I remember seeing this exact prediction made in 1980, with the same time frame. Progress isn't linear - we may never have real AI. Or we may have it in six months.

Besides all that, don't you think that your points don't quite match the observed facts? I mean, in most rampages so far, we have seen the perpetrators use long guns.

No, in fact I don't think that's true at all. The guy who shot Rep Giffords used pistols, as did the VA Tech shooter.

I disagree. Concealment is a pretty big plus for these kinds of people - if you lug a rifle around populated areas people start calling the cops. Beyond that, pistols are lighter, pistol ammunition is lighter and deadly enough at close range, pistols are faster to reload, it's easier to shift targets with a pistol, and it's harder to grapple someone with a pistol. Beyond that these guys are mostly penniless losers, and pistols are cheaper.

Understood. But he was saying the laser was only for rangefinding.

What I meant was there's no difference between using the cross-hairs to select the aim point and using a laser.

There are a whole lot of people out there who can hit the kill zone on a man-sized target from 265 ft. That's not a long distance for a rifle. A novice could probably do it after a lesson and a half hour of practice. Qualification range for marines is 500 meters from a prone position.

Long guns are almost never used to kill people (domestically, anyway). Your odds of being beaten to death with fists are five times greater. For the rampage killer pistols make more sense for a whole host of reasons.

Well, you can always file a lawsuit. But I doubt you'd actually win.

Somehow you have to tell the gun where you want the bullet to go, if not with the laser than with the cross-hairs. There's no practical difference from the shooter's perspective.

I agree with this. It's a hideous cross between a web page and a free-standing application, giving you the worst of both in an unintuitive, bloated package.

I remember sitting in a physics lecture where the professor assured us no computer would ever have more than about ten megabytes of RAM, since stray gamma radiation would cause bits to flip at an unacceptably high rate for larger memory "pools".

Reset? It was "overcharge".

As recent trends have shown, not just in the US but in many other countries, what you can actually get with a highly educated population is not everybody becoming rich, but rather lots of highly educated people with no job prospects.

This. Education doesn't create jobs. The people you need to fill high-end jobs are more likely to be around if your education system is good, but saying education creates jobs is putting the cart before the horse.

"Social responsibility" isn't part of the court's job. It's there to decide cases and whether laws pass constitutional muster. Citizens Unitied was decided correctly. If you don't like it you can try to change the constitution, but don't blame the court.

Have you ever been to a VA hospital?