On the other hand, yes, I get what you are talking about. Normal people have smooth, continuous minds and mine is more digital/discrete. But a good enough approximation is good enough?

I believe that the blind following of rules is a result of trying to adapt to an alien social environment, not one that is innate. A normal person stuck in a society of (functioning) autists/asperger people would be equally at loss, and would have to make up rules to get along. My mother has stated that she had to reason in this manner, both regarding me and regarding "aspie" colleauges and friends.

Also, for me at some point the rules turned into intellectual models about human behaviour that tries to relate my emotions and thoughts to those of others and thus lost much of their rigidity.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that numbers might be innate to the human perception of reality? If our brains worked differently we might use an entirely other way of viewing quantities that, for example, relies entirely upon geometry or some other, completely alien faculty not just for expression but for actually thinking about them - like those of a mind (hypothetically, that of a little green man from alpha centauri) that sees reality as a continuum and doesn't think about discrete objects or groupings as such. Who's to say that such a mind wouldn't have a more accurate view of reality?

A friend of mine has dyscalculia, and he doesn't grasp arithmetic or more than very basic numeral manipulation - yet he obviously can judge quantities and can intuitively reason abstractly about logical relationships between things. He just can't do math like we others can.

Computer security is still obscure, but it's gaining ground. At my local university there's a course in secure programming and one or two courses in "computer security".

You trained them to program? Could you perhaps elaborate on what this "programming" was?

Do you need to age into a career?

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to test a prototype software program designed to trap filthy Communists and Mutants inside a simulation of the life of a Red-level warehouse worker that Friend Computer has laboriously constructed. Unfortunately, the manual is marked Blue and cannot be accessed by a Red-level citizen such as yourself. Attempting to access the manual without clearance is Treason and punishable by termination. Friend Computer wishes you godspeed."

"They" "knew" about Sept. 11. And if we work backwards from the solution, physically stopping people from smuggling drugs across the border by force, isn't the problem fundamentally one of manpower?

While this is certainly rather awesome, as a non-US citizen I think they should be open about it. Even if everyone else already assumed that they monitored everything they possibly could. Also, how did they ever think they where going to keep a domestic operation of that scale secret?

Besides, how could they monitor foreign computer/internet-based espionage and other such things without actually monitoring the entire domestic network? If they where more open about this they could perhaps release information about botnet activity or similar useful data.

In the case of autism there's a quirk: "hyper-systemizing" people (i.e. potentially productive geeks) tend to have more children with autism and Asperger syndrome. This would indicate that there's a positive side to these genes that is maladaptive if taken too far.