Technology for the Obscenely Wealthy

Scenario 1: A black limousine runs over your left foot. From the capacious back seat, out pops a guy who looks familiar from those Microsoft "I'm a PC" commercials (he's the one who wears glasses). "Let's not bother with insurance companies," the guy, Bill, says, and he hands you a check good for a few million bucks, drawn from his "incidental expenses account."

Scenario 2: Turns out that the gawky kid who kept forgetting his lunch money in third grade was Sergey Brin. Sergey fondly remembers you sharing your Twinkies, and he sends you a few thousand Google shares, preferred, for Kwanzaa.

The details may vary, but you've undoubtedly had this fantasy: You're suddenly rich! But what do you do with all that money? Use it to help humanity? Of course not! Like any self-respecting geek, you'll want to redirect a sizable chunk of your windfall into tech toys.

But let's assume that the experience of suddenly becoming obscenely wealthy hasn't caused you to lose all function above the neck. You don't want to throw ridiculous amounts of money at diamond-encrusted cell phones or gold-plated MP3 players. No, you want to throw ridiculous amounts of money at products that offer really cool (though not necessarily essential) technology and design. Get out your credit cards because here we go.

Kaleidescape Home Entertainment System

Price tag: More than $10,000 (depending on configuration)

Everyone knows what a hassle DVDs can be. The disc you want to watch in the bedroom is always to be found (or not) under a couch cushion in the living room. And forget trying to get the kids to put DVDs back in their cases--especially now that they're fabulously wealthy and think the governess should do it.

With the Kaleidescape, you can say goodbye to all of those problems. That's because this system lets you store all of your DVDs on Kaleidescape servers in your home and then play the movies back in any room you like through one of the company's proprietary players. Now, some people might point out that you could do something similar for about $100 with a copy of DVD Shrink and a used Xbox. They might even say that for the money you're spending on the Kaleidescape, you could hire a toady to organize your DVDs and put them into the player for you whenever and wherever you want. You know what those people are? Poor. So ignore them.

Hardcore Reactor Extreme Desktop PC

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