The British-Indian comedians of Goodness Gracious Me had a recurring sketch about "Mr. Everything comes from India", who would argue (mostly with his son that) everything came from India. Not only the things that actually are from India, like shampoo and verandas, but Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa ("Son, this is Mina Losa, a Gujarati washerwoman from Bhavnagar!"), John Travolta, Superman and the British royal family.

I think all nationalisms have some people like that.

Gritty people sometimes exhibit what psychologists call "nonproductive persistence": They try, try again, says Dean MacFarlin though the result may be either unremitting failure or "a costly or inefficient success that could have been easily surpassed by alternative courses of action."

Well, maybe blaming them for that is just like blaming people for buying non-winning lottery tickets. Why didn't they do like that guy over there, and buy a winning ticket instead?

You quickly run into decidability problems when deciding on optimal strategies of inquiry in the general case. The only time you know with 100% certainty whether persistence will pay off, or whether it's time to give up and look around for other solutions, is when you basically already know the answer.

There's no way good solutions can be found without "wasting" a lot of effort on fruitless paths - and whether the waste and success happens in the same person, or over a large group of people, what difference does it make?

Here's the problem. We can't make the body match the mind. We literally cannot do it. We don't have the technology.

As long as transsexuals are well-informed about what can and cannot be done, I don't see a problem.

I see SRS as one of many possible ways of addressing gender dysphoria at the individual level. Like most other treatments, it may fail to succeed at this aim. That's not a reason to rule it out.

I also think it can and should be addressed at the societal level, by making it more "normal". But I think LGBT activists in general overestimate how much of the T's pains can be alleviated this way.

"These guys? Already on the US no fly list. Already known to French authorities for extremist sympathies. At least one already had been in trouble with police for violent crimes."

Yeah, but it looks like they also checked all the flags for troubled kids. You'll find lots and lots of foster home boys(which those were) who are kind of attention-seekers, kind of flirting with various radical political cults, kind of narcissistic, kind of sociopathic/antisocial. What are you going to do?

There are tons, tons of people who fit your 1 and 2. And much as they may be personality-fucked up people who go on to cause a lot of suffering for people they encounter, the vast majority of them are not terrorists. Surveilling them is not free, and is not without consequences in itself.

Just like every business in the world is licensed and regulated right? Except it's not.

Where are you running a business? Yes, every business in the world is regulated, and for businesses where there is high competition and temptation to cut corners, there are regularly domain-specific rules or licensing requirements in place. A highly competitive industry is by default a corrupt industry, because the more bitter the fight, the harder it is to survive without playing dirty. In many countries and many domains, regulation evidently helps with that, but if the industry is sufficiently capital-intensive, regulation itself becomes an arena for dirty fighting.

Taxi drivers are usually poor immigrants. Given sufficient desperation they will play dirty by cheating on their taxes, scamming their customers, or working with criminal organizations (to do e.g. money laundering). They do not, however, have the resources to play regulatory capture dirty game. Uber does.

The problem can solve itself with open information.

Only it didn't when they tried. Taxis are often selected in situations where you can't meaningfully discriminate between them (from a queue, or hailing). They're also heavily used by people ill-equipped to discriminate between them (tourists and drunk people). Throwing more information on them doesn't help.

The major negative impact from TG people is only that which society places on them and thus an unnatural impact.

I've heard a transperson dispute that, saying that even where people are 100% cool with them, they still feel awful about the mind/body mismatch, to the point of depression, self-harming etc. Gender dysphoria can still be a mental illness even if transsexualism per se isn't.

Though of course, not in any sane jurisdiction should that prevent you from driving.

I am licensed to do most of the things a plumber is licensed to do, too. Usually it's the insurance company that minds me doing everything myself, not the government. In fact I had a plumber berate me once, he said installing a toilet was such an easy task we should be able to handle it ourselves next time.

People are licensed to drive. Taxis are licensed to drive people for profit. Profit motives should always be considered potentially dangerous, there are a lot of things people are willing to do, corners they are willing to cut, if it stands between making good money and being destitute.

Taxi deregulation has been tried, many many times. It has many perverse and unexpected results. For instance, you get more taxis on the road with deregulation, but prices become higher. Customers are unable to discriminate between individual drivers based on price (this is also true in Uber's regime, by design). As a result, it's pretty much random who gets a paying customer. If you only win that lottery once every three days, of course you have to crank up prices when it happens - as much as you dare, until you start to worry that they might change their mind/step out of your cab/punch you.

It is false equivalence to say that unregulated taxis have the same consequences as unregulated pharma.

Well, that wasn't the argument. The argument was that if lawmakers think the consequences are bad enough to warrant regulation, then maybe companies (with a huge profit motive clouding their judgements of said matter) shouldn't just be able to disregard it.

MS-DOS games drew their graphics in software to the VGA's frame buffer, while Super NES games were more likely to rely on the S-PPU's built-in scrollable tile planes and sprite capability.

Yeah, which was why it was impressive that Commander Keen had actual scrolling, since that was damn hard to do on the IBM PC those days (although more game-oriented computers from 1983 and even earlier had no trouble with it!)

It was also why texture mapping happened first in PC games - in the beginning there was no hardware support for it anywhere, but the PC had already eschewed specialized graphics chips in favor of raw computing power, so it was easier to do the "impossible" there.

Yeah, I knew I was a little sloppy with the sound cards, just didn't know how :)

I never had many games that asked for mouse.

Civilization did. I think most Microprose games did. I have no idea why, as far as I know for all their games that you might want to play keyboard-only, it made no difference if you left the mouse active.

were coded to access the VGA (graphics), Sound Blaster, keyboard, and joystick hardware directly

More like...

Select graphics:

1. CGA
2. EGA
3. VGA
4. Tandy

Select sound:

1. Soundblaster
2. Roland MT32
3. Ensoniq
4. AdLib
5. PC speaker

Select input:

1. Keyboard and mouse
2. Keyboard only
3. Keyboard and joystick (good luck)

(remember to set IRQ/DMA! We will try to autodetect but it's very likely to crash your computer.)

The kids with the 8-bit nintendos and the A2600s were the "poor" kids.

Indeed, there was a class divide here, but it did not have so much to do with the cost of the systems. The poorer kids lived in apartment housing, which was cheaper, but only apartments had cable TV (private homes would need a satellite dish, which was both expensive and seen as vulgar/ugly). So they got a lot more cultural influence from the US. It wasn't just consoles vs. computers, it also was Transformers vs. Colargol, or Superman vs. Pellefant.

The British royal family. They all live in the same family house together - Indian. All work in the family business - Indian. All have arranged marriages - Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good - Indian. Children live with their parents until they are married - Indian!

Except Prince Charles. He's African.

They are good at memorizing chess games because chess games make profound sense to them. The more you understand the why's of a chess move, the easier it is to remember it. They aren't good at memorizing arbitrary stuff, and being good at memorizing arbitrary stuff won't help you much getting good at chess.

Playing from randomized positions, computers are vastly better than humans, since they don't rely on "moves making sense" the same way. Go programs (which are a lot weaker than the best humans) trounce humans if they play from a position of, say, 20 random moves - even if the human gets to pick color.

That has been tried with computer Go. It turns out that you can make a computer very, very good at predicting what moves top-level players will make, and still fail abysmally at making a strong program.