What an idiotic thing to say.

I don't really care what people on the street do - programmers think in types.

So I'm picking between the US/UK/Canadian signals intelligence, and the Russian security service? I'll go with the sigint guys.

Spetssvyaz is the Russian communications security agency (part of FSO).

Apparently "knee-jerk response" now means "opinion I disagree with". Good to know!

In the US, 56.49 billion potatoes are sold per year. If potatoes caught fire at the same rate, we would all be dead.

They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"

And no, this is not a troll or flamebait - it's justified, rational criticism.

Just saying it doesn't make it true.

It just plain cheats. Or did you mean it cheats in a highly technical manner?

Heh, "barely 6 year old computer" is somehow both adorable, and also really sad.

Yeah, 7 and 10 are tablets - they're using the number for both size and version (for the phone at least), it's kinda weird.

Don't really know what to tell you regarding the Old Man Rant - that's the hardware that phones have nowadays, and yes, they do more than your old computer.

You're so clever!

What you typically see in humans - monogamy with some-to-a-fair-amount-of cheating - is still much closer to monogamy than to polygamy, not to mention the promiscuity you see with most animals.

Why First Instead of Fourth?

It's the only one that still gets a rise out of (most) people. Most of the other ones have pretty much been hand-waved away, because National Security.

Although SpaceX's Falcon 9 is, in fact, carried by nine falcons.

The ramifications of what's implied are numerous and cover every aspect of our future.

Only if your understanding of cloning is based entirely on sci-fi movies and TV shows.

Cloning is a difficult procedure to create an organism that's (mostly) genetically identical to a different organism. It will no doubt become easier in the future, but will always require more effort than the regular means of procreation.

Why do you think this lends itself to the creation of "slave classes"? There is currently no shortage of stupid people. In fact, the lower your requirements, the wider the selection.

If you're talking about "below-normal" intelligence - if we ever find ourselves in a society where it's legal to create slaves of purposefully sub-human intelligence, then we'll have much bigger problems to worry about.