Depends. There's some confusion, now. There's a big IBM system being commissioned below me in Queensberry st, but I've just been told that it's for different things, and that this announcement might be for another, different, new IBM installation.

I used to be in CSSE, but I'm seconded to ITS right now. (That should be enough to identify me uniquely to those in the right circles...)

As for CSSE moving... that's been on-again-off-again for years, but last I heard it's definitely on-again. With deadlines and everything.

OK, hands up all you Unimelb peons...

I wouldn't be surprised if the AC and I are within twenty meters of each other.

Who would have thought that sysads might read /.

Careful, there, mate. I think you may have put the shiny side of the tinfoil the wrong way round this morning.

You are correct, it's in the University of Melbourne.

In fact, it is about two floors directly underneath me as I type this.

"Face blindness".

It is not a blindness of the eyes, it is a blindness of the brain. I cannot visualise faces. None. I cannot describe to you my own wife's face, nor those of my children. I can recognise them, but that is handled in a different part of the brain.

It is just as real, just as organic, as colour blindness.

"Auditory Processing Deficit".

I cannot filter multiple sound sources properly. The Cocktail Party Effect does not exist for me. It is not a deafness of the ears, it is a deafness of the brain.

And it is just as real, just as organic, as tinnitus.

Every man and every woman is a star... but stars are yet of the universe, and each star is in orbit around other stars.

While I am the master who makes the grass green, my head is not so big as to carry rocks inside it.

I am not my body, or my brain. But I am of them. And this is not a mere function of ‘personality’. My brain works differently from yours. You can perceive things which I cannot. It is that simple. You may as well tell me to see in gamma rays as to be able to notice subtle emotions on another's face.

Change is easy -- when you are physically capable of doing so. I can not think like you, but I can learn to look like I do. Which I have done, but it is not a matter of ‘changing’ my personality, but of hiding those things I cannot do.

So you are an Ásatrúar. In what manifestation then, do you see Óðinn? Is He the Blood God, harsh and demanding of sacrifice, or is He the One-eyed, questing for knowledge and wisdom? Because from your exchange here, Huginn and Muninn would blunt their beaks trying to penetrate your skull.

You do not understand Asperger's, or people with it. You think you do, but you are wrong.

An explanation is not an excuse. A reason is not a license.

Some people are just arseholes. And, shock, most of those are NTs. You're doing a pretty good impersonation right now, yourself.

I assume, then, that the face blindness is also a choice. Or the Social Anxiety (I know full well that there is nothing to worry about intellectually, but that doesn't stop my body having a panic reaction.) Or the Auditory Processing issues. Or, or, or...

Asperger's is a real condition, with real consequences. Those consequences can sometimes be mitigated, with practice and training, but those are workarounds: we really do not think in the same way that you do, we do not react in the same way that you do, even if we have learned to pass as NT.

It is a constraint on our behaviour, just as being male (I presume) is a constraint on yours. Unless you are a practising Thelemite, in which case you might have the first vaguest foggy glimmer of how hard it is to willingly change an innate trait.

Go ahead, tell a gay man that it's just a matter of willpower, and he can be straight if he really really tries.

And I hope that your obvious ignorance never comes back to bite you. Who am I kidding: you're NT, and have the privilege of being able to demand that I act like you, and feel like you're simply being reasonable. You have the privilege of being normal... so shut the fuck up about what it's like to not be normal, 'k?

No, it's not. It's really really not.

Please shut up before your ignorance embarrasses yourself further.

Words of someone who got lucky.

So it worked for you. Huzzah.

How many other kids do you think tried that sort of thing, and got seven kinds of shit beaten out of them? And then got it worse afterwards for daring to stand up?

What happens when you get someone who is willing to risk an elbow to the throat? And/or is simply better than you at head-kicking?

How about you try to think of a way of addressing this problem which doesn't hold the victim responsible for their own victimisation?

PS: and fuck whoever thought this was 'insightful'.

Knowing the reason for something is not the same as using it as an excuse.
Knowing where one has deficits is not the same as not having a reason to find workarounds, or to work on improvement.
Having Asperger's does not make one a robot, without willpower, discipline or a drive to improve.

TL;DR: Fuck you. And fuck you if you think that spending my childhood being bullied has made me a victim.

The factors involve a child's inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.

So... they've identified Asperger's as a factor in being bullied.

As an Aspie, may I say how wonderful it is that someone seems to have noticed.

If advertising didn't work, there wouldn't be so much of it.

Universities in .au, probably elsewhere as well, have been selling themselves increasingly for their job training and less for the concept of a liberal education for decades now.

Only a few go to university now to be simply educated, most are going to uni To Get A Job: it is an almost compulsory step between high school and any professional job. And most technical jobs. I wonder sometimes when more universities will go into more trade training, trying to steal business from technical schools. (As opposed to places like RMIT and Swinburn going the other way: technical colleges who became universities.)

And so, when university is sold as something which will get you a job, these expectations are built. Reasonably or not. (In my opinion, not.) But the trend is there, nonetheless.

A University education has gone from something needed for certain jobs, to something needed for certain classes of work, to a sine-qua-non of employment in entire sections of the workforce. And the universities have been competing with each other to advertise how good they are at giving an education which improves the student's chances of getting a job â" a good job, a desirable job â" advertising which might give the impression that such a job is practically guaranteed: that you go to this uni or that one not because of the education you get, but because of the job you are all but promised to walk into when you graduate. (Before you graduate, even, with graduate placements and the like.)

Personally, I think the uni sector would be better off selling the quality of the education itself, rather than expectations of the utilitarian results.

But I only work for a university, and as professional staff at that, so there is no hope that my opinion carries the slightest weight whatsoever.