Vorlonagent

I'm an American and I only grudgingly acknowledge "American Cheese" as in fact being cheese at all.  Give me a good swiss, a sharp cheddar, mozzarella and Parmesan (among others) for my pizza...Smoked cheese generally making things better still.
I have little use for American cheese which I tend to think as watered down cheddar, or perhaps the unholy offspring of cheddar and Monterey Jack.
Tthe obligatory Monty Python clip:
 

"I am attempting to build a mnemonic memory circuit out of stone knives and bear skins"...

"I am attempting to build a mnemonic memory circuit out of stone knives and bear skins"...

"I am attempting to build a mnemonic memory circuit out of stone knives and bear skins"...

"I am attempting to build a mnemonic memory circuit out of stone knives and bear skins"...

...Or she's trolling Catalina because she's Pandora...

In a sane world, transgender people's use of restrooms would not be an issue. People presenting as male would use the men's restroom, people presenting as female the women's. If their physical anatomy doesn't happen to match their presentation, or if for ANY other reason someone doesn't want to display their physical anatomy, they would go in a stall and close the stall door - so nobody would ever know the difference. People who go in a restroom to ogle or harass other users of the restroom would be escorted from the premises and instructed not to return, or possibly prosecuted - for trespass, if nothing else seems to fit (or the potential victims decline to be publicly identified) - without regard to either their sex or their gender.
(Locker rooms are a more complicated problem. I doubt that there's an easy answer - other than a lot of single-user-at-a-time locker rooms, which would be rather expensive in new construction and quite a bit more expensive, if even possible, in existing facilities.)
I disagree with the idea that anyone who claims to be feeling female at the moment has a presumptive right to be in the ladies' room (meaning that they can't be prosecuted for trespass and escorting them from the premises is a violation of THEIR rights), or the equivalent for feeling male. This is the law that several municipalities have enacted, making this issue hot in the public eye.
I also disagree with the idea that government should demand that private entities attempt to enforce restroom segregation by physical anatomy or by what's written on the birth certificate. As it happens, while the New Jersey state law did demand this, the Texas law (not sure if it's been enacted yet) does not.
I want the people who create trouble dealt with as trouble-makers, and the people who don't create trouble left alone. We don't need sex or gender differentiation for that, but selective application of such differentiation can be a useful tool - and it need not be government that does the selection, it can be a store manager.

Completely agreed.  Sarah would by default pull back a half-car cutaway but could choose to put a front end on it.   The front end would be whatever she imagined, not the car's real front-end, even if Sarah had a photographic memory and know exactly what the entire car looked like.  Sarah's no mechanic.  There could still be mice running on wheels under the hood.

That holodeck was way to capable. If I'm not mistaken there was at least one instance when someone managed to build a transmitter on the holodeck and used that to send information from the Voyager to an enemy faction. If a holographic representation of a subspace transmitter can send an actual signal it makes me wonder if it would be possible to blow the ship up with a holographic bomb...
 
Then there was the episode where someone was playing with classic villains from literature in some adventure setting. When they were summoned to the bridge the simulation wasn't paused, as it usually would be, but kept running. What was worse was that for some reason one of the villains, I think it was Moriarty but that's just a guess, actually saw them call the portal and exit. This was enough for these supposedly super intelligent villains to figure out that not only were they simulations, but that there was a starship outside the holodeck, and that they could actually use portable hologenerators, once developed for the ships doctor,to allow them to leave the holodeck. Being programed to be villains they were of course planing on taking over the entire ship.
Those holodecks are ridiculously dangerous.
 

This is simply wrong. There is no other way to set economic, or really any political policy than by ideology. Politicians today like to claim that their policies is beyond ideology and solely informed by pragmatical concerns. Their policy is "whatever works", as Tony Blair liked to say.
The problem with this is that a political policy can only be said to work if it achieves a result you want. And what results you want of course depends on your ideology, the values and principles that you hold. Denying that you have an ideology when you are a political actor is merely obscuring the values that underlie your actions. Conservatives, liberals and socialists all have different value systems and therefore want different results. 
Politics always raises questions and they need answers. These questions range from foundational and general, like "what is a good society?" and "how shall we achieve that society", to specific matters of policy. Answering them in a coherent and (nota bene) consistent way requires a system of values, an ideology. Philosophically, you can't consider each issue separately from the rest. Political action requires reasonable justification, and that justification must rest on a rational, coherent and consistent philosophical worldview,

"God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Aren't cultists usually tied to a cult emotionally?  Wouldn't that make intelligence an independent variable?

"God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

"God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

The solution to reliability issues: get rid of the scriptwriters.
And on the software side, you'd be amazed what percentage of code is dedicated to preventing the users from screwing things up. Software would be much easier without users.

I once saw James Doohan in an interview proudly state that there was never a problem with the Enterprise engines, unless the writers put it in the script.

Then there's Mr. Guy's cousin "This" who works at Gunnerkrigg Court...

Making mistakes is how we learn...  I call it "tuition in the School of Life"
My last post suggested that the Enterprise's phasers actually performed exceptionally well by any objective standard.  You just have to remember that there's a lot of phaser firings going on in the background that we aren't being shown.  The typical space battle we see in Classic Trek phasers fire at most 4 or 5 times, often less.  The Federation's design spec might even call for 10 or even 20 firings.  The Enterprise put its phasers through at least 100 firings if not several hundred, over the course of the episode.  It was back-to-back, constant repeated use with little if any time for proper maintenance.  Pardon the pun but that's stellar performance.

I cut Balance of Terror some slack.  The 1960s were only 20 years removed from World War 2 where we played out the Destroyer vs. Submarine drama on both fronts.  We were the destroyers in the Atlantic and the submarines in the pacific.  The whispering on the Romulan ship would make perfect intuitive sense to 1960s viewers, though it doesn't survive any serious scientific scrutiny. 

It was also Classic Trek's first dive into starship combat of any kind and they made a ton of mistakes even as compared to later combat sequences in the same show.

Any politician at the national level, it's a surprise.  D or R...

That is Trump's greatest advantage and liability at the same time. 
If Trump were representative of the Republican Party, we'd be talking about President Clinton now.

Someone on another forum said something on the order of "it's disconcerting to have a Republican politician, once elected, show some inclination to do what he claimed he would do while campaigning... but I could get used to it".

Not at all.  the Spell book simply has an UpdateSpellText(CasterName,Password,SpellName,SpellText,NewSpell) It's straightforward object-oriented programming. 

Getting a new spell calls UpdateSpellText with appropriate data.  A polling scheme is unlikely in any event.  In Sister2 we see a spellbook update in real time.
Designing a complete function call would be more complex since we'd have to deal with adding/updating spells that contain other spells, such as Fae Punch for Nanase's fairydolls or adding Elliot's Secret ID forms to his Cheerleadra spell.  A generalized function would probably have to deal with multiple levels of spell containership (Imagine one of Elliot's Secret ID getting one of more of their own specialized spells)

All this raises the possibility of hacking a spellbook or setting up a second independent spellbook connection and downloading a caster's entire catalog of spells.  It might not let a Wizard learn them (but it might!) but knowing exactly what magical options an opponent (or even ally) has is extremely useful. 

... is that to say that the spellbook defines a callback, and then registers a reference to it in the mage (for an onUpdate event or whatever)?  I guess Tedd could work out how to register his own callbacks (say, from a watch) in that case, but he might have to watch a spellbook as it is created (to see it being registered) and when a spell is being gained (to see it being invoked).  In this case (a) a cloned copy of the spellbook would remain static and not update, unless/until its callback is sepeartely registered, (b) if the spellbook is destroyed the mage may run into an unmatched dependency upon gaining a new spell (unless magic works such that the reference is also destroyed), which could be anything from silent to fatal (knowing Dan, more likely the former).
The diametric alternative, of course, would be the spellbook acting as a client, actively re-downloading the information from the mage intermittently.  An more efficient possibility is intermittently querying the timestamp and, if it's newer than the one it has stored, re-downloading the information.  These are less elegant but avoid making the spellbook a dependency of the mage (they instead make the spellbook dependant on the mage).  Also, an exact clone of the spellbook would work as is, unless the mage has some mechanism to prevent a given revision being downloaded twice, in which case it would be a race as to which spellbook gets a given update and which one does not.  If not, then the mage is essentially a queriable API, which Tedd could study by gazing at a spellbook as someone gains a new spell.
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"the mage is essentially a queriable API" never thought I'd say that.

Normally I would have suggested that you'd need someone other than Susan, but the way Dan had her practicing touch with Sarah in the pinup....