It seems like it is almost inevitable that someone "won't be paying their fair share" when we have a complicated tax code. We have numerous incentives and exceptions. We have reasons for them.

Personally, I'd like to see a simplified tax code. One with no exemptions or exceptions. But even then, some would still think others aren't paying their fair share.

If any country ever does manage to make a decent and simple tax code, they might find they have a worse problem: large numbers of suddenly unemployed lawyers looking for "work".

Uh, no.

Look, imagine that we discovered that about 2% of our population were heavily vulnerable to simple trickery, like they were much more enthusiastic about a 10% chance of survival than a 90% chance of mortality, even though they're the same thing. And they were easily manipulated by actors who knew how to show a particular emotion on command. And they had some cool things, like they were unusually good at reading emotions from facial expressions, but overall they had crippling problems that made it hard for them to function like rational adults.

Now, consider: If 98% of people were ASD, and 2% weren't, that would be what we'd have. We'd have a diagnostic criterion for "obsessive social behavior", but some people would argue that these poor overly-socialized kids are actually pretty tolerable once you get used to them, and maybe we should just accept that there's a few people who have this driving need for social interaction and can't focus on work and hobbies like normal people.

Neurodiversity isn't about dysfunction, it's about function that really is different, and not necessarily obviously better or worse.

Actually, he won't be "cured". He'll have autism spectrum disorder, rather than asperger syndrome, most likely. I can't see a way someone could have an AS diagnosis under DSM-IV and not be considered ASD under DSM-V.

What he said wasn't exactly super formal clinical language, but it certainly fits a pretty well-observed pattern. People do not deal well with autistics.

No, you broke it. It was, if not right, at least coherent before.

Psychiatrists are the ones that are MDs and prescribe medicine. The ones who sell therapy sessions are psychologists and counselors.

Except it's not the sneaky terms, it's the blatant fraud. I am not super convinced by the student newspaper report...

I've done some consulting work for him in the past.

Honestly... He's sort of a jerk sometimes, and he makes some really poor decisions sometimes. But he's honest, and he's not a total moron. He isn't suing people to create some kind of crazy profit center, he's trying to deal with people using forged or incorrect tickets to get on buses. People like to point to his (admittedly a little wacky) terms and conditions and imply that he's suing over stupid shit. He's not, so far as I know. He's suing over people who do stuff like print three copies of the same ticket and get on three different buses that are running the same schedule. This isn't about "socially acceptable behavior", for the most part. (Some of the later stuff, like the defamation claims, was pretty dumb IMO, though.)

And everyone jumps in with some "oh, hey, I know how you could easily solve this!" solution. It's like the thing where, if you spend ten years working with doctors to try to treat insomnia, anyone who hears about this will suggest you cut down on caffeine after dinner. Because, obviously, neither you nor the doctors have ever thought of that!

Yes, there really are reasons that checking passengers against a manifest is at the very least a substantially higher cost than the (fairly small, compared to the user base) amount of fraud. Yes, there are reasons it probably wouldn't be a good tactic at all. It's not that he's too much of an idiot to think of this, it's that he has more information about what is actually happening than those of us who are reading couple-paragraph summaries over the Internet.

FWIW, I got a ThinkPad in 2001, got the 3-year extended warranty. Two and a half years in, I bought another two year extension. I got some repairs under it. It was pretty cost-effective.

I still have that machine. Heck, I've used it in the last year because I had Windows stuff that needed XP.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I think Zero Tolerance polices are bullshit regardless of history -- and indeed, once you start taking history into account, you can't be talking about a zero tolerance policy, because if there were history to talk about, there wouldn't still be a student.

As to whether she "lied" in saying it was a project: She didn't say it was a project assigned by a teacher. "Project" and "project specifically assigned by a teacher" are not the same thing. Maybe she lied, maybe she didn't. She may well have been intending to do something like this for the science fair, and screwed it up. Or maybe she was just making excuses. We don't know! Asserting that it can't have been a project because the teacher said it wasn't is stupid for two reasons:

1. Not all projects are assigned.
2. Teachers also lie.

Pretty sure that, if you're a kid, but not a black kid, "what's coming to you" for a thing that doesn't injure anyone does not involve felony charges and being tried as an adult.

I was under the impression that charges which don't lead to convictions get dropped and that, say, employers are not allowed to ask or investigate that; they can ask whether you've been convicted, but not whether you've been charged.

I think you miss a key point: Racism doesn't necessarily imply people not getting along. It just implies that, say, they might be more likely to arrest a black person than a white person for doing the same things. Say, arresting a kid and charging her with a felony for doing a science experiment.

I don't recall actually encountering it, not when I was younger, not now. (I'm starting to be on the older end of the spectrum, I think.)

Dungeon Master was pretty amazing, too. I recently noticed that one of the "believed good" cracked images floating around still has some of the secondary protection in it. (And I have really no regrets about "pirating" the game, given that I've bought at least one copy of every DM game I've ever been able to find, and two of a couple of them. I even have the Sega CD version of DM2.)

(DM also wins points for the ludicrously over-careful design; I was once informed that the fact that you had to fall through a pit to get the rope that would let you drop into pits without taking damage was, in fact, discussed internally, and allowed on the grounds that you could have chosen to start with a character who had a rope.)

Copying ideas is not the same thing as copying implementation.

Ideas are cheap. Implementation is expensive.