to say Ray Kurtzweil is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless about the history of technology

Ray Kurtzweil is a very smart man. He is also a very sad man who thinks would be a good and practical idea to have a computer imitate his dead father. He's actually quite a pathetic -- in the sense of moving one to pity -- figure, unable to come to terms with basic truths about existence.

We're already soaking in the Vingean singularity: anyone with a smartphone and a data connection has effective Intelligence Amplification. That doesn't revoke the laws of physics or take us to utopia any more that the previous singularities that humanity has experienced (the development of speech and of writing).

And yet, homeschooled kids tend to outperform their bricks-and-mortar peers.

Homeschooled kids who volunteer to take tests administered by their own parents tend to outperform public school students...bit of the ol' selection bias there.

The vast majority of homeschooled kids in the U.S. are being taught by religious fundamentalists, ignorant of the most basic facts about science.

This is some serious confusion right here.

No, not if you understand arithmetic. In fact making students comfortable with these sorts of manipulations seems to me to lay a good groundwork for algebra. I admit that "making ten" and "number sentences" are weird terminology, and I've seen some baffling examples of CC math, but the paragraph you've provided seems like a sensible strategy for teaching basic arithmetic to kids.

No rational chain of logic can lead someone to committing any of the crimes that currently have the death penalty in face of even relatively minor punishments(like say 10 years in jail)

Of course it can. "I believe I have a 90% chance of succeeding in this crime, i.e., of not being convicted for it. If I succeed, I receive benefit (money, the elimination of an annoying person, whatever) which I value at A, a positive number. I have a 10% change of failing, i.e. being convicted, and receiving sentence B, which I value at a negative number. My expected outcome is .9A + .1 B. In this case that sum is greater than 0. Logically, I should commit the crime."

It all depends on how one values A and B, and what probability one estimates for success.

Now, I'll certainly concur that most people committing such crimes are not engaging in such rational analysis; they are acting from poor impulse control. But the proposition that no rational chain of logic can lead to committing such crimes? I don't think that stands.

No, "assault rifles" are not perfectly legal...

Bzzzzzt. Wrong.... The only rifles that are restricted to own are automatic rifles. ie: machine guns.

Bzzzzzt. Wrong. An actual "assault rifle" is a select-file (i.e., can be set for auto or semi-automatic operation) rifle of intermediate power. They are automatic weapons, and as such heavily restricted.

"Assault rifle" is not to be confused with "assault weapon", which is the sort of "ugly gun" you're speaking of. The term "assault weapon" seems to have been a deliberate coinage by a prohibitionist to confuse scary-looking semi-automatic rifles with actual military select-file assault rifles.

"Assault rifle" is a meaningful term. "Assault weapon" is not.

This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

You internal SATA is not an off-site backup. This seems like a decent option for a backup that will still exist if (fates forfend) your house burns down.

Unless we have the name of the person who owns that first telephone number it's still just a number.

"Hey, Sprint? Yeah, this is Agent Smith at the NSA. I see that the phone number 443-555-5555 is on your network. What's the billing address for that account? Uh-huh. Any other accounts at that address? I see. And is there a credit card on file? Can I get the name and card number? Ok. And what's the PIN on their voicemail? Right. And the MEID on the phone? Thanks."

Granted, matching a name to a phone number is trivially easy,

Especially when you're the frickin' NSA.

Have you ever tried to raise capital in a socialist system? Capitalism makes capital common and available.

Capitalism keeps capital in the hands of the capitalist class, that's it's whole reason for being. The idea behind socialism is to make capital -- not to be confused with money, but the actual "means of production", and so not something that has to be "raised" -- available to workers without having to get some parasitic aristocrats involved. Unfortunately, Marx was not an empiricist and his version of socialism lends itself to abuse by authoritarians; but even his fscked-up version took an agrarian nation barely out of feudalism (Russia still had legal serfdom until 1861!) and turned it into a space-faring nuclear superpower -- and that in spite of bearing the brunt of the cost of stopping the Nazis. Stalin sucked and Marxism has serious flaws, but the whole "OMG socialism failed!!1!" meme doesn't hold up to serious examination.

Demographics for the Baby Boom means more Social Security and Medicare spending than the 1990s. Sluggish economy -- thanks to decades of conservative policies eviscerating the middle class -- means more unemployment payments and more need for government assistance overall. Two wars means more veterans benefits.

But it's all Obama's fault.

There is no way to avoid the war any longer. The invasion has happened.

You are oversimplifying to a dangerous degree.

There is at the moment no legitimate Ukrainian government. Putin is a vile authoritarian asshole, but he is right about one thing: Yanukovych's de facto removal from office was a coup.

Yanukovych can still make a claim of legitimate legal authority to invite Russian troops in.

And some part of the population in Crimea wants them there.

So, an "invasion"? Not clear.

As for "an existential fight in the west", it's doubtful that Putin wants to absorb all of Ukraine. Keep in mind that Ukraine is a synthetic state, based on the "Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic" set up by the USSR...which was created with a bunch of ethnic Russians exactly to keep Ukrainian nationalism in check. All in all, letting Crimea go back to Russia might be in everyone's best interest...but only if it's handled in a legitimate way. Right now, nothing happening over there has any legitimacy.

Everything. And at some level, society needs to be built around facilitating and accommodating business. Again... they pay for EVERYTHING.

Ultimately what pays for everything is labor. All value is created by the labor of human beings.

We've created a fscked-up system where the ability to exchange one's labor is dependent of the pretense of large businesses, powerful organizations under the control of a small ruling class of "owners". And the sort of labor one can exchange is subject to the desires of that owning class. There's plenty of work that needed to be done, cleaning up the planet, fixing the infrastructure, caring for children and the infirm and elderly, moving the production of food and energy on a sustainable basis...which has little or no value to the owning class.

So we either need to kowtow to that ruling class, building everything around facilitating and accommodating those large business, so that they can continue to be parasitic upon people who do the actual work and return some crumbs to the masses until the whole thing collapses from its inattention to the demands of physics and chemistry...or we need to fundamentally change the system.

Looks at Detroit indeed. That's what happens when your town builds its economy around a big business: if it leaves, you're boned. The lesson is not, "kowtow better".

And before someone talks about the evil corporations, lets get something straight... look around the country in more business friendly areas. Take texas or South Dakota or either of the Carolinas.

"More business friendly areas"...you are suggesting that California, where Silicon Valley and Hollywood and a tremendous amount of agribusiness is located, is not "business friendly"? Your facts are disordered, my friend.

You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Ah, the irony.

Math is a creation of the human mind, and by its nature can never go beyond the limits of human ability to understand. The universe, on the other hand, is not bound by the limitations of the nervous systems of a group of balding apes, and I have to agree with J. B. S. Haldane's suspicion that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

People do crazy things when money and power is involved.

Neither of which will be involved once the Bitcoin fad ends.

Sayeth TFA,

Video games are currently used in healthcare to teach some basic medical procedures, but as wearable and 3D surface technology improve, they will be used to practice complicated surgeries and medical methods.

Those are not games. They are simulations.

When I take a CPR class and use a mannequin to practice, is that a game? No. And it's no different than using a computer program to simulate a procedure. These are not games.

Society needs revenge for certain crimes, for the sake of all our mental health.

Quite the opposite, actually. The quest for revenge is detrimental to one's mental health.

Can you provide any rationale for why we should care so much about the comfort of a serial killer?

Because we're supposed to be better than serial killers, we're supposed to be humane individuals. Because maybe we got the wrong guy, and it's worse to torture the wrong guy than to just lock up the wrong guy (though that's still very very bad). Because if we're going to imprison that serial killer with other people, people who are not serial killers and will eventually return to society, it's important how that serial killer acts towards fellow inmates. Because if we're interested in how to keep people from turning into serial killers, it's important to study that serial killer, to interview them in an atmosphere of some trust.

Non-violent offenders shouldn't be facing prison time at all, let alone solitary.

No jail time for burglars, then? Or car thieves or bank robbers who bust in after closing time? Interesting.