounds, sure, but it's just one more thing to keep in mind.

Don't get me wrong, they have a lot of features that make them very worthwhile, but they're not for everyone!

Eight-year-olds are apparently less picky about their online freedoms than you are. Which is unsurprising, given that if their parents are smart they have pretty limited "freedom" to begin with.

I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born..

Aw, that's cute. We'll see what he says when he's forty and he gives his kid an iPod to play with.

I think you're using the term "third world country" when you really mean "industrialized country that's just not quite as globally powerful as the US." If you really, truly mean third world in all of the places you say it, then you are incredibly ignorant. Believe me, not being able to afford to own a house within a few miles of your job, or having kids ten years LATER than you would have liked, are the least of the worries of anyone living in the third world. Try not being able to afford electricity in the one-room shack that houses five people, or having kids far before you were economically or emotionally ready to because you have zero access to birth control or any kind of sex ed (abstinence or otherwise) - or better yet, because you were forced into it, and that's perfectly legal in your country.

I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.

I think this is also known as "UR Doin it Rong." If you can't afford the basic necessities, then NO, by definition, you CANNOT afford the electronics.

Same here - but my birthday's not for a few more months, so I'm still waiting... Maybe they'll give it the boost when they do their iPod-centric show (with new & improved Jobs?) in September.

Question their motives? So what if their motive is that they want to draw fictional naked children? As long as no real children are portrayed or in any way harmed in the making of those drawings, why should anyone care? The original point of child porn laws was to protect the children in the pornography. In this case, there are none.

That doesn't really help the case in question, where the chargebacks were legitimate and the result of stolen credit cards. You'd just be punishing the people whose cards were stolen even more, if you could even hold them to it since they're not the one who agreed to the ToS.

Did you not even read my comment? Or maybe you just haven't seen Cambridge - it's not like there's tons of open, empty space to throw up more dorms. I suppose there's an argument to be made for getting rid of the football field.... but really. They have about 1000 people per class. Say there are 2500 applicants who would do great there (about an accurate estimate, from the people I've seen). They would need to increase their total housing capacity from 4000 students to 10,000 students - that's not just one or two new dorms! They'd have to buy out half of East Cambridge to do that. And then you get to all the professors required to teach that many more courses, no small investment. Plus smaller things - like the fact that right now 75-80% of MIT students have a research job at some point, and 2.5 times as many students would mean more competition for those jobs, which leads to a worse educational experience for the average MIT student and a loss of a big selling point.

You can shout "elitism" all you want, but until you can address these simple logistical problems there will be far more people taking MIT seriously as an educational institution than taking you seriously in this argument.

The bad thing is that journals may selectively not publish papers they would have previously accepted from a researcher if they require open access.

This is precisely why this sort of thing HAS to start at schools like MIT (and Harvard and Stanford). If Podunk State U tried this, their faculty would suffer - but any journal in a field where MIT is dominant will be hard-pressed to stop accepting any and all publications from their faculty. And when you get a few other big names in there together, the journal would be putting their own reputation in serious peril if, say, they published nothing by professors in the top 10 schools in their field. Journals cherish their impact scores (which are exactly what are used when deciding whether you've published in good enough journals to get tenure), and if they are suddenly not being cited they will feel it.

I don't see how any of this means that the peer-review process, or the prestige associated with certain journals over others, has to end. Could you explain how you got from point A to point B?

The main reason it limits the size of each class is simply space. Since passing the (idiotic) "Freshmen on campus" rule several years ago, MIT has to have room for every member of its freshman class in its 11 dormitories. This caused it to cut the size of each class from about 1100 to 1000. Though, even before that, housing of some sort (dorm, frat/sorority, or independent living group) was guaranteed for four years (as it still is), so there were still limits. And trust me, in a housing market like boston/cambridge, guaranteed housing is important - if you think $45K/ year is expensive, try multiplying your housing costs by 4 or 5.

Though they also have very generous financial aid, which is getting more generous every year, so only the wealthiest students are actually paying the full $45K. I had a yearly required family contribution of near $0, and I have more loans from my two-year master's program (at a public school) than from my 5 years of undergrad at MIT.

You're clearly a guy, and are vastly underestimating the biological drive to have a baby in one's uterus shared by most women.

That, and the fact that I'm not sure whether it's more likely that we'll go extinct/move to another planet first, or that such technology will first become cheap enough that it will be the main way of having babies even in underdeveloped areas. (Meaning that I don't believe we will reach a point where there is no poverty anywhere on the entire earth, or anyone living without state-of-the-art technology.)

One prescription-strength ibuprofen = 4 normal (OTC) ibuprofen. It's the same drug, you can get the same dosage by just taking more pills of the OTC stuff.

It just makes the whole thing even more insane - it's bad that the policy couldn't differentiate between an illegal substance and a legitimate prescription, it's completely ridiculous that it can differentiate between pot and an extra-large OTC pill.