Well, one answer might be that they could get the same rights everyone else does, to ask to be addressed or referred to a given way. But not necessarily the right to demand that everyone else be referred to the same way.

But I've only ever known one, and so far as I can tell, if her family weren't abusive she'd be fine, it's just that they're abusive to her. It's sorta like the distinction between "gay people" and "people who struggle with homosexuality".

See, that's the thing.

I don't want people going around separating me from who I am. Autism is not a thing that happened to me. It's what I am. If you made a thing otherwise like me, but not autistic, that thing would be a person, sure, but it would be a different person.

Please, please do NOT use "person-first" language.

I'm autistic. Most of my friends are autistic. I know dozens to hundreds of autistic people.

Guess how many people I have ever met who are autistic, and prefer to be called a "person with autism"? Hint: The number is slightly lower than one, and it's an integer.

Try going around referring, not to women, but to "persons with femaleness", and see how that works out for you.

A randomly selected blog article on the topic.

Basically, person-first language marks you as aligned with the Autism Speaks folks and their anti-autistic-people propaganda machine. Avoid it.

The distinction you point to is not as clear-cut as it might seem, because often these are the same people under different circumstances.

I do just fine. I have friends whose underlying autistic traits aren't any "more severe" or whatever, but who were raised by people who tried to force them to "be normal", and they have a much harder time.

Overload me, and I can't understand or use spoken language reliably. I can still read and write, though. But if no one ever gives you a pen, you can come across as a lot less capable than you are...

A guy whose company uses stack ranking is not in a position to complain about non-cooperative behavior.

This is a question about at the level of "yeah, if humans evolved from primates, why are there still APES?!?!?"

Basically, no one can explain it to you, because that you're asking at all tells us you are not seriously interested in the topic, and are either acting in bad faith or not patient enough to read through a complicated explanation.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? There's no such thing as a proof strong enough that someone who disagrees can't just say "I don't think that's convincing". They don't even have to be telling the truth; they can just lie.

The proof is plenty solid, no one's found "better" proof to the contrary.

People dispute climate change for the same reason they dispute evolution; because there's a lot of money to be made selling doubt to people who want to doubt.

How is this "news"?

There are a ton of reasons for which people care about medical privacy. Here's one: If you're trans, and you're on hormones, then being "outed" can get you killed. Although, frankly, nothing Google's done has ever given me the impression that they care; the way G+ has handled "real" names suggests to me that, as a corporation, Google would be happiest if all those people just stopped existing and being complications. (Note: I know a bunch of people at Google who don't feel that way; Google the corporation has behaviors that, so far as I can tell, Google employees generally dislike, but the dysfunctional way they run the company makes things happen anyway.)

Go read The Design of Everyday Things. Designers have, in multiple fields, consistently used their impressive educations and experience to produce systems which were demonstrably less usable and less well-liked than the things they replaced. It's very easy for people to fall prey to that, and "experts" are not immune...

It might sound like that, but when you consider the broad spectrum of things they're including as "active", it really isn't.

+1'ing apps in Google Play? Really? So everyone who's ever rated an app in the iTunes App Store is a user of Apple's social network? Everyone who's posted to Youtube, even if they've never created a G+ profile, is a user of G+ now? Everyone who uses gmail gets counted?

I've got no G+ account due to the naming policy crap, but I have gmail and I've posted on youtube. I bet they count me.

"If there is anything I have learned, it is that most humans have a desire to throw out the old and accept the new without any sort of hesitation."

I guess you haven't learned anything, then.

Maybe try again?

You mean, the sort of baseline of activity for "serious football fans"?

I mean, sure, there's excessive behavior around, but for the most part, the stuff I actually see people doing, as opposed to random people on the Internet saying they heard of someone doing, is pretty much normal for fandoms.

Please learn something. About something.

Seriously, the chances are pretty good that if you learn anything about any field of human endeavor, you will find something that is part of a compelling rebuttal to your idiotic screed.

Starting point: Humans cannot productively "work" all of their waking hours. They have to do other things to remain sane and functional. Do you think we should intentionally have the space station be run by, and maintained by, people who are no longer sane and dangerously incompetent from overwork? No?

Then maybe they should relax and goof off sometimes.

"More importantly, how do you do so without stepping on anyone's feelings?"

Is that really more important? Because it seems to me that, at the end of the day, engineering has to be about successful design and creation of things, not about feelings.

Being careful about people's feelings is important. If you want to succeed in solving problems, it is pretty much necessary. But you also have to be able to accept that, sometimes, people will be unhappy about things which are true, or hurt by things they need to be informed of.

I have about a 50-50 chance of strongly liking or strongly disliking legislation he proposes.

I'm sort of assuming that he's going to eventually turn this in a proposal to require unbundling of both cable packages and Constitutional rights.