France to halt exportation of crepes, Mexico tamales. Stop the spying the demand!

[TSA]

The NSA spying scandal is causing an uproar in capitals around the world as revelations surface that the US intelligence agency has been spying on citizens of friendly countries in France and Mexico. In France the US ambassador was summoned to explain why French telephone data was recorded by the NSA between December and January of this year. The allegation was published in France’s paper of record Le Monde.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Le Monde’s report on Monday that 70.3 million items of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between December 10, 2012 and January 8, 2013 were “unacceptable”.

The NSA’s targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, but also people tied to French business or politics, the report said.”We have extremely useful cooperation with the United States in the struggle against terrorism, but this cooperation does not justify everything,” Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting with EU counterparts in Luxembourg.

[hater]

http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2006/07/10/knPARIS_1_gallery__470x281.jpg

:lmao :lmao :lmao

[TSA]

:danceclub

[Th'Pusher]

Are you done with your emotional nosedive? Fuzzy didn't think the title of your thread encompassed the point of the story. Get over it...

[hater]

I haven't had this much fun since Lance Armstrong hustled these french bitches out of 12 Tour de Frances :lol

[TSA]

:stupid:

[Clipper Nation]

Are you done with your emotional nosedive? Fuzzy didn't think the title of your thread encompassed the point of the story. Get over it...
:lol Labeling everything TSA posts as "emotional" because you're still mad about losing a gun-control debate from months ago

[ElNono]

http://i.imgflip.com/4bner.jpg

[Th'Pusher]

:lol Labeling everything TSA posts as "emotional" because you're still mad about losing a gun-control debate from months ago
Link?

[The Reckoning]

lol i was going to make a baguette/enchilada joke but you beat me to it

[TSA]

Link?

Seriously? If I cared or was emotional enough I could link at least 50.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Seriously? If I cared or was emotional enough I could link at least 50.

Seeing your tantrum because I criticized your title, I would say you are full of shit. Is it so hard to just post the actual title of the article? You really aren't smart enough to go ad libbing like that.

[TSA]

Seeing your tantrum because I criticized your title, I would say you are full of shit. Is it so hard to just post the actual title of the article? You really aren't smart enough to go ad libbing like that.

Is it so hard to read between the lines you uptight douche? You and your leghummper Puther look pretty fucking dense here. Your Asbergers has been exposed. I figured you as such, being that I worked in the field for 6+ years. Let me guess....programmer in the Silicon Valley?

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Is it so hard to read between the lines you uptight douche? You and your leghummper Puther look pretty fucking dense here. Your Asbergers has been exposed. I figured you as such, being that I worked in the field for 6+ years. Let me guess....programmer in the Silicon Valley?

Uptight pfft. You're the one getting upset.

Read between the lines? Well there are quite a few lines considering I made that thread and you went on to make about 10 more. I have no doubt that after you got some positive responses it encouraged you but I also have no doubt that a bit of butthurt precipitated the initial response. Now go ahead and front that it was all a joke.


Classic Troll Tactic Number 1: If the heat gets too much for you, claim it was all "a joke." In this way you can excuse any and all deceit by claiming people just weren't smart enough to "get" the humor of it.

Chafed already.

My job title is firmware engineer although it is more or less programming where the instruction sets are on the bit level. I cannot just piggyback off of C# libraries which is what more than a lot of coders do. Not that I am criticizing that in and of itself. Why write new functions on standardized hardware when you don't have to?

Aspergers is demonstrated by a complete lack of empathy. I have no idea how you would think that I have that. I am guessing you are talking out of your ass. This issue is moot on the interwebs because most of the cues such as tone, the eyes, mouth, etc are not viewable. That is much the reason why we are such pricks to each other here.

[TSA]

Uptight pfft. You're the one getting upset.

Read between the lines? Well there are quite a few lines considering I made that thread and you went on to make about 10 more. I have no doubt that after you got some positive responses it encouraged you but I also have no doubt that a bit of butthurt precipitated the initial response. Now go ahead and front that it was all a joke.And you wonder why I think you have Aspergers.

"Some studies also suggest sufferers have a weak sense of humor: They may understand a joke on a cognitive level but lack "understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others,"

http://gawker.com/5885196/the-tech-industrys-asperger-problem-affliction-or-insult


If you have time today please take this test and share your results. Thank you.

http://www.aspergerstestsite.com/75/autism-spectrum-quotient-aq-test/

[FuzzyLumpkins]

And you wonder why I think you have Aspergers.

"Some studies also suggest sufferers have a weak sense of humor: They may understand a joke on a cognitive level but lack "understanding of the intent of humor to share enjoyment with others,"

http://gawker.com/5885196/the-tech-industrys-asperger-problem-affliction-or-insult


If you have time today please take this test and share your results. Thank you.

http://www.aspergerstestsite.com/75/autism-spectrum-quotient-aq-test/

Trying to take my schtick... how unoriginal of you. Nice google based psychobabble though.

[TSA]

Trying to take my schtick... how unoriginal of you. Nice google based psychobabble though.

I did behavior management/modification for six years with kids diagnosed with autism, I have also worked with clients with Aspergers although they rarely came through the program because they were generally non-violent. A very large percentage of these kids parents were programmers/techies. I know it's just an internet test so take it with a grain of salt. Serious question though, have you ever been tested?

[TSA]

Fuzzy do not mate with any of your co-workers please.


http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aspergers_pr.html

It's a familiar joke in the industry that many of the hardcore programmers in IT strongholds like Intel, Adobe, and Silicon Graphics - coming to work early, leaving late, sucking down Big Gulps in their cubicles while they code for hours - are residing somewhere in Asperger's domain. Kathryn Stewart, director of the Orion Academy, a high school for high-functioning kids in Moraga, California, calls Asperger's syndrome "the engineers' disorder." Bill Gates is regularly diagnosed in the press: His single-minded focus on technical minutiae, rocking motions, and flat tone of voice are all suggestive of an adult with some trace of the disorder. Dov's father told me that his friends in the Valley say many of their coworkers "could be diagnosed with ODD - they're odd." In Microserfs, novelist Douglas Coupland observes, "I think all tech people are slightly autistic."

Though no one has tried to convince the Valley's best and brightest to sign up for batteries of tests, the culture of the area has subtly evolved to meet the social needs of adults in high-functioning regions of the spectrum. In the geek warrens of engineering and R&D, social graces are beside the point. You can be as off-the-wall as you want to be, but if your code is bulletproof, no one's going to point out that you've been wearing the same shirt for two weeks. Autistic people have a hard time multitasking - particularly when one of the channels is face-to-face communication. Replacing the hubbub of the traditional office with a screen and an email address inserts a controllable interface between a programmer and the chaos of everyday life. Flattened workplace hierarchies are more comfortable for those who find it hard to read social cues. A WYSIWYG world, where respect and rewards are based strictly on merit, is an Asperger's dream.

Obviously, this kind of accommodation is not unique to the Valley. The halls of academe have long been a forgiving environment for absentminded professors. Temple Grandin - the inspiring and accomplished autistic woman profiled in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars - calls NASA the largest sheltered workshop in the world.

A recurring theme in case histories of autism, going all the way back to Kanner's and Asperger's original monographs, is an attraction to highly organized systems and complex machines. There's even a perennial cast of hackers: early adopters with a subversive streak. In 1944, Asperger wrote of a boy "chemist [who] uses all his money for experiments which often horrify his family and even steals to fund them." Another boy proved a mathematical error in Isaac Newton's calculations while he was still a freshman in college. A third escaped neighborhood bullies by taking lessons from an old watchmaker. And a fourth, wrote Asperger, "came to be preoccupied with fantastic inventions, such as spaceships and the like." Here he added, "one observes how remote from reality autistic interests really are" - a comment he qualified years later, when spaceships were no longer remote or fantastic, by joking that the inventors of spaceships might themselves be autistic.

Clumsy and easily overwhelmed in the physical world, autistic minds soar in the virtual realms of mathematics, symbols, and code. Asperger compared the children in his clinic to calculating machines: "intelligent automata" - a metaphor employed by many autistic people themselves to describe their own rule-based, image-driven thought processes. In her autobiography, Thinking in Pictures, Grandin compares her mind to a VCR. When she hears the word dog, she mentally replays what she calls "videotapes" of various dogs that she's seen, to arrive at something close to the average person's abstract notion of the category that includes all dogs. This visual concreteness has been a boon to her work as a designer of more humane machinery for handling livestock. Grandin sees the machines in her head and sets them running, debugging as she goes. When the design in her mind does everything it's supposed to, she draws a blueprint of what she sees.

"In another age, these men would have been monks, developing new ink for printing presses. Suddenly, they're reproducing at a much higher rate."

These days, the autistic fascinations with technology, ordered systems, visual modes of thinking, and subversive creativity have plenty of outlets. There's even a cheeky Asperger's term for the rest of us - NTs, "neurotypicals." Many children on the spectrum become obsessed with VCRs, Pokémon, and computer games, working the joysticks until blisters appear on their fingers. (In the diagnostic lexicon, this kind of relentless behavior is called "perseveration.") Even when playing alongside someone their own age, however, autistic kids tend to play separately. Echoing Asperger, the director of the clinic in San Jose where I met Nick, Michelle Garcia Winner, suggests that "Pokémon must have been invented by a team of Japanese engineers with Asperger." Attwood writes that computers "are an ideal interest for a person with Asperger's syndrome ... they are logical, consistent, and not prone to moods."

This affinity for computers gives teachers and parents leverage they can use to build on the natural strengths of autistic children. Many teenagers who lack the motor skills to write by hand find it easier to use a keyboard. At Orion Academy, every student is required to buy an iBook fitted with an AirPort card. Class notes are written on electronic whiteboards that port the instructional materials to the school server for retrieval. (At lunch, the iBooks are shut off, and if the kids want to play a two-person game, they're directed to a chess board.) The next generation of assistive technology is being designed by Neil Scott's Archimedes Project at Stanford. Scott's team is currently developing the equivalent of a PDA for autistic kids, able to parse subtle movements of an eyebrow or fingertip into streams of text, voice, or images. The devices will incorporate video cameras, head and eye tracking, intelligent agents, and speech recognition to suit the needs of the individual child.

The Valley is a self-selecting community where passionately bright people migrate from all over the world to make smart machines work smarter. The nuts-and-bolts practicality of hard labor among the bits appeals to the predilections of the high-functioning autistic mind. The hidden cost of building enclaves like this, however, may be lurking in the findings of nearly every major genetic study of autism in the last 10 years. Over and over again, researchers have concluded that the DNA scripts for autism are probably passed down not only by relatives who are classically autistic, but by those who display only a few typically autistic behaviors. (Geneticists call those who don't fit into the diagnostic pigeonholes "broad autistic phenotypes.")

The chilling possibility is that what's happening now is the first proof that the genes responsible for bestowing certain special gifts on slightly autistic adults - the very abilities that have made them dreamers and architects of our technological future - are capable of bringing a plague down on the best minds of the next generation. For parents employed in prominent IT firms here, the news of increased diagnoses of autism in their ranks is a confirmation of rumors that have quietly circulated for months. Every day, more and more of their coworkers are running into one another in the waiting rooms of local clinics, taking the first uncertain steps on a journey with their children that lasts for the rest of their lives.

In previous eras, even those who recognized early that autism might have a genetic underpinning considered it a disorder that only moved diagonally down branches of a family tree. Direct inheritance was almost out of the question, because autistic people rarely had children. The profoundly affected spent their lives in institutions, and those with Asperger's syndrome tended to be loners. They were the strange uncle who droned on in a tuneless voice, tending his private logs of baseball statistics or military arcana; the cousin who never married, celibate by choice, fussy about the arrangement of her things, who spoke in a lexicon mined reading dictionaries cover to cover.

The old line "insanity is hereditary, you get it from your kids" has a twist in the autistic world. It has become commonplace for parents to diagnose themselves as having Asperger's syndrome, or to pinpoint other relatives living on the spectrum, only after their own children have been diagnosed.

High tech hot spots like the Valley, and Route 128 outside of Boston, are a curious oxymoron: They're fraternal associations of loners. In these places, if you're a geek living in the high-functioning regions of the spectrum, your chances of meeting someone who shares your perseverating obsession (think Linux or Star Trek) are greatly expanded. As more women enter the IT workplace, guys who might never have had a prayer of finding a kindred spirit suddenly discover that she's hacking Perl scripts in the next cubicle.

One provocative hypothesis that might account for the rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists speculate, is an increase in assortative mating. Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room. There are additional pressures and incentives for autistic people to find companionship - if they wish to do so - with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or eccentric spouse.... They are attracted because their intellects work on a similar wavelength."


That's not to say that geeks, even autistic ones, are attracted only to other geeks. Compensatory unions of opposites also thrive along the continuum, and in the last 10 years, geekitude has become sexy and associated with financial success. The lone-wolf programmer may be the research director of a major company, managing the back end of an IT empire at a comfortable remove from the actual clients. Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have become monks, developing new ink for early printing presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher rate."

[FuzzyLumpkins]

I did behavior management/modification for six years with kids diagnosed with autism, I have also worked with clients with Aspergers although they rarely came through the program because they were generally non-violent. A very large percentage of these kids parents were programmers/techies. I know it's just an internet test so take it with a grain of salt. Serious question though, have you ever been tested?

Doubling down on it I see.

You are going to have to point to specific behavior if you are really going to do it right though. Right now it is just weak flailing. It is pretty obvious that you are not a psychologist or psychiatrist my friends that are were mortified with me when I did what you are trying to do. It is kinda funny though even if it is supposed to be at my expense.

[TSA]

.