The point is that you cannot live in a modern society without using certain government services (at the federal, state or local levels) paid by taxes.
To say that every service can be provided by a commercial enterprise is plainly ridiculous.

  There are certainly alternatives to the income tax, e.g., sales tax, property tax, etc. Each one of them has advantages and disadvantages.

> I don't take services from the government.

You don't use roads. That's impressive!

>Aren't support vector machines provably more powerful than ANNs?

In a sense yes. Both (non-linear) SVM's and Neural Nets are universal approximators. However, SVM's can be shown to converge to the ground truth given sufficiently many observations. No such result exists for neural networks. zz

Well, real numbers are inherently very problematic from the computational point of view.

> (b) using real numbers (real, not floating-point) would give a trans-Turing capability.

Not sure what it means -- a Turing machine is not even capable of storing a single (arbitrary) real number.

Both accuracy and permanence, unlike human memory.

This is by no means a new phenomenon. A library expands human brain capacity far beyond its natural limit.

However a library has three basic limitations:
1. It is not always available.
2. The time to access any specific piece of information can be slow.
3. The library is read-only

The cloud has already overcome all three of these limitations to a large extent -- it is ubiquitous (available on cell phones and other portable devices), the search is far more efficient and the storage is possible (relatively easy).

However the gap between the ease of storage/access/interface to human memory and the cloud is still quite large.
The new technology will make this gap narrower and at some point in the future it may even disappear completely. Perhaps one would be able to bring up information just by thinking about the key concepts, words or images.

The sun produces more energy in a millisecond than our civilization has used since the beginning of time.
There is no scarcity of resources per se, just the scarcity of our ingenuity to devise methods to capture it.

It does not track the viewer.

NASA is getting a significant amount of money and the payoff for much of it (manned space exploration, in particular) is questionable, while thousands of times more expensive than SETI.

The frank answer is that we do not know how aliens may be talking to us (if at all).

We listen with what we have. Once better technology is available we will use that, of course.

I don't have a strong preference one way or the other, but since we are giving so much tax money to NASA, funneling a tiny percentage of it to a speculative pursuit like SETI seems fine.

We can be pretty certain that dragons and big foot do not exist. On the other hand, it would be mind-boggling if we were the only sentient species in the universe. Whether the current SETI technologies are effective is questionable but not the goal of SETI itself.

These arguments may be reasonable, but you realize that they are purely speculative? We know nothing about other civilizations. SETI is a long shot, but it seems worth investing less than 0.00001% of the world's GDP in it.

I think in reality we know almost nothing about how life spreads and how civilizations progress. These are all fine speculations and may very well be true. However on their own they do not make the program silly. The point here is that the cost of the program is very low and that the pay-of (detecting an alien civilization, however unlikely) could be huge.