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.

But here's the interesting thing.

Who owns what? According to the hard core of bitcoin fans, it is based on one principle - that the blockchain is the final word on that issue, at least as it concerns bitcoins themselves. If you have the key, the coins are yours.

If you say "those bitcoins aren't yours, they're stolen!" you're implicitly accepting another standard of property - of who owns what - as higher than the blockchain. Then you concede to the messy passions of society to determine who owns what, rather than the mathematical certainties of the block chain.

Bitcoin fans are a bit two-minded on this. On one hand, they demand that money in anonymous accounts belongs to whoever controls the keys, and it's none of your business how they got there. On the other, some do call for blacklisting coins, e.g. the coins FBI seized when Silk Road went under. The technology actually makes that possible, unlike with cash or even conventional digital payments.

I'm all for convicting Karpeles for fraud (and in fact this article is old news to me - despite lots of anonymous accounts trying to pooh-pooh it, investigations of the block chain made a convincing case for fraud in the weeks after MtGox's fall), but I'm also for recognizing the limits of the blockchain, and I'd like BTC fans to realize it can't be a substitute for government, or even government-issued currency.

This is damage control. What the docs show, is that OTR encryption is safe. You can use OTR encryption with Jabber, but Jabber isn't encrypted by default.

What they presumably hope is that people will use Jabber and think they're safe. And Slashdot editors are being the useful idiots as usual.

Neural net-based Go programs have been tried countless times since neural nets were invented, and losing to GNU Go 20 out of 200 games is very very far from state of the art. I don't know which version of Fuego they used, but if it was rated 4-5k it must have been an old and weak one. It's currently rated 2d on KGS.

Worth noting that KGS is stingy on ratings, and especially hard on bots since matches are self-selected. If there's an exploitable weakness in a bot, people will ruthlessly mine it for rating.

The real revolution is the technique that CrazyStone pioneered: Monte carlo tree search. Even basic MCTS programs can beat GNU Go 90% of the time. CrazyStone was on 7d on KGS for a while, although in september it dropped to 6d (presumably because very strong players found a way to exploit its weaknesses - since programs play consistently, rating shouldn't vary too much otherwise).

Monte Carlo is the way forward. I'm convinced that the basic approach of it (randomized search, weighted with a tree towards positions more likely to be fruitful) is going to stay. Improvements are going to be about which moves to weigh the exploration towards in the playouts as opposed to the tree part.

Just shows how crazy it is to rely on Wikipedia these days.

By the way, anyone else missing comments they recall making in this thread?

So in other words, IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

The person Gamergate started with is an admitted pathological liar.

The rest can be put down to the journalist class' tribalism, and the need to distance oneself from low-status people close to you in social space.