I have twins with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (it's hard to narrow it down because it doesn't really fit any of the DSM4 categories.) I've not found that /formal/ social skills work is very helpful. What seems to work better is finding situations where they can have positive social engagement with people who "get it". As you observed, I've found that the particular training is much less relevant than whether the person "gets" people on the spectrum. A lot of people just don't understand how kids on the spectrum think, and they never will.

For us, our church was a great resource for an understanding, friendly group of people who knew us well enough to know that the twins needed special gentleness in social situations. But I don't think that would be true of every church.

Nope, that's not what killed it. Ethernet was just as bad before hubs and then switching came along -- even with hubs, one bad ethernet card could take down the whole broadcast domain, and did with some frequency. And with thinnet wiring (coax to the younglings) all it took was one marginal connector, anywhere in the loop, to kill the whole network. Don't even get me started on thicknet.

What killed it was money. Ethernet became very cheap to implement. Once everything moved to a star topology (hubs, then switches) the advantages of Token Ring were not worth the additional cost. Ethernet benefitted from being able to advertise higher bandwidths (10mbps, then 100mbps, vs. TR's 4/16 then, too late, 100) -- the perception was, "why would I want 16mbps token ring when I could have 100Mbps ethernet for less money?" Ethernet wasn't really any faster, and was often slower due to collisions, but everybody just looked at the total bandwidth. Once switch ports got cheap, collisions were no longer an issue and Token Rings fate was sealed.

Of course, Arcnet had a star topology long before Ethernet or Token Ring. But it too suffered from low nominal bandwidth.

Listen up, Junior ...

In some ways, Token Ring was very much superior to Ethernet. A hospital I worked for in the late 90's had a huge (1000 nodes) 4Mbps TR, all as one big subnet, built long before switches came along. If you tried to do that with Ethernet, it would have crashed and burned in a week. This was, on the whole, pretty reliable (if slow). The downside was that if one card in the ring failed, the whole thing would generally die. So it was great until the 10 year old TR cards started failing regularly due to capacitors failing. We ended up replacing the whole thing with 100Mbps switched ethernet, which wasn't really noticeably faster despite a 25-fold increase in nominal bandwidth, and failed more often. :)

More power, speed, etc. is nice. But what I'd really like is something even smaller than an rPi (and cheaper) that is still capable of running a reasonable linux distro. So far, I've come up empty. Don't need hdmi or sound, just USB. Anybody know of anything like this?

And still technical. 100% technical. There have been a few cases where I felt like I was denied a job because I was too old ... "not a good fit with company culture" and that sort of thing... but as others have said, those companies just disqualified themselves.

The reality is that I'm a better programmer now than when I was 25. I havre a much better understanding of "craftsmanship" -- things like testing, documentation, making sure my code is not "brittle" -- even though my ability to devour new technologies has slacked a bit.

I picked spatchcocked as the closest, but I actually roasted in pieces -- breasts boned and bound into a roast, legs and wings separate. Worked wonderfully.

My dad did a Masters in Math at Illinois back in the 60's. Part of his work was PLATO, and I still have an original manual. :)

I was a philosophy major as an undergrad, have a Masters in Theological Studies, and a PhD in New Testament, and pastored a couple of churches along the way (part time.)

I've been working in IT continuously since the mid 90's (part-time when I was working on the PhD), and am presently employed by a Major Telecommunications Company as a senior architect. I make very good money, and when I left another Major Telecom Company in March, after 15 years, I had 15 inquiries just by posting to Facebook. The other day, I had a recruiter from Amazon practically beg me to come interview (they lost out in March due to being too slow to arrange an on-site interview.)

The degree doesn't matter. The skills matter. If anything, my broad background sets me apart from the pack. But only because I've got the skills.

I was an Emacs dude for a long time and still use it. Then I tried RubyMine, and eventually upgraded to IDEA. The IDE features are sometimes handy. I also use vi very regularly for quick edits of small scripts.

I would no more stick to one editor than I would stick to one programming language. Right tool for the job is the key.

You're a fool. Once I realized that "willpower" is a metabolic state, not moral success or a moral failing, and I learned how to manipulate that metabolic state, I lost 150 lbs.

But go ahead, haters gotta hate!

You're right, I just got crossed up. I'm OLD and it's been a LONG time.

The distinction betwen "Linux" and "UNIX" is virtually meaningless. All of the traditional proprietary unixen are massively customized from the original System V/System 7 sources over the past thirty years -- such that it's hard to say that they have a common core even. The only real difference is a marketing difference.

So, say it with me!

Meh.

The point is not what the NSA has done with the information. The point is what they could do. Having "legally" (I use the term advisedly) obtained all this information on every American, they could now use it for any nefarious purpose. Having done so in secret, they hardly seem trustworthy.

I'm old enough to remember the days when we posted garbage at the end of messages for the "NSA line eater." Time to do that again.

Dude, I could drive a bus through the factual errors in your post. By the fifth century, the Roman Empire had no trace of democracy, it was a brutal dictatorship. Nor did kings have any real restraint in medieval Europe. Not did Islam have its origins in the late Roman Empire - Byzantine, MAYBE, but by the seventh century their control if Arabia was sketchy at best. Nor was Byzantium remotely democratic.

That dog won't hunt, and it's amazing to me that people are actually agreeing with you!

Sources: phd in New Testament and early Christianity, university of Virginia.

I work at a Very Large Company (who must remain nameless.) We've got Solaris boxes that were last rebooted in the 90's. Yes. Really. Running Solaris 2.6, even.