it's about not having the same brain mapping as "normals"

Being different is not a disease. Pathologizing deviance from the statistical norm is a piss-poor idea.

Yes, some people do have an actual pathology. But the problem is broadening the diagnostic criteria, to the point where everyone can be suffering from some sort of "disorder".

Over 20 years ago I watched news video from California plowing a HUGE mountain of perfectly good, edible oranges into the ground.

Goes back a lot farther than 20 years -- there's a passage in The Grapes of Wrath that talks about perfectly good produce being destroyed in order to prop up prices:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Android phones have Google lock-in

How is a device on which I can install CyanogenMod locked-in to Google? Please explain.

I REAL capitalism, when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition.

In REAL capitalism, companies acquire each other until there are only a handful (or only one) left, and there is no effective competition.

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.