Yeah, like votes still count for anything...

You realize that those 46% still pay lots of other kinds of taxes? E.g. sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes (latently, through their rent - surely the landlord passes on his property taxes to his tenants), etc. The idea that half of Americans don't pay taxes is a detestable myth/propaganda.

Substitute "brain enhancement technology" with "smartphones", "personal computers", "automobiles", "airplanes", "telegraphs", "printed books", "arithmetic" etc. All technologies that confer some advantage are generally more readily available, and sooner, to people with money than to people without. (The funny thing is, I don't know if I'm making an argument that technology is a rising tide that lifts all boats, or that technology and its superior availability to the wealthy is a proof that trickle-down really works...)

What about a solid-state phased array, like them newfangled AESA radars? I guess they're a little more than $5k-$30k though...

I have had this exact thought from time to time in the past - pretty much ever since I first heard of phased-array antennae. I can only imagine that the cost/benefit equation works out negatively. Remember, not only is the phased-array antenna (which I guess would look something like an AESA radar) technology fairly expensive (and possibly somewhat secret, for anything reasonably compact), but you need lots more satellites. For GEO, you could hypothetically get away with maybe 6 satellites (and you'd still have trouble near the poles), whereas with LEO you might need 20 or more (cf. GPS), depending on the orbital altitude.

Well, then I guess Junior's just going to have to suck it up and wait a few years till he can move to the big city, isn't he? You know there are kids on this planet being sold into slavery, or being drugged out of their minds and having AK-47s pushed into their hands, as we speak, right? Do you hear them bitching about a few ms of latency on their poor little satellite broadband Internet service? Not to mention that there are whole generations of us for whom 28.8 kbps was a hot new technology when we were Junior's age, and somehow we managed to reach adulthood without major psychological trauma... Sheesh.

Microsoft shot themselves in the foot, IMO, when they decided you wouldn't be allowed to upgrade from XP to 7. As we know, most folks did not upgrade from XP to Vista and therefore were still running XP, and continued to run it, when 7 came out. Many of those folks might have eventually upgraded to 7 if they had been allowed. And don't tell me it was technologically impossible - it's possible to upgrade from XP to Vista, and from Vista to 7, so they could have allowed it if they wanted to.

We can name the months after the letters in the Metric Alphabet. I hope my birthday ends up being in Ellemenno.

Are you kidding? Do you know what happens to permafrost when it thaws? It becomes an impassable, goopy muck that you can't build on, or drive on, or lay railroad tracks on, etc. Homes and buildings in the regions permafrost zone are built on pilings sunk way down into the portion of the permafrost that's cold enough to never thaw, so that the buildings don't sink into the muck. I'm not sure where the "fast profit" is in working in that kind of terrain.

IIRC it was officially available at one point or another for Alpha and MIPS R4000. A PowerPC port (for IBM PPC machines, not Macs) was in the works but I'm not sure it was ever released...? Of course, if you count NT-derived OSes that came after the one actually called "Windows NT", then there's also Itanium, and soon to be ARM.