I think you have completely misunderstood the post you are replying to. The author's whole point is that the syndrome formerly known as Asperger's is far less debilitating than those found at the other end of the autism spectrum.

There seems to be a contradiction in your positions here. You started by saying that Asperger's is/was "not really distinct from autism in any meaningful way", but now you are insisting that we make a distinction between high-functioning and the more severe incarnations of the disease. As the syndrome formerly known as Asperger's has been subsumed into the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum, you can't have it both ways.

For the limited purposes of the DSM, that may be true, but it is an invalid extrapolation to claim there is no meaningful distinction between the syndrome formerly known as Asperger's and what was meant by autism when Asperger's was in use. The fact that the former Asperger's is now regarded as a high-functioning autism spectrum variant does not justify this generalization, because the change is only in the language, not in what it denotes. The fact is that in many aspects of life, there is a huge difference in autism's impact across the spectrum.

I am also puzzled by how you can munge the definition of 'treatment criteria' in order to say that there is no difference between the treatment criteria for a nonverbal autistic person and someone with the former Asperger's syndrome.

My best guess is that what you meant to say is that there is no meaningful distinction between Asperger's and other high-function variants of autism.

In a rational world, that would be fine, and it generally works within the medical and other caring professions. Elsewhere, however, it is not hard to find people for whom this is too subtle, and who insist on over-generalizing from their own limited experiences, a habit that is facilitated by putting the whole spectrum under one word. You can find examples in this forum.

An unfortunate decision - for the victims and their families, there is a huge difference from one end of the spectrum to the other.

As diagnosed by Zach Weiner in his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2832

Who holds the copyright on that phrase?

I think you are almost certainly right, but because I don't know of an exploit that demonstrates a specific vulnerability of this sort, I did not want to make a claim that could be narrowly refuted. For more details on what I was thinking, see this response: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3763223&cid=43767955

That's a fair question, and I probably should have written something like "arguably, there was no security breach in these specific incidents." I don't think it would be a very good argument, but I wanted to 'immunize' my post against a sort of argument that has been used against me elsewhere (e.g. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3682437&cid=43544497 ) This 'so far, so good' fallacy takes several forms, such as 'the incidents [so far] have caused no losses / have only occurred in the lab / have all been caught [so far as we know]', 'the losses [so far] have been minimal / reversed'... In this particular case, an apologist for the system might say 'none of the incidents reported here involve covert subversion of [what passes for] the security of these systems'.

With regard to the specific incidents reported in this article, that seems to me to be true, but irrelevant. All 'so far, so good' fallacies share two problems. The first is that they ignore the fact that such incidents are good evidence that the system is not trustworthy, and the second is that the person making the fallacy is either unaware of its bogosity, or is deliberately trying to hide it. That means the commentator (and the organization she represents) is either incompetent (in the first case) or untrustworthy (in the second) on the subject of security.

The article includes another bogus argument: "the system has been extensively tested"... but the incidents are irrefutable evidence that the testing did not work. Another bogus argument that has been used in other cases is "there is nothing wrong with the standard, the problem was in the vendor's implementation"... but a standard without effective verification of compliance is useless.

By attempting to immunize my comment, I brought on your response instead, but that's OK, because we agree over what matters here.

While these incidents do not involve a security breach, they do indicate a sloppiness in the implementation, and so raise the concern that the system has been developed without the attention to detail that is a necessary (but not sufficient) prerequisite for security.

Part of the problem is that 'obvious' has gained a special meaning in this context, partly as a result of case law, and that meaning is not the obvious one. Lawyers aren't paid to be reasonable.

Good point. If I recall correctly from my brief encounters with the patent system, if you don't bring the examiner's attention to what could arguably be considered prior art, it explicitly counts against you should your patent be challenged. It may be that large corporations have realized that 'possession is nine-tenths of the law' definitely applies here, and they can cause a lot of trouble for a competitor even with a shaky patent, for example by dragging things out to the point where it becomes moot, or by using the threat of doing so to get cross-licensing agreements.

You imposed such a sweeping constraint on any planning beyond the personal (no-one in charge) as to render it pointless:

To be consistent, it would have to be your position that the energy sector, which you acknowledge in your subsequent reversal as being capable of planning, generally practices planning under this constraint.

On considering your later attempts to reinterpret the record, it seems possible that you had intended 'anyone' to refer specifically to either governments or government-like entities, but your placement of 'government' in a nonrestrictive clause rules it out. That would have been a different discussion.

But reason for what? You are attempting to make the case that country-level planning is an activity in which it is impossible, not just difficult, to do better than doing nothing at all. Unless you can demonstrate complete coverage, a list of ways things can go wrong doesn't get the job done.

You tacitly acknowledge this whenever you attempt to transfer your burden of proof to me. That's a common dogmatist move (most often employed to convince one another that their views are beyond question), but neither I nor any other rational reader need to go down that path.

I'm sure you will dispute all of this with more of the same, and it is clearly inevitable that you will have the last word, regardless of how many repetitions it takes. Go ahead - I am happy to leave any rational reader who might wander by to make up their own minds.

In other contexts, your observations about the difficulties of central planning would be useful contributions to the discussion, but they do not work as justifications for a self-contradictory piece of dogma.

The record stands for itself.

While going to jail has become an issue for Murdoch's editors in the UK, I don't think they are much at risk in the US.

The inevitability of flaws is not an excuse to foreclose on the question of whether the implementers of this system are trying hard enough to minimize them, and I belive the evidence shows they are not.

Leaving the implementation open for banks and card manufacturers to screw up was one of the bad decisions that indicate that the people who developed this system were not quite up to the job. in security, half a fence is no fence: you have to control everything.

All these responses that say 'that problem has been fixed' ignore the point that when you see one bad decision, it is almost certainly a sign that there are others that have just not surfaced. To give an example where lives were at risk, when it was found during the construction of the Los Angeles class submarines that a faulty weld on a torpedo rack had passed multiple inspections, it immediately threw doubt on every weld on every ship constructed under the program, because the inspection process for hull and reactor welds was not substantively different from the one that failed.

In addition, your use of non-sequiturs in your arguments, such as "this doesn't affect all cards", indicates that you are unwilling or unable properly evaluate the significance of the evidence.

Maybe this time it is better, but I am deeply concerned by how you, as someone involved in testing these systems, doesn't get these points and writes as an advocate for the thing you are supposed to be testing.