1: Free birth control makes it much easier for Welfare Mom to stop having babies that cost society *way* more than a few birth control pills ever would to feed, school and so on.
2: Because of tons of reasons, including 1., all add up to free birth control benefiting society. Also financially at both the short and long term.
3: Lots of countries have socialized medicine without going into people's private bedrooms. Scandinavia has high levels of it and is far better than the US at staying out of bedrooms. Your argument is just a slippery slope argument, as there's nothing in people getting free birth control from a private source that doesn't even disclose this to the government that gives the govt. more power over your bedroom.
4: Catholics in the US rarely subscribe to the arguments against birth control, but in a poorly paid job/part volunteer position in a religious organization opposed to it, it can be hard to get and afford.
5: As a side benefit/scary actual argument against free birth control, you can tell people that free birth control means far fewer people who will end up criminals get born.
This is because it disproportionally benefits the poor, and children growing up in poverty, especially in harder environments like ghettos/trailer parks, end up turning to crime more often. They get educated poorly because parents can't help, they go to bad schools and live in bad neighborhoods. Such children are more likely to end up in crime - often because that is their only real option.

So it benefits the health of the nation, the nation's financial bottom line and the perceived level of services received for your taxes.
Should be all good things to a politician, but the amount of faithful republicans is (one of the things) holding the US back.

And this turmoil which you yourself admit would appear and which would likely ravage the markets is less real than "real" turmoil how, exactly? You can't ignore basic psychology.

First comment in a while to make me actually laugh out loud. Good job :-)

Although that would postdate the steam engine, and by GGP's standard make me a crackpot. Damn. I knew there was something wrong with this idea.

Indeed, I was just thinking of starting a religion involving the steam engine and the patent issues surrounding it.
"We could've had a better steam engine 15 years earlier!" is our cry of faith.

Try Scandinavia?

Small correction: The Interplanetary Transport Network, not the low-energy planetary transfer network :-)
Bit tired now, good night folks.

Smaller. Smaller. Smaller.

Smart Dust, is what we're talking about - or at least the early iterations.

Weather sensors that flutter in the breeze and scavenge enough energy to remain active and transmitting at most times - and the swarm *always* transmits.
Flow control sensors that oil companies continually release into their pipelines to ensure that if there's a leak they'll know where it is in milliseconds - there's transmitting sensors outside the approved geometric area.
Microscopic "Sniffers" released into the wind, measuring and reporting the amounts of cannabis, cocaine, explosives, dangerous chemicals...
Sensors to detect fire. Sensors to find out if the gas tank in that burning building is leaking at all. Just point into an air current (strong fan or wind) and let them fly from your hands.
*True* microsatellites, measured in single-digit centimetres or even smaller. (I think there's a minimum useful size for a satellite, but it's greatly related to how many of them there are, also... You could have a continual swarm reaching through the low-energy planetary transfer network keeping in contact with quite small satellites in a mesh radio network).

Making Smart Dust *safe* might turn out to be more of a challenge, though... :-)

But "really-really-low-power computing"... Alongside bio/nano-tech convergence it's the beginning of the real microbots:
Invisible cameras, as a perfect 3D image of your head emerges from the small swarm of the tiniest insects you've seen hover around your head.
Robots navigating through your bloodstream, tiny as hell - yet you've somehow ended up with the processing equivalent of your (2012) mobile phone coursing through your veins and working on any health problems you have (mostly by monitoring, at least at first).

I'm sure you guys can come up with more stuff. Please reply if you've got any ideas :-)

That, my friend, is the iPhone 12 - as was revealed exclusively to me in a morphine-and-"don't worry"-drug-coctail following my (very successful) brain surgery 3 1/2 years ago, a little over a month after the iPhone3G was released.

At this point, sitting stunned in a hospital bathroom, I was pleasantly surprised:

You see, the Interplanetary Patent Office had commited a major temporal blunder, and I held in my hands the fabled iPhone 12.
I'd been looking forward to this, I came to realize, because of the wonderful new function added to this generation of iPhone.
  The Replication ability: Simply hold your phone in your right hand, turn your hand around to the left and a duplicate iPhone is created - one which lasts for 12 hours and can be used just the same as the original for that period.
Can you imagine the craze? Lend out your iPhone and keep it at the same time! Borrow an iPhone and buy apps, they'd follow you and not the phone. Lose an iPhone and you could join the begging crowd at the central railway station hungrily gazing at the iPhone Carriers - the source of their only light in life.

The only real problem was that damn bug - those jackasses at the Interplanetary Patent Office not only had committed a major temporal blunder, but they'd sent out a buggy test edition!

The only thing that happened when I turned my hand around to the left was that it made my head *hurt really bad*. I've chosen to take this as an analogy of what'll happen if I (a free-spirited hacker-minded kind of guy) pick up an iPhone... It'll just end in one glorious headache.

----------

Also, clearly, as evidenced by religious leaders, prophets and other conm^H^H^H inspired people, such drug-fueled visions - especially considering the holy trappings of the event... I'd just had a freaking robot in my brain!
This experience should from now on be considered the one holy truth about the iPhone 12.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the 4S isn't the only model increase that won't be a straight number one... By my calculations, iPhone 12 will be model 43.

Good of you to post the date. *starts plotting to deviously pre-empt you in June 2017*

I mean, my battery coat has a warming function, but I mostly don't need that because the coat gets plenty warm when I use batteries heavily. And if I do get cold sitting on a bench, or that cute girl next to me does, the warming function is a nice touch. I imagine if you're living in a cooler climate it can be a lifesaver. Mostly I use the jacket for my infinite and frantic mobile gaming habit. Got the glasses too, but mostly I prefer to use my imagination and the little screen for details - I imagine that will change when the graphic world overlays get better...
Oh, the clothes... The jacket's loaded with kinetic energy generators. But when I feel sporty I put on my heavy kinetic pants. That way I *will* exercise on the way to work. And produce a ton of useful energy as a practical side result. Battery low? Start working, boy!

I kinda have the "wimp" version of the kinetic pants, though. Some of my friends have theirs locked to a 5+ setting - but those are the friends I almost never see wearing kinetics... And looking too damn proud of themselves when they do.

But what I'm really looking forward to looks ready to hit prime-time in about 3-4 more years - fully user-safe versions of the synthetic lung... Unlike the shit the Special Forces are using today, this will actually be safe. It pumps oxygen into your blood at a ridiculous rate, and will eventually come with an optional add on - Hæ+ full blood transfusion. Haemoglobin Plus enhanced blood cells grown with your own stem cells and having the new and better oxygen carrier protein, that also as a benefit *doesn't* turn toxic if the protein leaves the cell like normal Haemoglobin does... I can already imagine the eventual ads... "It just might save your brain".
There's already all these blood variants that are really useful for hypothermic heart surgery and the like, and they're saving tons of lives.

I really do need a new lung to hold off the heart&lung transplantation, though, and it looks like I'll get it before most potential users.
That's the tech which sold me on getting used to wearing battery clothing: I do not want my synthetic lung to run out of power. Ever.

You put LiftPort on the front page and forget their KickStarter campaign?
It started on the 23.08, and in 5 days it's raised $27.514 of the 8000 goal.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaellaine/space-elevator-science-climb-to-the-sky-a-tethered

You know, the quote button is an excellent choice for good answers to stupid questions - then you can be modded up and he modded to oblivion, while retaining everything that was written... ;-)

To put it very simply, servers need to be able to resist things like Blue Pill and other advanced persistent threats.
This is vital for secure data processing and storage, and therefore needed by many organisations, businesses and governments.

I can't wait until the first good, fairly inexpensive servers come with this option. That's the point at which I'm changing career paths over to Sales ;-)

I'd give the cards and the PIN to some random teenager about to head on a bus to elsewhere, preferably on a journey lasting several hours. Causes much more confusion than the electronic traces just vanishing.