Just as I'm not going to go to the effort of working around Windows' bugs when Linux exists, I'm not taking the time and effort to work around slashdot's fuck ups when I can simply paste the text in soylent and just leave a link here.

I've thought about simply not posting items with smart quotes here at all. Dice needs to get its shit together. Every change they make makes the damned thing less usable. The last change they made seemed to do nothiing but force a horizontal scroll in my browser.

It's almost like they're trying to run users off the site. They're coming close with me.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought.

My oldest daughter is autistic and I'm pretty sure I know why. Autism spectrum disorder has a huge genetic component and is linked to families with high intelligence, which makes sense since they recently discovered that an autistic brain has too many neuronal connections.

Leila had birth complications, but despite our worries she was advanced in almost everything. She delighted in freaking people out by waving and saying "hi!" to them at six months. She discovered at a very early age that she could roll anywhere she wanted to go, so had no need to learn how to crawl. She walked at a normal age, and it only took a single day to potty-train her at fifteen months.

Then she got her MRI when she was two. An hour or two after we got home she started crying, then screaming and running a fever; we had no thermometer so don't know how high. We called the doctor, who said it wasn't that unusual and not to worry.

By the next morning she stopped talking, stopped using the potty, stopped playing, and withdrew into her own little world. Note this was early 1988 before vaccine fears came about and before autism was well known. Despite our poverty we took her to specialists, every one of whom misdiagnosed her. One doctor said mentally retarded, one checked her hearing and said she was deaf and we should all learn sign language (Leila has better ears than anyone I know).

It's my belief that a very small number of children who have the genetic component can't handle getting all three vaccines at once, or perhaps is allergic to some component. The doctor said fever is common, but perhaps a dangerously high fever happnes, too. That's what I think caused Leila's problems.

At any rate, thanks to the incompetence of some highly educated quacks, Leila, who turns 30 this year, will never hold a job or drive a car. She spends most of her time reading the news on the internet; she has the worst interpersonal skills of anyone I ever met.

You can be sure that we got separate vaccinations for Patty, rather than the MMR superbomb.

Get the measles vaccine, NOT the MMR. Get the shots separately, and if your kid gets a fever afterwards, take him or her to the hospital. We're a lot less ignorant than we were when Leila was 2 or 3.

Thanks, I just may. I wonder who the other person was?

B&N has one too, I may just go for both and look for more.

Amazon was an experiment. I read the library's copy of Andy Wier's The Martian, really liked it, and googled to see if he had any more titles. Wikipedia said that he couldn't get a publisher so he introduced it as an Amazon ebook, it went to their best seller list, and a publisher bought the hardcover rights for a six figure sum.

So I thought, what the hell, why not give it a try? I thought it might give me extra exposure, but I was wrong.

I came here to moderate, but unfortunately slashdot's bug initiation team has made it so I either have to have teeny tiny print or a side scroll. Hey, slashdot, we aren't all using thirty inch monitors! Jesus, even the newspapers (most are the worst sites on the web) don't fuck up this bad.

Really, slashdot, is Dice trying to get rid of you? This is really lame. You really should hang your heads in shame.

See you at Soylent News.

Now, someone else with points please mod me offtopic. Thanks.

ASCII is fine if it's only going to be published at slashdot, but conversion is a pain in the ass I shouldn't put up with.

It seems that slashdot no longer fixes bugs, but are trying to introduce more. Today I have a choice between a tiny font and a side scroll. LAME!

I think the writing was on the wall over a year ago when they tried to shove Beta down our throats.

I miss Taco, the place worked when he was here.

No, but he DID speak. This theory is the dumbest theory I've seen coming from someone who should know better for years; it's already been disproven before the dumbass thought of it.

Other apes have language. Prairie dogs have language. Even dogs have language, even though the only three things they say are "I'm hurt", "I'm lonely" and "get off my property before I eat you!" Previous STUDIES have shown this.

Why do these educated morons think vocal cords evolved for in the first place??

Also, the summary is likewise retarded: "If there's one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals, it's our ability to use language."

We may use it better than other species, but this is unproven; whales and dolphins may have more sophisticated language than us, but we can't tell because we can't understand them. It may well be that we're the only species to have abstractions, but that's not proven, either.

Tools aren't even human-only; birds and other animals have been spotted using tools. So what makes us different?

Music, art, and humor. No other species laughs (Hyenas' "laughs" aren't from humor); no other species make art (the elephant doesn't count; do you really think he knows what's going on?), and no other species makes music -- and no, bird "song" isn't music, it's speech (that the idiots coming up with this absurd theory don't understand).

Google's spider hadn't yet hit it that day according to site stats, while everyone else's had. Strange, since Google spiders more than anybody. After it was spidered I got the same results as you.

SSHHH! Damn it, Rula!