The first image is a dead hotlink. It's in the internet archive and I've uploaded it to imgur.

Getting a handgun in Britain is not straightforward, although I suppose wizards would have certain advantages in this department.

An unusual feature of an AI of this form is its speed - while the off-the-blockchain subprocesses can run at normal speed, IIRC the blockchain itself is optimistically going to have a block time of 12 seconds. This means you couldn't have a realtime conversation with the AI as a whole, nor could it drive a car for instance, although a subprocess might be able to complete these tasks. Overall, it would perhaps be more like a superintelligent ant colony.

Here's one of mine:

Chooser of the Slain

Not actually fan fiction, but inspired by two existing works many readers will recognize.

(How many different DAGs are possible if you have 600 nodes? Apparently, >2^600.)

Naively, I would expect it to be closer to 600^600 (the number of possible directed graphs with 600 nodes).

And in fact, it is some complicated thing that seems to scale much more like n^n than like 2^n: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph#Combinatorial_enumeration

I want a training session in Unrestrained Pessimism.

As someone who moved to Israel at the age of 25 with very minimal Hebrew (almost certainly worse than yours), went to an ulpan for five months and then served in the IDF for 18 months while somehow avoiding the 3 month language course I certainly should have been placed in based on my middle-of-ulpan level of fluency:

Ulpan (not army ulpan, real ulpan) is actually pretty good at doing what it's supposed to. I had a great time - it depends on the ulpan but I haven't heard of a single one that would be psychologically damaging. Perhaps your experience with a less intensive system as a minor has coloured your views? I know that I got put off Hebrew by the quality of teaching I had around the age of 11-13. I'm not sure if you could get benefits to do a free course (it would depend on your status) but that would certainly take off the pressure to learn Hebrew quickly. You'd have to delay your draft date, which is usually possible.

'Army ulpan' is, according to my friends, a bit of a joke, but that's three months you'd be with a bunch of Anglos, being taught by 19 year old girls, and going on semi-regular day trips, which is fun, rather than jumping straight into basic training, which sucks. It's also three months less time being bored to tears at the end of your service doing the same thing you've been doing the last two years.

You can't learn spoken Hebrew by reading. No way. Not only do you need grammatical knowledge to know which vowels should be used, but the spoken and written forms become quite divergent above the most basic level. You need to speak and hear Hebrew for most of the day, every day - which could be a pretty lonely experience in the US. Think Hebrew pop music, armed with a copy of the lyrics and the translation. Learn the songs and what they mean - it's just repetition - and you'll automatically pick up the most common vocabulary. Hebrew grammar isn't that hard for an English speaker, the verb conjugation is traditionally considered the hard part, and that's mostly just memorization. Genders are a pain but not knowing the gender of a word won't impair comprehension if you guess wrongly.

fairly novel contribution

Eh? People have been discussing this point for at least a decade, and I previously gave it as the main reason I'm not signed up for cryonics.

This argument has made me start seriously reconsidering my generally positive view of cryonics. Does anyone have a convincing refutation?

The best I can come up with is that if resuscitation is likely to happen soon, we can predict the values of the society we'll wake up in, especially if recovery becomes possible before more potentially "value disrupting" technologies like uploading and AI are developed. But I don't find this too convincing.