Marginal income. A lower-middle-class family might have to spend, say, 85% of their post-tax income on basic necessities, whereas an upper-middle-class family might be able to meet those same needs on 60% of their income. Wealthier people have more cash left over after their basic needs are met. That's why we have progressive marginal tax rates.

Yes, they do. They take public transit less, and they drive more and bigger cars.

Rich people have a greater expectation of service from the cops than poor people do.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama thinks the rich should pay taxes.

And don't miss it in the slightest. Okay, I do watch the occasional show on Netflix or streamed online. The internet is my TV, newspaper, and magazines.

Or maybe the hardware you install it on will be. If you don't have to shell out $Millions for the firmware OS, you can pass some savings on to your customer and still make a buck.

It's not the executable size of most games that takes so much space on your disk, it's all the pictures and sounds.

"Cut your teeth" is a term from the pre-industrial era, when only master craftsmen could design and build mechanical equipment. The masters worked with entire gear trains, apprentices were put to work polishing the metal plates from which gears were made, and journeymen made the gears. In order to graduate from apprentice to journeyman, you had to design and fabricate your own tooth-cutting bit and make a gear. If it meshed with the gears the established journeymen were making, you qualified.

Excellent response. Using break statements would have the same effect that my GOTO statements have, with non-GOTO syntax.

Using multiple return points in my experience is more trouble than not. It is just another magic "get me the fuck out of here", plus you have to duplicate your cleanup code.

When I'm chasing a bug, tracing the a program is easier when I know a function only exits in one place.

Boolean combinations doesn't really address my need. Most of my functions follow a pattern something like this:

Set the return code to fail.

Check the parameters. If there's anything wrong, just bail and return.

Perform step 1. If it fails, don't bother going any further, just bail, perform necessary cleanup, and return.

If step 1 doesn't fail, then use the results of step 1 to perform step 2. And so on through step N.

Set the return code to success.

Clean up and return.

Without the use of GOTO, the indentation level gets deep in a hurry. With GOTO, you know that at any given point in a function, all the dependencies are successfully met in order to get that far.

You may call it bad coding style; when I was a TA for freshman programming, I know I would have. But in practice, I find it to be a very elegant solution that dramatically improves code readability and debuggability in some cases.

I use GOTO quite often. It is useful for keeping code from getting deeply nested, which in fact can impair code clarity.

Where you might say:

if( OK ) {
... function body ...

}

return;

I would say:

if( NOT_OK ) goto DONE;
... function body ...

DONE:

return;

Now imagine the above example, with 8 or 10 different places where the value has to be tested before proceeding. Without GOTO, your code is indented at various depths across the screen. With it, your code lines up neatly and is easy to scan.

"I'm trying to long into my system at work and it doesn't seem to respond."
"No sweat, Chief, your desktop is just a VNC session on our server. Just fire up VNC Viewer on your home machine and point it to this host..."

You tell it, Ilgaz. For years I've had a high-quality mattress to rest my weary bones, even when I didn't have a bed to put it on.

You should not be asking, "am I too old for this".

You should be asking, "do I love doing this".

How much would you pay for carpal tunnel surgery?

I like my clicky keys as much as the next guy (more than the next guy, actually, since he has to listen to me type). But the reason I shelled out big $ for a Model M is because my hands don't hurt after I use it for 8 hours.

Midwesterners are as entitled to their dialect as anyone. Dude.

"self-driving cars on defined tracks"

We have these. They are called "trains". And they are very efficient, too.