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.

I used to know basically no gamers who didn't play WoW. Now I don't know that I still know any. I was one of the loud defenders of Blizzard's choice to enter into a business merger with Activision, and I have been forced to admit that I was wrong. Blizzard's handling of events since then has been spectacularly bad -- I left over the Real ID stuff, myself. (Yes, I know, lots of people say they "backed down". Only temporarily and from the most ridiculously stupid parts; many other aspects are still horrible now, and some of the bad ideas they postponed may come back.)

Thing is, in MMOs, network effects are king. If you want to play a game with your friends, the game your friends play wins. But once you start losing that "everyone I know plays X" spot, there's not really any particularly great technical advantages of WoW over a lot of other MMOs, and quite a few are in many ways better. Even apart from my personal grudge against Blizzard, I found other games to do a better job of things that mattered to me, and I really got sick of Blizzard's active hostility to various parts of their user base. It was a real eye-opener when, after Blizzard spent several years explaining that it could never be possible to tweak the rulesets between PvE and PvP servers, Trion turned around and did it in a week during the Rift beta.

So now I play whatever I happen to know other people who play. And none of the individual games have the population density WoW did, but I am not totally unhappy about that, because it means more choice and more selection.

Stuff that's still going:
DDO: Very different philosophy and design, pretty cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with how Turbine runs things. The microtransaction stuff isn't as intrusive as I thought it would be, and the game design has some really nice appeal.
Rift: As a game, this is basically what I always wished Blizzard would do, and then some. Developers have been pretty responsive to user feedback, and there's a lot less of a focus on tedious time sinks. Big weakness, from my point of view, is that there's been basically no visible community maintenance in ages, so not only are there people who engage in massive, long-term harassment and abuse, but now there are lots more people who are abusive because they're convinced they can get away with it. Still, if you just wanna play with a few friends and ignore public channels, the game itself is amazing. (Slashdotters may care more than others: The addon API is beautiful. One of the nicest development APIs I've used.)
TSW: Not hugely happy with Funcom, but the game is fascinating, and does a lot of things which are radically different from other MMOs, some in very interesting ways. Also pretty responsive to user feedback in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Being allowed to adapt to when your body likes to be awake is a huge benefit.

So far as I know, most online games have a transaction store, so they can roll back to any second they want.

They managed to reproduce results fifteen or twenty years, and offer a stupid interpretation. Not bad!

The sleep-deprivation thing is well known, and not new. However, there's nothing tying it to "mobile devices". Rather, there's strong evidence that teenagers tend to have a circadian rhythm which favors being up later and not getting up that early. Schools have historically shoved their schedules extra-early so that extracurricular events like sports can occur before the sun goes down, but after school. Last time I heard about this, a school district had tried simply moving the high school day an hour later, and gotten a very noticable improvement in basically every measure of achievement available to them.

Now that I'm an adult, I sleep until I feel like getting up, and if I'm up a bit late, fine. I pretty much wake up between 11 and noon, and I work "late" most nights... But I get a heck of a lot more done, and a lot better, than I did when I was trying to work 9-5.

If they don't change his GAF score, and people change their handling of him significantly, then people are doing something wrong.

That said, I am pretty unhappy with the "high functioning" label these days; the idea that if you are mostly functional that means you don't need help is a great way to make people stop being functional.

You can't measure a single/unified physical thing, but you can very definitely measure autistic traits. There's a heck of a lot of measurements out there that show noticeable and fairly consistent patterns.

And so far as I can tell, a whole lot of that disparity in outcomes is less a question of differences in brains than of the environments people are in over a long period of time. I melt down pretty badly if I'm badly stressed for a long time, but put me in a livable environment and I'm practically like people!